P R A D

It also has the benefit of leading to more successful producer hires. As a development tool and sales approach, team selling produced success in 69% of producer hires versus a rate of 60% for those producer recruits selling individually. The success rate gap between team selling and individual selling is even greater than the gap between specialists and generalists.

This is especially true in employee benefits, where producers hired into team selling environments succeeded at a rate 19 percentage points higher than producers hired to sell individually. On a firm-wide basis, the most successful firms in the study also have a higher adoption rate of team selling than the rest of the firms in the study, though team based selling remains infrequently used at all levels. Despite the apparent boost to success rates, only 12% of all producers were hired into team-based selling environments.

Team Selling Impact on Success Rates

77%

71%

56%

53%

Producers Hired in Their 20s

Producers Hired from Outside the Industry

Success Rate of Team Selling Success Rate of Individual Selling

Source: Supplemental survey

Team-based selling has the most positive impact on younger producers and producers hired from outside the industry. Within these two groups, team-based selling boosted success rates by 15% and 24%, respectively.

Assigning Accounts

There are two competing opinions about the wisdom of assigning accounts to new producers. Those favoring assigning accounts believe doing so provides a training ground from which a new producer can gain valuable experience and potentially derive new business referrals. Those opposed argue that although there might be some modest experiential benefits, a producer needs to learn the tricks of survival by producing his/her own new business. Thus, assigning accounts can inhibit a producer’s development as a hunter. Both of these viewpoints have merit. However, because of the nature of the action, even compelling data will not necessarily resolve the debate. In the supplemental survey, producers who were assigned accounts were more likely to succeed, but it is difficult to say whether their ability to validate, and the time required to validate, was directly impacted by the assigned accounts. In other words, the assignment of accounts may mask the new business production that determines success or failure in most other cases.

39 Producer Recruiting & Development Study