The status quo is a lack of desire to do something different simply because what you’ve always done is comfortable.

In the insurance industry, this mindset is a death sentence. Agencies are still training producers on sales tactics from two decades ago, ignoring the reality that the game has completely changed.

If you want to scale, you have to kill the status quo.

In this episode, I’m giving you the framework to modernize your entire sales process. We break down how to use AI to automate your pre-meeting research, the 7-step formula to take total control of the discovery meeting, and why your current proposal strategy is losing you deals.

This is the guide to stop doing what’s comfortable and start doing what works.

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Video Transcript:

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

To me, a rule is nothing more than a three step process. We look at establish where you are, show you how my recommended solution fit into your story. And now let’s look ahead and let’s give you a feel for what it’s going to look like to work with. What are the expectations, what are the promises and give you a clear path to actually hire us?

Shift your mindset. Hey, hey, welcome back to the Accelerate Your Insurance Sales podcast. Andy Neary here, CEO and founder of Complete Game Consulting. How are you doing today? I’m fired up today. Today we are going to talk about sales processes and what you can do to help your team utilize a more effective approach to sales processes and how to incorporate AI into making it effective and efficient.

So we’re going to start today’s episode with a phrase that is often used in the insurance industry, the status quo. And I’ve been trying to come up with a good definition for the status quo as it relates to any thing we do in life. And the best definition I can come up with without looking at the dictionary is a lack of desire to do something different, because what you’ve always done is just too comfortable.

Let me say that again. I know that’s probably not the best definition, but it’s what we’re going to go with here. The status quo is a lack of desire to do something different, because what you’ve always done is just too comfortable. Now, in the insurance industry, we often use the status quo to explain why our prospects and clients don’t want to leverage any of the strategies and ideas we share with them, because they like to do what they’ve always done, and we all could agree that that status quo thinking is why so many employers are struggling with the cost of their insurance, especially as it relates to the health insurance sector.

But let’s talk about how status quo thinking is affecting your agency right now, especially when it comes to sales. I watch a lot of sales leaders out there right now who are letting the status quo impact the way they, train their producers. Again, status quo is the lack of desire to try something new or to do something different, because the way you’ve always done it is just too comfortable.

And this absolutely applies to training. I watch teams train producers on how to book appointments using traditional methods that are factually not as effective as they used to be. Why? Because for the sales leader training them, that was the primary mode of prospecting when they were in the midst and prime of their career 15, 20, 25 years ago.

Yeah, I am talking about your traditional cold calls, cold emails, door to door. Two things we used to do with things I was trained on, but they have an unwillingness to change right now one because it requires them to get outside their comfort zone. But two, it’s easy to train the way that made them successful. But a lot has changed.

And so the way you train your producers, especially when it comes to helping them develop an effective sales process, it has to evolve. It has to change. The times are a change in, as they love to say. And I really want to jump off in this episode, fresh off a workshop that I hosted last week or two weeks ago.

Excuse me for a client. And the primary focus of the workshop was establishing a more proactive sales process. And I would argue for most agencies, there is no streamlined sales process that spans across all producers. You know, when you look at a lot of agencies out there today, it’s, you know, John does it his way. Sally does it her way, Bob does it his way.

And everybody is running with this sales process of their own. That is nowhere on paper. It’s only between their ears. It’s what they know and how they do it. And that is a completely ineffective sales approach, especially if you want to create consistent wins. And so what I wanted to do, I want to do in today’s episode is I really want to look at what I would probably call three key areas of the sales process.

Now, for the sake of this discussion, I want you to think about the sales process really starting when the appointment is booked, right? Marketing is everything up to booking the appointment sales is okay. Cool appointments booked, what do we do next? And that’s really we’re going to focus today. And I’m just going to talk about some key areas of the sales process that you can streamline across your entire team and quite frankly, how to use AI to make it more effective.

Because this is where I see a lot of agencies falling short, where I see a lot of agencies applying a status quo mindset. You know, I’ve actually had, believe it or not, I’ve had some agencies tell me that they’re still evaluating their stance on AI. And I’m actually said this in past episodes. I don’t know what that means, that you’re evaluating your stance on AI doesn’t give a shit what you think.

It’s here. It’s going to run you over. Are you going to sit on the sidelines and say, yeah, we’re going to wait until the industry adopts AI before we really jump in. You’re good. You’re setting your team up for failure if you’re not jumping in headfirst right now. But I’m going to share with you how you can apply to your sales process to make it more effective.

So let’s just dive right in. When I look at an effective sales process today, there are key areas that I often see amongst agencies who are looking for a better, more streamlined process across their team. The first area we’re going to focus on is okay appointments, but what do you do to set your prospect up for an effective discovery meeting?

You may call it an executive briefing. Meeting number one, first appointment. I don’t know what you call it, but what are you doing to set up your prospect for an effective meeting? The second area we’re going to look at is the discovery meeting itself. How do you run an effective discovery meeting and control the entire meeting so you stay in control?

And then the third thing, third area I want to talk about is not so much what happens in between, but when you come back with your strategy, with your your analysis, whatever you do, with a prospect where you are going to go for the ask, you’re making the ask to win the business, we’re going to talk about how you can make that more effective as well.

And I know there’s a bunch of other different areas inside the sales process, but those are the three key ones I want to talk about today. 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? At true captive insurance, they make that possible.

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Meeting is nothing. You work hard to prospect and market yourself. To book an appointment. Prospect agrees to give you 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, whatever that is, and you get the meeting booked on the calendar and it could be 2 to 3 weeks out. Right? And in that 2 to 3 week time period, it’s like you almost hold your breath that they hold the meeting and actually show up.

But in that time period, you are doing nothing to be proactive and doing nothing to set up the prospect for an effective discovery meeting. So what can you do? My advice is, if I am a producer and I just booked an appointment with the prospect, the first thing I am going to do immediately after booking that appointment, sending out the calendar invites.

I’m going to send that prospect a welcome email. Now, that welcome email is going to be a combination of introducing myself, because they may have never met me before. It’s also going to talk about what we’re going to discuss during the meeting, so I can prepare them for an effective conversation, and I’ll probably even attach it agenda to that email so they can see exactly what we’re going to cover and in what order.

So why do you want to do that? If you have been lucky enough to book time or get the time of a C-suite executive and an HR professional, my suggestion is you respect their time, and the best way to respect their time is to prepare them for what you are going to chat with them about. Now you want to take that to the next level.

You may even incorporate a nice little video into your welcome email. That is an actual introduction of yourself talking into the camera and doing exactly what I just said, but in video format. But the whole point is, if you want to set a prospect up for this, an effective meeting, and establish credibility with somebody who doesn’t have a lot of time, you might want to prepare them for that discussion.

Not to mention, this starts the path of showing them that you are legit and you have a legit process. Now, the second thing I would do in preparing a prospect for a good discovery meeting is I would make sure that I am at a minimum, connected to that prospect on LinkedIn, and I would even go as so far to tell them, I am going to send you a LinkedIn invite.

Why? Because if you pay attention to my podcast and my content, I hope you are producing content on LinkedIn that is building credibility and thought leadership. So why not use your content even before the discovery meeting? Start building some credibility with prospect before you walk in the door. Now the third thing I would do is just prior to that meeting, maybe 24, 48 out for the meeting is I would send out a reminder email that is reminding the prospect of the meeting, the time and exactly what you’re going to cover again.

Now it is here where most prospect or producers push back. I don’t know if I want to send a reminder, because that gives the prospect the chance to cancel. Well, I’ve got bad news for you. They were going to cancel with you anyways, but if you want to show that prospect you’re legitimate and you have a legit process, send out a reminder email 24 to 48 hours in advance telling them hey, we are meeting.

Just a reminder, looking forward to talking to you about this, this and this. It just tells that prospect you’ve done this before. You have a process. This isn’t your first rodeo and it keeps you in control. Now that entire preparation process can be automated. You might use an email platform that already automates those emails out to the prospect.

If so, awesome. If you don’t, what I would recommend you do from an AI perspective is I would go into AI right now and I would work with AI and I would make sure I am creating a welcome email template. I would make sure I am creating a reminder email template that I can save somewhere that I can use on rinse and repeat.

All I’ve got to do is insert the new prospect’s name, email address, new agenda, boom! Send go again. Even better if your CRM allows that to be automated so the producer doesn’t even have to think about it. But you have to prepare your prospects for an effective meeting so you can use their time efficiently, especially if they’re at the C-suite level.

00:12:24:15 – 00:12:49:27
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Time is their smallest, their their their most valuable asset. They have every day. Please use it wisely. Now, the other thing I’d be doing at this point in the sales process and leveraging AI to do it, is I would be going into ChatGPT and agent mode, and I would be asking chat to do all the research on this prospect.

I would incorporate the prospect’s LinkedIn profile URL. I would incorporate their companies, you website URL, you name it, I would go to chat, have it act as an agent, and do all the research on that prospect to prepare me for an effective discussion with the with the prospect that another way you need to be using AI right now.

All things you used to be so proud about that you that man hours you should be automating with AI now research is no different. There’s a prompt I’ve been using to great leverage with great leverage recently, and it comes from the AI driven leader, which is context role interview, task. Context is you telling AI what you need to do.

Role is the role you are giving it. You want it to act as a a researcher, a world class researcher, a world class email copywriter, and world class marketing strategist. Interview is giving AI the ability to interview you or ask you questions to get thoughts out of your head. And then the task is the task you want it to complete.

Researching your prospect prior to the discovery meeting. Using AI to get all the relevant information you need as a soon to become table stakes. And if you’re not doing it, you’re missing out on the point. But that is step one. What are you doing to prepare your prospect for an effective discovery meeting? Let’s talk about step number two controlling the discovery meeting.

What are you doing to control the discovery meeting today? Are you being proactive or are you letting the prospect control the meeting itself? The second the prospect in control, you just lowered your chances of winning the business. That’s why RFPs are so hard. The prospect is in complete control of that process. Very hard to win an RFP. It’s why the last time I looked, I think 70% plus of RFPs end up staying with the same advisor.

But what are you doing to control the process? Now, when I teach our method for controlling a discovery meeting, we use the six seven PS I can’t remember seven PS. First one is number one promise. When you open a discovery meeting, what are you doing to set expectations with the prospect? What are you doing to review the agenda?

To tell them about your sales process? You’re making a promise about what the meeting is going to entail. The second part is players. You need to establish who the decision makers are. Not all of them might be in the room, especially in the discouraging. But are you clear? Leaving that meeting who the players are and who will the decision makers be when it comes to making a final decision?

Now, the third we call the power four. This is where you need to be asking the right Fact-Finding questions. What’s your number one goal right now? What would it mean if you could achieve it? What’s your biggest challenge? Keeping you from it and how is that affecting you? The power for the next one is process. This is where you go into your process of teaching them what you do and what you believe about what you do.

That helps you and your agency look different and stand apart, and it’s going to be the bridge that’s going to help them overcome their problem and achieve their goal. This is what I used to call my do you believe what I believe presentation? This is how I would qualify or disqualify a prospect within that first meeting. Then we go into proof, which is all right, now show me some examples of the work you do by sharing case studies with clients that have had success with you.

And then the last P is what I call proceed, which is if the meeting has gone the way you wanted it to the prospect is qualified. You need to try to find a way to book that next step before you leave the meeting. I learned an acronym from a mentor I’ve had in the past, Steve Napolitano. ZamFam. Book a meeting from a meeting.

What are you doing? The book the Next Step before you leave the meeting today, producers leave the meeting feeling good, but there was no next step established. That’s why prospects get stuck in goals.

So a promise players power for process proof. Proceed. The last thing you need to do is pivot. The seventh P before that meeting is done is you have to pivot, and you have to look that prospect in the face and be clear about whether or not there is going to be anything that’s going to keep them from hiring you.

This is where you used to handle the objections before they come out of the prospect’s mouth. Is there a relationship? Is there a decision maker hurdle that we need to overcome in order to have a chance to work with you? You got to get the objections out on the table before you leave the meeting, because there’s nothing more frustrating than getting to the final ask in the proposal, only to learn they’ve had a 29 year relationship.

They’re breaking, and they were just hoping for you to come in with some miracle that might get them to change, but now they’re not interested. So we call it pivot. You got to flip now and pivot and ask them, hey, if we can help you overcome the challenges and the goal, the challenges you have right now and the goals you’re trying to achieve with your insurance.

Is there any reason you wouldn’t do business with us? Is there anything keeping you from doing business with us? Get it out on the table early. So, you know, now when that meeting is done, there is actually one more p, the final p, which is post call file. And it’s here where you can leverage I. One of the things I have been highly, highly using to our advantage lately is recording all of our discovery meetings.

Our sales calls. Now, truth be told, a lot of ours are done virtually, so it’s easy to record them. We use fathom note taker. And I’m going to say it again because I get blamed for not saying this enough. You got to ask the prospect for their okay to record the meeting, whether you do it virtually or you do it in person.

I would have a note taker some kind of a note taker on hand recording the meeting, because it allows you to stay 100% present in the conversation, and it makes the post call. Follow up effective. Using fathom II allows me to write the meeting notes or create the meeting notes, and write affective follow up email to that prospect in a matter of 60s.

It just makes the whole process attractive. Are you giving your producers that access to I to be able to do the same thing? So when it comes to step two, controlling the discovery meeting, there is a process to running an effective meeting. But there is also a way to use AI to make it very efficient, which is what are you doing to follow up with your prospect and what are you doing to establish clear next steps?

Which moves me to step three, which is the proposal now, in between your discovery meeting and your proposal, there can be a lot going on. You probably got to collect some data. You may even get back together with them to do so. There’s going to be a lot of things going on internally. My advice in a good, effective sales process is you’ve got to keep your prospect, in tune with what is exactly going on in the process.

Overcommunicate Overcommunicate Overcommunicate. Again, all of this can be done with emails that can be written as templates using a. And now we get to the proposal. Number one, if you are not setting up your prospect for the proposal with a proposal email or two, you’re missing an opportunity. If you’re not creating content via social media or email that continues to bring value to that prospect throughout the process.

To build credibility, you’re missing a huge opportunity. But now we get to the proposal. We overthink proposals. Why? Number one, we spend way too much time trying to make some stupid slide deck look pretty. We’re totally missing the message that needs to be shared because we’re spending so much time on the looks. Number two, we spend way too much time talking about ourselves, and we don’t think of the proposal as just another step in the process.

If there are three things I am going to focus on in a sales proposal, it is the following. Number one, to review what we covered in the discovery call, especially with power for questions because you want to reestablish their goals, their their challenges, and you want them to confirm they still are handling those challenges and know you’re still wanting to achieve those goals.

Number two, you need to learn how to fit your solution into that story. You have to pit your solution as this, the answer to their goals and their challenges. And number three, you’ve got to help that prospect look ahead and give them a flavor for what it will feel like to work with you, as well as what are the steps to actually hire you up?

To me, a proposal is nothing more than a three step process. We look back, establish where you are. Let me show you how my recommended solution fits into your story. And now let’s look ahead and let’s give you a feel for what it’s going to look like to work with us. What are the expectations, what are the promises and give you a clear path to actually hire us?

Now, where do I come in with a proposal? Number one, instead of spending hours trying to create a slide deck, why don’t you craft the message? Why don’t you take the notes? Hopefully done with I that you took from the discovery meeting and have I assist you in creating the proposal? Proposal should be now produced minutes with what used to take hours.

And number two, when that proposal outline is created, why don’t you go to eye and collaborate with it and have it act as your prospect and give it feedback on where the proposal could be better, where you are missing opportunity in the proposals, or where you’re dialed in. Ask. Ask AI to be your prospect. You see, my point is, there are so many opportunities right now to use AI within your sales process that you’re missing out on a big opportunity right now to make the process more effective, make it more efficient, faster.

But you shouldn’t have to spend so much time any more getting ready for meetings and getting prepared for a proposal and putting together a pitch deck. You have the world’s best experts at your fingertips today to help you get this done in minutes, so that you so you can spend your time on what matters most in sales without being in front of prospects.

So if you’re a sales leader listening in right now, think about where you are missing an opportunity to use AI one. Create an effective sales process. Let’s not. Let’s forget that. But number two, how do we use AI or give producers access to AI to make that process more effective? Whether it is writing emails, whether it is the post discovery call, follow up, or hey, how about we use AI sales coach to help us evaluate how to call in?

And then how do we use AI to help us get ready for proposal, maybe even role play? Having it act like our prospect so that we can get feedback on where we’re spot on and where we’re missing opportunity. This is how AI is going to help you take your sales process to the next level. Remember, AI is not meant to be the thought leader, it is the thought partner.

You are the thought leader. So if any of this resonated with you today, I would encourage you to send me a note. We’ve got an unbelievable program that’s rolling out for 2026. It’s the agency growth Accelerator. It is designed for agencies like yours that are looking to take their marketing and their sales processes up a level, and leveraging AI in many ways to make the whole thing more effective.

Your producers can spend more time on what matters most, which is selling, which means they’re doing the right things. They’re focused on the right activities, and they’re hitting their sales goals, which is not only good for your bottom line, it is good for their revenue. So hit me up. Shoot me a note. Hopefully today’s message resonated with you.

Now let’s go out. Let’s create an effective sales process and make it a hell of a lot faster and easier. They I 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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