Alison Ferguson

I try to be a good listener with my clients, show them I care before, during and after the sale. I don't give up. I'm pretty stubborn about admitting defeat or admitting I'm wrong. I work hard and enjoy what I do. I also try not to forget to pursue new business referral partners. It is easy to get complacent when referrals are coming in and business is good. But that can change on a dime. To be clear, there are many agents more successful than me. I would say I'm in the top 10% of the salesforce. For me success comes in many forms. I love that I can make a good living while maintaining a great personal life balance. I wouldn't want to sacrifice my personal life or piece of mind, just to make more money. I cherish my time away from work.

I'm not sure what advice helped me the most. What helped me was watching how others did it. If you hang around successful people long enough you start to see their work habits. Creating good habits and being consistent has made me the most successful. Getting up every day and going to work with the resolve to put in the work. Habits are key. And that includes losing bad habits. Being able to recognize when you should stop doing something and make a change.

The advice I would give is that, at the end of the day, this is a sales job. A lot of people get into insurance thinking it's a consulting job and that once they get licensed and set up, the phone is just going to start ringing magically. It won't. You've got to get out and get business. You've got to find ways to get clients, and how you do that is really individual and depends on your situation. My suggestion would be to try everything - try networking groups, try selling voluntary benefit programs, which is how I built my book of business. I sold voluntary benefit programs to other businesses, where I would go in and be the company's resource for personal lines of insurance. Get involved with their HR managers, get involved in their health and wellness fairs, and then once they got to know me, I would go in regularly and do quoting events. I also built my business calling on schools and doing breakfasts for teachers. I did a lot of events in the community, a lot of fundraising-type events through our Quote for Donations program, where every time we did a quote, we'd donate to whatever the cause was. Try to balance the short-term with the long-term payoffs, because I think you need to work on both all the time. When you don't have customers, you have a lot of time to do that. My thought was, let's just throw a bunch of stuff up against the wall and see what sticks. It took 3 years - it wasn't until year 4 that I really started to see the fruits of my labor pay off.

The biggest challenges now are carriers' profitability issues. With all of the weather-related catastrophic storms across the country, insurance carriers have struggled to remain profitable. That has resulted in large rate increases year over year, stricter underwriting, and other challenging issues that trickle down to the agent and customer.

I guess the most important thing for me is to feel that my manager and company are invested in me as a person. Sometimes that means taking extra time to make sure I have the right tools to succeed. Other times, it means having personal time to tend to personal matters at home. The worst thing in sales is to feel like you are a number on a spreadsheet. I am living proof you can be much more successful working for a company that is invested in you. Companies that hire the right kind of people, people with integrity. Comparion is that company for me.