It's a given that, in a competitive environment such as selling benefits, it's important to improve constantly. One of the earliest business adages regarding strategy is, "If you're standing still, a competitor is passing you by." By analogy, think of an athlete in training. After going through the same daily routine for an extended time, an athlete will reach a plateau eventually. To break out of that and improve, the athlete needs to try something different.
Consider some methods of change that can lead to progress. Change in the world of selling benefits can mean change in the products you market, the services you offer or the staff you allocate to projects. You might be considering the addition or deletion of a product, service or staff function. Or perhaps a substitution is on order: a product from a different carrier, a service from a different vendor or based on a different system.
For each type of change, there is risk. A new product, service, staff function or staff member might not work out. This means you need to create a system for managing change. Managing change includes accepting the risk involved, which includes accepting the possibility of failure. We often picture progress as a series of positive events. But, in reality, progress is a series of events with highly varied results, some of them failures. Success is measured in the aggregate, not the specific. Think of the financial chart of any highly successful company. Its stock price doesn't bolt to the top like an arrow, but undergoes a series of ups and downs that progressively reaches heights beyond the competition.
Let's consider a benefits selling example in risk taking. A few years ago, the carrier I worked for decided to add voluntary group short and long term disability to its product line that included voluntary term and universal life. While it seemed logical to add VGSTD/LTD, the market for these products was dominated already by leading distributors. This placed us in a position of lower sales than originally estimated, and also meant marginal expenses were higher than those of the major players. This resulted in our prices being higher than the competition. Over the next couple of years, there wasn't the proper sales momentum to maintain those products and they were discontinued.
Did the VGSTD/LTD experiment help the company make progress? Yes it did, though not in the way originally planned. There was progress because we learned how important it was to focus resources on successful product lines and on new products that had a marketable edge. Our success in universal and term life insurance was due, in part, to a sufficiently large block of business to keep marginal expenses competitive. We learned that due diligence in market research is key when launching an addition to the mix.
You must be willing to risk failure. And if you do fail, you must accept it as part of the improvement process. Next month, I will discuss managing change through the use of project management and how it can help facilitate the all-important communication aspect of change management.
