Building a High-Performing Sales Team 

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One of the greatest challenges for agencies looking to grow and scale their business is finding, onboarding, and retaining high-performing producers who drive new business growth and are also cultural fits. Because they don’t know how to overcome these challenges, most agencies experience slow growth, poor performance, and lost revenue opportunities.  

Let’s look at five critical areas where agencies struggle and how to overcome them.

Finding qualified candidates

To say that agencies struggle to identify and recruit producers capable of consistent, high-level production while also enhancing the organizational culture would be a huge understatement. This challenge keeps many agencies from growing and scaling beyond a producer or two. 

It isn’t that most agencies don’t attempt to find these producers. The problem is they are looking for the wrong traits and ignoring too many red flags. Because the industry insists that this is a “relationship business,” agencies seek out candidates with a lengthy contact list and big personalities. 

Yes, the relationship is important. However,  this business has become much more of an advice and results one. The best candidates are relentlessly curious about the buyer’s needs and challenges and how they can continually develop themselves to address them.

However, the first filter through which a qualified candidate must pass is to ensure that they share the agency’s values and vision and will be an enhancement to the organizational culture. 

The selection process

Salespeople hiring other salespeople can be a recipe for disaster. It often becomes a contest on who can sell whom. Of course, the candidate is selling the agency on why they should get hired. However, because agency owners are also salespeople to their core, they fall into a trap of selling underqualified candidates on taking the job. 

Because the cost of bad hires is too high for all involved, agencies must protect themselves from themselves. Having a non-optional evaluation process won’t ensure 100% successful hires, but it sure goes a long way in avoiding bad hires.  

• Have a structured interview process from which you don’t deviate. 

• Use personality profile tests to ensure the candidate is hard-wired for selling. 

• Test for call reluctance. It’s not a matter of whether they have it or not; we all do. This is to determine what type of call reluctance they have and how to manage it effectively. 

• Build case studies and role-playing into the process. This will confirm a candidate’s ability to think strategically, communicate effectively, and adjust to prospects' inevitable curveballs. 

Finally, don’t ignore career red flags from their past. People bounce around for a reason, and our industry is notorious for recycling marginal (at best) talent amongst ourselves.

Compensation

Any organization that rewards high performers in a similar way to their average performers, will soon find itself with a whole lot of average on its team. – Q4i-ism 

Many agencies struggle to grow because of a misaligned compensation system. Too often, producers will produce new business until they get to a comfortable income level, and then complacency sets in, and they plateau. 

This happens because agencies tend to pay the same commission (close to it anyway) to a producer for not losing an account that they do for going out, finding, and closing a new one.  Sure, the producer should still be paid for that renewal, but when an entire team helps to service and protect that account, their renewal commissions should be much lower. 

On the other hand, most agencies aren’t providing the marketing support to help their producers attract new prospects. Prospecting and closing new clients is more difficult than ever, and producers should receive a higher commission for their hard work. 

It’s not just a matter of renewal versus new business commissions. Mediocre producers who only occasionally stumble on a couple of new micro-accounts are paid the same new business commissions as those high-performing producers who consistently bring in ideal clients. 

Agencies need to implement a tiered commission schedule based on the size and frequency (volume) of new business generated by producers. On top of that, producers should be incentivized with big, over-the-top bonuses (above and beyond the commissions) when they achieve big, over-the-top production. 

Producers plateauing and becoming complacent should be unacceptable. They should be expected to always produce new business, not produce until they decide they’re “comfortable enough.” 

Agencies need to adopt a growth culture and mindset and ensure they reward those who operate with the same. 

Training, coaching, and accountability

When a producer commits the next phase of their career to you, you have a responsibility to provide the resources necessary to give them every chance at being successful. This starts with training during the onboarding process, continues with ongoing coaching, and is all reinforced with mutual accountability. 

The level and frequency of our industry's failure in this area is shocking. You’d think it would only be limited to the mom-and-pop agencies (they struggle, no doubt), but we hear story after story from producers in the largest of national houses who aren’t provided sales training or coaching. 

The primary reason is that so few agencies have a consistent sales process that they expect their producers to follow. They reason that if the producer produces, why should they care how it happens? 

Oh, the answers are many, my friend (but that's for another blog). Yet as Edwards Deming identified so wisely: If you can’t describe what you’re doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing. 

Producers need a consistent process to be trained and coached on, and the buyers also need to be guided through a logical process to help ensure they make the best buying decisions. 

I’m not always a big believer in generational stereotypes, but the generation entering the workforce today wants and expects to be trained and coached. They are beyond suspicious of potential employers who can’t show them the path to success. 

But training and coaching aren’t just for new producers. Here’s what a new (industry veteran) client told us recently. 

After completing the MORE sales training, all I can think is, WOW, I wish I had this 20 years ago! But better late than never! 

Having a plan to add opportunities to my pipeline and a new proven approach to my sales conversations is priceless; it’s brought new confidence to my sales process. 

Of course it’s hard 

Building a high-performing sales team is hard. However, stagnating because you are unwilling to do that hard work is even harder. Which hard are you going to embrace?  

Q4i and Goose can help    

We have built an online platform called "Goose: Your Ultimate Wingman" to help you implement these types of growth ideas. In it, you will find the business tools that you need to build a high-performing sales team: tracking tools, training programs, peer community, access to coaching, and marketing assistance.   

To learn how Goose may help drive your growth in 2025, check out our website at Q4intel.com/goose. Or feel free to connect with or contact me directly on LinkedIn.