Strengthen your strength
While you may be excited to see that you have a game-changing advantage in the marketplace, Urban says that’s not the end of the process.
The senior leadership team at Grange realized in the summer of 1999 that its sustainable competitive advantage was its relationship to its distribution channel — the independent agents selling the product. But just leveraging that type of advantage isn’t enough.
“You remember I said a sustainable advantage has to have three characteristics, it has to make you better, different and it’s hard for the other guys to copy,” Urban says. “So we said, ‘Well, our relationship with our independent agents really could be that.’ But we also noticed that there are a lot of other companies in our space that would sort of claim that position themselves, so we asked ourselves, ‘Are we really different?’”
In order to fully challenge an assumption, you have to take a step back to think about who is best served by your advantage and the processes you could create to strengthen that. Urban knows independent agents represent several agencies, so he worked on figuring out what led them to their final decision.
“So if you ever wonder what is it that causes an agent to pick company A versus company B, versus C, there are lots of reasons that go into that particular selection,” he says. “But when we thought about it, we said, ‘Human nature being human nature, what if we made ourselves the company that is so easy for the agents to do business with that they would most likely pick us.’”
From this came a process Grange calls EODB — ease of doing business.
“The idea was to figure out what agents wanted us to do differently that would make it just flat simple for them to use us so that literally they would think, ‘Oh man, I want to put this customer with Grange because they’re just really easy to get the product quoted, to get the policy issued, have the claims handled, etc., etc.,” he says.
This is another time where you can’t get tripped up by how simple Urban makes it sound. That process involved hundreds and hundreds of changes to even the most basic portions of the business, such as creating a paperless system for independent agents. In fact, the system is still being tweaked at this moment.
But the willingness to constantly challenge and improve upon a market differentiating strength has made Grange the destination in the insurance business.
“When there’s ever a survey done on which company is the easiest to do business with, we win every time,” Urban says. “And we know that that position has enabled us to get really a preferred position in the majority of agents that represent us.”
