Episode 168: The Bottom Line - What Is Your Marketing and Sales Strategy?

So the big question is this: how do small business owners like us grow our leadership, develop our teams, and scale our business in a way that allows us to get our products and services out to the world yet still remain profitable? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. I'm Bradley Hamner, and this is the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

Welcome to The Bottom Line, a new weekly podcast series that we drop every Thursday to complement our weekly Monday podcast interviews with the industry leaders. These podcasts are going to be designed to give you short, impactful, and value-driven information that you can start using right away in your business. I value your time and attention and will do my very best not to waste it. Just get what you need and go. So with that, let's get into today's episode.

Are you an agency owner looking to grow your revenue, increase your bottom line, and better manage your taxes? Club Capital is here to help. Club Capital is the largest accounting and advisory firm for insurance agents in the country, providing monthly accounting, tax strategy, and CFO services. Way more than bookkeeping and your everyday run-of-the-mill tax prep, Club Capital is focused on providing financial and tax advisory services that help you plan and forecast your agency's performance. Their financial dashboards and agency forecasting tools help you better understand your agency's historical performance, create, measure future targets, and see how your agency compares to your peers around the country. Imagine what it would be like to understand the impact to your bottom line when deciding to hire a new employee, or forecast the impact rate changes or commission rates will have on your business. With over $200 million in tracked annual revenue and $140 million in tracked annual expenses, Club Capital has the data and the team to help you make better informed decisions for your agency. They will help you turn that back office stress into the backbone of your agency's success by giving you the tools to take your agency and your leadership to the next level. Visit club.capital today to book a solution overview with one of our business consultants. Club Capital, way more than a CPA firm. Are you an agency owner looking to grow your revenue, increase your bottom line, and better manage your taxes? Club Capital is here to help. Club Capital is the largest accounting and advisory firm for insurance agents in the country, providing monthly accounting, tax strategy, and CFO services. Way more than bookkeeping and your everyday run-of-the-mill tax prep, Club Capital is focused on providing financial and tax advisory services that help you plan and forecast your agency's performance. Their financial dashboards and agency forecasting tools help you better understand your agency's historical performance, create and measure future targets, and see how your agency compares to your peers around the country. Imagine what it would be like to understand the impact to your bottom line when deciding to hire a new employee. Or forecast the impact rate changes or commission rates will have on your business. With over $200 million in tracked annual revenue and $140 million in tracked annual expenses, Club Capital has the data and the team to help you make better-informed decisions for your agency. They will help you turn that back-office stress into the backbone of your agency's success by giving you the tools to take your agency and your leadership to the next level. Visit club.capital today to book a solution overview with one of our business consultants. Club Capital, way more than a CPA firm.

Hey everyone, hope you are doing great. So for the last 4 weeks, and this is now week number 5, we've been going over 5 key questions every small business owner should be able to ask themselves and answer. We started, just real quick recap, we talked about number 1, what are your priorities in the business? Number 2, show me your calendar. Number 3, show me your scoreboard. Number 4, this was last week, who is on your team? And then lastly, we're going to talk today about what is your marketing and your sales strategy. And then I'll throw in a bonus at the very end, the last question that be able to help you. When you think about establishing the priorities of your business, the allocation of your time the scoreboard to keep track of it, the team of A-players that you have. At the end of the day, we've got to be able to have a plan of marketing and sales systems to make all of that happen. Now, for a while, I have been— I started reorganizing. When people will say sales and marketing, it probably sounds a little bit better to say sales and marketing. But I do believe there's a reason I say marketing and sales systems in that order. Ultimately, marketing's job is to deliver leads to the sales team. Now, it can do that a lot of different ways. We're certainly not going to get into today that all the different tactics— SEO, pay-per-click, uh, community involvement, networking, outbound cold calls, paid leads— my goodness gracious, there's really 6 main ones. But that's not specifically for today, all of the different tactical ways to be able to market in your business. But at the end of the day, can you clearly define what is your marketing plan? What are the ways that you and your business are going about generating leads? And then in some cases, many of you, maybe it may be, well, paid leads is one way that we're doing that. We're buying leads, or we're are paying Zuckerberg leads on Facebook, or paying Google team to be able to generate leads. Okay, great. That's one major lever that you're pulling. Maybe another one is one of the biggest ways that we generate leads is through our referral system. Fantastic. The point is, is if I were to be able to sit down with you and ask you simply that question, tell me about your marketing plan. What is your marketing system that you have in place? Could you be able to say, well, number one, we do this, number two, we do this, number three, we do this? What are all the ways that you're generating leads in your business? Number two, what is your sales system? Do you have a system from whenever a lead comes into your ecosystem, we'll say, of what happens? Well, when we have a call-in, we have walk-in, when we have somebody who is a referral to us, this is the process we take them through. And could everybody on your team be able to articulate exactly what that system is? And you've heard me say before, it takes you adopting or embracing one of the key hats that you need to wear in business, or titles, is Chief Reminding Officer. Is being able to— you can't just say it one time, you got to say it over and over and over and over again. This is our marketing system. This is our sales system. This is the things that we do to generate leads. Once we generate leads, here's the system we have to be able to convert those leads, nurture them, and ultimately be able to convert them over to clients. So here's how we take a lead and we convert them into a customer. Um, and then of course you get into other things such as ascension strategies. How do we get those customers to be able to buy more from us? But that's not for today. What are your marketing and sales systems? And I promise you one last question, that kind of a bonus question. How are you managing the cash in the business? How are you managing the cash? So we've set priorities, we've— we know exactly what we're doing in an allocation of our personal calendar time to hit those priorities in the business. We have a scoreboard to be able to keep track of it. We are recruiting and developing a team of A-players. We've got a clearly defined marketing system. We've got a clearly defined sales system. Lastly, as we're generating cash, we've got an actual plan for how we manage the cash in the business. Now, obviously, our partners at Club Capital do an amazing job. If you're an insurance agency owner, which I know obviously many of you are, I'd be about being able to get really clear, defined financials to be able to use those to make great systems. Obviously, our partners at Club Capital do a fantastic job if you're an insurance agency owner about being able to help you to be able to manage all of the cash in the business and make good decisions about how are you going to— what are you going to do with the profit? How profitable are you? What about if you make this decision hiring this person? What about in pulling the trigger on this lead source, etc.? How is that going to help? How's it going to affect impact profitability? How's it going to impact cash flow in the business? So if you're an insurance agency owner, you guys know, go to Club Capital and book a demo. Um, but just generally speaking, what is your system for being able to manage the cash in the business? Many of you are familiar with— he's been a 3-time guest on the podcast— Mike Michalowicz. Written some incredible books. He's most well known for Profit First, I would say. Uh, had him on not long ago talking about the updated revised version of Clockwork, which was a— is a fantastic book in and of itself. Um, but back to Profit First, you know, one of the things that I really took away from that book is having multiple business accounts. I mean, I was, um, at the time of this recording, we just got finished with Thanksgiving, and if you thought about trying to eat everything, like the entire Thanksgiving meal was on one massive platter, um, and then you're just doling out things from that. That's kind of the imagery that I think about regarding the business. And so if you're going to start a business, I would immediately start it with several, at least 3 different business accounts. Go read that book and you'll get the idea of where he talks about small plates, okay? Allocating money for profit, allocating money for owner's comp, having an account for payroll, having an account for operating expenses, and then being able to distribute it. So regardless, having a system for how you're going to manage the cash in the business, what profitability are you looking for, etc. So anyway, we could certainly go very deep on that, and maybe that's something that we'll do at another time. But for today, what's the marketing plan that you have in place to be able to generate leads? And could you be able to clearly articulate what that is? Once you get a lead, what does your sales system look like? Is it kind of willy-nilly? Uh, we're just kind of having conversations with them, but is there actually a defined way that we're going to nurture that person through the process? And then lastly, as we're generating cash in the business, what is our plan? What's our plan to be able to manage the cash so that we can make sure that we're maintaining profitability and increasing profitability? What should that— where are we today? What should that number be? And then lastly, Not only that, but, um, how are we managing cash flow? Because there's a big difference between profitability and cash. So I hope these last several weeks have served you. Those are the 5 questions. If I was going and sitting down with you, uh, those are the things I would ask. I'd ask number 1, what are the priorities, uh, that you have in the business? Number 2, uh, talk to me about your calendar time that you're allocating to make that happen. Number 3, uh, talk to me about your scoreboard. How are you keeping track? Do you have a visual scoreboard that you and your team are working off of? Number 4, who is on your team? Let's talk about A-players. How are you attracting them? Have you clearly defined and maybe used the tool that Dan Sullivan has, the 4x4? And then lastly, number 5 is talk to me about your marketing and sales systems. What is your marketing sales strategy, if you want to use that word? And then how you manage the cash in the business. So Those are the 5 major key questions every business owner should be able to ask and be able to clearly answer. I hope this is helpful to you. If it has, would you consider sharing it with someone else? It helps us to be able to spread the word. It's one thing about podcasts, there's not really a really great way to, to, to grow the podcast except to be able to serve. And, uh, we and our team, we, we take a lot of effort to try to make sure we deliver to all of you really great, fantastic content that that hopefully, uh, serves you in your journey. So appreciate you all, and till next episode, lead well. If you're listening to this podcast, I know you're someone who has a growth mindset. You probably want to be able to grow your book of business as well. What Direct Click specializes in helping insurance agencies leverage Google Ads and SEO to drive inbound phone calls, leads, online visibility, and even organic traffic. You can be confident in knowing exactly how well your ads are working getting support in what really matters in your business. Get exclusive online marketing support today when you visit directclicksinc.com. You know how important it is to develop yourself and to develop your team. Well, if you're going to do that, you want to do it with the best. Work with Coach P Consulting to learn and implement the same strategies that he used to sell over 700 life policies in 2021 alone. You'll get personalized coaching, 2 times a week and an in-depth look at how his office is run, and Coach P will train your team alongside his own. Get your first month free when you mention the Club Capital Leadership Podcast during signup. Visit coachpconsulting.com to get started. If you've listened to this podcast for any amount of time, you've heard me say many times the best use of money is to be able to buy back your time. And one of the best ways to do that is by hiring a virtual assistant, whether it's an executive assistant or creative marketing assistant. Rock Solid has a unique hiring process to net the very best talent, and they intentionally match you with a great fit for you and your team. They value your success as if it were their own, because it is. If you're looking to build a rock solid team for your business, reach out to Tracy and her team at rocksolidassistance.com.