How to Attack Your Competitors’ Fatal Flaws

Your Golden Sales Opportunity in the Hard Market

Even in the Hardest of Markets, you have a Golden Opportunity to grow your book of business. Market conditions are changing by the day (prices and incomes are going up), and your competitors have been asleep at the wheel for years. Now that the Hard Market is upon us, their fatal flaws will put them at a significant disadvantage. Here are the flaws that virtually all of your competitors are hampered by:

1. They blame the insurance marketplace for their inability to help clients contain or reduce costs. By doing this, they have abdicated their responsibility to their clients.  They see themselves as “insurance brokers first” who now deliver bad news around price increases and play the victim card while blaming the insurance carriers.
2. They offer a variety of resources (you all do) but fail to see them as a valuable part of their representation. Why not? Because they can’t value those resources or their impact. So, they lose their biggest advantage in creating an ROI for the client.
3. They don’t understand how to work with the C-Suite. Rather than work inside of a buyer’s financial outcome of EBITDA, margins, shareholder value, or budgetary surplus, they stay in the world of insurance rates.
4. They leave the back door wide open for you. Your competitors do not provide their C-Suite Buyers with a meaningful stewardship report six months before renewal, which means they cannot show the buyer the ROI of their representation.
5. They are lazy and rely on the insurance marketplace to either save them or give them covering fire. Instead of delivering the services and resources their clients want (and need), they fall back on the same tired offerings of decades past.

So, here are the three steps you should be taking right now to take advantage of this moment:

1. Seek out new prospects that have “outgrown” their broker (no matter the size of the brokerage firm). Chances are, their current broker is fatally flawed.
2. Look for C-Suite-driven accounts where analytics and KPI’s play an important role. Today’s executive suite craves the “decision support” and business intelligence you can offer them around their financial statements.
3. Take credit and quantify the resources you have available to help them reduce their frictional costs and reduce their claims. DO NOT just give them a “list of features.” Buyers want to know how much value you have provided them.

Now is the time to use the language of business and show large account buyers how you can provide them the Return on Investment they deserve. If you work this way, you’ll pace yourself way ahead of your competitors who are scrambling to offset price increases. Our clients are thriving despite the Hard Market as they take market share from their commodity-based competition. If you want to move upstream, increase your sales pipeline, and gain sales techniques and insights to navigate the Hard Market with your own growth strategies, you can learn more here.

All the best to Analytic Brokers,

Rob Ekern Chairman, Analytic Brokerage™ Platform   Make more money on Larger accounts - Let's get started