Grow what you have

00:03 Hey, everybody, Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute this week, coming to you from home in Denver, Colorado. You know, I was on a coaching call yesterday with a client and their focus is really on helping the account service people grow their existing book of business. And so he was asking me, how do you inspire and get them focused on and get them thinking about out all the ways that they could help their clients grow, not only grow their business but obviously grow the business that they do at the agency. Many agencies have new business meetings, and what that usually means is that you are bringing a task force or a small subset of your team together, and you're talking about what's in the pipeline, prospects, what you're doing to attract new clients to the agency, to have an opportunity to sell to them. 00:48 But very few agencies have a sales meeting focused on existing clients. So once a week or once every two weeks bringing your account service people together, all of them, and having everybody very quickly go around the horn and report what they're doing to get smarter about the client's business and what they learned. A lot of times that cross-pollinates either the idea of how they're learning or what they learned is valuable to other AES on the team and then what ideas from that learning they are going to take to the clients. So what that does is two things. Number one, it instills in the account service folks the need to keep learning more about our client's business. We are their business advisors. We are their thinking partners. And we can't do that if we're not smart about their business. 01:36 In lieu of that, we become order takers. And that is not about really ingraining our value into the client. Anybody can take an order. So, number one, it teaches our AES that they have to keep learning about the clients. And when they learn more about the client's business, the competitors, the industry, it is inevitable that they're going to see opportunities for the business to grow and for the agency to help the business grow. And so that one two punch of here's what I've learned and here's how I'm going to translate that into new ideas. If nothing else, I'm going to share what I learned with the client. 02:12 But it also made me think maybe we could do this at the next trade show, or maybe we could do this to talk to their existing clients and get them to increase the wallet share, whatever it is, it's a muscle that you need to exercise on a regular basis, otherwise it doesn't happen. So again, sales meeting, but for existing clients with your account service people, not your sales team. All right, give that a try. See you next week.