School's Always in Session

Whether you commit yourself to resolutions every year or you’ve decided to quit quitting by avoiding them altogether, I’m sure you’d agree that the process of developing them can be a valuable one.

The same is true with your business.

Every company goes through a process of planning their next year. Every employee participates in some way whether it’s reviewing a new comp plan or writing one.

What most businesses miss, is the deep dive into last year. There are treasures to be found.

Let’s look at my process to harness the lessons learned through the rearview mirror.

1.  Consider the product life cycle and where you are in it.

Whether you are managing a territory, a product, a department or an entire business, there are stages of growth that played a role in your last 365.

Development

When you are working to develop business where none currently exists, this process of capturing the lessons learned is critical to your success.

It’s time to be ruthlessly honest with yourself. Is your approach working?

This is not the time to ask, 'Should it work?' Don’t confuse the two questions. Don’t build next year’s plan on hopes and dreams.

Ignore the pats on the back and the atta boys.

Do the numbers tell you the money is coming? Do people back up their interest in your work with action? Do they buy? Do they recommend you to other potential buyers?

The products we work with at CalChoice are well beyond this stage, but certain territories are not.

We have sales professionals working developmental blocks to create new opportunities for our business. I mentioned one of them, Don Hutchinson, in my article How to Succeed with Purpose in Sales.

There’s a reason I mentioned him. He happened to be hugely successful in his efforts.

His numbers went up every year he was working the block. That’s true despite the fact that there was an avalanche of businesses buying in December of 2015 and only a hail storm in December of 2016.

Don had a strategy that proved itself. Breaking down his actions and comparing them to the actions of less successful blocks teaches us how to improve our entire team.

Growth

If you spent 2017 in the growth stage building on established success, congratulations. Celebrate your achievements... but then take a closer look at them.

Have you built out the footprint and the processes you need to attract recurring business in a predictable and repeatable way?

How will you continue the expansion? Were there opportunities that you weren’t yet ready to take advantage of that you could capture in the new year? And why?

Did you discover new markets? Or did they discover you? Were there products your customers were requesting that you could improve or develop?

More importantly, if you're out there selling and seeing these opportunities first hand, are you sharing them with your management team?

If you're managing, are you sitting down with your employees and asking about the opportunities they see?

So many of the answers are already there, things that are obvious to people in the field, things that are discussed every day. Sales people should have total ownership of a territory, that means each person working their book of business like it is their own business.

Sitting down with your OC, Inc territory sales team or your LA, LLC reps could be the most valuable thing you do all year as a manager because you should be looking for ways to grow and they have a direct line of sight to the people buying.

2. You're in sales so take on more than you should... just keep a keen eye on the core business that created your success.

Never sacrifice what's working for what you want to do next. Find ways to leverage what you've done in the past to get you to that next level.

Our success is the direct result of brokers in the community that have taken time to become educated on health exchanges. (And that's a fact. Broker representatives are the greatest distribution arm that exists for the health insurance industry. Nothing can replace an informed independent consultation when it comes to choosing care for ourselves, our spouses and our children.)

That's why, as we take intentional steps to grow our business by broadening our public outreach, it's all to the benefit of our broker partners. We now market direct to consumers, but we won't sell direct to consumers.

Even our portfolio improvements are based on broker feedback: Rate parity with Kaiser is back. Anthem PPOs are enhanced. Even more narrow networks are available.

Building on the success that ACA brought us, we keep taking broker feedback to build a better ecosystem. Now we have a captive audience when we sit down and ask an agent to put the spreadsheet away and start selling a solution that solves for both access to care and increasing premiums.

In business if you aren’t growing, you’re fading away because your competitors are trying to chip away at your market share as fast as you earn it. That's why it's critical to look back at 2017 to see where you can leverage momentum in new and unexpected ways for 2018.

3.  Find interested users and then find ways to turn them into raving fans

In wrapping this up, find your super users and tailor your products and services to their needs. In our world, that means offering year over year stability for the client.

CalChoice does a lot of business. Still, the concept of repeat customers is critical to our survival.

It’s easy for an agent to be successful with a product they know and trust. Moving a company from one product to another means underwriting and the possibility of unforeseen issues.

Right now our focus is on catering to the small business, not just the agent, because making it easy for the client to stay with us makes it easy for a broker to introduce us to more groups. It’s allowing us to turn one new group into a block of new groups.

We’ve spent the last year building out a robust client retention program to serve the businesses that write with us and it’s paying off in dividends.

We’ve also expanded our Business Solutions Suite to grow our offering in an area that has already proved to be popular. Our CalPerks discount program has had a phenomenal track record with it's discounted lifestyle options so we introduced the Member Value Program with discounted wellness product options.

That means companies have access to both discounted entertainment through CalPerks and to high quality but deeply discounted wellness gear through MVP. We’re talking about name brand products at rates that beat Amazon.

In other words, we are designing an program for our clients where members can still enjoy the benefits of health coverage when they are sick but now they can also enjoy wellness when they aren't.

Brokers are noticing. We are earning more recurring business than ever in our 22 year history and we're doing it successfully exactly because of that history.

Whether you are working as a broker, with a general agency, with a carrier, a TPA or a startup business, using your yesterday to sell better tomorrow is something that applies to you.

Cheers to success and happiness in 2018 and beyond. Off to go duck hunting now.