Defense Articles

Rarely a week goes by without my receiving several inquiries from agency principals wanting me to “teach their CSRs to sell.”

“I’d love to,” I reply, “I just need to learn more about your agency.” My list of questions includes:

* What exactly do you want to accomplish quantitatively and qualitatively?

* Tell me about your agency culture.

* Tell me about your people.

* What, if anything, have you done in the past to turn service to sales? What’s worked? What’s not worked?

A few seconds of silence generally follows, then a sigh. “Don’t you just come in and do a training class?”

How I wish it were that easy! Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet to create CSR sales success.

Changing from a reactive service agency to a proactive service-sales agency is a huge culture change. Culture is the set of beliefs that governs behavior. To change behavior, beliefs must change. Let me give you an example from a client on what happens when an agency tries to change behavior without changing beliefs.

Five years ago, Best Insurance Agency signed up for Reliable Insurance Company’s personal lines service center. The agency owner thought that with 25% of the policyholders’ day-to-day inquiries being handled directly by the competent staff at the company, the agency CSRs would be free to grow the personal lines business. The CSRs attended a seminar to teach them the skills to cross-sell, upgrade, and close new business opportunities.

Reliable Insurance Company kept all of its service center promises. Notices were sent to the policyholders advising them of the change of day-to-day inquiries and calls were handled professionally and accurately.

There was only one problem. The CSRs never believed that the company service center could take care of their clients the way they did. So when a service center client called the agency, no one reminded them of the change and the agency continued business as usual.

When the agency manager audited the files of the service center clients six months later, she found that almost all that had been designated as service center clients were still being handled by the CSRs.

Upon learning this, the agency owner’s reaction was to proclaim the company service center a failure. Of course, this was not the case. The responsibility fell on the agency associates to support and reaffirm the service center partnership with their policyholders.

I asked the agency owner if he ever discussed the big picture plan for moving business to the service center with his team. No. Did he create a strategy with objectives to grow the agency-controlled business using the skills learned in the training class? No. Has he incorporated sales objectives into position descriptions and performance reviews? No.

Larry Bossidy, former CEO of Honeywell and co-author of the best-selling book Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done states, “Unless you translate big thoughts into concrete steps for action, they’re pointless.”

Agencies that desire to change from a reactive service culture to a proactive sales one should remember this-to change individual behavior, beliefs must change. Leadership must be willing to debate with their team the ideas behind both old and new positions. Uncovering the CSRs’ perspectives is the first step to overcoming their fear of change. With those issues on the table, an organization can create an execution strategy to assure long-term culture change.

Pre-packaged Mini-Meals such as Oscar Mayer’s Lunchables work for millions of kids and adults while triggering disgusted Yuck’s from an even greater number of rejecters. The users have a simple rationale the products work and they’re easy to use The rejecters say they are overpriced, over-packaged, hard to open, and have too many preservatives, fat grams, and calories and way too much sodium. Observers of kids in school say that they are much too hard for many school kids to open without help. Some of the opposed feel strongly enough about all that’s wrong with these products to suggest that there should be laws against allowing them to be marketed for children. But the bottom line is that they work and they are easy Even if they aren’t easy for kids to open, even if they are hard for to fit into small lunch boxes, they work for the parents and little kids are willing to struggle with whatever works for the bigger kids. The bottom line the products work and the category grows and grows.

Internet shopping is soaring because it works and because it’s easy when you know how. Consumers who successfully did some of their holiday shopping on the Internet reported pride in their accomplishment as well as time and hassle saving. Many were better able to zero on the needs of their giftees on the Internet than they would have been able to do in traditional stores. The feelings of accomplishment were reminiscent of the excitement generated by double coupons in heyday of double coupons when shoppers counted their hits and their savings. Our qualitative input suggests that Internet holiday sales would have been double $7 billion if more of the triers had been able to become buyers.

However, while most of the others painted cheerful snow scenes and villages, Spencer worked in a muted palette and chose as his subjects the tenements and mills along the canals of the Delaware river and the people who lived and worked in them. A Boston newspaper critic summed up these scenes with great vividness: “Out of the grime and smoke and deadly commonplace of the mills, the ugliness of the tenement houses, the sickening squalor of a row of unpainted shacks lining the farther side of a canal, [Spencer] manages to extract the ‘fleur du mal,’ the blossom of beauty emerging from the slime of the gutter.”

The artist was born in Nebraska, the son of an itinerant Sweden-borgian minister, and, as a keen genealogist found that his family tree included an earl of Spencer. However, his favorite ancestor was a pirate who roved the Caribbean Sea in the service of Queen Elizabeth I. Spencer married Margaret Fulton, a painter and architect and a descendant of the artist and engineer Robert Fulton. She grew up comfortably in Philadelphia, where her mother was painted by Thomas Eakins. The Spencers were alternately madly in love with each other or “positively thrived on battles–high-pitched, screaming tirades,” according to one of the reminiscences left by their daughter Margaret, known as Tink. Spencer took his revenge for these scenes by using himself and his wife as models for paintings ironically entitled Happy Family and Alann Clock. The first, quite reminiscent of the work of Honore Daumier, one of Spencer’s favorite artists, shows Spencer dressed and kneeling, fending off an enraged Margaret, who has leaped out of bed and nearly out of her night-dress and is grappling with her husband. On the floor sits a yowling baby. Alann Clock shows a disheveled grumpy Spencer sitting up in bed, while Margaret prepares to wrench the covers off.

Sometimes to recover from these fights, Spencer would flee to New York City for weeks at a time to paint the waterfront in Harlem, or his wife would retreat to a building on their property that contained a studio, kitchen, and bedrooms. She held the only key.

In another mood, Spencer was a convivial companion who was welcomed by the most hospitable of the impressionists, William Langson Lathrop, and his wife at their mill in New Hope, Pennsylvania, which was the social center for the group. The Spencers, in turn, liked to organize parties at which they served the beer Robert brewed in his cellar, where he also made sake and grew edible mushrooms. Oddly, Robert Spencer became an excellent golfer, playing on the local course and with the pros at East Hampton, Long Island, when he visited relations there.

Spencer could not read music and had no ear for harmony, but this did not prevent him from playing the piano. As Tink Spencer recalled, “he often sat for hours at the piano pressing out great crescendoing chords and passionate single-noted melodies. And at other times–with soft, retaining, and loud pedals all to the floor–he made queer, haunting music blow through the house making time forgotten. He said it made him paint better and that he could get, from the music in his head, the substance and the shape and the color of what he wanted to put on canvas.” These shapeless sessions at the piano doubtless helped him build the increasingly imagined scenes he painted in his later career. As he wrote to his friend and faithful patron Duncan Phillips in 1926, “I have to … build a city of real bricks and mortar before I paint it, and the real bricks and mortar are imagination–solidified…. I first have to make what I see–so it’s slow–dreadfully slow.”