There’s a heated discussion about a cold subject going on at the AA&B LinkedIn readers’ network.

It all started when a reader posted a link to a blog entry by sales consultant Steve Kloyda about his unpleasant experience with a salesperson who cold called him, then lied that he’d already spoken to him — when Kloyda knew he hadn’t.

It sound innocuous enough, but the posting started a debate among several readers about the ethics — and efficiency — of the practice of cold calling, and the right and wrong way to do it. The debate essentially boiled down to what exactly is acceptable in cold calling, and morphed into  a discussion of more controversial cold calling practices, such as dropping in on prospects unannounced, or following a script on a phone cold call that’s clearly fake. Even AA&B columnist Chris Amrhein got in on the controversy, defending the practice of the drop-in while reviling the fakery of an aggressive canned pitch, a la the “boiler room” denizens in David Mamet’s masterful play (and movie) on the sales mentality, “Glengarry Glen Ross.”

Agents and brokers understandably pride themselves on being professionals, on acting as “trusted advisors” to their customers. Producers practicing overly aggressive cold calling run the risk of compromising that perception and casting the profession back into the image of the hand-gripping, fast-talking used car salesman.

Everyone agrees cold calling is a part of any sales job. But my question to you is, how cold is your cold calling? A sale is a sale, and these are tough times. Would you go as far as the salesman who called Steve Kloyda and lie in your pitch? Do you consider “drop-in” visits to prospects acceptable or anathema? Have you ever crossed the fine line between cold call and telemarketer?

In short, what’s OK in this area and what isn’t?

To paraphrase the late, great Rodney Dangerfield, independent insurance agents don’t get no respect.

It’s bad enough that a recent career survey ranked your profession below janitors, bookbinders and even editors (see my related blog, ”At least you’re not a roustaboust“). Now, the latest Forrester Research consumer survey reveals that your customers don’t even find you fun.

The survey, conducted over the Internet last October, gave independent agents an overall score of “okay” from 4,600 consumers who had interacted with a variety of companies. Forrester asked consumers to rate insurance companies on three areas: “meets needs,” “easy to work with” and “enjoyable.” Several insurers, including USAA, Liberty Mutual, Progressive and The Hartford, were ranked “good” by respondents. But when it came to being “enjoyable,” consumers rated independent agents “poor,” while giving them “good” ratings for “meets needs” and “easy to work with.”

What does this mean? Evidently it’s not an ease-of-use issue; respondents ranked agents “good” on meeting customer needs and being easy to work with. And it’s not just a carrier issue, either. Savvy carriers know, and slower carriers are discovering, that it’s not enough to simply provide ease of use through technology and real-time services — in fact, that’s just the starting point (see this related article on Deep Customer Connections’ recent survey on agents telling carriers they need more ease of use).  

From just looking at the numbers, the problem seems to be with the agency system itself, as several carriers got high marks from consumers as being enjoyable to work with. Granted, the results may be skewed because of the focus on personal lines insurance purchasers, but this dissing of insurance agents shouldn’t be the case. It all boils down to the perception of insurance agent as unnecessary middleman, useful perhaps, but more likely just another roadblock between the customer and the underwriter.

The irony is, agents are in a much better position to deliver real customer satisfaction — and yes, even “fun” – than any insurer ever could. In our monthly agency success stories, we speak with agency owners, especially those in small towns or rural areas, who don’t think twice about emergency customer visits, of knowing the names and ages of teenaged drivers about to be added to a family’s auto policy, of engaging customers in intimate conversations to discover their plans for the future and how insurance coverage can help protect those plans. These agencies and their employees are also connecting to their communities through charitable work, recruitment at area schools, and other ways to create engagement with customers and prospects. It’s a testament to the level of service that every independent agent should be providing to valued customers, especially at a time when every customer counts.

And inevitably in today’s world, part of that customer outreach is through intelligently developed and executed social media planning. Maybe that’s where the smart carriers have an edge on agencies — they have the financial wherewithal and staffing to plunge right in. (Luckily, you don’t need these resources to make good use of this new tool: check out ACT’s recommendations for creating a social media policy for your independent agency). 

With more insurers, including traditional direct writers, using multiple distribution methods, the stakes are higher than ever for agents to prove themselves invaluable to their customers — not just by meeting their insurance needs in a smart and timely way, but by engaging with them on multiple levels.

What’s your agency doing to build your brand perception with your customers?

In George Orwell’s allegorical novel Animal Farm, the collective’s credo was ”All animals are equal” — until the leaders change the credo to ”All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” 

The same might be said for regulators’ handling of contingent commissions.

In one of my first blog posts at “Agent for Change,” I threw out the question of whether contingent commissions should be an industry practice, considering the controversy surrounding them. At the time, N.Y. AG Cuomo was reexamining the issue and the consensus was that contingent commissions were bad.

More than a year later, the tide may be turning — at least for some. This week, state regulators and AGs in New York, Illinois and Connecticut have allowed Willis, Aon and Marsh to bring back contingent commissions. The thinking goes that the three brokers and their carriers have implemented enough transparency to free them from the settlements they signed in 2005. The new agreement also reduces the brokers’ disclosure requirements in all 50 states to that required in the New York agent/broker disclosure regulation, released last week. 

This rankles Main Street agents, who are bothered by the fact that the New York DOI felt it necessary to promulgate its new regulation as a condition of the big brokers’ release, said Wes Bissett, senior counsel for the Big I. They’re so bothered that IIABNY plans on filing a legal challenge, both to the “substance of the regulation and the manner in which is was promulgated,” Bissett said in a phone interview. “It is ironic and disappointing to us that thousands of innocent Main Street agents are facing a series of costly new burdens and mandates so that the world’s three largest insurance brokers can be freed from settlements they voluntarily entered into five years ago,” he said. “The result is thousands of Main Street agents will be paying the price for what they did.”

Calling the New York regulations “unnecessary” and a “hypothetical, law-school approach” to transparency, Bissett said smaller retail agents required to follow the regulations can’t simply use a boilerplate approach to compliance, and often need to work with outside counsel to develop the right approach, making the process time consuming and expensive at a time when agencies need to watch every penny.

And relying on a ruling from a regulator rather than going through the legislative process is wrong, too. “Public policy should be left to lawmakers, not regulators,” he added.

PIA National agrees, calling the New York regulation “burdensome, unnecessary and unwarranted.” Through amicus briefs, public testimony and other action, PIANY has continued to oppose the reg — even though it does not ban contingency commissions, something PIA members have members have vehemently supported, maintaining that Main Street agents are not mega-brokers and contingent commission income is critical to their ability to serve their clients.

Not surprisingly, more sanguine on the subject is CIAB, whose spokesperson in an e-mail stated that, “We’ve been long-time supporters of transparency, and long believed that intermediaries should have the benefit of the same regulatory and legal environments, with the freedom to determine their own business models.  Now that they do, we believe it’s time for the industry to put this issue behind us and move forward – it’s been a distraction for far too long.”

Unfortunately, the end of the issue may not be in sight. With consumers still smarting from financial services bailouts and excuses, overturning some brokers’ transparency requirements could very well bring new public attention to a practice that’s contentious at best.