Tracking numbers = life. The reason why it's so important to be tracking specific metrics is to ensure that everything that you're doing in your daily operations is turning out to get the results that you want (aka profit). And if you are not tracking that data, you're not going to be able to physically see and analyze that information to make better decisions and to see what's working and what’s losing you money.

We track and set up our Monday CRM (customer relation management system) so that we can keep data that's accurate and up to date in real time on what's happening in our agency and making sure we're measuring those. Tracking allows us to make better decisions in our agency, allows me to make them in real time, quickly so that we don't continue this ugly snowball of things that are going wrong I can fix them. In. Real. Time.

Disclaimer: I am not an Monday.com affiliate. I just LOVE what you can do with this CRM and how it works really well for my agency to track, communicate, and plan!

So here’s what metrics you should be tracking in your agency:

Marketing

Sales

Retention

These are the three things that we stay in all the time

Here’s what that looks like in my agency (feel free to steal some ideas for yours!)…

The one tracking metric that I tell everybody to start on is to start tracking your leads (marketing part one)! I want you to start understanding where your leads are coming from, what the status is on selling those leads, and what is happening within that process. You need to have all the leads and their info in ONE PLACE.

We track when the lead came in, the name of the lead, their phone number, their email, the type of insurance that they're looking for, did anybody refer them to us, the person that referred them to us, or what was the marketing source. We track their status in the sales process too, but I’ll dive deeper into that in a second. But just having somewhere to go and look over all the leads we have and where they are in the sales process allows me, the CEO, go in and see how many leads each person on my team has, look at the ratio between how many personal lines leads, how many commercial lines leads, or other product lines, and how many leads each person is working as far as sales

And something as easy as just hovering over them will let me know their status. Also letting me know how much premium is out in the world being quoted. This is a good number to use for motivating your team, but I’ll come back to that too!

It's important for you to understand how metrics and measuring them accurately are going to help you when leads come in. They help you with the bigger picture (💰) and help you stay on track month to month and year to year. Knowing your closing ratios (how much premium quoted versus how much sold), the kinds of policies written, if there were any pivots made or businesses added when closing the sale are all things if tracked can help you make more informed decisions for the future.

Now, obviously the goal is to convert the lead to a sale. So next thing my agency tracks is SALES.

I use the Monday dashboard each month (twice a month) to quickly check that my agency is on track to meet our sales goal. The dashboard is going to take information from our leads and our sales and show me where we're at in a snapshot! I go in and just look at numbers quickly without having to sift and roll through any other information When it comes to sales, I want to see which agent is selling the most, what type of policies they're selling, where that business is coming from, and what is the total premium amount. This really helps me as the agency owner and the CEO figure out where we are when it comes to our goals.

We use an automation to take that lead information (once sold) and move it directly into a separate workspace that tracks our sales in real time. We only must add the specifics like how much premium was written, when it was written, policy info, type of policy, etc. to their info. Transferring a lead over into our sales board is going to adjust the premium that has been written in our agency IN. REAL. TIME. This allows me to know things like who sold what (per agent), how much premium they sold, if you're paying them commissions on that, and I can calculate in Monday with a formula so the team members can see how much they're going to be making off each policy. They can just filter that out to the agent's name and see what their total is for when you're creating payroll, or they can also keep track of how much money they've made so far this month. This will help you see the total premium amount written, how much commission is kind of getting geared up to leave your agency, and/or what to pay out, helping you stay on top of your goals.

Now back to what I said before, I come in twice a month to check our sales number (mid and end of the month) to quickly see if we’re on target for our monthly and annual goal. My rule of thumb is if by mid-month, we’re not at least 50% of the way to goal, I go in and peek our sales board to get an idea of what’s going on, I check the leads board to see how much premium is out there being quoted, how many leads we have to quote, types of policies, and then check in with my team and give them that information as motivation to hit the goals. This also gives me the chance to look at what hasn’t been paid and figure out what’s going on because my team does not get paid on a policy unless we get paid. So it also helps make sure we have that accountability and that checks and balances. That they're making sure policies are completely going through submitted, bound, and getting paid on commission statements. And so that way I can say okay these are the policies we've been paid on, these are the ones that you're going to get paid on, and this is the total amount per person that I need to pay when it comes to payroll. Tracking this lets me realistically predict how much premium we're probably going to be closing by the end of the month (based on those closing ratios) and I get that snapshot look of what's happening in our agency and no need to micromanage or communicate to my team too much

We have each sale transferred into the month that it needs to go into because we have our entire book of business in here, so we are able to set an automation to send renewal information automatically at a certain date specific to when they're renewing. So they're going to be getting a text message and an email letting them know that they're renewing soon, letting them know that if anything has changed they need to contact us so that we can get that updated prior to their renewal and if they have any questions they can contact us. This is just part of the things we track for retention. We want to know all the business we can have next month, but we also need to know what’s cancelling or pending cancellation. So in our cancellations board, we use a duplicate to know how much premium is due, what date they’re going to cancel, what policies, notifications we send to them, and if they’re good or bad business. I don’t want my team wasting a whole lot of time chasing down business we don’t want to win back, so we classify each sale as good or bad business. Bad business being people who are chronic nonpayers, constantly cancelling before term, asking for a ridiculous amount of re-shops… you get the picture. This preserves my team’s time and energy by keeping them focused on the business we want, rather than spiraling out of control just to get a little extra premium on the books. We have a board set up to focus on all good business we want to “win back.” So we have automations and integration set up for us to use that as a leads list to try to win back the business that we didn't want to lose and have a campaign for winning them back. Once the policy has canceled, we remove it out of the book of business so our book of business stays up to date and accurate. Having these metrics and understanding why people are leaving is really going to help you with getting a retention plan or understanding what's happening with the people that are leaving your agency.

 Another important part of tracking retention goes back to marketing (marketing part two). Knowing where you’re marketing sources are coming from when it comes to sold business helps my agency know who the first person to call is when they need referrals. We also have an onboarding process that sends automated messages giving our clients incentives to send us referrals or give us a Google review. I also like to track where the leads are coming from so if we have a referral partner, we can send them incentives to keep up the behavior and send more leads because we like to take care of the people who take care of us. We also track our marketing budget to make sure we’re not handing out gift cards to people who aren’t really giving us a return on investment or certain marketing tactics aren’t working, but we want to know ASAP so we stop spending unnecessary amounts of money on things that don’t work.

So this is how my agency uses metrics to track money coming in and money going out to make sure we’re always making the best decisions possible to hit all of our goals. It gives my team members something to strive toward and helps them keep on top of their personal goals too. Plus it takes a lot of the micromanaging OUT of the job for me as the CEO which I am forever grateful for.

If you’re curious about how you can get this system set up for you and your agency, make sure to go watch the full YouTube vid so you can SEE each board and more of a breakdown on how the automations and integrations work so we have more time to stay sales focused and grow!

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