Insurance agents, are your success vitals healthy?

February 16, 2016 at 06:02 AM
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There are a few essential vital signs such as pulse, temperature, respiration rate, and blood pressure that determine the state of your body functions and quickly determine the state of your health.

In any health analysis, the vital signs are always the first thing that is checked. They deliver the most information that is vital to your well-being and survival.

What about your well-being and survival as an insurance agent? How are those measurements checked?

You must understand your success vitals as an insurance agent. Today's high-achieving super producer understands the importance of their success vitals. 

Success vitals are built around the most important tasks and activities that make insurance agents successful. Those actions serve as your vital functions. A super producer realizes that they can't do it all, but there are a basic few functions that contribute the most to their success.

Competition is fierce and it's not just other agents or insurance companies out there; you are faced every day with your own personal obstacles, distractions, and self-doubt.

Winners prepare and train through continuous knowledge and practical experience, but the most important ingredient is mental focus. You must be laser focused on the actions that generate the most results.

Without mental focus you lose sight on your mission and the consistent activities it takes to succeed. You are easily distracted on working on items that keep you busy, but aren't pushing you closer to your goals.

I found there are two crucial questions you must ask yourself.

1. What three daily activities are the most important to my long-term success?

2. What must I give up in order to succeed?  

Take some time to honestly answer these questions. Let's start with the first one.

What are the three indicators that your insurance sales business is healthy and what daily activities will improve upon those success vitals?

In my insurance business, I realized that three success vitals that would determine my long-term success are:

  1. My prospect list

  2. My network

  3. My knowledge

Everything else to these three activities was secondary. My calendar was planned to ensure that each day I was growing my prospect list (online and offline), meeting new people in my community and industry, and learning new insights about products and services to serve my clients better.

If I would take these actions every day, even just a little bit, I was taking action toward achieving a higher level of success in my insurance business.

Your success vitals may look different. They are different for everyone, but you must determine what specific daily actions you will take that are non-negotiable. Not every day is perfect and urgent problems and issues can and will arise.

However, if you don't determine your specific success vitals, everything will become more important than the true activities that will help you achieve your goals and dreams. You will quickly find yourself doing tasks that seem important at the time, but are not contributing to your success vitals.

That leads to the second crucial question you must ask: What must you give up in order to succeed?

This question is often the more difficult of the two. When you know what it takes to succeed you can pinpoint activities to drive you towards your goals and dreams.

However, in order to move forward and make positive changes, you also must give up activities that may be hampering your success vitals.

Only you can determine what you need to give up, but here are a few pursuits, interests, and hobbies that I have had to personally either give up completely or severely minimize. These are:

1. Watching TV:

No, I haven't completely given up watching TV, but between business time and family time, TV rarely serves a positive purpose in growing my business or adding value to my life.

2. Waiting for phone calls or emails:  

This may sound strange, but there have been times where I used to let my workday consist of reacting to the calls and emails I receive. Many agents have no plan and therefore are 100 percent subject to reacting to their circumstances instead of creating the circumstances they want.

3. Golf: 

Yes, golf can be a great sport for networking and prospecting, but it doesn't serve me well to take a work day each week to try to improve my score from 90 to 85.  

This goes for any sport or hobby. It's important to have recreational time, but not at the expense of your success vitals.

4. Social media and internet browsing:

I'm not going to lie, I really struggle with this one. Especially since a majority of my business is internet based and I utilize social media for business purposes.  

That being said, it's easy to start using Facebook for business growth, only to realize you are watching the latest cat video. You must stay focused on the task at hand and save the social browsing for a dedicated personal time.

Only you can determine what activities you will need to give up or minimize for you to achieve the success you desire.

The choices aren't easy, but you must think long-term. What impact do you want to make for your family, community, business, and your clients?

Today's super producers are constantly checking their success vitals and ensuring that the actions they take are improving those success vitals.

Ask yourself: What are your three success vitals? What are three activities you need to reduce or eliminate?

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