This week on the Accelerate Your Insurance Sales Podcast, I’m sharing the 4 pillars of modern insurance sales that will change the way you view and interact with prospects.

I share a bit of what the insurance sales cycle used to be like, and contrast that with what it should be in today’s world. If you’re new to insurance or you’ve been in the game for decades, I promise you’ll learn a lot from this week’s episode and walk away thinking about how you can better engage your prospects.

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Video Transcript:

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If you leverage these four pillars of the modern day sales cycle, you will have more leads, which will turn into more appointments, and these appointments will become more sales, more consistently. Your mindset.

Hey, hey, welcome back to the podcast. This is episode 14. My name is Andy Neri, founder and CEO of Complete Game Consulting. And in this episode, you are going to learn how to master the four key pillars of the modern day insurance sales cycle. Notice I said modern day. Yep, things have changed. And in this episode, I’m going to break down the four key areas the sales cycle and how you can leverage them to make sure you are the advisor of choice when your prospects make a decision.

All right. If you are an insurance agency owner or a sales director, this is an episode you are not going to want to miss, because you are going to want to take this content and feed it to your team. Especially if you are an agency looking to create more consistent revenue growth, this is going to be very important for you to tune.

In fact, at the end of the episode, I am going to give you, an opportunity to really dive in and leverage this and take advantage of today’s episode. So let’s just dive in. How can we master the four key pillars of the modern day insurance cycle? Well, to understand this, we got to go back and look at the outdated version of the insurance sales cycle, which far too many producers are still trying to leverage today.

If you think about the sales cycle in the insurance industry as it has existed for decades, I would argue that, it has been pretty basic. You know, when you look at the insurance cycle that I was taught under 25 years ago, it really came down to this. You have a suspect, right? You got a list of suspects are people who don’t know who you are.

They don’t know you exist. And your number one objective is to take a suspect and make them a prospect as fast as you can. And the bridge between suspect and prospect back in the day was purely activity, right? It was calls, emails. Heck, when I started my career at Federated Insurance, it was parking my car in an industrial park and going door to door, and that was the goal.

You wanted to use activity called outreach to simply turn a suspect into a prospect as quickly as you could. Now, worse yet, that list of suspects, most of the time we didn’t even know who they were. We just had a list of suspects. We didn’t know if they were a good fit or not, but it was. See suspect.

Sell suspect. Right. And so our objective in the old version of the insurance sales cycle is just to quickly make a suspect in a prospect. Now, when you had success and you did turn them into a prospect, in my opinion, the definition of a prospect is at the point they accept an appointment with you. They accept a meeting with you, then they become a prospect.

At that point, your job was to turn them into a sale as quickly as you could. Now, the thing that stood in the way, or the thing that bridged the gap between prospect and sale was, quote, right. If you just spit out a bunch of quotes and you had the right plan or the right coverage at the right price, if you’re in the PNC world, you had the right carrier, you might win.

And I remember as a as a new advisor at Federated, being told to throw a bunch of stuff at the wall, something’s going to stick. Right. And that was really the sales cycle back in the day. It was you got a list of suspects hammered with calls, emails, door to door. Make them a prospect when they become a prospect, ask them who they’re, who they’re with, what their plan is, what their X date is.

If you’re selling benefits, it’s how many employees do you have? Do you have a census? Go get a bunch of quotes and hey, if you got the right one, you might win right? And, you know, a lot of advisors succeeded under that model. And I know I didn’t. I think that model was very damaging to my success. Not for any other reason but my own fault.

But really think about that model. It’s it was really hard to stand out in that model. You know, I used to think about selling Federated Insurance early in my career. The one advantage I did have is we were a captive right? So I could go into any situation and know I was the only one producing a federated quote.

So that enhanced my success rate of turning suspects into prospects. Because I could come in with something they weren’t getting from their current advisor. Now, for most advisors, independent advisors, which I ultimately became, that’s a different story, right? If you’re selling commercial lines, it’s really down to what markets are you going to get access to? I always find this really funny, and this is part of the outdated sales cycle.

On the commercial side, you would have multiple brokers go after the same piece of business. And what will determine their ultimate success is comes down to what markets do they get access to? What value does that bring to the prospect? Really, if you win because you somehow got access to the right market, did you really bring any value?

No. You won the lottery. And I used to love how incumbent brokers would play the game of going and blocking all the market, so any competing broker couldn’t get access to a. Better yet, I’d love when prospects would literally feed out, you’re doing it all right. You can have these free markets, you can have these two and you can have these five.

Like really that’s what’s going to determine how you have the most success. This is why the success rate in that model for the brokers that did not have the business is so low. Now on the benefit side, it was even worse because you get access to all the same markets. There was no blocking markets, right? I can remember selling benefits 15 years ago, and at that time I was selling primarily small group business.

And I would walk in and it was the same conversation every single time. What’s your state? How many employees do you have, who you’re currently with? What are your plans? What are the deductibles? What are the out of pockets? Okay, well, if you’re interested and are willing to give me a census, I’ll go get a bunch of quotes.

Oh, by the way, your current broker can get the same quotes. And I will try to win the business from your competing broker by showing you the same plans he or she is currently showing you. Good luck. Right? And unless the prospect was done with their existing broker and ready to leave them, your success rate was extremely low.

Yet there are brokers today that still operate under this model, and they wonder why they’re having such low success rates. Worse yet, I still watch teams and these are some of the biggest firms in the country. I still watch teams being taught. The number one strategy to get your prospects attention has to be the cold call. There are firms who run cold call power hours in 2025.

Do I have to do the math for you again, it takes 18 phone calls, roughly 18 phone calls to get one prospect to pick up. That means you have to make 180 phone calls to get ten prospects to pick up. And if you are a speed dealer, you can call every minute on the minute and leave a voice message.

It still takes three hours to get ten prospects to pick up the phone. But here’s the worst part you’re not building any awareness with them. You’re not leveraging the requirements of the modern day sales cycle to have success. And that’s what I’m going to teach you today. I’m going to leverage how to optimize what has happened with the insurance sales cycle, how to evolve, how you can adapt to it so you can have more success with it because there’s a lot of producers right now who aren’t even getting to the stage of turning them into a prospect.

They’re not opening doors because they’re still using outdated metrics or methods that are just aren’t getting the job done. You’re not building any awareness. And worse yet, the sales cycle in the insurance industry is longer than it used to be. Think about that. So your second challenge is not only does a traditional sales cycle not work like it used to, it’s longer than it used to be.

So how are you going to win? And that’s what I’m going to help you with right now, is how to harness the four key pillars of the current sales cycle in the insurance industry, so you can have some more success. By the way, this goes for anybody listening. If you sell a product to the industry where you work through brokers, it’s no different.

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The first phase of the modern day sales cycle looks a lot like the traditional. It starts with a suspect, right? It starts with somebody who does not know who you exist. They don’t know how you’re different than anybody else. They can see that you’re a broker. Heck, again, they may not even know you exist today. The first thing you have to do if you want to leverage the modern day sales cycle to its fullest, is you got to get clear about who that suspect is.

Who are you trying to attract in your world? Stop trying to call just any suspect who are you trying to do business with? Sit down and get clear. Pillar one is clarity. Get clear about who you’re trying to attract in their world. What are their demographics? Who are you trying to go after from a size perspective, industry perspective, geography?

What decision makers are you trying to get the attention of that? Step number one, before you even try to turn a suspect into a prospect, you got to be clear on who the suspect is. You’re trying to attract. Now, once you’re clear, your first objective is to build awareness with those suspects. We call it content. What are you doing today to leverage content, to build awareness with the suspects who aren’t quite aware of who you are yet?

What do you want to be known for? What problems do you want to solve? What are your top prospects today need to know to hire you? If you’re going to build a content strategy to turn suspects into prospects, it has to start with leaning into content that’s built around what you do best and what top prospects need to know to hire you.

Be an educator. This is how you build awareness. This is the first bridge. Remember what I said about the outdated sales cycle? Literally, the bridge between suspect and prospect was cold outreach. That’s it. Cold activity. Well, now the bridge between suspect and prospect is actually awareness. You have to start by building awareness with those prospects using the marketing channels that exist today.

Social media, email, webinars, podcasting, whatever you name. Public speaking right. So that’s how you master pillar number one. You got to be clear on this aspect, and you have to create content that build awareness for you so they know you exist. Now step number two. Now you turn awareness into a prospect. How do you do that? By leveraging some of the activities you’re doing today.

Yeah, I’m not saying the cold calls dead. The cold call cold emails dead. Heck, you still may go to door. Go door to door. We have clients today that are in markets where stopping into a business is still effective, but here’s where the awareness you’ve created becomes makes it all more effective. If you’re picking up the phone, you’re sending the emails, you’re out networking, you’re going door to door, whatever you might do to try to turn suspects into prospects, that activity becomes more effective now because you’ve built awareness.

Maybe it’s sending DMs on LinkedIn now that people know you exist, suspects know you exist. I promise your activity is going to become more effective. This we call capture pillar two is capture pillar one is clarity and content. You got to be clear on who you’re going after. You got to create content to make them aware that you exist.

Pillar two is capture. Now you got to turn them into a prospect. By the way, my definition of a prospect is at the point they accept a conversation with you, a meeting, then they become a prospect. Up until that point, they are not a prospect. But you do this through capture and if you’ve done a good job building awareness capture becomes more effective.

Now this is where we used to get it wrong. Right now we got a prospect. They’ve taken a meeting. They’ve accepted a meeting in the back in the day. We’d go in and we do what? This is where we gather the information, the X dates, the number of employees, the current policies, the carriers. Right. And then we’d say, hey, I could go supply you a bunch of quotes.

That doesn’t work anymore, folks. You got to get off that track. Step three is credibility. Better yet, pillar three is credibility. Just because they’re a prospect does not mean your job is done. Even though you’re there in your pipeline now, you still have to work hard to build credibility with the prospect. The best way to do that is to continue using your content on social media, on email, on webinars, however you want to distribute to them, continue to educate them all the while they’re going through your pipeline.

Because if you can focus there, if you can continue pumping content and putting it in front of them outside of the actual in-person visit you’re having with them, you’re going to continue building credibility all the way to the finish line when it’s time for them to make a decision. So whether you have an email newsletter, you host monthly webinars, I don’t know what you do.

Pump out content on a weekly basis. On LinkedIn. You’ve got to find a way to continue to build credibility with these prospects, and content is the best way to do that. Kind of starting to figure out content is the secret sauce of this whole thing. Pillar three is about credibility. Now that they’re a prospect, your number one priority is to build credibility.

It’s not to go get a bunch of quotes and hope you block the right markets. Now you have to build credibility. How do you do that? You continue to teach them, and I would urge you to teach them as hard as you can and as much as you can, almost to the point they could take what you’ve taught them and do it themselves, but they need somebody like you to hire them.

And I know where you’re going right now, Andy. I don’t know if I want to do that. I’m a little hesitant. If I give away a bunch of stuff here, they’re just going to give it to their current broker. Well, that’s true, but I’m here to tell you something. If they do, they weren’t hiring you in the first place.

I’m going to take that risk because I know I’m going to get rewarded more than I’m going to get used. But pillar number three is all about credibility, which leads to pillar number four. Now that you have credibility established, you have got to have a defined and repeatable sales process to convert them into a sale. Pillar four is convert.

I watch too many teams have no process, especially a unified process amongst all producers, to turn a prospect into a client. Bill’s doing it his way. Betty’s doing it her way. John doesn’t even have a process. He just spits a bunch of shit against the wall and hopes it sticks. Nobody’s got a process, and it’s not uniform. You want to have success as a team.

You got to have a uniform sales process. What happens in meeting number one? What are you doing after the meeting between meeting one, number one and number two, you use an assessment you use in a survey. What are your proposals look like? Do you have a uniform slide deck that you use in your proposals? Whatever it is, you got to have some form of process.

Remember, brokers sell products, consultants sell processes. You’ve got to have a defined sales process that you rinse and repeat with every single prospect. If you leverage these four pillars of the modern day sales cycle, you will have more leads which will turn into more appointments. And these appointments will become more sales and more consistently. You got to leverage the four pillars.

Pillar number one is clarity. When you have a list of suspects, be clear about who you’re actually trying to attract and use content to build awareness with them. Pillar two is the capture phase. Now that you’ve built awareness, you still have to put in the activity. It might be the calls in the emails to turn suspects into prospects, but it’s going to be more effective because you’re creating awareness.

Building. Number three is credibility. Now that they’ve agreed to a meeting, what is your process via content to continue building credibility with them? And pillar four convert as you’re building credibility, what is your define sales process to convert them in to clients you leverage those for? Your team is going to have a ton of success. And if you want to know how to dive deeper into leveraging the modern day sales cycle in the insurance industry, I’m going to encourage you to sign up and register for our webinar on April 22nd.

I am hosting it how to master the four pillars of the Modern day Insurance Sales Cycle. If you’re an agency owner sales leader, this is a webinar you’re not going to want to miss. You’re going to want your producers on that webinar. All you got to do is go to the link in the show notes here, and you can get registered, but it’s going to be on April 22nd.

The four pillars to mastering the modern day insurance sales cycle. You are not going to want to miss this, but at a minimum, I want you to take what you learned today. Leverage it. Leverage these pillars so that you can have more success turning suspects into prospects, building credibility with them faster so you can turn them into clients.

Like I said, you do that you and your team are going to create more leads, more appointments, more wins and more revenue, which is what we all want to do in the first place. 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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