2011 was an incredibly busy and blazing fast year for us. Or it sure feels that way! We have been very involved with creating and training, and time seems to be defined by each of those mile markers along the way. We’ve learned a lot of great lessons and continue to incorporate each of them back into training, resources, and blog posts – where you’ll find our experiences and lessons diligently documented!

We started out the year launching our new sales system and digging into training sessions throughout the spring. Then there were on-site strategic planning sessions we conducted with individual agencies. That definitely kept us moving and thinking a lot about agency business models and the need to evolve that model. We rounded out the first half of the year with our networking conference, BGNLive.

From the conference we had several takeaways to develop for the remainder of the year. That included additional training and vetting new strategic partners. Another big project was getting an internal social networking site up and running for agencies to discuss ideas and share files & best practices with one another.

While we’ve learned many things along the way, here are a few key summarized lessons that we met again and again this past year which have been invaluable:

  • Set your mind to it, create a plan, and commit to getting it done. Persistence, persistence, persistence.
  • Making public commitment statements to your clients/community is a great motivator to keep going even when it’s difficult.
  • Listening to clients’ struggles provides great opportunity to develop new/improved solutions/offerings.
  • Asking for accountability is an amazing way to get things accomplished.
  • Repetition, repetition, repetition. One time and one method of communication is not enough to learn something new or change thinking and behaviors.

Coming Up Next

As we move into 2012, we are looking to go deeper and get more specific on training, both at the network level and within each agency. Another area that will receive increased attention will be driving more interactive agency networking as a means for faster and more effective implementation.

We have our sights set on transforming agencies into independently thriving businesses regardless of the outcome of the various economic and healthcare challenges we face. You can be sure that we’ll continue to take every opportunity to learn and incorporate those lessons back into what we do every day to make our member agencies and brokerages more successful.

Thanks for a great year and here’s to another one to come!

 

Content provided by Q4intelligence 

Photo by Dharmit Shah.