This is the support site for my program, entitled, "Into the Enchanted Forest: Improving Agency Profitability and Productivity with Net and Web Tools", delivered for the Allied Insurance AIDCO Sales Conference in Carlsbad, California on March 2, 2002.

Before we get started --

Bookmark this page so you can get back to it easily.

This Support Website is designed to cover the material I covered in the on-site program. You can go through it in the same order we did there. Or follow links to move around as your interest moves. If you get "lost" you can either use the back button to get back to a familiar place. Or use your bookmark to return to this page.

There are lots of links from this site to other sites and other pages on this site, so feel free to explore as your needs and interest dictate. And now · on with the show!!

The objective of the program was to help you leave the room with ideas of how you can use the Net and Web tools to improve your agency profitability and productivity.

There is an awful lot of hype and an awful lot of nonsense out there about what the Net and the Web do to the insurance marketplace and the kinds of opportunities and threats that they present. This program is not about agency management systems or automation tools per se, but those tools have a place in the Digital Age. This is certainly not a program about how, suddenly, youâll make millions more in profit by dropping your costs through the floor and shooting your revenue through the roof. Instead this is a practical business program that looks at how the Net has changed the marketplace and what you can do to seize the opportunities and avoid the threats.

Here's an outline of the program.

You have to start with the knowledge of what the ground is like. So our first section is, Where Are We Now; and in that section, we're looking at several things about the current Net and Web marketplace. We talked about the state of the Net; and, specifically, the state of the insurance business on the Net. We concluded the first section with an overview of consumer uses of the Net.

Next we moved to a section with some good news: The Fundamentals Apply. That's good news, because it means that the things that you've learned about the insurance business over the years pretty much will apply in the Digital Age.

That's because the laws of nature and human nature simply don't change. People buy in pretty much the same way they always have. Their basic perception schemes and the way they make decisions stay pretty much the way it has since we began trading ax heads, right after we crawled out of caves. What is important here, too, is to understand the basic marketplace dynamics so that we can see how the Net changes those dynamics.

That's our third big section: How the Net Changes the Insurance Marketplace. We're going to look at three key factors of the Net and the Web that change marketplaces. Those factors are reach, transparency, and speed. Weâll look at how they change marketplaces in general, and how theyâll act on the insurance marketplace specifically.

If you're going to deal with changes in the marketplace, you've got to have a pretty good toolkit. And that's our next big section. In the toolkit, weâll look at the two major tools that you have to increase your profitability and productivity in the Digital Age. Those are Web sites and E-mail.

We wrap up the program with a section on how you can take your knowledge of the marketplace and its changes, your knowledge of the tools and how to use them effectively, and put them together into a program that can work to improve your profitability immediately and over the long term.

In addition to the information that's involved here, youâll want lots of other resources to deal with improving your profitability and productivity in the Digital Age.

I've included those in a separate resource page with links to resources around the Web.

Let's get started by considering where we are right now in the Digital Age.

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Copyright 2002 by Digital Age International, Inc..
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