In this video you’ll learn a strategy to help you save a TON OF TIME finding your best prospects.

Resources:

 

Video Transcript:

This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.

I’m going to teach you a little sales secret to quickly qualify your best prospects…

We’re going to talk about how you can quickly qualify your ideal prospects. In fact, you’re going to learn how to quickly disqualify him as well. And what we’re going to talk about today is something they don’t train you in the insurance industry, but it is a little strategy. I started deploying back earlier in my career a few years ago that really helped ensure I was talking to better prospects.

So let me start today’s episode by sharing a story. When I moved out to Colorado, nine years ago, I found myself talking to a lot of unqualified prospects. At that time, I thought everybody was a good fit.

Every prospect is a good prospect, and if I just throw enough shit against the wall, something’s going to stick, right? Well, all that led to was frustration and financial failure. You know, I was the guy who always had a good full pipeline. But if I was being honest with myself, 75% of that pipeline was crap. I was lying to myself because I just kept talking to people who really didn’t want to do business with me.

They were kind enough to take my meetings, but they had no desire to go anywhere. I was trying to push them to the goal line. They had no desire to score a touchdown with me, so I had to develop a better process to make sure I’m talking to better prospects. Now, a few years later, I found myself working for insurance agencies that leveraged cold calling services.

And this is this problem I had actually got worse because if you think about the philosophy behind a cold calling service, right. Their job is to schedule appointments. The downside to cold calling services is they’re often scheduling appointments with unqualified prospects. It that’s why a lot of agencies have the problem of just getting prospect to show up for a first meeting in the first place.

But even if you show up for that meeting with a prospect who was booked through a cold calling service, what I found is that meeting often went nowhere. And when I started recognizing this, I started testing this theory that I had that cold calling services weren’t as effective as they thought to be by asking the prospect. One very simple question when I would engage in that first meeting.

What intrigued you to take today’s meeting? And I was very surprised by the answer. And the answer I often got was, Well, Andy, I really didn’t want to take the meeting. The guy on the phone just wouldn’t let me off the hook. Our prices have never been lower.

That is totally inappropriate. You never feel in the client. You listen to me, sir. Here we go. So I just finally said yes. At that point, I knew that meeting was most likely going nowhere. Right. So here I am talking to a prospect who’s already in a defensive position. Their arms are folded and they don’t even want to be there.

How am I going to turn that conversation into meeting number two? And so at that point, I made a couple very important decisions. Number one, I decided I personally was going to stop using the cold calling service because I found that out of every ten meetings I booked, seven, eight went nowhere. Number two, I leaned into deploying a better marketing strategy, which if you listen to our episodes every single week, you know, that’s what we do.

That’s why we built the complete game marketing playbook. The complete game marketing Playbook was designed off of what I had to build for myself because my goal was I want better prospects coming in the pipeline, not just any. And I knew that that was going to drive better sales conversations out of the gate. However, if I had a better way to qualify and disqualify him in my first meeting, it would make the sales process even more effective.

And that’s what I’m going to share with you today. I’m going to share a little strategy I deployed with you. I deployed that I called the Do you believe what I believe presentation? And I’m going to talk about why I built it, how it was built, and then I’m actually going to deliver it to you. So if you are an insurance professional, especially a benefits advisor, I suggest when you get to this point of the podcast, you might want to go back and listen to this a few times, but let’s first talk about some of the mindset shifts before we get into how to qualify that are prospects.

The first shift I want you to make is understanding that what you’re about to learn goes against the grain in the insurance industry. It goes against what we were taught. We were taught volume and quantity is what we want. When I’m here to tell you, the answer is quality, I would much rather have less prospects in my pipeline if they’re all of high quality versus a ton of prospects in my pipeline.

If three fourths of them are crap. Now, the second thing I’m going to tell you about going against the grain is every marketing and sales strategy I have leveraged that has actually worked and helped me change my career for the better. I learn from outside the industry. The reason the complete game consulting actually exists is because I went outside the industry to see how they other markets, other industries utilized marketing and I brought those concepts and philosophies into the insurance industry and lo and behold, they worked.

It’s why I built the company around it. So what you’re about to learn goes against the grain. The second mindset shift they want you to make, and this is really tough for producers is stop trying to be all things to all people. Start selling your service is almost like it’s an exclusive thing. Think about this. When I sit down with teams and perform the four day workshops we do.

One of the questions I ask the producers is for you to hit your sales goals this year. For you to have an amazing year. How many wins do you need? And the answer is a lot less than you think, right? For you to have an amazing year, look at your sales goals right now. How many wins do you need for five, maybe seven, Eight at the most?

It’s not like you need 40 or 50 wins. You just need a few wins to have an amazing year. So why are you trying to go after value when you should be going after quality? I learned this lesson from a peer of mine in the industry who has gone on to do extraordinary things in the insurance industry. He works with some of the largest companies in America now, and I remember when I first met him, he was actually a sales director for a TPA.

And this specific TPA knew that there were certain kind of employers that were a good fit for the TPA to do its best work, he tip. So they knew that they could not take on just anybody. They also knew that if they sold over a certain number of new clients every year, they would start to push against the capacity of their bandwidth.

And if they brought in any more business, they would start to water down what they do best. So they knew every year they could only bring in roughly 12 new clients a year. So the pyramid I knew every year his job was to go sell 12 new groups. And here’s how he did it. He actually went to the market and he sold it as if it’s an exclusive thing.

He had 12 gold coins to give out and he went out every year, spent the year finding out which 12 companies were going to be lucky enough to get the gold coin. And here’s what happened. Here’s what’s interesting. He would sell all 12 groups on January 1st and he’d spend the rest of the year determining who got the gold coins for next January exclusivity.

Interesting. Now, you most likely don’t need 12 wins. You need like four or five, maybe six to have an amazing year. So why not start thinking about your whole sales process as if it’s an exclusive thing going out, interviewing prospects? If they’re a bit for you, might change your trajectory, might change your success level.