![\"Focus](\"https:\/\/www.thegrowthcoach.com\/central-ohio-north\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/ocus-jpg-scaled-300x200.jpg\")
<\/p>\nRecently I worked with my friend Sarah who said she needed help within her time management. Her frustration stems from distractions with other work that keeps her from her primary goal; selling more insurance.<\/p>\n
When Sarah focuses on selling more policies, she grows her income as she is paid commission only on selling new policies. Her agency also wins when she sells a new policy. So why does her boss continue to shackle her with service calls and renewal requests that bring no additional financial value to the agency?<\/p>\n
To be a successful agency, you have to produce new business. However, people keep their business with an agency because of the service and attention they perceive when insurance is needed. This is a classic urgent vs. important time management debate that seems challenging on the surface.<\/p>\n
If we dig a little deeper and apply some metrics to the situation, it becomes easy to see that Sarah should be devoting more time to selling new policies than servicing existing work.<\/p>\n
By dividing Sarah\u2019s annual sales goal by the number of hours in a year she works, we calculated that her agency loses $117 per hour when she is tasked away from selling<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Or to put another way, every week she spends handling service calls, her agency loses $4,680<\/strong>. If 3 weeks of her year were taken up by service, the agency would lose $14,046<\/strong>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This example is just Sarah. The agency has 9 other sales people. If they had similar goals and similar requirements as Sarah, the cost of mismanaged priorities comes to $140,400<\/strong>.<\/p>\n I would hope Sarah\u2019s agency could find a way to support their existing client base with resources and strategies that cost far less than $140,400 per year.<\/p>\n This story is an example where organizations align their efforts to items that are more urgent than they are important.<\/p>\n It feels like putting resources towards servicing clients is the right thing to do. Plus, it is expensive to hire a person to service clients so that sales people are free to sell.<\/p>\n However, the numbers tellvus that there is roughly $100,000 of pure profit<\/strong> sitting in Sarah\u2019s agency if they choose to value the important work of selling new policies over the urgency to respond to existing clients.<\/p>\nThe opportunity beyond Sarah<\/h2>\n
The Time Management False Positive<\/h2>\n
What about you?<\/h2>\n