Analyzing your data and metrics will help you discover critical insights your agency needs to grow. Data analytics applications will help you gather, process and analyze your data in real time for greater insights into your efforts and outcomes. Data metrics can also help your agency become a data-powered organization to help drive greater employee productivity, identify new sales opportunities, identify and act on approaching renewals, and focus time on valuable insurer relationships. Agencies that utilize Data analytics are 20% more profitable than their less analytically driven peers. While any insights into your agency’s performance are valuable, there are some data points that are considered significantly more valuable than others, that every agency must keep track of. Tracking these five data points will set you apart from your peers.
1. Sales Growth: Since sales and growth are proportional to your agency’s health, this is one most important metric that should not be ignored. This data point shows your agency’s sales growth for a specified period, such as for a month, a financial quarter or a fiscal year. For practical purposes, it’s best to break this data point into two categories: new policies and renewals. For example, if new policy sales are growing at a higher rate than renewals, you can find out why and use your success with sales to build a strategy around how to increase your renewals. Tracking this metric monthly provides great insights into your book of business and overall health of your agency.
2. Average Policies per Client: This is one of the most helpful data points you have to measure how well your team’s efforts are paying off at cross-selling. Total policies divided by the total number of clients gives you this number. Roughly, 1.6 average number of policies per client is used. If you are around 1.4 or less, it indicates you need to focus and find ways to improve your efforts at cross-sell because cross-selling boosts both new business and retention. With improved internal sales training and follow up phone calls, and email campaigns, you can see this metric climb up. Tracking this metric monthly will tell you if your efforts are yielding results.
3. Top Brokers: This data point is based on your sales revenue, and ranks your top-performing brokers. The purpose of this data point is twofold: First, it fosters accountability and healthy competition between brokers; secondly, it lets you make tactical decisions based on the sales and claims management strategies of each employee. In addition, you can also focus on the strengths and weaknesses of your agents and use them to the agency’s advantage. For instance, agents with good social skills can build customer relationships effortlessly. Agents that are not very good with communication and social skills can be used to perform other tasks that do not demand as much social interaction. Their talents can be used to build upon the relationships that have already been established including risk matching and other underwriting activities.
4. Close ratio by category: Learning close ratios by category can provide a boost to your sales and thereby to your agency. Agents receive leads from multiple sources. But tracking close ratios provides insights into the effectiveness of the source of leads. For example, if your close ratios for auto insurance referrals are 80%, you know that the leads are worth your time to follow up. On the other hand, if this percentage is in single digits, you may want to focus your resources and time on other efforts at generating high-yielding leads. A lower close ratio means that agents are accepting any lead that may or may not turn into a prospective customer, so you can better decide if the leads are worth following.
5. Average Client Acquisition Cost: If your agency spent $1000 a year for marketing and gained 100 new clients, your agency’s CAC is $10. CAC is the Customer Acquisition Cost. This metric is the cost of convincing a potential customer to buy your products. Agencies engaged in highly targeted online marketing must track this data point to assess the progress of their customer’s decision-making process. Creating something pleasing to the users, implementing a good CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool, and tracking and improving on-site conversions will help stretch your marketing dollar.
Organizing Data Visually
Humans process data better when they can visualize it. They can also better identify trends and patterns. Organizing data points into visually appealing charts and graphs also makes it easier to understand. Tracking and visualizing data is easier with data visualization tools and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). By keeping track of these five valuable data points, you’ll enjoy seeing how your monthly report card can drive growth and stronger profitability for your agency.
