After 30 years in the business, agency principal Bob Sturtevant maxed out.

When Sturtevant’s book at Gibson Insurance reached $1.5 million, he found himself running in maintenance mode simply trying to stay on top of his current client base—a far cry from having the capacity to pursue new business.

As an experiment co-created with his agency’s president & CEO Tim Leman, Sturtevant combined books with a fellow producer, devised and invented a compensation model based on team performance and found synergy by working toward common goals.

That was five years ago. “Today, we effectively have five producers on my team, including myself, and we have the same philosophy,” Sturtevant says. “In the last five years, I’ve written the most new business I ever have in the 30 years I’ve been with the agency. It’s blown up.”

Team selling is a still the exception rather than the rule in the independent agency system—only 12% of producers entered team selling environments upon hire, according to Reagan Consulting’s “Producer Recruitment and Development” study. But for the few that use this strategy, the rewards are abundant.

“I understand the nature of the business lends itself for agents to be lone wolves,” says Eric Baron, author of “Innovative Team Selling” and founder of sales consultancy The Baron Group. “But not taking advantage of the resources available to you is a missed opportunity.”

The Truth of Teams

Co-production can help agents compete on the basis of interaction rather than product—strengthening the client relationship, cultivating ideas from multiple sources and ultimately presenting 360 degrees of risk management protection.

“Any new customer we’re working on is amazed at the resources we’ll use on their business to win their business,” Sturtevant says. “They’re deciding when to bring in the safety professionals and claims consultants and resources the agency has to demonstrate the capabilities of risk management for a client. That is distinctly different than what any other agency will bring to the table.”

Mike Schultz, co-president at global sales consulting and training company RAIN GROUP, puts it this way: Imagine meeting with a prospective commercial client’s risk manager, CFO and financial committee. Facilitating an imaginative, efficient meeting may be an individual producer’s strength, but an entire team can tap into a slew of personalities and offer a wider range of expertise to the client’s group.

“They all bring certain things to a table that could wow, surprise, delight and differentiate the client, especially in insurance, which is based in a regulatory environment where there’s not that much room for product differentiation,” Schultz says. “It’s all interaction differentiation, imagination differentiation, innovation differentiation.”

It’s an ideal approach for agencies with declining close rates or sporadic larger-than-normal prospects—what Schultz calls high pursuit intensity opportunities (HPIO). If there’s potential to generate gains, he says a sales manager should create an opportunity plan. And in most HPIO cases, that should involve perspectives from the technical, support, partnering and sales sides of the agency.

“The first thing you need to think before structure is strategy,” Schultz says. “Where can this help? Where is this going to be useful? Where are we missing sales and where we can win sales? That takes win-loss, cross-sell, up-sell and penetration analysis.”

And while the consumer-facing side of sales is key, team selling can heighten an agency’s in-house sales process. Baron calls this the “internal” component of team selling: recognizing an opportunity and tapping into the brainpower of others to outperform what an individual could accomplish on their own.

“This team structure is a terrific solution to the problem of sales management in an agency management system,” Sturtevant says. “We’re accountable for each other. We have a pipeline meeting every two weeks and a very defined sales discipline in our risk management process.”

The process can impact producer development tenfold. Reagan’s study reports that 69% of producer hires succeed in team selling environments, compared to 60% of those who sell individually. Producers specifically hired outside the industry and those in their 20s experience similar positive results: Team selling boosts success rates by 15% and 24%, respectively.

A People Plan

Dan Horton, vice president of Horton Risk Advisory Solutions, says his agency “fell into” adopting a team sales culture. Joining the agency in a group of fresh producers at 25 years old, he teamed up with a fellow young producer to tackle a large prospective client.

“We basically did it because we were two new producers and figured we needed to support each other early on,” says Horton, for whom team selling “took some of the lumpiness out of the opportunity pipeline.”

The process became a two-way street that gave Horton a partner in crime and helped him, a risk-averse millennial, feel more confident about new opportunities [download the free IA magazine iPad app for more about why many millennials prefer a team-based work environment]. And although the pair split up after gaining more experience, Horton says the structure evolved from a fluke into a formalized training and development program throughout the agency.

Horton Risk Advisory Services has since developed practice groups, experimenting with four- to six-person teams comprised of support, safety and claims staff to bring more value-added resources to the table for larger clients. To start, the agency aligns new producers’ interests with a team or practice group.

“If you find someone interested in construction and throw them into the tech group, they might just not be a good fit because they’re not interested in that business,” Horton points out. “We try to align the producer with their interests. Once we figure that out, we then find a fit between the team and the new candidate as well.”

One way Gibson Insurance tackles the process is by informally interviewing a current producer to assess team fit and personality strengths. But the agency also engages team members in the recruiting process, using them to find potential hires and future team members—a practice more common in the most successful teams.

“We’re now finding that the team has an incentive to hire new producers because the more business we write, the bigger our bonuses,” Sturtevant says. “We’ve also learned that we’re all incentivized on the success of other producers that are on a team.”

Reagan reports that producers hired into team selling environments succeed 19% more in employee benefits than those selling individually. And because specific markets may lend themselves more effectively to a group sales approach, account size is another important factor to keep in mind.

“More complex accounts require a team,” Horton says. “If you have an account that is smaller in size that never has any claims, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to bring out the claims management team. We determine the size and depth of the team by matching up the team to the complexity of the account.”

As a niche-oriented agency, Gibson Insurance utilizes industry-focused sales groups. With specialties in schools, municipalities, nonprofits and manufacturing, teams “incubate” certain specialty areas and become dedicated to the market.

Team selling “keeps your intellectual capital engaged with the agency organization,” Sturtevant says. “It’s a lot more fun because you’re winning new business, which is the thing that drives most natural salespeople. I have a lot of energy, I’m happy, I feel needed and I’m not isolated in my book. Team selling is something that keeps your senior people excited about the business and the industry.”

Fair Share?

While a team mentality may foster creativity and idea generation among sales staff, revenue still reigns supreme for financially driven agencies—making compensation a fragile area that demands a careful approach in a team-based sales environment.

Horton Risk Advisory Solutions leadership takes a back seat, leaving compensation in the team’s hands. “The producers have to come to a mutual agreement on who’s going to get what—whether they split it equally, how long they split it, who sourced the opportunity,” Horton says, adding that some of the agency’s pairs split revenue 50/50 for a predetermined amount of time. “For the team to be successful, they have to come up with what’s going to make them both happy. You have to have expectations before you write the deal. After the fact is typically not the way to figure it out.”

At press time, Sturtevant’s team at Gibson had raked in about $450,000 in revenue since last December—$200,000 short of their total year goal before the end of this month. Split between four producers, that’s about $160,000 per group member—nearly double an individual p-c producer’s goal at the average agency. “The compensation allows for that deep relationship where they are responsible for your success and we’re responsible for your success,” Sturtevant says. “Salespeople are held to a higher standard to now be responsible for their co-producers.”

How much an individual contributes, and what they’re willing to share, is another piece of the puzzle. Sturtevant, who partnered with a 30-year-old book, contributed a substantial volume of business that now results in nearly two-thirds of his group’s revenue—a share that may indirectly correlate to a 50/50 compensation split. But “the slices can move year to year depending on how well that individual is doing and how important they are to the team,” he says. “Over time my percentage has gone down, but that’s been by design. So I will continue to take a lower percentage of the pie.”

In his consulting experience, Baron has also seen what he calls “the assist”: If Producer A receives an opportunity but hands it off to team-member Producer B to handle, Producer A receives a percentage of the commission from the account’s success for some time.

The bottom line? Be fair. “If people are thinking in terms of only themselves, making as much money for them as possible, not thinking in terms of the company, the client, their colleagues—team selling is never going to work,” Baron says. “But if you’re thinking in terms of doing what’s best for the client first, the company second, and realizing that if all that goes well, then I’m going to be just fine—that’s when team selling works most effectively.”

Morgan Smith served as IA assistant editor.