If you’ve read the AHCP blog for any period of time,  you know that one of our recurring themes is that brokers should spend the first part of the year—after the madness of the fourth quarter is over and things slow down a bit—increasing their knowledge and planning for success. After all, your sales are unlikely to grow unless you make a few changes to the way you approach the business. There’s always room for improvement, even for the most successful agents.

Reading articles from multiple different sources is a great way to get new ideas that can help us achieve our goals, whether those goals are to sell more, become more efficient, eliminate sources of stress, or all of the above. So we thought we’d pass along a couple suggestions from the Quotit Blog. Quotit is a tech-based sister company of AHCP, with a lot of great articles to choose from. Please take a few minutes to read the below articles; we believe you’ll find this to be a good use of your time.

How Insurance Agents Can Recover from Open Enrollment Period: This article will help you reflect on 2021, have a successful 2022, and get ready for 2023, which will be here before you know it. The post includes “a sampler of questions” that should help you define “actionable goals for the year.” Yes, we realize that we’re already a quarter of the way through 2022, but if you didn’t get off to the fast start you had hoped, maybe it’s time for a do-over. There’s still plenty of time left if you get started now.

How to Answer Questions Your Clients Have about Health Insurance: If you’ve recently hired somebody new, especially someone who’s relatively new to the health insurance industry, you might be struggling to get him or her up to speed. This article, which answers some of the common questions clients have about health insurance, will definitely help. And it’s also a great refresher for agents who have been in the business for a while.

Social Media Strategies That Will Help Insurance Agents Increase Referrals: If you’re like most Americans, you’re already spending several hours a day on social media. But what if that practice, which many consider to be a waste of time, could actually generate more business? It can! That’s because, like you, your clients and prospects are also spending a lot of time on social media. And, as this post points out, “you need to be where your customers and target audience are. In today’s digital world, making virtual connections via social media is a way local insurance agents can really stand out.” Read this article to find out how.

5 Insider Tips to Effectively Cross Sell Insurance: This post explains the “massive advantages of cross selling insurance” and provides tips to help agents do so more effectively. Some of the benefits of cross-selling include an increase in revenue, client retention, and the fact that it’s easier and more efficient to sell to existing clients than it is to find new clients. So how can you start enjoying these benefits of cross-selling? Read the article to find out.

Must-Read Books for Insurance Agents: To finish up our list of recommended articles, here’s a post about books you should consider reading this year. Don’t worry, only one of the five is actually about insurance. Three are about improving your sales skills, and the final book, Think Like a Monk, is written by a “former monk turned author, podcaster, and social media star” named Jay Shetty, who “leverages his own personal lessons learned as a monk to help readers remove roadblocks to success by living a more focused, self-disciplined, and meaningful life.”

Do you have some additional reading recommendations for your fellow AHCP agents? Please share them! We’d love to pass them along.