 Well thanks everybody for joining us today to the compensation and bonus plan that top producing agents are using to pay their team members. Wherever you're tuning in from we know you're going to see a lot of value if you're looking to potentially introduce a new comp plan, right? And we're super excited today. My name is Jeff Sophia. I've been with the company Ideal Trates for over five years now. I've had some very entertaining years and you know we talk to agents a lot about their asking the question, what should I compensate? You know what are the what are the best compensation packages out there? So what better way to share that than by introducing you to Kevin Mulneric and Vlad. Vlad, how do you pronounce your last name? Turchenko. Thank you Turchenko because they have they've collaborated and they have some really good information and can bring you a lot of insight on really good compensation packages. Kevin could you give a quick intro about your background and the success you've had in all state? Yeah sure. Hey thanks again for you know everybody watching this video and specifically Vlad. You know we've talked a few times and it's always a pleasure and to dive in and get to the knowledge that you have is awesome. So yeah I started an agency back in March of 2007. I started Scratch No Policies and started with one employee and then kept quickly growing and growing. I realized that two was better than one and three was better than two and then I started thinking maybe even locations two would be better than one and then so I opened one up in 07, 08, 09, 2011 and then 2014 all with zero policies and we quickly grew that to about 20 million in organic premium after eight years and it's just been great ever since. So being on the in the we'll call it the inner circle there at all state it had me speak around town across the country I should say and they said well what do you do how do you do it and it really comes down to the people and by hiring the right people we're able to accomplish anything that we want and with the wrong people you know you really have a hard time so that's kind of started with ideal traits how we open that company based on using the assessment that I use to find great people along with my brother and other partner Todd so we had the same formula we assessed everybody got the right people the right person in the right seat on the bus and move forward and then so ideal traits have been around for eight years we're helping thousands of agencies across the country so it's been fantastic and with that I'll turn it over to Vlad. Yeah Kevin thanks so much for the introduction it is interesting with with what you got what we got going I should say we because I've been here for so long what we got going on with ideal traits and how specific we are to this industry and then obviously you be an active agent you know and your your comp plans and your knowledge I think you know agents will get a lot of insight Vlad it's interesting with you too I actually stumbled on Vlad's site I mean what like three months ago I had agents calling me and saying hey Vlad told me to get with ideal traits I'm like who's this Vlad guy right everyone keeps saying Vlad Vlad Vlad and sure enough I look up your site and I see all the awesome content you had and how much agents trust in your and what you got going on so that's the main reason that I think we partnered up and collaborated and got this going so Vlad if you could give some quick insight on your background your passion and what you got going on over at Insurance Sales Lab. Yeah absolutely thank you for the introduction I just want to mention to everyone who stays to the end of this webinar I think Jeff you have an offer to make a special offer that's right a free offer that I think everybody should stay till the end for so if you're looking to hire good team members make sure to state to the very end to hear what that is my quick background is that six years ago I was recruited by a state farm recruiter to become a state farm agent and I was really close to signing the contract and become an agent but as I was talking to agents not just from state farm but all state farmers independent brokers and and I asked them about their first two three years of being an agency owner I kept hearing the same exact thing over and over again and what all these agents told me was that Vlad do not expect to make any money in your first year and expect to break even the second year really start making money your third year and I thought there has to be a different way to run an agency and not have to go into major debt the first couple years and as I dug deeper and try to figure out the root cause of what causes agents to go into debt the first couple years I realized that most agents are either a not compensating their team members correctly where they're not the team members aren't motivated to perform at a really high level which is what we're going to talk about in today's webinar and secondly I realized that most agents don't have a good sales process in place so what I decided to do was instead of opening up the doors to my own agency and opening up an agency hiring five six producers I thought let me just work in an agency as a producer get on the phone sell get to a point where I can write 100 policies a month or 100 items a month and if I felt like I felt like if I could do that in a span of 18 months come up with a sales process then when I open up my own agency 18 months later I'll just teach my staff how to do the same thing and to keep a long story short it took me nine months to get to a point where I was writing over 150 policies per month or over 150 items a month and that's when agents started reaching out and saying glad we hear you have this good sales process tell us more about it and then I started in workshops trainings teaching agents and team members my sales and referral process and I'll be giving it away at the end of this webinar for free if you want to see how the script works I'll give you a preview of it's at the end of this webinar but for the sake of this training what we'll concentrate on is paying team members so Jeff I think you have a few questions to ask both Kevin and I so let's go ahead and get this party started yeah thanks Vlad and just to be really clear about this webinar it's really about you guys tuning in you know I think over on Vlad's side and our side at ideal traits we get this question a lot right and we want to make sure that we're giving you the best information about how agents are producing so high and how they compensate their and that's how they compensate their their top producers so any questions you have you can feel free to reach out on both ends and I think Vlad will give you everyone their contact information at the end correct yes awesome starting out with question question number one this is going to go to you Kevin what makes a perfect compensation plan well perfect is a really high bar for sure and I would say that all pay plans are always evolving as we continue to strive to get the best one but there are some key components within a pay plan that I think that we all need to you know consider and you know the the big one is is rewarding the high performers Vlad touched on that a little bit you know it can become a problem in agencies as they're trying to grow and get started and if you're not paying them appropriately they're going to find another seat and it may not incentivize them to sell as many policies now at the same time you really need to discourage poor performers a poor performing agent is going to cost you a lot of money I'll imagine real quickly somebody pays 2,500 a month and they paid 5% commission whatever it may be and you add it up they only do $10,000 you're paying them 30% of the money so we won't get died deep to we won't dive too deep into that but the reality is is you need to know your numbers know what they are so you can know how to create the perfect pay plan as you're going to hear today so and then last but not least is keep it simple you know some of these pay plans I've seen are you need a super calculator in order to figure out where you're at and then on top of that you got to you know look on 10 different pages so keeping it simple and that is what I really like about Vlad's pay plan that he's put together here and that we're going to hear more about yeah Vlad you know when you show me this plan it really like popped up in my eyes right because it's modernized and I think that's a big thing and you know Kevin and I discussed this in a recent webinar with EverQuote is we got to modernize our compensation packages right across the board so for a sales and CSR count plan can you show everyone what that looks like and you know the all this basically the reasons why you have this count plan absolutely absolutely and I I'll go back to Kevin's the question you asked Kevin for just a second that's when it comes to creating a comp plan I agree with the two components that you you brought up the only thing I would add is that at any given time team members can look at the compensation plan as a motivator or demotivator a motivator to produce at a high level or just be average so what I have created here and you'll see in the sales producer is a compensation plan that does not tolerate average performance and definitely does not tolerate poor performance so the way this is broken down is that there are three tiers and only three tiers that team members need to look at and the tiers are based on the number of households a producer writes let me say that again it's not based on premium it's not based on apps or items or policies it's based on households so to define a household we'll look at the right side of the screen here if someone just switches their car insurance that's not a complete household that's not a whole household that's just half a household if they switch two three cars to you but they keep their homeowners with their current company that's not good enough that's considered to be half a household if someone just switches homeowner's insurance or just the runner's insurance but not the auto that's also considered to be half a household but when they switch both home and auto or home and runners that's a complete household does that make sense jeff it does okay it does let's go ahead no I was just gonna say I think you're gonna get to this but a lot a lot of questions you know agents have is if you recommend paying unwritten or issued yeah it's uh going to be based on um I'll I'll save that question for just a moment I'll answer your question once I perfect the uh breakdown but that's a good question so if someone writes less than 10 households so zero to nine for that month they don't get paid any commission so Kevin Jeff if you're paying a $2,000 base or $2,500 base salary that's all they get they don't get any commission so if they write nine households and uh that's how they end the month well or nine and a half households too bad so sad you don't get any commission once they cross that 10 household mark 10 households then they get paid 3% of the premium that they wrote so if they wrote 20,000 in premium they get paid 3% of that as their commission now that that top tier is 20 households that's the highest commission that you can get and that's uh 7% so if you write 20 households 30 households or more however many households as long as it's more than 20 you get paid 7% so two quick things to note that there needs to be a big jump between writing 10 households and 20 households so I wouldn't do like 5% for this tier and then 7% for this tier because that difference doesn't feel like a lot when you go from 5 to 7% but it's huge when you go from 3% to 7% so I'll just say this last part before I give you a a simulation that if these numbers aren't designed to be fixed then you can't uh change them this bottom number I would keep fixed I wouldn't go up or down I would just keep it at 3% but this second number of 7% in premium I wouldn't um if you can't afford to pay more than 7% I know a lot of agents pay 8, 9, 10% already I would pay a higher commission but I wouldn't pay less than 7% because you want to reward the people who are writing a lot of business 20 households so let's see what that looks like in terms of a monthly basis and what how that breaks down so let's suppose the producer writes five households for the month that's what they wrote this month an average household let's say is 2,500 in premium that's supposed to say 12,500 is it not you have my mouth wrong I have my mouth wrong it's supposed to say 12,500 but close enough um how much commission do they get paid if they write five household nothing nothing because they're part of the the first tier so their commission is zero dollars so they just get their base of 2,000 or 2,500 this is just a suggested base pay so their monthly total is just 2,500 over the course of a year that's 30k now I think this that's a good example too kind of what we were talking about earlier is that's an expensive person this is why you want to disincentivize and to realize the fact that this low performer you're going to pay 25 commission they wrote 10,000 you gave them 2,500 there's no other way around it and what you'll find that most people might don't consider is paying at the higher rates of the premium is they're going to be more expensive in the reality is it's going to be less and I think black and uh help attest to that yeah that's a good point so um let's let's take that next tier of 10 households someone writes 10 households that ends up being 25,000 in premium how much commission do they get paid do they get paid zero three or seven based on this grid three percent three percent so three percent of 25,000 in premium is $750 so that's their commission check they get paid $750 as their commission plus their base of 2,500 that ends up being 3,250 for the month not bad not terrible but not good enough for an A player if you're an A player who's maybe driven by money I think you would be pretty pissed off if you're always at that at that mark of less than 20 households now let's see what happens when you get to 20 households you do 20 households multiplied that by 2,500 in premium per household that's 50,000 in premium now you get paid seven percent of that that's the the high tier that's $3,500 that you get paid in commission which is more than your base so you add the two together that's 6,000 in monthly pay over the course of a year that's $72,000 so that in my perspective if I'm a producer and I'm doing 15,16,17,18 or worst case scenario I do 19 households I would be pissed off because the difference between writing 19 households and 20 is huge in terms of how much I get paid so that's the that's the sales comp plan before we get to the CSR comp plan Kevin what are your thoughts on this compensation plan things you like dislike you know the things that really like about it are household it's a really unique approach you know a lot of agents look at items they look at premium and in in your paying off of it but you're really getting them in the mindset to incentivize and to make it that the agency wins too and some pay plans out there that agents receive from their carriers are based on their bundling package so it's awesome to be able to take a look at that in a unique approach to do that the other way is you know again you go to the high side the person who writes 50,000 they get a great salary it's $72,000 you're going to be able to retain them more it's a lot more of a stable person in your agency and if you look at the premium again now you're looking at 6000 on 50,000 it's 12% again to the point it's less expensive to have a great producer they're happier they're making more money and it just makes for an all-around perfect package for your agency and and Vlad you mentioned I mean producer across the board an agent and any that has any carrier farmer state farm independent you know we know that terminology but as you go to the CSR you know so you talk to agents and some of them call it different types of roles right for farmers I know they call it a customer service sales specialist or representative an independent agent might call it a count manager and some agents have their own unique name for it would this be a CSR that's also selling is that what we're getting to with this next account plan yeah so I'll show you the we'll call a customer service all those titles in and I'll show you what's can be done for a customer service representative now what I'll show here is just a suggestion but it could certainly be tweaked so this is for that that that customer service representative whose job is not to sell their primary job is not to make outbound calls and close deals they're taking the incoming calls they're changing vehicles adding drivers making taking payments that's the same right there's a different role a third one where if you're a hybrid you do sales and service you're like 50 and we'll discuss that in just a moment but for a customer service representative again it's a three tiered system zero to nine 10 to 19 and 20 plus exactly the same as what we just saw on the previous account plan but this time you're not measuring households written but you're measuring the number of referrals that that customer service representative gets so picture this Jeff you call in you say Vlad I'm calling in to pay for my policies I process the payments I say Jeff thanks so much for calling in have a great rest of the day enjoy your weekend and we cut the conversation there right that's what happens in a lot of agencies is they they just try to move on to that next call now what if I stopped and said Jeff before I let you go I am curious you know we love working with you you've been a client for a long time we want to work with people just like you who else do you know in your community of friends family members church members co-workers that you could refer to us that we can work with as as well and possibly save money on their car and homeowner's insurance Vlad I got two best friends that were just talking about how their insurance rate is too high do you want me to give you their numbers absolutely here's what I'll do I'll go and send you a text right now the number that you're calling me from is a mobile number right correct that will include all of my contact information go ahead and text that information to your two friends and have them give me a call and we'll see what we can do for them so if I do that and I send you that text and I don't get a referral from you then a day later I'll follow up with you and say hey Jeff just a quick text hey Jeff I want to make sure you got my text from yesterday were you able to talk to your two friends right so if I if I do that at the end of every call and I'm getting 20 calls a day how many referrals do you think I can get on a monthly basis if I do that every single time like Kevin would expect plus 20 for sure and knowing him working on his agency and working on ideal trades for sure yeah he would say 20 a week but let's just say a person makes that a habit where at the end of every call they ask for a referral and not just one customer service rep but every customer service rep like they're competing against each other who can get the most referrals and they don't have to be the one who ends up quoting them they can just send that over to the to the sales person but the fact that they came in from my referral that's um that needs to be recognized so if you can generate if you generate zero to nine referrals or what just call it less than 10 referrals then same deal you don't get paid anything on that you have to be incentivized to do at least 10 if you can get 10 and 19 you pay that uh CSR we'll call them 10 dollars per referral that they got if they can generate 20 or more referrals and they get paid 30 dollars per referral now these numbers aren't fixed you can adjust these however way you want but um like picture this if I got if I get let me just rephrase this I think most agents would pay a lot more than 30 to get an incoming call from someone who calls in and says hey Jeff I got your number from so and so I'd like to get car and homeowners insurance quote and you're getting calls like that all day long Kevin would you pay 30 dollars per incoming call like that would you pay 40 would you pay 50 how much would you pay well you know that would be an inexpensive way to to get leads and knowing that referrals are going to close at an 80 percent higher close ratio and why because if they call your office they're looking to do business they are looking and finding ways to actually do business with you and you'd have to really screw that up to not close that business so with that high rate it certainly pays off and the thing that I like about what you did here Vlad is that zero to nine to zero just like the sales count plan and you're sending a message and the message is this is a part of your job yeah you have to do it it's a part of working for our agency is asking for the referrals and I would assume too Vlad with this too could be a referral of a current client that you sell another line they call in with a model line and you refer it over and that's a warm transfer right away that hey mr customer I see here you only have auto you know we can lower your price right away we'll help you do that what we always do is add your home let me get you contact with Vlad and he'll be happy to quote that out or you know while I have you on the phone let's take a look and make sure you have all of the discounts and coverages you deserve blah blah blah you get down to the end and you find out oh you know what an umbrella policy would be a great opportunity for you let me send you over to the sales department so I would assume would be another great way to get instant quotes along with some referrals of their friends and family 1000 percent I'm so glad I didn't even think about that 1000 percent the other thing to consider here is it doesn't just have to be referrals maybe you're an agency who's who wants to write a lot of life insurance I know state farm all state farmers is very like life insurance is a big deal for the caps of carriers what if at the end of every call I could also ask I can say Kevin I see you have your car and renters insurance with us but you don't have life insurance who do you have your life insurance through oh I have it through work I overcome that objection and then we realize that okay maybe it does make sense to get a life policy if I'm not licensed for a life policy for life insurance I can transfer it over to a sales person who is or if I am licensed I can just give you a quote and give you a presentation and say okay for car renters and life insurance is going to cost this much how does that sound you like it perfect we start an application we tell them that this is an estimated price it's not a final price once we get the results from underwriting then we can give you the actual price but we want to encourage at least submitting a life application so it doesn't just have to be referrals it can be referrals or life insurance apps that you submit so let's say someone does 10 life apps per month and they generate 10 referrals per month that amounts to 20 between the two so that would put about that top tier yeah or you might value getting google reviews and say look for every google review that you get that'll count towards your 20 so I wouldn't do three categories I wouldn't do referrals google reviews and life apps because that can just get too much I would just pick two I would pick two whether it's life applications and referrals or life applications or or referrals and google reviews so that's the general setup now when as far as what this looks like on a monthly basis we'll go through the numbers pretty quick someone that gets five referrals again no commission they just get their base I put three thousand dollars as the base that's just an example someone gets 10 referrals for the month they get paid a hundred bucks as a commission someone gets 20 referrals now they get paid six hundred dollars in commission now they're motivated and they know it's part of their job to ask for referral every time but they're getting rewarded every time they do so so that's the customer service plan and I think if they're doing sales and service like a hybrid that I would do households as one of the metrics and then the other metric that you got to look at is referrals so households and referrals but households must be one of them if you're a hybrid between a sales and a service does that make sense Jeff because I think yeah no it makes total sense and I love that and that's why I wanted to ask Kevin here because you know working for Kevin at his at his agency and then working here at ideal trades he just firmly believes as well as me like any time you're on the phone with the customer right whether you're a salesperson or not you always ask for referrals so Kevin after looking at this I know you gave some feedback but there's anything that you wanted to add or maybe like or dislike about this compensation plan you know again it just rewards the top performers and what I think is really key is when you bring a new person on is to get them started right away and getting them a taste of it so they get in that habit and that ongoing ritual of continually asking and the only way you're going to do that is by checking up on them I do have one little tweak to your life insurance is something that we had and it's nearly the same just one thing would be we say who do you have your life insurance with outside of work so now we've already made the assumption they have it it's okay they have it at work but they also should have it outside of work so it gets a little bit more response to that sometimes so well we should agree I need to look into that yeah Jeff I know you can um can we go take one step back there because I feel like there's one detail that's uh I want to make clear going back to the sales producer role with tracking households I think we touched on this but I want to go one step deeper Kevin how often have you seen especially with new producers a lead comes in and they say hey I want a car insurance quote and they just give them a car insurance quote and then they mention oh we can save you some money if we bundle it with your home but they don't really push for it as hard as they should how often does that happen with new or sales producers well you know I think that when sales people start out they typically take the path of least resistance they think everything is going to blow up their deal and so you can certainly see some pushback in that area um in knowing to you and me and even to them that it's very obvious that you should ask and push for the clothes to continue you want to go with the home but um again in the beginning and in some people who are afraid to push forward uh they lack the confidence of doing it and so what I'd like about this is it really kind of forces that it drives yeah your agency to get the household bundling number up yeah because they'll know that this person like this is a done deal we're saving the money and their auto insurance let's say all I need to do is just push a little harder to get the home and now I get got my complete household all right I have a household um and when we do that Kevin what happens when most of your your clients are getting both home and auto how does that affect your retention in an agency do you have any stats on yeah it has a really profound effect I mean you know there's a lot of agencies that I've heard have 75 percent on their auto they might have 80 percent on their home but you combine them and you get 90 and then you add an umbrella or life insurance and then you can get into the 95 you know the mid 90 so it has a massive effect on your on your renewals and the reason it does that is because when it comes time for renewal it seems like a much bigger chore yeah all of these policies I'm tied in I know them I don't know if I want to spend all of this time and effort to go get it all re quoted I might as well just stay and so that's the reason it's you're not easily dispensable and that's why we like to keep all the dates the same date the home and auto umbrella and motorcycle if possible of course is trying to line them all up that's awesome and this is this section we're getting into is bonuses correct Vlad yes so this brings me to my next question for you because I think it's it's super important to know like when we're talking to agents and agents always say okay what type of bonuses are we given it's not always about money right money's awesome of course everyone wants to be awarded with money right but there is an important thing here and like it's about personalizing and tailoring something to to us someone's special in your office especially if they've been with you for a while so can we get into like personalized items and how important that is just giving some thought to an employee before you just give them a certain amount of money I'm going to jump in here first and because we're going to this does set around glad we talked about this a few weeks ago and I was really impressed with your creativity on this so I've adopted that and we are going to be using that in 2021 so thank you for that I am going to back up just a bit and talk about you're right Jeff like it's not just about the dollar amount what we've done in the past has really created some a lot of creativity around what kind of a contest do you have so the typical is I just pay on items or I just pay on premium you get a little bonus at the end of the month and we've done you know lots of different things we've done it around talk time we've done done it around you need three hours of talk time we know the talk time is a perfect correlation of writing business we've done it on everybody has to do their the same amount of talk time or nobody gets that bonus for the day and then it accumulates we've done things that every item you write you get to shoot a basket we've got a little mini basket in our back room and we have a lot of fun of that we've got a massage chair in the back I was about to break that one out policy with an umbrella you get to get a massage so I think the creativity and getting outside of the box of the typical you know if you write this items you know that's what you'll get another one we did is is around umbrella because what happened you can't just write a standalone umbrella and maybe do a current client but if you're writing an umbrella it means you're writing the home in auto too so now you're getting much more items you're getting better retention so getting really creative with the kind of contest and now I'll turn it over to Vlad and how can we reward them when they accomplish these goals yeah I agree that gamifying is what makes it super fun and interesting I'll tell you my personal experience of how this came to be as a producer when I was working in the agency State Farm has these incentives where if you write a certain amount of bank policies whether it's credit cards auto loans then you could get a bonus so we have this contest in our office amongst the five producers that were there where if we could each like I think the I don't remember the exact details but it was something like whoever gets 10 credit cards in a span of two months which is a lot of time 10 credit cards you get paid a thousand dollar bonus very doable like if you just ask every time you'll get easily gets a 10 credit cards what was funny to me is that I was the only person who who tried because at that time I was saving up for for a wedding and an engagement ring so money to me was the most important thing like I don't care about anything else I just want to get my big bonus so I got that in two weeks whereas everybody else in the office at that time they waited till the last week before they started trying and no one ended up hitting that goal and it made me think how is it possible that no one tried that hard to make a thousand bucks and then the the fascinating part about that was the following month our contest was and it wasn't even for the full month it was like again for a couple of weeks where if we did something else there was another contest in place but whoever wins there was only going to be one winner whoever wins gets blazer tickets so I'm from the Portland Oregon metro area and we have the Portland trailblazers also known as the greatest basketball team of all time and everybody else in the office like the blazers as well so the the tickets that we were going to get weren't the best tickets but they were 100 level so probably a couple hundred bucks to to get the tickets so whoever whoever wins this contest ends up getting these tickets I tell you everybody worked their butt off to get these tickets because they knew that the item that they're going to get is something that they normally would not buy which leads me to like this whole conversation of what happens when you pay someone a $500 bonus or a thousand dollar bonus well the first thing that happens is it gets taxed right so Kevin you give me a thousand dollar bonus or a $500 bonus I don't keep the whole 500 bucks it gets taxed so and then when I do get my say $400 after taxes well guess what I'm married I have kids I'm not going to take that $400 and buy myself blazer tickets I'm not going to take that money buy myself something nice that I've been wanting to get for a while what am I going to do I'm gonna take that $400 put it into our family fund right pay for groceries pay for all the things that we need so yes I feel like a winner because I'm contributing to our family's income in a greater way but personally I'm not getting that that's a like personalized gift that I or that item that I really want so which leads me to this when when you get a $500 instead of giving someone a $500 bonus what is it that you can buy for $500 or let me rephrase this what is it that you can give to your team member that would be worth around $500 that you can give that item instead of a $500 bonus are you with me so far on that cabinet okay you know the other thing too not only the tax to them but an employer is going to play the employee taxes on top of the 500 yes be 550 and then you only get 350 400 so why give them money away yeah exactly exactly so let's picture this you have a mom that works in your agency Kevin um a 32 year old mom she's married she has two young children the last thing that she will spend this $500 on is a new coach bag right she's not going to go to Michael Kors coach and buy herself a bag even though she might be into that she loves purses and bags she always talks about it with the other girls and maybe guys um but she's not going to go out and buy it because she's like I'm not saying she shouldn't buy it but that's not what most people do what if you could give her a gift card Kevin for $500 that she to Michael Kors or coach that she can go and buy herself another purse like when she goes and buys herself that that purse and you you give her the gift card and say look because of you achieving this whatever that this is um I'm giving you this bonus uh and go go treat yourself to a great purse I know you always talk about getting a coach purse here's $500 towards that that girl will probably ball her eyes out in your office and go buy herself a purse and then guess what the next party she's at when the girls see that person they'll they'll know it's expensive and they're going to ask her where she got it from well maybe not that question because it'll be clear she'll say I got this for my boss my boss bought me this purse what's the next logical question that they're going to ask her your boss bought you this purse who do you work for why would he buy you a $500 purse so I guess the point is that you it'll always put you in a position of someone who's who's taking care of them outside of just giving them more money so that that's one example another example could be you have someone in your office that loves cooking or they're always bringing bringing a juice to work and you know they have this hundred dollar ninja blender but instead of doing that you buy them a nice four hundred dollar Vitamix from Costco that they probably wouldn't go out and buy themselves so you get that instead of a $500 or instead of just a bonus you have someone in your office who is into fitness they're tracking their calories their steps but they're wearing a four-year-old Apple watch you upgrade them to the new Apple watch that cost a few hundred bucks or you pay for their gym membership for the year like every time they wear that Apple watch every time they use that Vitamix every time they look at that purse they're going to remember you so I mean the list goes on of things that you can get but the point is that you have to personalize it to the person that you're talking to it could be an iPad you know someone's into music you get them a four hundred dollar uh uh headphone sets they would every time they put it on every every time they use it they're going to think about you and how you gave it to them maybe you give them a a great spa experience for for that person plus one or that person's into gaming they come home from the office and they jump on their console if that's their thing that's their thing maybe buy them that new ps5 or whatever that thing is out that's out right now that everybody's crazy about if they're into outdoors you can get them fishing gear a gift card to a sporting good store if they're into sports maybe get them tickets to a game if they're into cars I'm sure every big city has these tours where this company comes I don't know what it's called but they bring in these supercars and you can drive them around the track and it costs a few hundred bucks so maybe you can give them that it's not something they would pay for themselves but you would pay for it so I guess the point here is be creative and it doesn't always have to be you that comes up with these items maybe you ask your office manager to sit down for 20 minutes and come up with with a list of what every person would care about and give them options so you don't just offer one thing but you give your producers an option of you can get this or that so that's my perspective on personalized bonus gifts that you can give instead of just paying a $500 cash bonus I got something real quick Kevin because I know you're chomping at the bit to to go here too come up from an employee side right I've been an employee all my life and well first off I don't I don't even have an Apple watch so upgrading that that'd be super cool Vlad but secondly we're about to get company uh company swag here a little bit for ideal trades and because we're we just released a new logo I believe and I think it's in the works um here soon or but it's about to be released but I've been chomping at the bit texting Kevin check texting our owners to get to get some clothes right and I would just say this because I talked to agents about this a lot and they're like well they just started they don't really care for any company clothes they'd really have something different to Vlad's point it depends who you are for someone like me someone young you know you see it more and more um people want to rep where you work they want to take pride in it so I would just say having uh some merchandise of your farmer's agent if your independent agent all state whatever it is find a way because that $30 shirt could be worth to them more than $300 and I'm being serious just because from my perspective sometimes that that's the kind of mindset that I have but I just wanted to put my two cents in there yeah no I mean it is great a lot of times we'll do the all state swag where they can pick from an all state shirt or an all state jacket and that's actually one of the contests we have for January you've got it already mapped out for the year you can win uh an all state coat so um it's it's creative it's unique here's the thing guys you got to get out of the box you got to get out of the norm and create a great environment in a work um a work environment for your team so that they want to stay it's engaging and you're getting creative with it and I think glad you did a great job with us yeah that's awesome I appreciate that and to your comment um on swag Jeff people make uh they don't like fun to me but they poke fun because I I tend to wear the same stuff every day you know I I'm not copying Mark Zuckerberg but I just I have five of the same black shirt gray shirt blue shirt and I just go through that rotation because it's isn't it easier that way though yeah yeah the people might look at me at the office and say didn't you wear that shirt that same exact shirt the last three days uh it is the same design but it's not the same exact actually I got four of those yeah right so and it's just one less thing you think about and if it's branded to your company like there's a logo on there somehow then you know that's one last decision that your team has to make every morning again it goes into making a good environment for your team members to work in where um not only do they get compensated well but just the atmosphere in the office is just um especially this generation coming right out of college I tell you what it's almost like a competition people are literally like oh nice bash like that's cool and he wears it all the time I want to I tell Kevin this I want to rep my logo man like I love it here right so I just think you know this generation especially you go to events well when events come back to life you know you're seeing more people without suit jackets now you're seeing them wrap their company swag so yeah I'm a big proponent of that yeah um Kevin is there any other important motivating factors you want to add in I know you talked a lot about it but it was all really good stuff yeah you know we certainly had a lot of things and you know like like you have up here is is public praise is really important they need to feel good they need to feel like they're part of the team they need to feel like Vlad said that there's um uh that actually right here that you know there's opportunity for growth um in that that younger generation Jeff that you're in and and up and coming they want to be a part of something they want to be a part of a community they want to know that you are are helping to improve the environment the community around many involvement right team environment a team you know a team concept and that's tough in today's age but we know uh this day shall pass and soon enough we'll be able to get back out there do that volunteering but in that office when they do something right and I tell my team all the time you can brag to me like brag to me like please like send me send me the text like it's okay bragging typically is not viewed as a nice thing to do but to me as my employee I want you to like I want to hear about that so that I can give you that public praise yeah love it 100% I think for a lot of people if they're not like if their love language is not gifts but it's just words of affirmation we know the five love languages if whoever's watching this if they don't know me uh they need to look it up uh but like if my love language is words of affirmation I would much rather have you Jeff or Kevin come up and in front of everybody say Vlad congratulations on last week you had um you had uh asked for the sale 20 times it's something you've been working on for the last few weeks he finally got the 20 asks for the sale and that resulted in five new households that you wrote I want to congratulate you on that lunch is on me today uh great job in doing that maybe not even lunch is on me but just giving them that praise in front of everybody is going to be worth more than that $500 bonus that you'll give me because that might be something I'm missing in my life so I think to your point uh Kevin that's not something that can be overlooked and a players to go to your comments on opportunities for growth you can pay me great bonuses you can give me a great compensation plan you can give me public praise all the time but if I don't know where I'm going to be a year from now two years from now three years from now if that vision isn't clear it'll be hard for me to to stay super motivated to continue to improve myself and improve my skill set but if you have a conversation with me and you say Vlad if for six months in a row you can do 20 households a month then you'll be eligible to um apply for our sales manager role at that time and here's what that would look like and you tell me about what that uh what the opportunity would look like and if you can do well for another six months then I'll go to bat for you to a state farm or all state or farmers whatever company you work for and you say I'll help you become an agency owner and uh just seeing that understanding that vision I think for me when I was a producer working from 8 a.m I would come into the office at 7 o'clock and leave often at 8 o'clock I would start making phone calls at eight nine o'clock even though I hated the commute to the office and going back from from work especially since I took public transportation because parking was just expensive in downtown Portland despite all those negatives I was motivated like crazy to perform at a high level because my vision was 18 months from now I'm going to have my own agency 18 months from now I'm going to have my own staff but before I get there I need to make sure that I'm an excellent salesperson that I can write 100 policies a month so that was my goal every day was get to 100 policies a month so that I could open up my agency and teach my team members how to do the same thing so it was clear to me no one needed to have that conversation with me I just knew what I wanted but that's not the case with a lot of other people sometimes you have to bring that out of them sit down with them for 10 15 minutes and ask Jeff what is it that you want to achieve in a year from now where do you want to be three years from now well I don't know well let's let's dream let's talk about this out loud for a second let's let's brainstorm this we don't have to come up with a definite answer but at least start that conversation so that when you're when you're talking to your producer about doing 20 households a month it's not just hey you better get to 20 households otherwise you're not getting your high commission rates it's hey Jeff remember why we want 20 households a month right it's because of that sales manager role and then later become an agent you can tie all of that in so that's just my quick two cents on to add on what you said Kevin that's great really good sometimes we'll do we'll ask them hey what motivates you and then we'll have them create that as their screensaver so now every day all day as a screensaver in the background it shows what that item is that they're looking to do and the screensaver can change right from time to time one last thing on this flat because I've been looking at a lot of webinars recently on this and you know humanizing the way managers are today is so important especially with the pandemic right so finding out what's in it for them how do they get motivated and for our sales team and my sales team you know there's three questions that I've just implemented it's one you know how do you think you're perceived whether it's in the company or in life in general you know we go that deep to how do you want to be perceived there's always something there I'm sure you too could obviously give me some things of how you think you're perceived and how you want to be perceived and then three what are the steps needed to take to get to where you want to be perceived in life and in professional life and I don't know I've been doing that with my boss recently and it's it's helped tremendously so something to keep in mind too yeah I think that's yeah genius well and I think the one thing you know top speaking of top performers and what's inside of you is there's there is a you've got the right DNA you've got the right ingredients you've got the right traits in order to you know perform at a high level and that's where it starts you know hiring that right person so that they understand and they I have that drive inside of them to keep striving to get to the top so you got to find that motivation and drive and Vlad we talked about a different couple different comp plans I'm not trying to go back to that but there was something we talked about and that's with an office manager I know there's probably some agents maybe watching this webinar and they or this recording they might be thinking like okay so you talk about CSR and producer what about an office manager so is there anything that you guys can give on that end like let's start with you Kevin because I know you had an office manager for your office that is just amazing um maybe what kind of personality and then like how do you motivate them how do you compensate them well you definitely want a cheerleader someone is going to praise their team in public for sure and show them where the opportunity for growth is but then you also want to have an incentive plan that's going to pay an override so based on all of their team's production incentivizing them in a way that it makes sense that everyone's pulling in the same direction so that's really important and then we also do an annual bonus just based on how do how are we doing overall you know how does that relate to the company goals how does that relate to the agency goals and making sure that we're hitting all the numbers that we need to okay and then to that to when we talk about you know compensating compensations there is no matter how great of an agent you are no matter how great of an agency you're running you're going to have charge backs right so can you give idea of what you guys do at your agency on charge backs and Vlad actually you take this one first I'll answer um I want to add to what Kevin just said if you don't mind yeah go for it go use the term overrides Kevin and I think most 99 percent of the agents do know but for that one percent who might not know if if your agency writes 50,000 or 100,000 in premium you're saying the office manager gets paid one percent of that right or two percent what that number is so let's just say um your your so my suggestion to that is also have it be tier based for the office manager so that if the agency writes 99,000 and uh 99,000 in premium that the office manager gets paid one percent's override but the moment they cross that 100,000 in premium for the agency for that month then they get paid two or three percent as an override that way the office manager is also incentivized to pull that team up past that 100k mark or it could be 50,000 so different agencies depending on how many team members you have you would structure that differently but there has to be a tier based system as well only yeah and and again three tiers if they do less than 50,000 in premium the sales manager gets no override once they pass 50,000 in premium now there's a 1 percent override you get to 100k in premium now the sales manager or office manager gets paid a two or three percent override so also has to be tiered um your question on chargebacks I think uh I'll just say that chargeback should be uh something that every agency institutes so if I'm a producer working in Kevin's office and I wrote a policy five months ago and it cancels today um I don't know how you do it Kevin but I know a lot of agencies they'll pay the producer for the five months that the policy was enforced but that one extra month that was still remaining in that term I need to be charged back for that and you use a system to help you do that is that right yeah we use agency zoom so it's a great way we can import all the reports and just automatically gets charged back right back to their agent number and that's associated with them and so we always will charge back we can't have somebody writing policies and having them fall off and then paying them full commission that's not going to work out and that helps them to write more clean business that system is awesome thinking from an employee standpoint give a shout out to agency zoom I know they didn't ask us to do this but oh go like that oh yeah you guys should check them out they do a great job agency zoom in less than 30 seconds who are they what do they do um agency zoom is a is a management system it it helps to track your commission it helps to track ALR referrals it's got all kinds of information you can set up your account plan right inside it and with just within a few clicks your entire payroll or your bonus plan whatever it is will be calculated they just do a phenomenal job yeah so you're saying I shouldn't be using a spreadsheet to track commission yeah yeah keep it up Vlad so many agents still use spreadsheets that's oh man we're in yeah 21st century um specifically designed for insurance agents so yeah a great program awesome uh great i'm glad we gave him a shout out uh jeff what else do you have on your assistant questions well you know and this is something that agents will ask me from time to time and um I've had experiences you know in my years as an employee right and I just feel like there's good ways and great ways for a manager or an owner to release a new compensation plan but there's also some terrible ways right so Kevin can you take a deeper dive um and just give some like I don't know biggest biggest ways to to to make sure you're delivering that the right way to your new employees or current employees yeah well you know I think you know some ways not to do it it's just send out an email um the way's not to do it is you know I'm paying too much or we're not hitting our goals you know I think that you really need to know the why behind it so I would get the team together I would make it just the people that are affected by the paid plan all of everyone has to be in attendance and really go into the reasons why the current paid plan isn't producing the results that the agency needs to succeed it could be in the bundling category it could be in total items category and and then get into you know the how so how are we going to change that and what are we going to do in order to correct these measures and and create a positive experience out of it let them know that this is a good thing that's going to reward the high performers and it's also going to disincentivize those that that aren't doing very well that quite frankly could be dragging down the team and grabbing that uh dragging down some of our eight players so it can be done in a way and you know I don't the pay plan would be intended to as I mentioned incentivize the high performers and how they can make more money than they're currently getting out so make it a make make it a fun time you're saying don't let the employees play telephone so tell a couple and then they go tell other employees and if they don't like it they commiserate that's the worst blad what's what's your take on it that's good stuff Kevin yeah I agree I think there's a company whose name I won't mention that I think most companies especially captive nowadays they give you a higher uh pay structure up front like when you become an agent for that company you know coming into it you sign a contract that in the first two years you don't get paid uh say for example 10 so you get paid a lot more on uh as a commission so you come into it you have the math figured out you know what you're going to get paid so when you hire your producers I'll think a lot of these first year agents are super desperate to bring someone on board so they pay crazy commissions because they can afford to do that because they're getting paid well but there's never that expectation set from day one that a year from now or two years from now that that this commission structure is going to change so this person might come in and they'll produce well for a year and then they'll have a sit down conversation with their agent or the agent says well my commission just changed so yours has to as well so I think a couple of ways that you can do this is A either be up front and say look this is where we're going to start but in a year from now it's going to be a different comp plan but by that you're by that time a year from now you're going to be so much better you're going to be writing so much business that that extra two three percent that you get paid won't even matter because you'll be writing a lot more business so you can do it that way or just use the compensation plan that we discussed earlier today in our call and keep that same comp plan all around and I think what we should do in our next webinar gentlemen is maybe break down these numbers and show the return investment because I know both of you are our math nerds like I am where we can sit around and play with sprite shooting not as big as you though I don't know maybe we could break that down and show how does this comp plan actually pan out in terms of our life or for the agents are you guys cool with doing that I love to do that that's a great idea and you know I so personally I opened up five scratches that had the enhanced compensation and I just paid the same because I didn't want to face that day to say you're going to get a pay decrease like the you might say it sounds good now and you know we'll kick the can till later but that never will go well they just won't enjoy the thought of getting reduced commission getting paid less or they have to do more in order to get less and the other negative piece to that is what it'll do to some people hopefully you know if you don't hire the right person is they can do less and feel comfortable so now you train them that less is okay because you're paying them an absorbent amount on that premium the reality is that extra commission has just helped to run the agency it's helped to get the agency up and run in to pay for the build out to pay for all the computers and everything you need and the insurance and and the payroll to cover all of the expenses and not just look at it as an individual yeah that's great and you know all the whole it's interesting the whole recording we we've really been talking about high performers and low performers right um so when agents talk about like okay so how do you get more high performers than low performers or how do you get people that want to work at all right Vlad how do you get people that want to work at all especially in a tough market right so that's actually where ideal traits comes into play and uh Vlad and I we're talking and Kevin and what we want to do is give anyone who actually joined this webinar a free trial so what we're going to do is if you hop on here right Vlad um what we did is made a deal with you that anyone who accesses this link will get a free trial get on there if you're looking for staff in the next two or three months do it now and start building that pipeline use the assessment and if you need any more information besides just obviously it's a free trial you don't get you don't we don't need a credit card if you need more information before doing that give us a call I mean we're here with you and give you as much information as you need yeah I'll include the the link will pop up and we'll tell agents where to go but let me say this real quick that uh what a month ago when you reached out to me you said Vlad uh are you hiring right now I said I'm not but I will be in a week uh you kind of twisted my arm and you said you got to try out ideal traits and as you know I was using a different platform at that time I knew about ideal traits but I had this other platform that I've had for so long that I just kept using and you like it made me sick it made you sick I uh I thought you know what I I love ideal traits but I haven't personally used it I've only helped a few agents set it up and uh I thought okay let me just give it a try and I kid you're not in the first week and I could pull up the reports to prove it to you but I had uh more than 50 applicants if there's like 51 or 52 in the first week I had over 50 applicants come through and out of those 50 applicants as you know with the system uh every person is required to take an assessment and then the way I customize mine was every person who applies has to answer five written questions about their background and I'm due to interviews with with great candidates and hired one of them who just started with me last week so that's just a testament and here's a crazy part here's the crazy part it took me less than 30 minutes from the time that I created my login to the time that I published my jobs less than 30 minutes and the next day I already had like 20 some applicants come through it was ridiculous so the immediate ROI on that was crazy because what's the alternative to ideal traits is I go to Indeed post a job pay them money to boost it and there's nothing wrong with that but what I like about ideal traits is that it streamlines the whole process so out of the 52 applicants that came in a good number of them took the assessments and answered my questions that I had for them but I didn't like any of them I just deactivated all of them my the two that I really like I ended up setting up a call with them and doing a zoom call so I'm a believer I have converted to the ideal trait platforms that's going to be my platform of choice and I'm more than happy to put my name behind it so I know that typically you guys don't do trials in fact I think this is the first time this month is the first month you've ever offered a trial is that right in the eight years or ten years you've had ideal traits yeah absolutely the first month ever and you know it just gives them a taste and what we really like to do is you know assess your stack like you can see what it is and then we can go from there and show you how you can rinse and repeat but it just how simple and easy it is to know more and go deeper about each one of the candidates that apply and they're freaky accurate Vlad's going to take one probably today hopefully I'm going to bug them yeah um I've been meaning to do that um okay anything else you got Jeff well I just want to give you some praise I mean here's the thing like I told you in the beginning of this and I'm super I'm not going to say skeptical but when I check out vendors I got to make sure I'm recommending the right thing to my agents right because if I'm not recommending the right thing and they come back to me and say it didn't work I mean that's my reputation it really is no matter how you skin the cat so um I had agents calling in like I said and I'd ask them oh how'd you hear about us and they kept mentioning this guy Vlad and it got to the point Vlad I'm not kidding I'm like who is this Vlad guy like who is he so I look you up and sure enough I think like after I checked you out I saw a bunch of Facebook ads I'm like I gotta I gotta chat and I gotta give them a call and that's when we collaborated and teamed up and I just feel like anytime you sign up I don't know if you sign them up or you just you connect with an agent you build a ton of trust like that agent and I take I give you a lot of praise because that agent absolutely loves what you do they're always coming back to you and they tell me on the phone like hey I'm not I'm always going to use Vlad he is the best he's giving me great advice and I just want to say like you know from an outsider looking in it's something I'm going to recommend because if you can give them that much value that's something we want to do here at ideal trades obviously too so I'm glad we're collaborating on this this webinar I think you have you around more often it gives me additional confidence boost Jeff so I thank you for that I'm just kidding appreciate it so for people who want to check out my sales script and I think that's the that's the bonus that I want to give away the six step script the one call close if you want to see exactly how the script works how I was able to write 150 policies per month consistently how a lot of other agents across the country do as well then go ahead and click the link below this video you'll be taken to a page where you can register to watch a 90 minute webinar in that webinar I'll break down the six steps and I think to go to your point Jeff it's not a sales presentation it's actual value you'll walk away from that webinar with actual scripts that you can implement right away so I enjoyed this conversation thanks for much thanks so much for setting this up Jeff I appreciate it absolutely and just to be clear too it's even a brand new agent right brand new agents right away you're helping out as well yeah brand new agents or agents who are already super successful if you want your team to sell more specifically auto homeowners PNC policies check out the webinar I think you're going to pick up a lot of great insights from it that's great hey thanks for your time lad thanks for joining us always great to connect with industry experts in the field and spend a really good conversation