Lessons in Mentorship: Building a Bright Future for Your Business

I am fortunate to have mentored many young men and women who now play significant roles in various local, regional, and national firms. Most were able to build fabulous books of business over relatively short periods, typically less than five years. A decent handful were faster than that. ?However, this blog isn’t about these successes. It’s about our failures when recruiting and bringing in new talent.

Some Background

When my former agency looked to recruit new talent, we seldom used outsourced recruiters, especially for new-to-the-industry candidates. We were not against outsourced recruiters, but believed we were better at identifying and engaging candidates that aligned with our culture and style. Philosophically, we preferred to recruit from outside the industry, but half of this same group had had at least a cup of coffee at another shop.

Initially, our leadership intentionally suppressed the volume of candidates due to Mentorship Capacity, Financial Resource, and Talent Availability concerns. ?Accordingly, we needed to clearly confirm we could identify, recruit, and hire young talent. Perhaps more importantly, we had to prove and remove non-performing candidates without any of these efforts negatively impacting the performance of our primary roles.

So we built reasonable and culturally aligned Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) to help us manage these individual producer candidates. We spent the agency's money like it was our own and expected a strong but reasonable return on our investment. Lastly, we established a decision-making process that included our self-assessment of past decisions.

Of the 60+ we hired over 12 years, our validation rate was just over 50 percent. While these statistics might be Hall of Fame worthy in baseball, as a realist, I believe we didn't meet our high standards of excellence given the time, energy and resources expended.?Even after multiple interviews, personality testing, mentor matching, reference checks, etc., over 30 candidates didn’t make the cut, and most left the industry. For me, it's all about opportunity costs.

Lessons Learned

After seventeen years of testing, observation, and experience, my takeaway is that we failed to hire enough candidates. If you are only going to hit the mark 50 percent of the time, you need to recruit more candidates and then give them the opportunity to quickly establish that they had the skills to meet your needs.

AFTER they have shown that they have the 'right stuff,' then you invest your time, energy and resources to train and mentor this next generation.?There are three fundamental strategies that agencies can employ to cultivate producer talent.

Training: Like many firms, we learned (the hard way) that teaching insurance and getting licensed is easier than mentoring staff to be productive and validated. Other than blood relationships, avoid wasting time and training resources on new talent when they quickly display an incurable degree of call reluctance, fail to evidence the necessary rapport-building skills you thought they possessed, and can only trade on their low handicap or having the right last name.

Carrier training is fine for insurance-related subject matters. However, relying on an insurance carrier for sales training is akin to asking me what giving birth feels like. While I may have an idea, I will never truly know what this experience is like. I concede that some carriers have a decent program, I wouldn’t bet the farm on any of them.?

Most importantly, unless or until your entire team is continually reinforcing a singular, clearly defined sales proposition and pre-qualification process, your validation success rate will remain inconsistent. Just like dropping them off for practice, today's generation of sales candidates thrive in a well structured, collaborative environment that spends quality time supporting their individual and team efforts.

Time: You don’t have much time to assess new candidates. From the moment you meet face to face, set the tone that they’ll have roughly 120 days to demonstrate they have the skills needed to join the firm.

Either they have the urgency to succeed, or they don’t. For the 50% that self-select to continue the conversation, they know you won’t be wasting time educating them until they have displayed behaviors necessary to hunt successfully and are indeed coachable. The reward is a small but meaningful bonus and an invitation to a carrier training school for insurance training.?

During this same 120-day period, candidates should have a handful of KPIs that are measured weekly. If they routinely satisfy those requirements, everyone knows they are progressing to the next step. As cold as this might sound, you’re doing them a favor by letting them do something they’re more likely to succeed in. Just because some make this role look easy, we know it’s not. Be fair, firm, and consistent.?

Just like the saying goes, sales is a contact sport. The same is true for mentorship. The more interaction and contact we had with our producer candidates, the more effectively we could assess their aptitudes (things they are apt to do). The amount of time required varies greatly from candidate to candidate and not every Mentor is as generous with their time. This is where Mentorship selection becomes both a science and an art.

Mentorship: Given the finite resources of most firms, finding the ideal Mentor in one individual is unobtainable. Hence, think of your mentors as head coaches: They coordinate and oversee all assistant coaches and coordinators to ensure that the player (mentee) fully understands the fundamentals of the game and what success looks like. The Mentor, perhaps with the help of a sales manager, runs practices and drills to prepare the mentee for their next prospect meeting, aka game day. On a consistent, weekly basis, the Mentor provides vital qualitative and quantitative feedback to the mentee. The mentee has a clear understanding if they are on or off track.

Just like in sports, the Mentor may believe the training provided (internally or externally) is committed and competent, and this is where the rubber hits the road for most candidates and firms.

When we don’t match desired outcomes with actual skills, we potentially set the candidate up for failure. Hence this can become a political hot spot for all participants. I encourage everyone to breakdown down core competencies into bite-size chunks, so the right folks are providing the training. At the same time, the Mentor needs to know what the expected outcomes from that same training are. If the results don’t quickly match desired outcomes, either the content misses the mark or the candidate has difficulty mastering the skill. Select mentors who acknowledge and recognize the importance of this behavior.?

While quality time spent early in the assessment process helps more effectively assess a producer candidate's aptitudes, strong Mentors see past likeability and focus on coachability. Equally important, beware of Mentors who suffer from "temporary" illusory superiority. In other words, just because they helped select and train a producer candidate, doesn't mean every one of them is going to be successful.

Closing Comments

If you expect this process to be easy or straightforward, you will be disappointed with the results. Attention to detail and constancy to purpose are significant contributors to the actual outcomes reaped from this initiative. Constantly refine the process and push the standards forward. Limiting beliefs and self-fulfilling prophecies will undoubtedly have an impact as well. Just keep in mind, if this was your son or daughter coming into the business, what would you be willing to sacrifice to help them succeed??

I hope you found my blog post interesting and informative. I’m always intrigued by how individuals address business challenges; I am particularly eager to explore and understand what others are doing. Your insights and thoughts on the matter would be highly valued and appreciated. Please reach out to me directly at [email protected].?