Time Management: The #1 Differentiator in Sales

Every producer in this industry, from the rookie to the top all-star, gets the exact same 24 hours in a day. It’s the ultimate equalizer.

Yet, most waste this invaluable resource on outdated training, get bogged down in service work, and lack the discipline to focus on what actually drives growth. They treat time as something that just happens, not as their most critical asset.

The top 1% understand that how you manage your time is the #1 differentiator between mediocrity and massive success.

In this episode, I’ll give you the game plan for how elite producers leverage time at every stage of their career. This isn’t about working more hours; it’s a new framework for using your time to build an unbeatable competitive advantage.

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Video Transcript:

This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.

Here’s my point. Whether you’re an UN validated producer validated, or the home run king all star of your agency, time is the great equalizer. Yet it’s also the great differentiator. And the number one thing every producer has to do today, if they want to continue scaling their business, is build brand awareness, mindset.

Hey, welcome back to the Accelerate Your Insurance Sales podcast. Andy Neary here, founder and CEO of Complete Game Consulting. How are you today? Today we are going to talk about the great differentiator in the world of insurance sales. And that differentiator is time. I’ve had a lot of conversations in the past two months with agency executives and sales leaders who represent some of the bigger, independent agencies in the country.

So you’re talking about execs and sales leaders who often oversee upwards of 100 producers. And when I think about what separates the best from the rest, it is time, how you use it, how you manage it, how you buy it back. And that’s what we’re going to talk about in today’s episode, is when you look at the life cycle of a producer, from what we might refer to as on validated, to somebody who has quote unquote, made it and validated to the few all stars you have in your team that you would do anything to support their continued success.

These are the producers you can’t afford to lose. What connects and separates them is time when you think about the journey of an insurance producer. So at the early stage of one’s career, time is to your advantage because you have a lot of it right when you are new to the insurance production role. You have a lot of time and you have to spend that time training.

Obviously learning the industry, language, learning the products you’re going to be selling, but you have a lot of time for prospecting, and how you use that time is going to determine how much early success you are going to have. You know, when you think about how we pay insurance producers in the industry, it is it’s I would say it’s pretty unique, right?

For a lot of producers. They’re paid a salary guarantee for the first 2 to 3 years. And when you think about why we do that, well, it’s because we think it’s going to take that producer 2 to 3 years to become profitable. Right. And so we know it’s going to take them time to understand the industry, learn the language, learn the product.

But how that producer uses his or her time early in their career will greatly dictate how quickly they get up to profitability, which we’ll talk about then in the middle, where I would say the largest chunk of producers exist within an agency is what we call the validated. They’ve made it. They have hit their early career goal that they had to meet in order to stay employed.

But in this space of validated producer, you have a wide swath of success. You have anywhere from a validated producers who are you’re having mediocre success. To those that have continued scaling their business and are having a lot of success. And when I look at how a producer elevates their career path, we’re going to talk about some mindsets they leverage or mindset shifts they have as they gravitate from and on, validated to validated and from validated who’s having mediocre success to one who’s having a lot of success.

And then at the top you have the All stars. When you look at a team of producers, we’re talking a small handful of producers whose book of business is in the multi-millions. Some of them have hit a point in their career where they’re happy, where they’re at, they’re making a great living, where they’re at, and they’re probably in more of a managing of their book role than trying to continue scaling the book.

However, my question for you, if you run a team is what can you do to encourage that producer to continue? Because their biggest disadvantage at that point is going to be time, because they don’t have a lot of it. And when you look at that career arc from how do you use your time as a new producer? Because you have a lot of it.

To the validated producer, how do you manage your time? Because you have the mix, have a mix between production and account management to the top, where you don’t have much time at all? How do you leverage it to your advantage so you can keep scaling? We’re going to talk about all three of those right now. This episode is brought to you by True Captive insurance.

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But I’ll tell you, sitting in my position today, working with a lot of agency owners, a lot of producers, time is the one thing that dictates one’s success more than anything. When you think about the words discipline, consistency, accountability, right? They all have a common bond time. And so how you use it is going to determine how much success you have.

So when I think about a new producer, if you’re an, sales leader or an executive in an agency, this is how I want you to start thinking about this. You’ve got new UN validated producers who are new into the business, right? They’re going to have a lot of time for production. So what are you doing to teach them how to produce successfully today?

I’d still argue that in 2025, our mode of training at that level is pretty outdated. We are still teaching them how to cold call, how to cold email, which again has to be a part of the equation. But our training stops at that. And a lot of producers who are new to the industry remember, we’re dealing with a whole new generation as well.

Gen Z, Gen X, millennials, you name it. We’re training them how to do it like we did 30 years ago, and we’re leaving them with those channels as the only way to go out and make a living. And if you’ve listened to any of my content over the past years. So, you know, I talk about the fact when it comes to cold outreach, the math isn’t in our favor right now.

It’s just harder than it used to be. It requires more time to get the same result as we did 5 to 10 years ago. So if you leave your producers with training that just focuses on cold outreach, they’re going to struggle. It is going to take longer for them to get up to the path profitability, which means they may not validate or worse yet, they may leave before they ever had a chance to validate.

And all of that is costly to your agency. So my advice to you is if you’re trying to help producers who are new to the business leverage their time effectively, not only teach them how to utilize cold outreach, but teach them how to build brand awareness. When you look at the modern day insurance sales cycle, it is not like it used to be.

When I got in the business in 2002, I think the sales cycle was pretty straightforward. Take a bunch of cold suspects, turn them into appointments as fast as you can, and then when you get the chance to meet with them, eventually you’re going to throw a bunch of quotes at them. And if you are competitive and have built a little credibility and a good relationship, you got a chance to win.

But that’s not how it works anymore. One the sales cycle is longer, too. There’s more brokers in there ever been, so there’s more competition. And the first step to winning in the game of sales today is building brand awareness. So above and beyond training your new producers how to call an email and network. You need to train them.

How to build brand awareness. How are you helping them use social media platforms to build awareness and credibility with their prospects? How are you teaching them to get a message in front of a lot of prospects at one time, so they can create exponential awareness? The beautiful thing is here in 2025, it has never been easier to do that if you leverage channels like social media, podcasting, speaking webinars, email campaigns, you name it, but you have to teach them how to use those effectively.

My urge, or my advice to you is when you’re training on validated producers who have a lot of time teach them how to use their time for prospecting by not only teaching them how to build cold outreach, but warm outreach as well. Now let’s talk about the middle category the validated producer. The key for the validated producer is how do they manage their time as their book continues to grow?

When you look at your current list of producers, I’m willing to bet the largest chunk of those of your team fits into this validated producer, and it can be anybody who is validated having very mediocre success to validated having a lot of success. Excuse me. And soon to be come at your all star producers. How they manage their time is going to be key.

And this is where productivity comes into play. Of course, we could argue teaching new producers how to be productive is key, but when it comes to the validated producers, you have to help them continue scaling their book of business by being hyper productive. This is where teaching them how to build that brand awareness becomes even more important, because slowly but surely, they are going to have less time for prospecting as they continue to grow their book, right?

If they’re validated, they’re anywhere from probably, what, a quarter million to $1 million book of business at this point. Once they hit a million. This is my theory here. Once a producer hits $1 million book a business, they hit a plateau because the book is large enough that if they have any involvement in the account, management takes a lot of time, especially during renewals season.

So they have to use their prospecting hours very wisely because they have a lot less of it. So helping them learn how to manage their time is very important, especially when it comes to building brand awareness. And when I look at validated producers, I can tell how much success they’re having or not based on their calendar. Do they have time blocked in the calendar for prospecting, even though they have a lot of requirements right now in account with client management, client services, the best are routine and rigid about it.

You look at their calendar every week. They’ve got time on the same days, at the same time. Block for prospecting Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, hot prospecting hours. They’ve got time blocked, the ones that are validated but having very mediocre success. They’re making excuses. They’re hitting the easy button because when you’re given the choice to prospect or serve a client without a clear game plan, you’re going to serve a client because it’s easier to do that.

And I hear producers who literally excuse their way around the calendar for why they’re not producing in the first quarter. It’s the January 1st renewal excuse. I’ve got a lot of cleanup I’ve got to do. I don’t have time to prospect right now. Plus, my prospects don’t want to hear from me. They just renewed. It’s very true of your benefits.

Producer Q2 so we start to head towards the summer. You make the excuse that summer’s coming. School is going to be out. If these prospects have kids, they’re not thinking about insurance right now. Why would I want to hit it up? Hit them up at this time of the year? Heck, your producers might be taking vacations right now.

We get the Q3 and that is very much the excuse. It’s summer prospects aren’t paying attention. And then before you know it, it’s Q4. And guess what your producers are telling you I can’t produce. I got to handle all my renewals, but I’m here to tell you, you want to help a validated producer go from mediocre success to a ton of success.

It is going to come down to accountability and time management. Do they consistently have time on their calendar blocked for the act of prospecting? Whether that be trying to attract a new prospect or being persistent in interacting with their existing pipeline pipeline, being the people they’re already chatting with? So if you want to help your validated producer elevate and graduate from.

I just got validated and I’m having mediocre success too. I’m validated and I am on that quick path to $1 million and beyond. It is going to be holding them accountable to how they are managing their time. Now we get to the All Stars. You got 50 producers. You may have 4 or 5 you consider all star. These are the producers that have built a book well north of $1 million.

They don’t need to be taught how to sell, and you would do anything you could possibly do to support these producers because you can’t loses these people. They were to go to a competitor. They were to want to go out on their own, hang their own, sign on a shingle. You’re going to be in trouble, right? Because these are the producers that are going to leave.

They’re going to go somewhere else. And, you know, within the next two years, half of your bath of their books going with them. So you would do anything to support these producers. And it’s at this point you need to help them buy back their time. If I’ve got a $3 million book of insurance business, I have a lot of account service duties.

If I am still involved in the act of servicing a client, how the heck am I going to have any time for production? And it’s at this point it could be very appealing for a producer to take his or her foot off the gas. Quite frankly, they’ve earned it. They’ve got a $3 million book. They are making a very good living.

They are bringing a lot of revenue to your organization. But I hope your goal is to help them continue to grow. So what can you do at this point? You got to help them buy back their time. That’s why we built a program we call the expert membership. It’s literally taking the work off a producer’s plate to help him or her build brand awareness every day so that they can focus on taking care of their clients and scheduling and managing sales calls and appointments.

You have to help invest the time and money to take work off their plate. Here’s my point whether you’re an UN validated producer, validated, or the home run king all star of your agency, time is the great equalizer. Yet it’s also the great differentiator. And the number one thing every producer has to do today, if they want to continue scaling their business, is build brand awareness and has an UN validated producer.

You’re going to have a lot of time to do it. So how are you using that time effectively when you become a validated producer? Managing the time to do that is going to be your biggest asset. So are you blocking time in your calendar every single week? The prospect as the size of your book continues to grow. And then when you’re at that point, you are now an agency all star, you have to figure out how are you going to buy back your time and let somebody or your marketing team help you build that brand awareness with the time you don’t have.

This, my friend, is how you continue scaling an agency. We are trying to make organic growth cool again, and when you look at the top agencies in the industry right now, their number one growth channel is mergers and acquisitions. Why? Because honestly, it might be the quicker path to growth and trying to grow organically. But we can’t forget the importance of organic growth.

One of the biggest complaints I hear from agency executives who are a part of the M&A activity, where they are going out and buying agencies is we buy and we buy an agency, bring them under our roof. And then it’s at that point we learn the largest piece of the revenue coming from that agency is with a producer who is no longer actively selling.

They’ve taken their foot off the gas. And it’s at that moment you have the oh shit, what did we just do now? You’ve got to go find producers who are going to proactively continue to grow the book from that office, that agency you just bought. That’s a problem. But if you can have a system in place to continue supporting your producers through the entire journey from invalidated to all stars so they can continue to build brand awareness throughout that journey, you are going to help them continue to scale with organic growth.

And as that producer elevates their mindset, the type of business they go after, that brand awareness is going to help them build the credibility they need to go from writing their first 20 life or $10,000 revenue account, to writing a group with a thousand lines or their first hundred or $500,000 commercial insurance policy. Brand awareness is the key in your ability to help your producers build brand awareness all along that journey by leveraging time is going to be the key.

So I wanted to share that advice today. I hope it’s helpful if you know that you need to be providing more support to your producers. We are here to help. Our agency Growth Accelerator is built for just that. We’re helping the UN validated producers get the training they need, the hands on online training they need to speed up their path profitability.

We’re helping the UN validated manage their time more effectively with a mix of time management and accountability. So they stay in production mode and we are supporting the all stars by helping them put their brand awareness out there every day. This is how you make organic growth possible again and make it cool again. So I hope you take today’s advice.

Run with it. But this look at your team today and ask yourself, what are we doing to help them build brand awareness? They can keep scaling and they never have to take their foot off the gas. You do that and you’ve got an agency that’s going to soar to new heights. Be good. That’s all we got. For this episode of the Accelerate Your Insurance Sales podcast, one of the most valuable things you can do to help us and other new potential listeners find our show is for you to rate the show and leave a review.

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