Your Close Rate Is Lying to You

Your Close Rate Is Lying to You#

I spent years tracking one close rate number. One number for the whole agency, updated monthly, compared against whatever benchmark my carrier gave me. And for years, that number told me almost nothing useful.

My overall close rate sat around 22%. The benchmark was somewhere in the mid-30s. So I knew I was “below average.” Great. Now what?

That single number didn’t tell me why I was at 22%. It didn’t tell me which leads were closing and which weren’t. It didn’t tell me whether the problem was my sales process, my lead sources, my quoting presentation, or something else entirely. It just sat there on a dashboard, being unhelpfully red.

Not Every Client Deserves Equal Time

Not Every Client Deserves the Same Amount of Your Time#

This is going to make some agency owners uncomfortable. The instinct in this business is to treat every client the same. Give everyone great service. Respond to every call promptly. Review every renewal with the same attention. It sounds right. It feels right.

It’s also how agencies stay stuck.

Because treating every client the same means your $8,000-per-year commercial account and your $900-per-year monoline auto get the same service effort. It means the client who refers you three new accounts a year gets the same proactive outreach as the one who’s never referred anyone. It means the family with a home, two autos, an umbrella, and a life policy gets the same renewal attention as the person who bought a minimum liability auto two years ago and you haven’t heard from since.