In this podcast episode you’ll learn how to turn an intro meeting into a hot prospect.

Make sure to watch the whole as I deliver my “Do you believe what I believe?” presentation at the end. Use it to level up your sales process!

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Video Transcript:

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

For you to hit your sales goals this year, for you to have an amazing year, How many wins do you need? 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. You just need a few wins to have an amazing year.

So why are you trying to go after volume when you should be going after quality?

Hey. Welcome back to Bullpen Sessions. My name is Andy NEARY and this is episode 241. In today’s episode, I’m going to teach you a little sales secret to quickly qualify your best prospects. But before we dive into today’s episode, want to make a quick shout out to our sponsor Complete game consulting.

Yes, that is my company. We don’t take any other sponsors on, but if you are one of my insurance professionals who listen in every week, number one, thank you. I am super grateful for you taking the time to do so. But if you know, you could be booking more appointments with better prospects or you have appointments, but they’re just not going anywhere.

That is what we do. We help insurance professionals book more appointments with the right prospects so they can win more business that they want. It is that simple. So as you’re listening in, if you’re wanting to know how you can up level your sales, you want to know how you can drive better sales conversations with better prospects. I’m here to tell you it is not about quantity.

It is about quality. And if you want prospects, come in to you, man, you got to check out the complete game marketing playbook. So go to the notes schedule, call hook up with somebody from our team and see if it is a fit for you. All right, let’s dive into today’s episode. Today, 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 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 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. That’s why a lot of agencies have the problem of just getting prospects 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 out 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. 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.

Of 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 a company around it. So what you’re about to learn goes against the grain. The second mindset shift I want you to make and this is really tough for producers is stop trying to be all things to all people. Start selling your services 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 volume 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 Hint, hint.

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 new 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 a an 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 and interviewing prospects if they’re fit for you might change your trajectory, might change your success level.

So bring it back now to how does that mindset help you qualify and disqualify your prospects. Well, at the end of the day, when you realize you only need four or five prospects, four or five wins, excuse me to have an amazing year. You don’t actually don’t need that many people in your pipeline. So number one, spend copious amounts of time with good marketing.

Talk about that and plenty of different episodes. But now when you get the right people in your pipeline, what can you do to qualify your prospects quicker? And this is where my do you believe what I believe presentation came about? Because when I put together internal meetings, discovery meetings, I realized that my job was to have a very set agenda, every single internal meeting not to go off it.

It should be set in stone. I run the same agenda with every prospect, and it started this way. First part of the meeting, very simple. Set up the expectations, get to know the prospect. Right. Middle of the meeting is going to be all about the fact. Finally get to learn about the prospect. Where are they at? What are they trying to accomplish?

However, it is at the end of the meeting where most where you and I screw up, even if we felt like we killed it, we didn’t do anything to really qualify the prospect. And this is why we walk out of the meeting feeling like it was a great meeting, feeling like the prospect was eating out of your hands.

And then it goes nowhere. It’s when the proverbial proverbially goes to you, right? The ghosting we all hate. So I said, okay, I’ve got to have a better way to wrap up a discovery meeting to determine if this prospect’s a good fit for me. And so I developed this. Do you believe what I believe? Presentation. And the presentation was built around what I believe.

This is the the how I set up this presentation before I get into actually delivering it, let me set up how I said how I set up the presentation itself. I wanted to deliver the presentation so the prospect knew where I stood. Why is that important? Well, if you have followed our content closely enough, you know, we talk about psychographics all the time, right?

Demographics alone cannot identify an ideal prospect. You need psychographics. You see, your best clients are your best clients because you and them are psycho graphically aligned. They believe what you believe. They stand for what you stand for. They make decisions the way you make decisions. Now, when I say they believe in what you believe, I’m not talking about religion, politics, things like that.

No. When it comes to what you sell, they have a lot of the same beliefs and opinions that you do. That’s why they’re an ideal fit, because they’re letting you do your best work. So I had to develop a presentation built around my psychographics or what I sold to see if the prospect was a good fit for me.

The second thing I did is I built it around the story selling formula that we teach here at Complete Game Consulting. Now, that formula comes directly from building a story brand, the book written by Donald Miller. We are. I am a certified guide, so we can deliver their material, but it comes right from that storytelling formula, which is simple.

There is a hero who has a goal, but they have a problem keeping them from achieving the goal. Therefore, they need a guide who has a solution to help them have success and avoid failure. Now, key points in that story. Number one, your prospect is the hero, not you. You are the guide. If you think about movies like Star Wars, which Donald Miller talks about, this book, The Hero is Luke Skywalker from the original trilogy, right?

The guides are Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi. So in this story, your prospects the hero, not you. Too many agencies, too many advisers think they’re the hero. No, no, no, no, no. Your prospects, the hero. You’re just the guide. So when I would deliver this, do you believe what I believe? I just would walk through that story selling formula and I would tell them what it is most companies want we work with.

I tell them what the problem is, keeping them from their I’m good. I would give them some legit examples of how they’re losing, and then I would talk about how that losing those problems are leading to their current failure today. And my goal was to see if my prospect agreed or disagreed with me because I knew by delivering this presentation I would get one of two reactions.

One reaction was it kind of look at me cross-eyed? Not quite sure what I’m saying at that point. If they still didn’t understand what I was saying, they probably we were not a good fit and here’s the great thing. At that point, we’re only 15, 20 minutes into the meeting. No harm, no foul. I’m only wasted 15, 20 minutes.

And the next one, I didn’t spend countless hours and weeks emailing and cold calling and following up with prospects who had no desire to move forward with me. The other reaction was they are nodding their head and you can actually start seeing the anger boiling up inside because no one has ever told them the stuff. They’ve been thinking it, but no one’s ever actually verbalized it.

And they’re going, yes, this is exactly where we are. When I had that reaction, I knew I had a good one. I knew meeting one was going to turn into a meeting, number two. And so I started delivering this presentation over and over and over again, and it started working. So why don’t I deliver that presentation for you and then kind of summarize it at the end about why this is important to you and how it can help you.

Well, remember, as I’m about to deliver this for my insurance professionals listening in, remember, I was a benefit advisor. So what you’re about to hear does relate to benefits. But whether you’re a commercial risk adviser or you’re a financial planner, this can tie right into your own story. Remember, what I want you to hear is the formula I use to tell the story.

And then I want you to go back and I want you to listen to this section of the podcast a couple of times. So I would sit down with the prospect. This is after setting expectations for the meeting and our process getting an oh, the prospect fact finding. Before we wrapped up the meeting, I would take a few minutes to talk about what I believe and it would sound something like this.

You know, most companies we work with, what they’re trying to do is build a great health insurance plan without breaking the bank. They’re trying to build the best health insurance plan that can doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. Now, I call that my no shit comment, my no shit moment. Like who is not going to agree with that?

Yes, Sandy, we would love to build a great health plan without breaking the bank. No one’s going to say no and not interested. We don’t want a good health plan. We actually want to spend as much as we possibly can. Said no one ever right. So I kick it off. Just simple. Here’s what companies we work with typically want.

Then I talk about the problem. The problem is they have not been able to control their health insurance costs for years now. That wasn’t where the gold lie. The goal line when I came out of my mouth. Next, let me tell you why this is happening now. At this moment, I’m about to share what I believe. I’m about to share what I stand for.

This is where that prospect’s going to agree or disagree with me. So I would say, you know, there are three reasons why it has been so hard for you to control your health insurance costs. Number one, health insurance companies, their goals are not align with yours. Why? Well, back in 2010, when the Affordable Care Act was rolled out, along with it came a rule known as a medical loss ratio rule.

And it said for every dollar a health insurance carrier brings in, it has to spend a certain percentage of those dollars on claims. If it spends anything less, it has to give money back to its client. Now, you may have gotten a check back from the carrier years ago, right? You’re not anymore. Why? They stopped caring about controlling your count, your claims.

Otherwise they’d have to give money back. And that fact is, we know carriers are doing pretty dang well these days. Why do we know that? And then I would show their stock price performance, right? For example, Anthem, their stock price, March 23rd, 2010, the day the Affordable Care Act rolled out was right around $36. Today, it’s just shy or north now I’m not quite sure of $500 a share.

They’re doing just fine. Second problem, the health care systems goals are not aligned with yours. How do we know? Well, price and quality in the health care system are all over the map. Price does not equal quality. Just because something costs a lot in the health care system does not mean that provider is good at doing it. In fact, in the health care system, it’s quite the opposite.

Often the best providers charge a lower or fair amount. Why? Because they’re good at what they do. Worse yet, your employees actually don’t get to see the price for quality. And I would show a graph illustrating this. And then the last problem you have, which is probably the biggest problem. And at this point I’d pull out my medical ID card from my wallet and say, you know what this is?

And they’d say, Yeah, it’s a medical ID card. It’s exactly what you and I see. But every year you hand this out, your employees see an unlimited company credit card because as long as they stay in the PPO network, they can go wherever they want and spend whatever they want. So if the health insurance companies, their goals aren’t aligned with yours, the health care systems goals are not aligned with yours, and your employees are running around with these unlimited company credit cards, How in the world are you going to build a great plan that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg?

In fact, because of this, you have been taught one of three ways to control your health insurance costs. Enter failure. This is the failure part of the story. Number one, you’ve been taught to shop carriers every year. Two, you’ve been told that the best way to control cost is to raise deductibles and out of pockets. And three, you’ve been taught how to just ask employees to pay more at that point, if the prospect is still looking at me like I don’t quite get it, and I knew they were not a good fit, I made it so clear to you I even had slides visualizing how clear this is.

If you don’t get it, kind of move on. No harm, no foul. But if you’re shaking your head up and down, you’re nodding up and down. And I can see you’re almost kind of angry. I know you’re going to be a good fit. Now, at this point, I will deliver my solution. Here’s the process we use to help you fix this problem.

My process would have a name intent. Name your process. And then I would show a case study of a client who has actually done it at the end of the presentation. If they were a good fit, they’d be saying, We want that. How do we get what your client has right there? Perfect. Now I know I haven’t engaged Prospect.

Who wants to know how my client got the results they’re getting? And I know this is probably a first meeting that is going to turn into a second date. So if you follow the formula I just shared, All I said to the prospect is our typical client has this goal, but they have these problems that are keeping them from achieving the goal.

Therefore, today, here’s what failure looks like in their life. We have a solution, a process to fix it. And here’s a destination that you can have look at. One of our clients is doing. Once I started incorporating that story, that message into my first meetings, everything changed. Yeah, I distracted a lot of people, but they weren’t going to buy from me anyways.

I saved my time and I saved their time. I was no longer pushing variables so hard. Yeah, you’re not going to eliminate ghosting forever, but I can guarantee you’re going to have better conversation with that or prospects. This is how you start winning more with less in your pipeline because every single prospect is high quality. So that’s my advice for you today.

I hope that helps. So what I ask you to do, go back and listen to the last three or 4 minutes. I just delivered the presentation, listen to it for you a few times. For most of my benefit, advisors replicate Copy what I just said. Make it your own. But at the end of the day, you’ve got to have a better strategy to qualify and disqualify a prospect’s as quickly as you can.

So you’re not trying so dang hard to push an unqualified prospect through the pipeline who has no desire of working with you? I’ve been there far too often. It sucks. Like I said, it leads to frustration and financial success or financial failure. Not financial success. I’d much rather talk to fewer people but make each one better. I don’t know about you.

I know it goes against the grain what this industry has been taught. Not every prospect is a good prospect, but remember you just need four or five or six wins this year to have an amazing year. Not everybody’s a good fit, nor should they be so take what you learned today. I hope it gave you a little clarity now that you mix it with some confidence and go out, do it consistently, you will become on stoppable and that is the ultimate goal.

Those who take what they learn and apply it consistently will go out and create an unstoppable sales machine. I hope it happens for you because your sales goals will thank you. Be well.