Increasing production is a perpetual goal for every agency leader. It’s also one of the six criteria of the MDRT Culture of Excellence Awards. To qualify for this criterion, applicants need to prove their 2023 agency production was at least 25% higher than their 2022 level.

Interviews with five MDRT Culture of Excellence Award winners who hit this production target pull back the curtain on their operations and reveal a very human element at work behind the numbers. Though their agency’s sizes and markets differ, certain themes can be seen in how they were able to achieve this increase. These include: 

• Framing the agency’s goal as part of the advisor’s own personal goal 

• Segmenting and supporting advisors in groups based on past performance 

• Holding advisors accountable, and also being held accountable by the team  

While external factors influence annual agency production, their stories reveal that leaders have significant control over whether their advisors reach production targets. Read on to find out how this year’s winners exercised that control.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.     

Let advisors set their own goals 

I don't give my advisors a production goal; they tell me how much they want to produce, and then I hold them accountable for it. I don't like giving a solid number because it always comes to, "Hey, you're striving for a number, and then once you hit it, what's next?" It is just an arbitrary number. I do 90-day action plans where we have constantly changing goals for everyone on the team.  

In the past, I found that my team would gravitate toward goals that were much larger than what was expected because they held themselves to a higher standard. They're extremely self-motivated. That is a core quality I look for while recruiting. Finding people with those intangibles, with that drive that you can't teach, is paramount to the success of an agency. The focus then shifts from setting certain goals for the team to helping each agent develop into the agent they want to be. 

My advisors hold me accountable in helping them meet their goals, and I trust they will choose a goal that is not only realistic, but also furthers them down their career path. Along with their main goal, I always ask for stretch goals as well. I feel that if you're hitting all your goals every 90 days, your goals aren't where they need to be. You should be missing your goals about half the time. You always want to be striving forward.  

Tim Boyle, CLU, FSCP; United States; Diamond Agency; tboyle@thgfinancial1.com 

See the person, not just the advisor 

Honestly, if you prioritize the flourishing of the human person, and prioritize them living a life of significance, purpose and harmony, what ends up happening is you are seen by advisors as an ally rather than an adversary who only cares about production, production, production. When you focus and truly align yourself as a friend of your advisors, what ends up occurring is the production is way beyond anything either of you could have imagined, because we're now partnering and living our best lives. 

"How can the agency better support you?" That’s something I'm continually asking advisors, and they give me meaningful feedback that helps the agency improve and accomplish its objectives. In those conversations, it becomes relevant to talk about what we're working on as an agency in terms of goals.  

It's in that space between all those common goals that the agency achieves its success. And the agency can communicate what it's trying to do intentionally. Say we want to improve a specific category of sales. We noticed that in the agency, our disability insurance contracts were down by a certain percentage from our goal. I could communicate that very clearly, but what I do instead is say something like, “Let's talk about the value that we want to bring to our clients' lives as part of each of our business plans.”  

When we're talking about DI sales increasing and being more intentional and bringing DI sales to top of mind, all we have to do is say in an agency training or meeting, "Let's think about how disability income products really can help people's lives. Let's talk about some case studies that show how this is a transformative tool in ensuring that financial plans unfold the way that people want them to." 

Accountability here isn't a negative thing where it's like a manager managing for results only. It's peer-to-peer, holding each other accountable to own what we said we want to do for the world, for the people we're here to serve. And if we want to own that, we communicate a goal and a vision, and we welcome feedback from peers and colleagues that points out where we're lacking and have opportunities for improvement.  

I also realized that taking the elements of gaming can draw people in. Gamifying this whole system, not just gamifying production, but gamifying all elements of the Whole Person concept, and creating a culture and systems where that game is tracked, measured and incentivized. That's really the big secret here moving forward. We began the process of implementing gamification at the end of 2023, and then we rolled it out to the entire agency at the beginning of 2024. We're already setting massive growth records in production as a result.  

Jason Staas, MS, CLTC; United States; Diamond Agency; jason.staas@kofc.org   

Consider a digital dashboard for tracking  

I have a total of 962 advisors. I have grouped them into an A list, a B list and a C list. It's very interesting because as I grow my agencies, my advisors also grow. They're promoted to be agency managers. I help them to recruit, to train and to supervise. Once they grow, it means all my team grows as well. I see the growth and the developments of the A list. Some of them are aiming for MDRT Top of the Table, some for MDRT Court of the Table.  

Our company has a digital dashboard that allows leaders to track performance digitally every single minute. I can check on my mobile phone, my tablet or desktop software, so when an advisor submits their cases, we can see that in real time. I feel confident that 2024 will lead to an increase of 40% over last year. 

Pornprapa Sukreepirom; Thailand; Platinum Agency; wealthy-group@hotmail.com   

Discuss the bigger picture 

Advisors have to know the branch’s vision and goals. Visibility is key. We always say, “Big or small, your contribution is valued.” 

I make it easy for them to understand the incentives and opportunities they can have. Assuming they hit this goal, this is the equivalent amount of commission, or amount of bonus that you can get. I have a one-pager that explains everything. If you do this, this is your income.  

Our unit leaders always talk to the advisor one-on-one as far as the goal is concerned. But for me, as the branch manager, I check on the leaders. I need to communicate with them that hitting their branch target is easy, assuming that a specific percent of advisors will be active, a specific percent of advisors will be doing two cases a month, et cetera. So, it’s a computation. I try to make it easy for team members to understand how we are going to achieve this number, and how much needs to come from each branch. 

We use the 80/20 rule, also called the Pareto principle, which states that 80% of production is generated from 20% of clients. Our advisors are similarly segmented. We have the big sellers, the case counters, people who need joint fieldwork, people who need more help closing and people who need more help prospecting. Definitely, there will be more communication and collaboration with the MDRT advisors and the big sellers.  

Julieta Tolentino, CIA, AFC; Philippines; Gold Agency; plukjulieta.tolentino@gmail.com  

Pay attention to underwriting 

At the start of 2023, if you had asked me how the year would unfold, I would have been very apprehensive. We wouldn't have said, "We're going to do very, very well this year." I had hoped for it, but it's not something I could have promised. As the momentum built up during Q1, Q2 and Q3, that angle became clearer, and I know that we are on a great trajectory upward. Only then did we get excited. We just do our best and see where we land at the finishing line.  

Emotions are always a mixture right before the end of the year. There is a feeling of fear. I can still remember toward the end of last year, a couple of advisors had big cases that came in. But with the insurance profession, the client is not always healthy. In this instance, there were some medical issues. Both advisors were very afraid that the case could not be underwritten by the company. So, we went through a lot to get it done. We brought the clients to see a specialist, did the necessary medical checkups and obtained whatever medical documents we could use. 

After we received approval from the underwriters, we still needed to present this case back to the clients to see whether they were OK with the terms. Eventually the clients understood that, based on their health conditions, this is the best outcome. Both clients took up the plans. We overcame many obstacles, but there was that much more excitement when we did it.  

Jaden Wang, ChFC; Singapore; Platinum Agency; jadenwang@apaofficial.sg