EP 247 – How To Speed Up Your Decision Making To Speed Up Your Success
In this podcast episode you’ll learn how the speed of your decision making can determine your success.
There’s a common trait our most successful clients share when it comes to decision making. Tune in to see what it is!
Resources:
- Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyneary/
- Connect with me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andy_neary/
Video Transcript:
This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.
Hey, Hey. Welcome back to Bullpen Sessions. My name is Andy Neary and this is episode 247. We are creepin up on the Magic 250. I’m excited to be releasing that episode here in a couple of weeks. Today, I’m going to talk to you about making quick decisions and why your inability to make quick decisions could be the thing that is holding you back from reaching your goals.
But before we dive in to today’s episode, I want to give a big shout out to our sponsor. Yes, it’s my company. Complete game consulting. We don’t take any outside sponsors, but I do want to bring this up to you. If you are an insurance professional and you want to book more appointments with awesome prospects, our next broker Branding Academy starts right around the corner August 16th.
And if you know you need a plan to book more appointments with the right people so you can reach your sales goals between now and the end of the year. I want you to check out the academy. There is a link in the show notes to learn more, go check it out schedule. Call with the team to see if it is a fit for you.
All right, step back into today’s episode. So let’s talk about quick decisions. Let me let me set the stage for why this is the topic of today’s podcast. I want to explain one event that happened to our team recently in one of our weekly team meetings that really opened my eyes to the importance of making quick decisions. And I’m going to be talking about an observation I made lately.
When I look at the clients we work with and those that tend to go on to have great success versus those that have good average success from from what we do and how we can help them. Because I’m really starting to see a clear fine line between who are ideal clients, a complete game consulting and how we’re helping them and really what separates them from everybody else when it comes to success.
So I hope today’s episode is is really helpful and insightful for you. We’re not going to go very long, but I promise you this will be full of a lot of golden nuggets, maybe even give you a mindset perspective shift that you need right now, because as this episode airs, it is early August and fourth quarter is right around the corner.
Right. And fourth quarter is always an interesting time of the year in the insurance industry because I think a lot of even producers give up on the hope of selling, especially if you’re a producer who also has to manage a book of business. So not only are you responsible to try to bring new clients in during the fourth quarter, you’re also responsible for renewing the business you have.
And there is truth to the notion that, hey, it’s more important to retain the revenue you already have versus going out and trying to find new sources of revenue. However, I see far too many producers use fourth quarter as an excuse not to sell when it’s actually a really good opportunity to go out and win some business. Truth be told, you know this I know this majority of your prospects renew on January 1st.
So it is a key time of the year. Now, where does this come into today’s topic? Well, when I look at a producer sitting here in early August who is behind on his or her sales goals, they have got to make a decision and they’ve got to make a decision quickly, which is am I going to keep trying to do more of what’s not working when it comes to my prospecting activity, or am I going to make a decision to solve my problem as quickly as I can?
And this is where today’s topic comes in. So to set the stage for you, our team was on it’s one of its weekly L turns. If you’re not familiar with what a L ten is, we have incorporated the EOS system, the entrepreneurial operating system. It’s a great book that comes from great, great system that comes through the book Traction.
So if you’ve never read the book, you own an agency. I highly recommend you not only read the book, but you start incorporating EOS in your company. So what are the weekly meetings you host as part of the EOS system? Is on the L ten. So we are on our weekly L ten and we were talking about our two do’s, our 90 day rocks, our issues, and I brought up an issue that I had been concerning me, which was we have our next broker training academy coming up and you probably heard me talk about at the beginning of the podcast and I was unhappy with the way we were promoting it because I felt like
we were taking a very lackadaisical approach to getting people enrolled in the academy, meaning that we weren’t putting forth a ton of effort to make sure that we were putting out the content, the messaging necessary to blanket the market, especially in the insurance industry, to try to get as many people enrolled in the academy as we can. I thought we were taking more of a laissez faire approach, like if we get five, six, seven, awesome, but we’re not yet.
We just I just felt that unease that we had a problem. This is what I want to talk about today. We had a problem. We are not putting good putting forth a good effort to enroll people into the academy. So here we are on the outset and this is a key moment and this is what I want to talk about today and it’s what do the most successful people do when they encounter a problem?
Now, I’m not saying this from an angle of I want to share this because I think I am one of the most successful. No, no, no. I’m going to share with you how we solve the problem, what we did when we encountered this problem. But I’m also going to share with you what I’ve noticed about our best clients and what they do when they also encounter problems.
So here we are. I’m not pleased with the enrollment with the academy, not pleased about our approach to get enrollment into the academy, and we decided that in the moment we had other to do is to talk about in the L ten we had other priorities, other rocks. However, we kind of put all that aside and we, we got this problem front and center.
And over the next 20, 25 minutes, we uncovered the problem. We talked about why it’s a problem, and then we went to work attacking the problem. And for the next 20, 25 minutes, we put together a game plan of how we were going to blanket the market, how we were going to get emails out there, how we were going to create a system of referral partners, how we were going to incentivize our clients and our former academy members to refer people to us and come up with a social media strategy to make sure that we are always talking about the Academy for the next three or four weeks.
And after that, 25 minutes was over, we had a very clear and I’ll say confident plan to make sure we were doing everything we could to leave it all on the field. When it came to promoting the broker training academy. And at the end of the week, when I look back and I look at a kind of review the week and I look at all the wins we had and wins don’t necessarily have to mean new clients.
Wins can be just progress, right? Those small victories we often overlook one of the wins from the week that week was what we did to attack that problem when I felt we were not putting the effort forth to encourage enrollment into the academy. And I was really proud of the fact how quickly our team just saw the problem.
We all agreed it was a problem and then we just committed the time and the effort to attack the problem. And now we’re getting enrollment. Things are going the way we want it to. And here we are on the the eve or the brink of our next academy. And I feel really good not only about the enrollment we have, but I’m more proud of the effort we put in because we saw the problem and we attacked it.
And this is where I transition to you. What I often see in the insurance industry is we get a lot of advisors who come to us or agents, principals, sales directors with a problem could be my producers aren’t booking enough point. It’s could be I’m struggling, Andy, because I’m not booking enough appointments or I’m getting appointments, but they’re not really going anywhere or what I used to do as far as prospecting goes, is it working as good as it used to or I need to get my mojo back, but I don’t see a lot of proactive attacking of said problem.
And when I look at what differentiates, what separates the best from the rest is when the best see a problem, they don’t hesitate, they don’t negotiate with themselves. They attack it and put the time, quite frankly, and the money sometimes to solve it. So when I look at those advisors and those agencies who come to us, that now looking back in hindsight, I probably bet our most successful producers and our most successful agencies are the ones that can do a come with us to us with a problem.
We show them how they can help and in a matter of ten or 15 minutes, like, Yep, we’re it, we need to solve this. You look like you’re the team to help us. Let’s go. What do we have to do to get this going? On the flip side, we get the folks that come to us with that problem.
We show them how we can help, but then they’ve got to take time to think about it. Then they start negotiating with themselves. Then they start talking themselves into, well, maybe it’s just bad luck, you know, maybe it’s just the bad timing. Maybe if I just keep doing what I’m doing, you know, luck’s going to find me and I’m going to start getting momentum back.
But you and I both know how that story ends, right? Exactly where it started. You you’re you’re in the same place, the same level of stuckness as you were six months ago. The only thing has changed is you’re six months older. You’re six months closer to not hitting your goal. So what I encourage you to do, if you’re listening today and you know that you could be getting more better results than you are today, I’m here to tell you there’s still a lot of time left between now and the end of the year to create the result.
You want to hit your sales goals. However, what I am going to encourage you to do is stop, contemplate, stop thinking about what you’re going to do and just do it. Just attack the problem in front of you and figure out what you new, what you need to do to solve it. Is it going to take a certain amount of time?
Is it going to take a certain amount of money or a combination of both? What do you need to do to attack the problem? So the first thing I would tell you to do is sit down and go, What is my problem in the first place? If I am not hitting, am I not achieving the level of sales I know I’m capable of?
Why? What is the problem? Is it the lack of activity? Is it a lack of the plan to go out and create the activity? Is it the lack of prospects? Is it the lack of good prospects? What is the problem then? Craft a plan to attack it step by step. What do you need to do to solve this problem?
So it’s what is the problem? How am I going to attack it? And the third question is who can help me attack it? Who can help me solve it? Now, sometimes that answer is you and you alone. You’re going to figure it out. Maybe it’s going online and watching some YouTube videos to self-study, but maybe it’s also looking outside of yourself, outside of your organization to find that company, that person that can help you out.
But attacking a problem comes down to knowing what the problem is, putting a plan together to know how to fix it, and then going and finding the person, the who, the company that can help you fix. But sitting there and negotiating with your results, sitting there and contemplating what you’re going to do next, or sitting there and waiting for the perfect time to solve your problem is never going to fix the problem.
I put out a post a couple of weeks ago about having when your best strategy to solve your problem is waiting for the right time to solve the problem. You’re never going to solve the problem, so just get on it right now and attack the problem by asking those three questions. What is my problem or what is the problem?
How am I going to solve it? And by the way, there’s no perfect plan. Just what is the how would it put together a step by step plan? And then who can help me solve it? Now, if you have no idea the how, that’s where you definitely have to seek the who but put together a plan. But most importantly, quit waiting again.
When I look at our best clients, the ones that have gone out and had tremendous success, that the success, those that have created exponential growth in their businesses and in their lives for cripes sakes, they don’t hesitate. My strategy calls with them last about 10 minutes because they’re bought in. They know they got a problem. They see we can help and they just decide.
And I know I had to learn that the hard way in the past because I too was one that would hesitate. I too, was one that would have to think about it. But every single time I let myself off the hook and I gave myself that that that break to contemplate and think I never ended up getting the result I wanted.
And the only thing I lost was time. Sometimes I even lost money. So that’s my advice for you. Today wasn’t going very long, but I wanted to give you that advice because I’ve seen what this strategic approach to problem solving has done for us as recently shown by our ability to attack our broker branding academy problem. And I know what it can do for you.
So if you find yourself here today listening to this episode and you know, you need to be getting better results right now, you still have time to hit your sales goals for 2023. But don’t wait to figure out what your problem is. Figure out how you’re going to solve it, and then go find the who who can help you solve it and just know you need to invest the time.
You might even need to invest money, but attack the problem and you will be rewarded. And most importantly, if you’re watching the video and you look behind me, you see three words on this wall. It’s about being consistent, it’s about being persistent and it’s about being patient. You apply those three approaches to your business. You will be very happy where you end up.
So take my advice today, run with it and I hope it helps. You have one hell of a finish to 2023. Be good.