Rainmaker producers: myth or reality? Agency owners and sales experts say they really do exist—and if your agency hasn’t found one, you’re looking the wrong places.

 

“I know a rainmaker when I walk in the door,” says Craig Ryder, whose agency, Scott Insurance in Lynchburg, Va., has six young rainmakers with $2-million to $3-million books of business.

 

“Rainmakers are organized, continually make new contacts and have the desire to win—not to manage. They want to be out talking to clients.”

Opinions abound regarding the innate qualities and acquired behaviors that must combine to create a super producer. But sales experts, principals at Best Practices agencies and those with top-performing producers say super producers love what they do—but need guidance from their leaders and unflagging support from other agency staffers to ensure their success.

 

Liz Christoffersen, founder and CEO of Empower Consulting Group in Reno-Tahoe, Nev., not only believes rainmakers exist; she makes a living coaching them and helping other talented salespeople become rainmakers.

 

“We work with men and women around the world, some of whom produce $1 billion annually selling real estate, insurance or luxury goods,” she says. “What we know from working with these people is that they’re highly organized and have systems and supports in place.”

 

Rather than cold-calling, Christoffersen says they’re strategic: “They look for targeted, specific profiles and take action every day to be in front of people who fit those profiles. Rainmakers make sales happen, regardless of the economic climate.”

 

In addition, she says rainmakers leverage technology, but don’t rely on it to build relationships.

 

“These folks are masters of human behavior,” she adds. “Even though we have all these social media outlets, great salespeople make sure they’re interacting every day on a personal level.”

 

Another trait of rainmakers is intimate knowledge of their own strengths and weaknesses.

 

“They absolutely know when they need to delegate or not engage in certain activities,” Christoffersen says. “They know these things take away from what they do really well—which is to sell.”

 

Herb Greenberg, founder and CEO of Caliper Corp., a Princeton, N.J., firm that pioneered pre-employment assessments in the 1960s, says gifted producers love their work.

 

“When agents hire [producers], they often look for experience,” he says. “What they should look for is, does the person want to do that job? Will it be fun—an activity they’d do without money? Great producers love to prospect. They want to get to that ‘yes.’ ”

 

Along with love of the job, Greenberg says Caliper has found that people who become great producers possess three other important qualities: Empathy, the ability to understand others; ego drive, a desire to get a “yes” from the customer; and the ability to take rejection, that is, to bounce back after a “no” and go after the next opportunity.

 

If a candidate or existing producer has these qualities, agencies should also look for self-discipline and the ability to reason abstractly, Greenberg says.

 

“Tremendous self-discipline is required for a person to sell in any consistent way,” he adds. “Great producers have enough self-discipline to plan their work, their follow-up and their personal marketing campaign. And when a prospect says no, the producer needs self-discipline to find a way to come back to the prospect again.”

 

Abstract reasoning, in comparison, stems from empathy. “You don’t just go in and sell a package,” Greenberg says. “You have to be able to understand what the person really needs and then mold your product to meet that need so you both win. In insurance, abstract reasoning requires intelligence, empathy, a knowledge of forms and financial skills.”

 

“How do you get all these great young producers?” is a question Ron Patterson hears when carrier representatives visit his office.

 

Of 18 employees at Patterson & Associates Insurance in Richardson, Texas, nine are external producers, including eight who are under age 50.

 

Patterson, the agency’s vice president, and his son Ben Patterson, who recently succeeded his father as agency president, find great producers in many places.

 

“We’ve recruited from schools and from our network of who we know,” Ben Patterson says. “Some were hired while working their first jobs after college. We look for people with any kind of sales experience or leadership experience.”

 

The Pattersons believe leadership experience can be gained through a variety of activities. “Maybe they led a fraternity, a business class or student government,” Ben Patterson says. “Maybe they were in athletics. Leadership and sales ability often intertwine.”

 

One source from which the Pattersons usually don’t recruit: other agencies. “We don’t want to create enemies,” he adds.

 

Scott Insurance’s Ryder is always on the lookout for great producers and seeks candidates through its existing ones. “We incentivize them to always be looking,” says Ryder, COO, CFO and producer recruiter for the agency with 250 employees, including 45 producers.

 

Scott Insurance also finds exceptional sales talent in a variety of places. “The next one could be could be a waiter or waitress, one or two years out of college,” he says. “It could be someone in another field who calls on you, and feels like us.”

 

Typically, those hired “have one or two sales jobs out of college, not normally in insurance,” he adds. “We look for the top sales person in a firm. We feel like we can teach insurance—but we can’t teach sales.”

 

Caliper’s Greenberg notes many recent college graduates are ideal candidates for selling insurance. “If you can’t find great producers, you’re looking in the wrong places,” he says.

 

When hunting for prospective producers, he suggests using this line: “We don’t care much about what you’ve done, but we care very much what you are. If you’re somebody who loves to sell and loves to work with people, we want to talk to you. We can teach you skills, but we can’t teach you attitude.”

 

Many would-be producers talk a good game but can’t walk the talk. That’s why Scott Insurance uses a personality assessment to test producer candidates for traits and behaviors normally accompanying sales ability.

 

Candidates then interview with a group of four to five senior managers or producers, who look for intelligence, trustworthiness and drive.

 

“The people we hire as producers must also have a strong presence in the room,” Ryder says. “They should stand out, be someone you’re interested in talking to. They should also be caring and able to go deeper into the sales process.”

 

“Anybody can ask questions, but the producers we want are good listeners who can then ask deeper questions that show the prospect what we do is different,” he adds.

 

Ryder says superstar producers at his agency have all these qualities to a high degree. “They also want to win by winning accounts,” he says. “If they tell us they want to be a sales manager, that’s a strike against them.”

 

Ron and Ben Patterson also use a personality assessment to test producer candidates for sales abilities.

 

“But it’s not always 100% accurate on the qualities that make a super producer,” Ron Patterson says. “So we’ve taken a super producer we have here and gotten him to take the profile so we know what we want to look for.”

 

Once candidates with serious sales talent are tested, interviewed and hired, their production should be benchmarked against the performance of others like them.

 

Ben Patterson says rainmakers or those with the potential to be rainmakers can be benchmarked quantitatively “by revenues generated and being generated.”

 

He recommends comparing revenues against those reported for top producers at similar-size agencies in the Big “I” Best Practices Study.

 

Qualitative benchmarks, on the other hand, should include the quality of relationships developed with agency partners, the ability to network and promote the agency and the ability to work in a team environment, he adds.

 

“Rainmakers absolutely exist,” he says. “They’re born with a set of skills that are God-given, then made into rainmakers when they’re put into an environment that helps them flourish. They have to have that perfect balance to fulfill all of their potential.”