Astonish Results Insurance Blog

Scott Purves, owner of Purves & Associates Insurance Agency in Davis, California, recognizes the divergence between a seemingly cold and impersonal Internet and the need to connect with customers on a personal level. The Internet guarantees anonymity when desired, but also offers unlimited opportunities for branding and partnerships. Seizing the opportunities is where most insurance professionals fall short.

For those of you who don’t know, I started my career as a chemist. I remember going to the Boston Museum of Science on my ninth birthday with my mom and dad. Science makes sense to me. There are rules, principles, and laws. You can experiment to confirm those laws, but you cannot mock those laws. If you try to mock the law of gravity, guess what? You may end up dead.

One of the most important messages Astonish Results communicates to its insurance agency partners is that a happy employee is a productive employee. We’ve seen clients do everything from flip-flop Fridays to Luau Wednesdays, drinks out on the town for the entire staff and even ½ days off every other week to keep workers content and producing. On our own turf, the Astonish executive team recently gave managers $150 to entertain their department any way the saw fit (future blog on this coming).

Office culture is a broad term that encompasses agency morale, accountability, employee interactions, tone of meetings and even things as benign as the décor in the office. A downbeat office culture breeds workplace dread and stifles productivity. A positive, upbeat office culture promotes productivity and employee morale. The challenge is, many agency owners struggle to come up with ways to promote a positive office culture, but that’s where Astonish Results can help.

Evolution in nature can’t be forced; however, evolution in an insurance agency can be.

The most recent Rough Notes eMarketing Agency of the Month article focuses on H.G. Holdam Insurance & Tax Accounting. It tells a story of evolution that agencies would be wise to pay attention to.

A young man from the city graduated from college with a degree in journalism, and got a job at a small-town newspaper. One of his first assignments was to interview a very successful old farmer who lived twenty miles outside of town. As he sat with the grizzled man on his front porch, the young journalist looked at his notepad and started asking questions. One of the first he asked was, "Sir what time do you go to work in the morning?"

"Son, I don’t go to work, I am surrounded by it," replied the farmer.

We can learn a lesson from the old farmer. Opportunities are a lot like his work. They are everywhere. But the problem is that we often don’t see opportunities, not because they aren’t there, but simply because we choose not to see them.

For decades, insurance agencies have been like greyhound dogs chasing rabbits around a track. Unfortunately many agencies see the only viable way to generate leads and new policies as to buy them from data mining companies, and hope they can convert that data into new policies. With all of the incredible resources available today, why would an agency take this risk and spend thousands of dollars, just to HOPE that they can sell one or two policies from purchased leads?

The industry shift is not going to happen, it has happened. So the question is – when are agencies going to stop gambling with lead buying, and start generating their own?

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but EVERYONE is on Facebook. According to recent estimates, Facebook has about 500 million users! The modern consumer is spending a lot of time on Facebook, and they are using their mobile devices to do it. Sumal Mandal, managing director of a large venture capital firm that tracks tech companies, says in a recent article in USA Today, “the user is changing faster than companies can keep up.” The facts are clear...

Before Facebook, MySpace was adding users every three seconds. That’s faster than the birth rate in this country. A baby is born in the United States every eight seconds. Think about that for a moment.

Billion-dollar advertising budgets can buy a lot of online real estate. But all the web promotions and pay-per-click ads on Google can’t put direct insurers on the ground in every community across the country. For this reason, the Internet is the great equalizer.

To say the insurance industry is conservative is an understatement. To clarify, I’m not talking about politics or even personal beliefs, but rather conservative marketing and the crippling fear that keeps agency owners from shifting their mindsets to serve the modern consumer. Oddly, part of the best solution to this issue can take the form of someone with virtually no knowledge of insurance.