This week I’m going solo on The Broker’s Voice and teaching you 2 secrets to using LinkedIn to create sales opportunities.

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Video Transcript:
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Welcome. It is 9 a.m. Mountain Time here in Colorado, and it was supposed to be doing a Broker’s Voice episode today. Unfortunately, my guest had to cancel due to an unforeseen slight emergency. So here I am. I am going to record today for about 20 minutes, so I figured I’d use this time to give you some very, very important advice.

If you’re an insurance producer right now that has a chance to watch this on my feed and you are hell bent on achieving your sales goal this year. You’re going to want to listen to what I have to say. We’re going to talk a little bit about selling on social media. Now. We’ve been doing a workshop for agencies and insurance partners around the country that has been very well-received about how to sell on social media, and this workshop has three main components.

Number one, it’s about teaching you how to identify your ideal prospect because you cannot be all things to all people. So the agency that feels it can help everyone actually helps no one. And you have to get really clear this year on who you best serve. The easiest way to do that is go look at your favorite clients.

Think about all the things that your favorite clients have in common, and I bet you can start to start uncover who your ideal prospect is just by doing that. The second thing is teaching you how to create championship content. So in this workshop we spend an hour and a half to 2 hours just talking about how to create championship content, how to create content.

Your prospects actually want, and how to create content that draws your prospects to you. And then the last part is how to sell on social media. So I walked through our LinkedIn strategy that we use here at Complete Game Consulting. By the way, I’m going to share this and it’s not to brag, it’s to make a point. This LinkedIn strategy helped us grow 75% in 2022, and it did not include using the automated bullcrap that you see people using on LinkedIn.

It did not include making one phone call, one cold call all year, and we didn’t spend $1 on ads. Let me repeat that. No automated Autobot LinkedIn program, not one cold call and not $1 of ad spend used. And we grew 75% last year. Why? Because of our content and our LinkedIn strategy. So this workshop has been extremely well-received.

By the way, if you’re an agency principal or your sales director of any company in the insurance industry, this is the this is what your producers are asking for. They don’t want the outdated training anymore. They want to know how to win today. And so this leads me to the conversation that I wanted to share with you today, which is how do you sell on social media?

There are two things I want to talk about today. If you want to use social media more effectively to grow your business, the first thing I want to teach you is this concept of giving versus asking one to commerce. A conversation I often have with our clients is when you give a lot, you have earned the right to ask.

One of the challenges I see in the insurance industry right now is there are too many producers who do nothing but ask. So if you’re only strategy as far as prospecting goes, is picking up the phone and making dials, all you’re doing is asking. You’re not bringing any value to your prospect. So the truth is you haven’t earned any right to ask for anything.

We currently live in a giving economy. People only do people business with people who give to them first. Your prospects want value from you before they’re ever going to consider taking a meeting with you. So my question to you is how much are you giving today before you ask? I can sit on this video right now, this recording.

I’m doing this live and ask all I want. You know why? Because I give to you every single day. We give to you as complete game consulting to you every single day through our content. So we have earned the right to ask, Are you doing the same again? If all you’re doing is reaching out to prospects right now, asking for meetings, asking for their time, you haven’t earned the right to do any of that.

You have to give before you take. So as you look at your year, where in your prospecting strategy have you designated time for giving? By the way, 80% of your prospecting should be giving. And there’s a part to that. This first step I want to talk about you have to save the best for first. This is a concept I learned from one of our mentors, Rory and AJ Vaden, about the whole content strategy of giving.

If you are saving your best stuff, you’re saving the gold for when the client hires you, They’re never hiring you. You’ve got to save the first four past. You’ve got to save the first four, save the best for first. Excuse me. You got to come out of the gate with good content. You got to share almost to the point you’re uncomfortable because there’s a huge difference between education and application.

You can educate your prospects all you want. They still have to hire somebody to apply it. And if you’re the one who’s constantly educating them, guess who they’re going to hire. Yes, you. So the first thing you’ve got to think about this year, if you want to use social media to sell, is you’ve got to lean hard into giving because the more you give, the more right you have to ask the clients we work with today that are putting out social media content on a daily basis.

Holy cow, if they earn the right to ask, there should be no qualms about asking when you’re giving. In fact, I feel so strongly about this. I am so confident about this that when I reach out to a prospect today, whether it’s an email or a LinkedIn message, I almost feel like they should take a meeting with me.

And I don’t say that to be brash or cocky. My point is I just know how much we’re giving, so you need to start doing the same. If your content play today is just to pick up the phone and ask for meetings, you’re not doing enough. One, you and I both know that’s harder than it’s ever been these days.

But number two, you really haven’t earned the right to ask because you’re not giving at all. So make giving a part of your prospecting strategy. Number two, The second thing I want to talk to you about today, if you want to use social media to sell is you have to figure out how you’re going to create an effective content strategy.

So you and I can both agree giving has got to be a part of your strategy right now. Part two of that is, all right, how are you going to create content that’s going to draw prospects in? And if you really want to make content part of your strategy this year and if you’re not, you’re going to be left behind is there’s two types of content I highly urge you to create.

Number one, you need to create content that lets your prospects get to know you. I have talked about this at length. The way we build relationships with prospects has changed forever. Back in the day, you were able to go take them to a baseball game or a football game, take them out to lunch, take them to dinner, take them out for a round of golf.

Go grab a cup of coffee. You could schmooze them, right? And that’s how you built a relationship. But the way we do that has changed. Yeah. It’s coming back little by little, but it’s never going to be the same. But here’s what’s beautiful about social media. When done right, you can actually build a relationship with a prospect before they ever meet you.

They bought that. You can build a relationship with a prospect before they ever meet you. And by the way, it doesn’t cost anything. Maybe. Maybe you have the sales Navigator subscription to do it well, but really, it doesn’t cost you anything to build a relationship with the prospect. So the first thing you have got to get better at is letting your prospects get to know you.

One thing the pandemic did to marketing is it humanized marketing. The days of sitting and hiding behind a logo are gone. Maybe. Maybe it’s still true for the big companies like an Amazon or a Nike, but it’s not true for you. You can’t hide behind your company’s logo anymore. We need to see you. In fact, there was a survey done a year or two ago and they interviewed millennials and and Gen Z who, by the way, are going to become the vast majority of our buyers.

And they were asked, you know, how important it is that the people they buy, the services they buy have a personal brand behind them. And I think it was overwhelming. It was something like 77% of the purchases, 70% of the millennials and Gen Z who are interviewed want a personal brand behind any service they buy, which includes legal accounting, insurance.

They want to see the person they’re going to do business with. So if you’re one of my insurance producers, my insurance professionals, this holds true for you. You can’t hide behind your company’s logo anymore. People buy from people. And my agency principals out there that are listening and my sales directors that might be listening in to this, here’s a reality you have to digest what your company is renting the brands of the producers who sell for you.

They are not renting your logo and that that holds true for an Lockton Gallagher Mercer It doesn’t matter. So the part two of this equation, part one is you have to give before you ask, before you take. Part two is you have to have a content strategy. These days, social media isn’t going away, and I see too many in the industry act as if social media doesn’t exist.

It’s where your buyers are hanging out. So number one, you have to create content that lets them get to know you. It is the quickest way to build a relationship today that doesn’t cost money. And quite frankly, if you do it right, it doesn’t cost a lot of time either. The second type of content you have to get really good at and it ties in to step one is educational content.

You got to teach your prospects. The more you inform your prospects, the more educated they become and the more educated they become. They’re learning from you. And if they’re learning from you, guess who they’re going to hire? Yes, I know there’s that fear. Well, they’re just going to take what I teach them and give it to their broker.

Well, if they were to do that, they’re not a good fit for you anyways. They’re not someone you want to do business with anyways. But guess what? Nine out of ten people, nine out of ten prospects are not going to do that. They’re going to work with you because they’re learning from you. Now, here is the key with educational content.

It’s not sexy. You don’t need to teach this epic game changing, mind blowing content, teach what your prospects are looking for. And the reason you don’t want to do this, the reason that kind of content seems boring is because you’re worried about what your peers are going to think Doesn’t matter. It’s what your prospects want. You’re in insurance.

If you sell health insurance and you focus on things like self-funding and captains, you got to create content around what is a captive, how does it work? How does cell funding work? I’ve heard self-funding is too risky. Is that true? I’ve heard we’re not big enough for self-funding. Is that true? This is the content you need to be creating because that is the type of question your prospect is asking.

Create searchable content. Be searchable. When you create content, your prospects are looking for, you become searchable. So those are my two tips today. Number one, you have got to give. Oh, by the way, when you’re creating educational content, guess what you’re doing? You’re giving you’re giving a lot. And the more you give, the more you can ask later on.

And by the way, the more effective you’re asking is going to be later on. So, number one, you’ve got to give give more than you ask. Number two, you have to create content for this platform. Listen to this statistic for a second. There are 850 million people on LinkedIn today. Do you know how many actually create content for LinkedIn?

Less than 10%. This is a blue ocean. You want to stand out, create content for the platform, and do it consistently. Over 90% of the 850 million people on LinkedIn come to digest content. They come to absorb content. There’s very few creators, and I’m going to say it again, we grew 75% in 2022 because of how much we create, how much content we put out.

Are you willing to put that work in? Are you committed to hitting your goals this year? Because if you are, it can’t be on the back of an outdated strategy. And I do get frustrated with the insurance industry because I see these organizations that continue to implement outdated training. They continue to use the sales methods that don’t work the same way anymore.

And if you are a sales director, you’re an agency principal listening in. Your producers are begging for this. They want to know how to win today. You know how I know I talk to them every week. They don’t want the outdated stuff anymore. Social media is here to stay. It is not going anywhere. It is only going to get bigger.

So what are you doing to create a social media strategy that’s going to help you drive business? Here’s another stat I want you to remember 50%, almost 50% of the businesses you want to do business with go to LinkedIn to vet you before they decide if they’re going to hire you. Think about that 50% of the businesses out there go to LinkedIn to vet you to decide whether or not they’re going to hire you.

What is your LinkedIn presence look like? I can’t tell you how many agencies I type the name of in Google, and their website doesn’t even show up on page one. That’s a loss of credibility. If I don’t see you have a presence on social media or the internet at large, you don’t seem credible to me. Let me give you a one quick real life example.

We have a client right now who just hired a PR firm to help them get some spots on news stations, local news stations in the market. He does business up and so their job is to basically just create the interaction with the news station. But the news station still has to vet you to determine if they want you on their show, because they have an audience every week of, you know, probably 200 to 500000 people per episode.

So they got to make sure you’re legit. And here’s what he said to me. He said, Andy, this is how I know what you teach. What you’ve taught me works. The first thing this news channel did when they vetted me was they checked out my online presence and they said to me, We see you are everywhere. That tells us you’re legit.

Take note of that. I know I’m kind of talking in circles now, but I’m trying to make my point and I’m trying to drive it home to you. If you want to hit your sales goal this year, you have to have a social media selling strategy. There’s no other way around it unless you live in some market that is so rural that the wi fi is of the United States, the Internet.

So the United States barely touch you. You need a social media presence. And the two things you have to think about today is, number one, how are you going to build giving into that strategy? How are you going to share your best stuff out of the gate? And number two, how are you going to create content that lets people get to know you and content that educates your ideal prospect?

If you just focus on those two types of content, you will create a championship content strategy. Now, if you are watching, I see Jeremy Sachs’s is live here. Jeremy, thank you for being here. If anybody else is here right now, you have any questions, just type it in the comments. I can see the comments right now, so feel free to ask a question.

I’m here to answer. I’m going to go for about five more minutes here. But guys, I think my point is pretty clear. In 2023, there’s there’s still too much of the insurance industry that acts as if the Internet and social media are a fad and that it does not exist. And you have got to put any personal biases you have towards social media to the side, because it is where we do business today.

And if you want to have the kind of growth you know, you and your team are capable of social media as part of that. And I’m going to re going to reiterate what I said at the beginning of this this episode here. By far our most popular workshop, full day workshop we do for teams in the industry right now is are selling on social media.

And that workshop consists of three key areas. Number one, identifying your ideal prospect. Think about if you run an agency right now and you have ten producers and let’s just imagine each producer has $150,000 sales goal. If every one of your producers were to hit that goal, you sold $1.5 million this year. Where in that’s that that path to that 1.5 as social media in our workshop it starts with identifying who your person who your ideal prospect is.

The second step is you have to figure out how you are going to create championship content, how are you going to create content that resonates with your ideal prospect and draws your ideal prospect to you? I just talk to you about that education. Let people get to know you. And then the third step is how are you going to use LinkedIn to create business opportunities?

We teach a strategy we call the LinkedIn diamond. There’s four parts to it that we use today. That’s what helped us grow 75%. Again, it doesn’t require any of the automated bot crap that people use. The automated messaging. No, no, no. We don’t believe in any of that. We believe in putting the work in. We believe in humanizing your messaging.

You got to interact with your prospects 1 to 1 as a human. But if you just do this, if you put in the work, if you work the process, the process works, but you’ve got to put in the work. So, number one, if you want to know more about these workshops and you’re interested to shoot me a message, you’re on LinkedIn.

I’m here every day, so send a message if you have any, if you have any peers, any colleagues in the industry who run teams in the industry and you think they could use this workshop, send this to them. I’m happy to connect. But my point is, is this guys, I’m going to wrap up by saying this. Like I said, I don’t know what’s going on today.

I feel like I’m talking in circles, but here’s what I want you to think about when you meet with a prospect today and their mindset is right here. Okay? And you need their mindset to shift over here for them to say yes to you, but all the way back here before, when you meet them for the first time.

What does this do to your sales process? Yeah, it makes it a lot longer because when I would walk into a discovery meeting with a prospect and they were still way over here with with their mindset about what I did and I needed them to get here. HALL That’s going to be a long sales cycle, probably well over a year.

However, if I can use my content to shift their mindset before they ever meet me. So as I’m creating content and I’m putting it out there, I’m giving, I’m giving, I’m giving. What’s happening to my prospect is their mindset is starting to shift slowly but surely. And then by the time they’re ready to meet with me, they’re already bought in.

Guess what happens? Your sales cycle. Because by the time they reach out or you reach out to them, they’re already bought in. It drastically reduces the length of your sales cycle. So this is why content is so important. Just in welcome and question, is video the best content and what’s a good ratio of video to articles? I don’t think there’s any magic formula just in as far as ratio articles, and there’s no secret formula.

Is video better than articles, better than audio? Pick what you like to do the most. Personally, I love video. I think it’s the most effective way to get somebody to learn from you and get to know you at the same time because they’re getting a feel for your personality. But if you’re not a video person in, you’re a good writer.

Hey, lean into articles all day long because you gotta remember people digest content three different ways. Some like watching I love watching videos, some like reading and some like listening. That’s why podcasts exist. You just figure out what you like to to create content through the easiest, what’s easiest for you, and just lean into that. If you can do video highly recommend it because it’s the most effective thing you can do from the standpoint of teaching and letting people get to know you at the same time.

Good question. Can welcome aboard, my friend. Yes, I know. I’m preaching. I know I feel like some days I’m just preaching to the to that to to a blank wall. But I’m telling you guys, this stuff works worse. We’re still doing it every day. There’s not a thing we teach that we don’t do ourselves. In fact, one of our core values as a company, a complete game consulting, is we go first.

There’s nothing I will ever teach you that I haven’t done before, or I still do today. We’re not one of those companies who are going to preach and pontificate. And then when you ask us how we do it, we go, Oh, I don’t know. We do it a little differently. No, no, no, no. Everything we teach you, we still do today, and it’s worked. If it can work for us, by the way, it can work for you. So with that being said, we are 2 minutes shy of the bottom of the hour. If you’ve got any more questions, send me a message. If you are interested to know how you can leverage you and your team can leverage. One of our workshops are selling on Social Media Workshop, which has been an absolute hit right now.

Reach out to me. If you have a friend who you think or a team that you think could use this, send it to them. But I’m telling you guys right now, please develop a social media strategy. It’s not going away. Everything changed with the pandemic. The way we do business change forever. The way your prospects look for you and value has changed forever.

So you got to be here is the best way to build a business today. It’s one of the cheapest ways to build a business today because really it only cost you time. My question to you are, are you willing to put in that time? So what? That being said, my friends, have a beautiful day. You got any questions you want to know more about the workshops? Reach out. Otherwise you know what happens. Clarity mixed with confidence means you do amazing things. Go do amazing things Today.