HELP! Bought Book & Seller is Stealing Clients!!!!!!

[Insurance-Guy]

I had a producer that left our office under let's say "bad" circumstances. We had a few of our clients call us to say that this producer had contacted them regarding switching their insurance to her at the new agency she was working at. We had our attorney send a letter a cease and desist with a copy of her non compete agreement...and we got a letter back from some joke of an attorney that she hired saying that we were harassing her...so we had our attorney call her attorney and her current employer and told them all that we are ready to precede with legal action if this was the course that they wanted to take. The new employer assured us that he would not tolerate her doing this and it would stop immediately. She ended up taking a few clients but at the end of the day for us it just wasn't worth pursuing much further.

On another incident...I had an employee leave and I noticed a policy that she did a AOR change on. I sent a letter...with a copy of the non compete agreement with her stating that any further action by her would result in me contacting my attorney and legal action. I never had any more problems from her...she actually called me to apologize and said that she didn't realize it was one of my customers...I said sure you only listed our agency name on the AOR change form. She promised me it wouldn't happen again and it hasn't.

I know it is a little different when you buy a book and the person that you bought it from is doing this…but you need to know for sure that they are contacting these clients. Did you advertise that you have purchased the agency…change the name of the agency? If you did this could be a reason that you are loosing clients. People don’t like that kind of change and you are going to loose some business from it. Point is you will never keep 100% of the book that you have bought…

 

[Josh]

I think the even better question is if these people are going back to their old agent, how do you know she is instigating it? They can buy their insurance from whomever they want.

Back at that.

If you just sold a book and people ask you about insurance that are in the book, especially when you know how heavily Allstate compensation is tied to aggressive measurements including how much of your book you keep, all you tell them is "(the new agents first name) is a great agent and they'll give you the same great care I gave you." That's it, to do anything else would be unethical.

To answer the "how do you know she is instigating it?" question, it's a numbers game. If you have one or two out of that size of a book leave in a month that'd be one thing, but it sounds like there are dozens rolling over. That's WAY above normal and it doesn't happen unless someone is trolling for the business.