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Special Announcement: Beyond Best Practices Training

How productive and effective is your organization?

BBP training

Keeping up with all the changes in automation and technology to keep your agency alive and well continues to be a time-consuming and difficult job. There are constant, new changes that affect how you run your agency. These changes are not going to slow down… if anything, they’re going to speed up, especially over the next few years. The pace of change is going to go faster, not slower.

How are you supposed to keep up with technology changes, and sell insurance and run your agency? It’s challenging! The challenges you face are many. Here are just a few:

“Sales and Marketing: Successful Processes for Insurance Producers – Episode 050”
by Steve Anderson and Ryan Deeds

Sorry, listening to the audio on this website requires Flash support in your browser. You can try playing the MP3 file directly by clicking here.

Sales and Marketing: Successful Processes for Insurance Producers – Episode 050
March 19, 2019

Summary:

In this episode of The Digital Broker, Steve and Ryan talk about the challenge of holding producers accountable to a process. By listening to this episode, you will learn:

  • Why producers are inclined to resist any process
  • Where the interests of producers clash with those of everyone else at the agency, and where they converge
  • How to get producers on the same page as everyone else
  • When it’s wise to let producers do their own thing

The Digital Broker podcast is brought to you buy Indio Technologies. Indio turns the application and renewal process into an online TurboTax like experience for your clients. As a result, the 1,000+ agents using Indio provide their clients with a top-rated customer experience, reduce their E&O exposure, and outgrow their competition. To learn more about Indio, click here!

Recap:

Any talk of sales and marketing inside an insurance agency must involve producers. There can be no sales and marketing reform without their approval and participation. If you’re serious about integrating your sales and marketing processes into your operations, which we’ve recommended doing in a previous episode, you’re going to have to hold your producers accountable to a process.

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Update Your Chrome Browser “Right This Minute”

This week’s TechTip is a Public Service Announcement (PSA) for those of you who are using the Chrome browser.

update chrome

Several security researchers identified a “Serious Chrome zero-day” vulnerability. This just means that there is a vulnerability in the Chrome browser that hackers could exploit to gain access to your computer.

A zero-day threat is a threat that exploits an unknown computer security vulnerability. The term is derived from the age of the exploit, which takes place before or on the first (or “zeroth”) day of a developer’s awareness of the exploit or bug … Attackers exploit zero-day vulnerabilities through different vectors.

How to Check for the Latest Chrome Browser Update

It’s quite simple to take a look and make sure your Chrome browser has been updated to the latest version which fixes the problem.

“Operationalizing Sales and Marketing: First Steps for Insurance Agents – Episode 049”
by Steve Anderson and Ryan Deeds

Sorry, listening to the audio on this website requires Flash support in your browser. You can try playing the MP3 file directly by clicking here.

Operationalizing Sales and Marketing: First Steps for Insurance Agents – Episode 049
March 12, 2019

Summary:

In this episode of The Digital Broker, Steve and Ryan talk about sales and marketing as an operational process. By listening to this episode, you will learn:

  • How the sales and marketing processes differ, and where they intertwine
  • How the processes tend to fall apart in the absence of operational oversight
  • How an operational makeover of sales and marketing makes the processes sustainable, repeatable, and scalable, ensuring growth and the survival of the agency

The Digital Broker podcast is brought to you buy Indio Technologies. Indio turns the application and renewal process into an online TurboTax like experience for your clients. As a result, the 1,000+ agents using Indio provide their clients with a top-rated customer experience, reduce their E&O exposure, and outgrow their competition. To learn more about Indio, click here!

Recap:

Though we’ll talk about sales and marketing as a single process, they ought to be defined differently. Marketing is the process by which you identify leads and prospects—people who might have an interest in what you’re selling. Sales is everything you do after that to get a check.

Here, we won’t be so concerned with how to market or sell better, but rather the operational aspect of either process. How do you integrate sales and marketing into your agency’s operations so that the process is more sustainable, repeatable, and scalable?

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The Perils of Using Internet Explorer as Your Default Browser

When Microsoft released Windows 10 nearly four years ago, it included a new updated and modern browser called Edge. While Internet Explorer lived on due to some underlying code in Windows and for compatibility with legacy business websites, Microsoft no longer provides updates for Internet Explorer when new web standards are released.

no-internet-explorer

That’s a problem for the insurance industry.

Way too many insurance companies and technology vendors require the use of Internet Explorer to make their websites and web platforms fully functional.

Microsoft has tried some different ways to push businesses to improve their older web apps but, unfortunately, IT administrators have naturally taken the easy route of continuing to rely on Internet Explorer and its various compatibility modes.