Greg Arnold's blog

Ted Baker is the Founder of Advanced Automation.  Thirty years ago he started selling life insurance and still believes that was a great sales foundation for his career in our industry. Ted teaches a monthly class for Solutions agencies focusing on "How To Become an Awesome Producer".  Trust me, this is not the type of sales training you will probably hear any place else.   This audio class is edited down to 40 minutes and everyone in your agency who is primarily focused on selling, absolutely must listen to this audio recording.   

Ted Baker

Awesome Producer Training

Whether you actively use social networking for our business, it may already be impacting you positively or negatively.  There have been numerous examples of people fired for things appearing on social networking sites or even being arrested for things shared on line.  Chances are potential customers or even your insurance carriers may be looking for information about you or your business on line.  If you are trying to attract quality employees, it is very likely they are searching as well.  Have you "Googled" yourself, your agency or even your staff to see what is being said about you, your business and those conneced with your business?  Don't ignore negative information that may be out there in the world of Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc.  This is all part of the direction our world is moving! 

   Most agency Owners are looking for ways to cut costs.  One of the easiest ways to cut printing costs (are you ready for this one?), stop printing!!  As you probably know, ink and paper aren’t cheap and we have a huge theme in our country about saving trees and being more "green".

So what are some realistic ways, in our industry, to save money?  While stopping printing documents all together is probably not the answer, there are some great solutions to consider.  (read more)

As we work with independent agencies, we are always looking for better ways to do things (and hopefully save money as well).  We like to "practice what we preach" whenever possible and when we found a great answer for hosting our company email, we recommended this to many of our insurance agency clients and overall have heard "glowing reports".  What's even better is that for 99% of agencies it is totally free!

Possibly you have an exchange server to host your email but if not, we suggest using the service provided by Google.  (I do have friends that says, "Google has a sinister plan to take over the world" but hey, I have met people who think the internet is a fad like "pet rocks").  Google does a great job on spam filtering, you don't have to change your email addresses or anything (in case you were wondering).  Here is the place to start:  http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html