Most producers do not have leverage when it comes to prospecting. Why? Because they’re still primarily relying on outdated sales tactics.

This week on the Accelerate Your Insurance Sales Podcast, I share some practical tips on building leverage with your prospects, why the outdated ways of prospecting are much more effective if your clients know you, and my thoughts on the modern sales cycle.

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Video Transcript:

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

Now, if you’re tuning in and you’re saying, Andy, I listen, I’m hearing you, but I still disagree. I think there’s a place for cold call to cold emails. Awesome. If you let them build their brand, you let them create awareness. Calls and emails become more effective. Why? Because people know who they are. Hey, hey. Welcome back to the Accelerate Your Insurance Sales podcast.

My name is Andy Neary and this is episode ten. In this episode, you will learn how to increase your leverage and efficiency with prospecting. Today I am talking about prospecting leverage. Most producers do not have leverage when it comes to prospecting. Why? Because they’re still primarily relying on outdated sales tactics. No, I am not saying cold calls and cold emails are dead.

It just isn’t effective as it used to be. And more importantly, it’s taking more time to get the same results that you used to. So today I’m going to teach you how to create leverage, how to get more effective prospecting done in less time so you can have more success faster. I’m going to show you what changed my career, and I’m going to teach you the same thing and how to leverage prospecting so you can get a message in front of a lot of people quickly.

And you can leverage the power of 24/7 marketing. So if you want to be more effective with your prospecting, you wish it took less time than it does today. This is an episode you want to tune into, and your sales leader in an agency owner who’s struggling with producers right now. Man, this is an episode you’re definitely going to want to tune into.

So here we go. Let’s dive in. Episode ten How to Create Prospecting Leverage. This episode is brought to you by True Captive Insurance. What if you could take full control of your health care strategy without the financial burdens of traditional insurance, a true captive insurance? They make that possible. As the only captive in the nation that puts up the majority of collateral on your behalf, they provide financial flexibility from day one, making them an advocating partner for their customer success, true captives, fully customizable plans and cost saving strategies ensure you never have to choose between affordability and quality care.

It’s time to break free from the limitations of conventional insurance. Take the next step today. Visit True captive.com and discover a smarter way to manage health care that is true captive com. Hey hey welcome back. It is episode ten of the Accelerate Your Insurance Sales podcast Andy right here. How you doing? In this episode, you are going to learn how to increase your leverage and efficiency when it comes to prospecting.

Yes, I am going to teach you how to create prospecting leverage. Now you might be sitting there listening, going, Andy, what do you mean when you say leverage? You are soon to find out. So today I’m just going to teach you how to get more done in less time. And when you think about the word leverage, let me actually read the definition of leverage to you.

Good old ChatGPT helped me write this one. When it comes to leverage in relation to time, leverage refers to maximizing productivity and efficiency by using strategies, systems, or resources to achieve more in less time. And I would argue most producers today are not leveraging their time effectively when it comes to prospecting. It is taking them way too long to get very little done because they are still relying on outdated tactics.

And I am just going to be blunt. A lot of the tactics we are still teaching in this industry are outdated. I understand that there is a place for calls, there is a place for emails, there’s a place for drop ins, I get it, but they’re not as effective as they used to be. Just look at the statistics.

Most producers right now do not have leverage when it comes to prospecting, because they’re relying on the traditional 1 to 1 prospecting. By reaching out to people who do not know who they are. Think about this if you compare email today to 25 years ago, back in 2000, open rates for emails were somewhere between 80 and 90%. If you got an email back in 2000 you were excited to open.

I remember email came around when I was in college, and I remember getting my first email address and every single email that I got, I was excited to open right back in the AOL You’ve Got Mail days now I hate it. Open your inbox any chance you get. There’s 4050 new emails a day. Your emails are getting drowned out in the noise at a greater level than they’ve ever been.

If you get 20% open rates today, you’re doing really well. Now let’s talk about cold calls. Statistically, it takes roughly 18 calls to get a prospect to pick up the phone. Now, that comes from some data from Anthony in Reno. I had a client go through some of his training, so he shared that information with me. 18 calls to get one prospect to pick up the phone.

So let’s do the math. And if you are an avid listener of the podcast, you know, I talked about this a lot. That means it takes 180 calls to get ten people to pick up the phone. We’re not even talking about it. Yes, we’re talking about picking up the phone. And if this episode is focused on leverage, if it takes you three hours, that’s 180 calls every minute, on the minute to get three, ten people to pick up.

Is that a good use of your time? Now let’s be more realistic. It probably takes two minutes per call, especially when you go consider leaving a voice message. And now we’re talking about six hours to get ten people to pick up the phone. That’s not leverage. Now let’s talk about touch points. You know, the old math says it takes anywhere.

Depending on the data. You look at 7 to 20 touch points to get a prospect to agree to an appointment. I would argue it’s probably closer today to 20 than it is to seven. Just because your prospects are getting hammered by you and your competitors every single week from more channels than they’ve ever had. And so if you’re relying on 1 to 1 cold outreach as your primary form of prospecting right now, I don’t want to say you’re wasting your time, but you’re definitely not leveraging your time.

And here’s the problem as an industry, we’re still focusing too much of our sales training on these forms of prospecting. Why? It’s what we know. I know this is probably not going to be very well received with what I’m about to say, but it’s what our sales leaders and our agency owners are comfortable with. A lot of agency owners out there today, and if you’re one of them and you’ve been around for 30 or 40 years, my guess is that you’ve built your book to a point where you don’t have to sell a whole lot.

Right now. You’re comfortable, you’re managing this existing book, and you’ve earned it. But when you were selling, actively selling ten, 15, 20 years ago, things were a lot different. And I see a lot of sales leaders and agency owners still force these old world sales tactics down their prospect or their producers throat, because that’s what they know. That’s what they’re comfortable with.

And we’ve got to change, because what’s happening is we are setting our producers up to fail. And if you are wondering why you might have a turnover issue amongst your producers, this is a big reason we’re not giving them the tools to win today. And I’m going to teach you how to do that. You know, I don’t give, certain individual enough gratitude and thanks when I look at where I’m at today, you know, when I look at what allowed me to change my career, in the insurance industry, what allowed me to to love this industry again?

I think about a man who I went to work for in 2014, Claire Volk. Claire, if you’re listening, I don’t give you enough thanks for for who I am and where I am today. Complete game consulting wouldn’t exist if you didn’t give me the opportunity you gave me. You see, in 2014, when Amy and I made a decision to move to Colorado, Claire took a chance on me.

He hired a producer that was totally unproven from another state, Wisconsin, who happened to be moving to Colorado. And Claire took a gamble. And the thing that Claire did that ultimately changed my career is Claire gave me the freedom to prospect the way I wanted to. Claire gave me the freedom to build my personal brand and he didn’t have to.

I’m sure there were times I made him very uncomfortable with what I was doing, but it was that freedom that allowed us to really create a tension amongst, prospects who we’ve never who had we had never open doors with before. It allowed us to go down to Denver in a very competitive market and open some opportunities. We had never opened before.

But it was that flexibility and that freedom Claire gave me that really ultimately allowed me to build a brand, which changed my career again. It’s why I’m sitting here today recording this episode of the Accelerate Your Insurance Sales podcast as the founder and CEO of Early Game Consulting. Because I built the brand and he gave me that flexibility to do so.

And I share that because when I look back at what made the brand building so effective, it was leveraging my prospecting time. And this is what I want to share with you today. If you want to create prospecting, leverage, you have got to get more done with your prospecting in less time than you are today. How you’ve got to get one message in front of a lot of people at one time.

We call it exponential awareness. Better said. Prospecting leverage. How are you getting one message in front of many prospects at one time? You see, when I look at my journey from 2014 to 2018 where I was building my brand, it was about getting attention. However, it was how I went about getting attention that made it so effective. Between 2014 and 2018, I added the following prospecting channels to my repertoire.

Number one social media. Right? I started using LinkedIn and I started creating content for my prospects because I realized that content creation can get a front of a lot of prospects at one time. Number two, I started speaking. That’s a great form of exponential awareness. Standing on a stage in front of a room full of your prospects is the most effective thing you can do in prospecting.

Webinars I started hosting consistent webinars every single month. Why? It was an opportunity to bring multiple prospects to me, to listen to me at one time, and then I started the podcast years later. Why? It’s an opportunity to get my message out in front of a lot of prospects at one time. And this is why this is all important.

This is all forms of content, correct? But if you think about the statistics around the touchpoints, it takes anywhere from 7 to 20 touchpoints to get your prospects attention, to get them to agree to a meeting. What are you doing to create those touchpoints, and how are you getting those touchpoints in front of them quicker? You see, most of you right now are doing it by picking up the phone or sending in a cold email 7 to 20 times, hoping it finally hits them on the right day or they finally pick up the phone.

But if you leverage these other channels social media, speaking, webinars, podcasting, what are you doing? You’re getting dozens of touch points in front of them in a matter of a few months. I call it 24 over seven. Marketing. Marketing. Why you sleep, credibility, why you sleep, whatever you want to call it. This is how you build credibility. This is how you create vast touchpoints with your prospects so that by the time they’re ready to say yes, you’ve already got credibility with them.

Hey, it’s Andy Neary. Thank you for listening to the Accelerate Your Insurance podcast. Did you know the ideas we share on the show are things we actually specialize in helping you implement. You want to increase your sales, make more money and be the thought leader your prospects reach out to. Please go to my LinkedIn profile, DM me and sign up for a free discovery call again, go to my LinkedIn profile, DM me and we’ll get you set up for a free discovery call.

All right, now back to the show. You have to think about the sales cycle this way, and I wish I had a visual I could show you. If you look at the sales cycle today from suspect to sale, I would argue the old way of this, of leveraging the sales cycle was pretty short. It was how quickly could we take a suspect, make them a prospect, turn them into a sale?

And in between there, you had cold calls, cold emails, drop ins, you name it. Because we were trying to turn suspects into prospects as fast as we could. And then when they became a prospect, they accepted a meeting. By the way, that is what creates a prospect when they agree to a meeting, we did whatever we could to quickly make them a sale, whether that was throwing a spreadsheet of quotes in front of them, trying to get the agent a record letter as quickly as we could, there was there was really no value add in the sales cycle other than C prospect or C suspect.

Turn them into a prospect, turn them into a sale. Nowadays, the sales cycle is much different. It number one, it’s a lot longer than it used to be. There’s a lot more advisors in the industry than there ever been, but it’s what’s happening in between suspect, prospect and sale that’s important. You see, between suspect and prospect, there’s awareness.

And my question for you is what are you doing right now leveraging these channels? I just shared social media, speaking webinars, podcasting to build awareness with suspects who don’t know who you are. That’s number one. You have to spend a lot of time today building awareness. By the way, those are all touchpoints that are building credibility with your prospects.

Now, when they become a prospect, they have agreed to a meeting. Your job’s not done. You have to continue building credibility between prospect in the sale. How do you do that? You nurture them. How do you continue using your content to educate them, to continue to bring value to their world so that by the time they’re ready to make a decision, you are the only one they think of.

If you are not leveraging those two additional steps in the modern day sales cycle awareness and nurturing, you’re missing a big opportunity. And selling insurance is going to be a lot harder for you. You can’t just depend on cold calls and cold emails to turn a suspect into a prospect. You also have to build awareness with them so they become aware of who you are.

And then when they agree to a meeting, you have to continue educating them with those channels social media, speaking, webinars, podcasting, emails to bring education and value to their life so that when they’re ready to buy, you are the one they want to buy from. If you’re not leveraging that right now, you’re missing a huge opportunity and it’s in the awareness building and the nurture building where you can create those touchpoints that get your buyer to a place where they trust you, they find you credible, and you become their go to choice.

It’s that simple. The days of just hiding behind cold tactics, calls and emails. They don’t work like they used to. And if you continue teaching your prospect, producers, forcing your producers to use those channels as the primary mode of prospecting, you’re going to continue having a turnover issue at your at your agency because you’re setting them up for failure.

Now, again, please hear me out. I’m not telling you not to do that. But if you also give them an opportunity to build a brand to leverage these forms of prospecting in the channels I’ve been sharing in social media, webinars, speaking, podcasting, you know what you’re letting them do. You’re letting them build their brand, which is what they have to do today.

But you’re giving them that chance to build the awareness and the credibility they need to win the business. And the most unintended consequence of this entire philosophy is they will love what they are doing. You see, producers are not leaving your firm for another agency because they don’t like cold calling. They don’t like what they’re doing. It’s not even the fact that the calls in the emails aren’t effective anymore.

It’s they don’t like what they’re doing. Now, if you’re tuning in and you’re saying, Andy, I listen, I’m hearing you, but I still disagree. I think there’s a place for cold call to cold emails. Awesome. Guess what? If you let them build their brand, you let them create awareness calls and emails become more effective. Why? Because people know who they are.

So that’s my advice today. You need to create leverage in your prospecting. How do you do it? It’s about getting more done in less time. And if you leverage exponential awareness, pushing one message in front of a lot of people at one time, using channels like social media, speaking, webinars, podcasting, live events, whatever it is where you can get in front of more than one prospect at one time, it’s going to build awareness.

It’s going to build your credibility faster. It is going to speed up those 7 to 20 touch points. You need to get a prospect to say yes. And when they do say yes, they already trust you. They already find you credible, which means you’re going to win business a hell of a lot faster. So take my advice today I hope you use it.

Get more done in less time. I want you to be effective with your time when it comes to prospecting. But most importantly, I want you to love what you do. So take it. Run with it. Let’s go have some fun. Be good. That’s all we got for this episode of the Accelerate Your Insurance Sales podcast, one of the most valuable things you can do to help us and other new potential listeners find our show is for you to rate the show and leave a review.

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