Short Term vs Long Term Goals as a New Insurance Agent

Setting goals is an essential practice for all business owners. This is especially true for new insurance agents, as it can be very easy to lose track of where you want to go — and how you get there — if you aren’t setting goals and measuring your progress toward achieving them. 

By setting goals, you can get a clearer vision of what exactly you want to achieve, which then leads to setting up actionable steps for what you need to do to accomplish those goals. 

Regardless of whether you’re creating short- or long-term goals, it’s important that they are SMART — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely. These five factors will help you make informed decisions on what goals you should set, why they’re important and how you can execute them. 

In this article, we’ll discuss some short-term vs long-term goals as a new insurance agent. 

The Role of Goals for New Insurance Agents 

It’s often beneficial for new insurance agents to set long-term goals first. There are a few reasons for this. 

For one, long-term goals are typically easier to come up with than short-term goals. They could include the general topics of career goals, where you want to take your insurance agency, what type of insurance you want to sell and more. 

In addition, achieving short-term goals should help you eventually achieve your long-term goals. In other words, by setting long-term goals first, you can get a better sense of what short-term goals you need to create in order to achieve the bigger plan. 

Remember that it’s important that all of your goals, whether short or long term, are specific and measurable. If your goals are too general, it can be very hard to achieve them because it’s hard to measure success. 

Examples of Short Term vs Long Term Goals 

To see the relationship between short-term and long-term goals for new insurance agents, let’s take a look at two examples. This could serve as a blueprint for you when you start setting specific goals for your own business.

Achieving a Certain Sales Goal

Let’s start with a common goal that most insurance agents have — increasing their sales and/or achieving a certain sales goal. New insurance agents might set a sales goal for their first year, rather than a percentage increase, because they have no past sales. 

So, in this instance, we’ll set a long-term goal of selling $500,000 worth of insurance policies in the first year. This goal is specific in terms of what you want to achieve by setting not only a number threshold but also a timeline to accomplish it. 

From this long-term goal, you can figure out what you believe you need to do on a short-term basis to achieve it. You can break this down into measurable and actionable steps. 

To sell $500,000 worth of policies in a year, you need to average almost $42,000 in sales per month. Your short-term goals, then, should be based around this number. 

How many plans would you need to sell per month to achieve this goal? How many prospective customers would you need to contact per month to sell that number of plans? 

This information can help you achieve your short-term monthly goals, which then will make it easier for you to achieve your long-term first-year goal.

Achieving Customer Satisfaction

If you want to be successful as an independent insurance agent, your customers must be satisfied with the work that you do for them, the products you provide them and the experience that they get with you. 

A great long-term goal for new insurance agents, then, is to achieve customer satisfaction. That’s a fairly generic goal, though, so you can measure this against certain metrics such as reaching a certain star level on review sites or gaining a certain reputational score based on feedback from customers. 

Just like the first goal, you can then set more measurable short-term goals that will help guide you toward that longer-term, overarching goal.  

To do this, think about the things that lead to customer satisfaction. Some common measurables could include consistently and quickly responding to requests, making touchpoints with customers who submit a request for information or a quote, processing applications in a certain amount of time, and much more. 

By breaking down your long-term goal into these and other smaller measurable steps, it allows you to produce data that you can then analyze so you can adjust your operations if need be to achieve your goal. 

Seek the Support You Need as a New Insurance Agent 

Setting short-term and long-term goals that are SMART and interconnected is key to succeeding as a new insurance agent. This will help you get your new independent agency off the ground as you look to build your small business. 

Independent agents may not have the backing of large insurance carriers like captive agents do, but that doesn’t mean they can’t get exceptional support and guidance.  

At Good Life Insurance Associates, we provide advisors in our network with access to a full range of insurance products from more than 100 carriers across the country, as well as tools, resources and support to help independent insurance agents succeed. 

For more information, please contact us today.