An Interview with Jeff Sargeant
Selling insurance has been great. I know how important it is for people, if you do your job right and you take care of them. We’ve
all walked through homes that just burned down the night before… We’ve all delivered that life insurance check when a spouse has died… Those are the deeply, deeply meaningful events that allow you to see the value of what you’re doing, and I wouldn’t trade that. That’s why we must do everything we can to grow our business. We depend on constant “grassroots” marketing to do that. – Jeff Sargeant, Owner/Principal, Community Insurance Group, Ltd., Sidney, Minster, Botkins and Ft. Loramie, OH
Jeff Sargeant purchased his first agency in 1995. “It was a small operation. Since that time, we have acquired four more agencies. Today, through growth and acquisition, we are eight times the size we were in 1995.” Located in west central Ohio with offices in two counties, Sargeant attributes his success to several key factors:
• People. “As long as you surround yourself with good people – folks with solid character who genuinely care and regularly interact with customers and prospects – good things will happen. We’ve been fortunate to have such good people around us.”
• Personal Client Relationships. “One of our mantras is we never, ever, want to hear a customer say that they have not heard from their agent in the past year. While it may take many forms, one-on-one interaction with your customers is vital to an independent agent. Being accessible, responsive and, most of all, proactive is what makes us different from and more valuable than commodity insurance providers.”
• Technology. “Embrace it! Let it work for you! Let it simplify and manage your processes. We work to be technologically advanced while still providing that one-on-one interaction with our customers, and our retention numbers show it. Taking advantage of our agency management system allows us more time to work with people – both our customer base and our prospecting list – and we’re growing because of it.”
• Grassroots Marketing. “We had our two highest sales years in 2008 and 2009, and our retention rates were the highest ever for the same period, but our net growth in 2008 was only .5% in ’08 and dropped to -.5% in ’09. That’s just the current state of the market. It is frustrating to feel as though you’re doing everything right but not see the results you expect… still I really believe we must consistently deliver our marketing message, now more than ever.
SIS: How would you describe your marketing efforts overall?
Jeff Sargeant: We’re doing what I consider grassroots marketing. We have done media campaigns in the past with newspaper, radio and billboards and then syncing them all together, but we just didn’t get any consistent feedback from that. Now we’re being much more targeted in our efforts, and it definitely seems to be bringing in more new business, especially in packaged accounts. Oh, every once in a while we’ll have a billboard, and we feel that gets some response back for us, but we’re focusing on smaller, more targeted efforts. When trying to get new blood into your group, that grassroots marketing is, by far, the best approach that we’ve seen.
SIS: What are some of the specific methods that work for you?
Sargeant: We believe in being as personal as possible, and in communicating with a few specific groups at a time. We define what demographics we want – maybe an individual neighborhood or a certain group of people, like schoolteachers – then craft a personal letter or targeted mailer, something we can do ourselves.
We also do what I call “drip” marketing. Every couple of months we “drip” our message out to a particular prospect list – a couple a hundred or less at a time, not mass mailings of thousands.
Those two things would be the biggest factors in helping us grow. Again, it’s frustrating to know that you’re doing all these things right, and putting new policies in force on your books, and then realize that all you’ve been doing is treading water when you assess the numbers at the end of the year. Still I’m certain that if we weren’t doing these things we would’ve lost quite a bit of business and been behind the eight ball.
SIS: Does the fact that you have four offices affect your marketing choices?
Sargeant: Absolutely. Each office has some freedom to pick and choose what markets they want to try for, but we always try to be target-specific to reach individuals, and then follow up.
SIS: Where do you get your lists?
Sargeant: We develop our lists through local chambers of commerce, from organizations’ membership lists, or by pooling our collective resources. Since this is small town America, there may be 50 schoolteachers in a community. Chances are someone on the staff will know most of them. We also spend time creating lists from combing through directories by hand! It’s time-consuming, but worth it. Of course our best leads come from client referrals, which we solicit during our annual customer reviews.
Wherever they come from, we use Partner XE to manage the lists and keep track of how often we touch the people on them with mailers or phone calls or whatever.
It’s a constant, ongoing effort.
SIS: What else is important to your marketing strategy?
Sargeant: You may not call it marketing, but we believe that carving time out of each business day for our CSRs and licensed agents to interact with our customers – not just the menial tasks that you have to do in a day – is one of the best ways to keep our name and value in our customers’ minds. Our management system makes us so efficient that we’re able to spend more time in one-on-one interaction with the customer. Of course, it helps us more effectively track all of our prospecting, manage our lists and record how and how often we’re marketing to each individual.
SIS: How do you determine what your message should be?
Sargeant: We regularly refresh our marketing image. We have a great connection with a local marketing group, and every couple of years we work with them to develop a new catch phrase or look and feel. The basic message stays the same, but we believe it’s important to freshen it up a bit.
SIS: What about electronic communications?
Sargeant: Well, we do have a website, but we don’t use it as a cold prospecting tool. I feel that that’s very difficult to do, and I don’t think the success rate’s very high, at least from our personal experience. But the website can be a great tool to provide information for people who are interested in us or who are already our customers and may want to increase their coverage… I think it can be valuable that way.
It is hard to keep it up to date, though. We try to keep it fresh with the latest news or PR pieces that may have been in the paper about us, and maybe a hot topic on the insurance industry… But truthfully we’re not very consistent here.
SIS: Do you do a regular newsletter?
Sargeant: (Laughs.) We are in the process of redesigning that. We did it years ago, and I don’t know why we got away from it… I believe a newsletter is very valuable, It can be done very cost effectively and you can deliver exactly the message you want. I think they work, and that you should do them at least semiannually. So, we’ll start with two a year. It’s the piece to get back to, both in print and electronically.
SIS: What about email?
Sargeant: We use our management system to collect email information on all of our customers. As that list slowly builds, we can obviously send out a PDF file of any marketing piece, but we’re still going to need to send hardcopy until we can get everybody caught up into the 21st Century!
SIS: What’s your biggest challenge right now?
Sargeant: “Commoditizing.” People think they can go anywhere – shoot, you can even go to Sam’s Club® – to buy insurance. It’s all over the place: 1-800-this and that.
The challenge for independent agents is how to differentiate ourselves from commodities selling the same product, and from captives like the Nationwides or State Farms. We are so much more than just a commodity! We offer choices. And we know our customers – they’re our friends and neighbors, our barber, the woman in the next pew at church. We can help our customers select the coverage that’s best for them, and continue to advise and support them as their families grow and life situations change.
It is vital that we use every available marketing tool to reinforce the personal value independent agents can provide, and that we are proactively, personally accessible through one-on-one interactions with our customers.
SIS: Any last comments?
Sargeant: I don’t want to mislead anybody into thinking, “Boy, we need to start doing what Jeff’s doing so we can make a lot of money right now.” I do think we’re going to be very successful again in a few years when the marketplace changes. By consistently continuing our marketing efforts, we’ll be that much farther ahead of the competition. I believe that and that’s the way we operate. If we hadn’t kept up our marketing efforts, I know we’d be worse off than we are now. People who are taking the stance of putting their heads in the sand, hoping for the marketplace to turn and the economy to recover but not doing anything about it, are in for a rude awakening when it does. Meanwhile, the agencies that are trying to market and stay progressive even in these down times are the ones that will be that much further ahead in a few years.
