Many agents find themselves hitting a premature plateau, instead of continually growing their business. Here, industry legend Al Granum, CLU, shares how he has been able to help agents conquer this problem:
As a new agent, the only clients you acquire are new clients. As time progresses, an agent's business mix changes from all new clients to mostly new and some existing clients. As more time passes, the mixture might change again to mostly existing clients and just some new clients. Granum refers to this in the OCS (One Card System) as "premature retrogression," pointing out that if an agent does not continuously add new clients to his book of business, he runs the risk of waking up one day to discover he is back where he started — trying to build up his business through the acquisition of mostly new clients.
Granum says he thinks this is because new clients, at the time acquired, tend to be relatively young as a group. More experienced agents aren't always willing to go after young, non-wealthy prospects.
"It's a fine line. You can't say to agents, 'Don't try to get your foot in the door with a middle-aged successful person,' but the bulk of your new clients are going to be relatively young. With an agent that is plateau-ing, the answer almost always is that the agent is not doing anything about client-building," Granum says.
"It starts with facing the truth in your active clients. If you do your part, you keep up to date and serve him well, it's reasonable to expect that he'll buy from you again. Is this a client? Yes. Is he still active? I don't know," Granum continues. By helping established agents figure out which of their clients were truly "active," Granum was able to help the agents realize they might have serious client shortages.
