The Tied Agency Channel

Senior Business Associates, Development officers, CLIAs of LIC and unit managers, sales managers, agency managers of private companies need to recruit agents. For easier reference let us call this group as sales team leaders (SLTs). Also it is in the interest of branch heads and others in the marketing hierarchy to recruit agents. Agents are the life line of the tied agency channel and without fresh blood at regular intervals, new business takers a hit for the worse. And tied agency is the life line of the life insurance sector.

Irregular Recruitment Activity

Sales Team Leaders (SLTs) tend to take agency recruitment lightly and attend to the task of recruitment in an ad hoc and irregular manner. The representative approach is:

Let us recruit during non-business months (normally April to June or July) so that we are in business for the rest of the year.

Another representative feeling in the market is:

Our business is down so let us quickly recruit a few agents.

Consequences of Not Regularly Recruiting

Managing a sales team of agents has certain inherent characteristics. One of them is the manner in which recruited agents become inactive and disinterested in continuing their agency business. Very often a person is recruited as an agent and within a few months the person shows a complete disinterest in continuing the business. What does this look like for an agency team? Take a look at the Table below

Immediate disinterest and Inactive agents

In the Table above an example is given of a sales team leader recruiting 10 agents every month for 4 months. From the 10 agents recruited each month, agents begin to drop out or opt out of the team. Typically after a few months out of the 10 agents selected in a given month, only 1 or 2 remain active.

One-year disinterest and Inactive agents

Once the sales team leader stops recruiting (4th month in the example above), the number of active agents keeps falling. After 4 months you may have about 22 active agents, but as the months go by the situation changes significantly. This is the issue that development officers face once they stop recruiting.

At the end of say nine months or a year, the sales team leader will be lucky to have 4 to 5 agents who are active, out of the 40 agents recruited. Some sales team leaders with a very good leadership qualities will have may be 8 to 10 agents active.

Long Term Disinterest and Inactive agents

Going further, after 5 years, out of the 5 (or 10) active agents at the end of 1 year, may be 1 will remain active. And if in the meanwhile if there are incentives to the agents to become a sales team leaders (subject to achieving a specified performance level), even this one active agent after 5 years is doubtful.

This is YOUR Experience

Career sales team leaders, such as development officers, have seen and experienced this time and again, Every time they fall short of agents, they rush to recruit. But the recruitment activity remains sporadic and irregular.

The Solution: Recruit Regularly

The solution to this is to take a look at what successful development officers do. They recruit regularly. some of them have very large unmanageable teams, numbering 500 or even 1000. While one need not gather such numbers to be successful, recruitment should certainly take centre stage in the daily work of development officers. The aim should be to have a team of 15 to 20 active agents to be added every year, to take care of the immediate disinterest (within one year of becoming an agent) and the long term disinterest of agents (after 5 years of becoming an agent) to continue working.

Recruitment activity should be conducted on a daily basis so that actual recruitment can take place every month. Two hours daily on recruitment activity can build a great sales team of willing and active agents.

The Institute of Insurance Sales Training, Pune has a unique training content that systematically teaches you how to conduct recruitment activities on a daily basis, to build your dream team.