213. The Complete Game Marketing Playbook: Step 1

The name of the game is going out and finding clients who let me do my best work. This group, I can't do my best work. I am literally useless to them. And I'm too passionate about what I do to just let that be. I need to go find clients who are going to let me do my best work.

Hey. Hey. Welcome back to Friday Bullpen Sessions. My name is Andy Neary and this is episode five, 213. I'm excited because we are making a change here to the podcast and I know I've talked about this a couple times in the past. We are bringing back some interviews and what we're going to be doing from here on out is rotating back and forth between a solo episode, like I'm doing right here, and interviewing some great guests. Former athletes who had success on the field are having success in business today. So I can't wait to bring our first few guests to you. But here's what we're going to do with the solo episodes between now and the end of the year, I'm going to focus on health, helping you make 2023 the best year you've ever had. That is the goal. So we're going to spend the next four solo episodes getting you prepared, walking you through what we at Complete Game Consulting call our marketing playbook. And it has four parts, clarity, Capture, content and convert. And today I'm going to focus on clarity. When we go out and we do private full day workshops for the agencies and insurance companies we work with, clarity is the goal. And when I look at the workshops we provide, they really have three pillars. And those are the three pillars I'm going to walk through today as part of clarity. Because for you, my goal is that you enter 2023 with a ton of clarity of what your marketing plan is going to be. Whether you are an agency or you're a producer who is.

Ready to make next year the best you've ever had, it has to start with clarity. And as I mentioned, there's three pillars. Let's just dive right into it. The first pillar is your brand. Before we can talk about who your ideal prospect's going to be, we gotta look in the mirror and you have to ask yourself this question. How do you want the market talking about you? You know, one of the this question was posed to me a couple years ago by one of my former coaches, Jerry Sandusky. No, not that Jerry Sandusky. Jerry with a G. He is the anchor sports anchor in Baltimore. He's the play by play of the Baltimore Ravens. Also a speaking coach. I had at one time, great man. And he asked me this question because we were building my brand. And he said, how do you want your market to talk about you? And the question he posed was this. Imagine you have a room full of your favorite clients and your ideal prospects, and they were having a conversation about you. What would you want them saying? What words and phrases would you want them using? And he and I sat down, we made a list of all the things I'd want the market saying. And the list came to about a dozen different words and phrases. And then he made me break them down and narrow them down to my top four, which he coins your core four of your brand, brand identity. And so I want you to do the same. I want you to think about all the words and phrases you would want your clients and prospects using to identify you, to talk about you. And then I want you to take that list, I want you to narrow it down. What are your top four? And this is gonna create a lot of clarity. Believe it or not, many agencies don't know what their brand is. They're trying to serve everybody, therefore they're serving no one. And without a clear brand, it is hard for you to even really build a foundation of identifying who your ideal prospect is. And you'll see why this matters. So the first step of clarity is determining what your brand is. And again, this applies whether you're an agency trying to figure out the entire agency's brand or you're a producer just trying to figure out your own personal brand. How do you want the market talking about you? And then step two is now we flip the script, we look at the prospect, and we start to identify who your ideal prospect is. And you know, there's an age old belief in the insurance industry that we can serve all people. But the truth is when you try to serve everybody, you serve no one. When you try to speak to everybody, you speak to no one. So you have to get really clear about, about who your ideal prospect is. And when you and I got in the industry, whether that was five, 10 years ago, for me it's 21 years ago, we were taught how to identify a prospect demographically. And the way you identify a prospect demographically is pretty easy, right? Size, number of employees, location, industry, that's how we build lists, right? If you go to a platform to build a list of prospects, you're probably building the list from demographics. Now here's the challenge. You can't identify an ideal prospect from demographics alone. Think about it. I've never had a client of mine say, Andy, my favorite client is ABC Machine Shop. Now, the people there are jerks. They treat me like crap. They don't ever take action on what I suggest they do. Really don't like what they stand for. But, you know, they're a machine shop, so they're my favorite. Nobody has ever said that. That's why demographics alone can't identify an ideal prospect. You need psychographics. Now, psychographics is something I stumbled upon six, seven years ago. I didn't even know what it was called that at the time, but it came from frustration. When I moved out to Colorado, I took over a book of business, and I quickly started seeing the clients I loved working with and the clients that frustrated me. You know, the clients whose name would appear on the calendar, you get excited, and then the clients whose names were on the calendar, and you'd kind of take that deep breath and go, all right, just get through it. And there was one particular client I can remember that I would go out and see and often find myself sitting there going, why am I even here? I am completely useless to this group because they don't want to take any action on what I'm suggesting. They don't even like what I'm suggesting. They have their own beliefs about health insurance, which I don't agree with, and we are completely misaligned.

And when I realized that, I said, okay, the name of the game is going out and finding clients who let me do my best work. This group, I can't do my best work. I am literally useless to them. And I'm too passionate about what I do to just let that be. I need to go find clients who are going to let me do my best work. So I need to think about who they are, what they stand for, what they believe in, how do they make decisions, how do they treat me? Because your favorite client isn't going to be based on demographics. It's going to be based on psychographics. What they believe in, what they stand for, how do they make decisions, how they treat you. Right. Go look at your top five clients, your five favorite, and I guarantee they all have that common thread that they are aligned with you psychographically.

And so what you have to do is you have to get really clear about who's going to be a good fit for you, good fit for your team. And it has to come down to the psychographics.

Demographics can be a good barometer from which to start, but they can't identify your prospect alone. So step two is getting really clear about who your ideal prospect is using psychographics, which leads to step three of clarity. The third pillar in building clarity in your marketing strategy next year is building the marketing message, the brand message. And this is where you have to be very, very careful. If you try to speak to everybody, you will speak to no one. So you have to get very clear on who you're trying to serve by identifying your ideal prospect. At Complete Game Consulting, we use the story brand format to teach our clients this. I am a story brand certified guide. So we walk them through the journey, the story of your customer, what's their goal? What's their problem? Who's the guide with the plan to help them have success and avoid failure. And the key in building a brand message is it can't be your message. Nobody cares about your agency and how old it is and how long it's been around and who you're a preferred partner of. No, you have to tell the prospect story. When I go to most agencies websites today, I can tell the problem within a matter of 2, 3 seconds. They talk about themselves. You gotta talk to the prospect, tell their story, draw them in. So building the brand message is key and it has to be your prospect's message, not yours. You see, if you take these three pillars of clarity, your brand identity, knowing who you are and how you want the market talking about you. Step two is identifying your ideal prospect using psychographics, what they believe in, what they stand for, and then building a brand message that speaks to them. You are going to get your best prospects to start raising their hand.

Now the key with this is you and your team need to stand for something too. You need to lean into what you believe in about what you sell. This goes back to the if you try to serve everybody, you serve no one. That's vanilla, that's boring. You have to stand for something, you have to take a stand on something. Yeah, not everybody's gonna agree with you. But you know what? They wouldn't be good clients anyways. Go find the people who believe it too. They're gonna be great clients. They're gonna let you do your best work. That's the whole point. I'd rather have a book of business, a half million dollar book of business with clients I absolutely love versus a million dollar book of business where half of them frustrate me because I can't do my best work for them. Revenue can't be the only barometer.

There's more to it than that. So take today's Advice on clarity and figure out what your brand is. Figure out who your ideal prospect is. Asking yourself the question, how do they align with you psychographically? And then go build that brand message. Sit down and write the story of your prospect. Build the brand message for that ideal prospect. And here is the key. Find your smallest viable market. I know it goes against what we were taught. We were taught the bigger the better. The bigger the list, the better. Today it's about the smallest viable market niches. Yes, there are riches in the niches. You can't serve everybody. I'd rather have a small list of hyper qualified prospects from which to throw that brand message out to. So that's my advice. Now, in the next solo episode, I'm going to dive into step two, which is capture how to capture qualified leads consistently. But before I wrap up today, I do want to make a really quick announcement. We are excited to say that our next broker branding academy is officially open for an enrollment. It starts January 18th. We take 20 advisors, industry partners, and we cap it at 20. And we teach them our marketing playbook. 12 calls, 12 weeks. Your marketing strategy will never be the same. So if you want to know more, click the link in the show notes to learn more. Schedule your call. It's by call only. We do not let you enroll. We want to make sure we have the right people in the group of 20 because it's about coaching and collaboration. So if you want to know more, click the link, hit me up, get on my calendar, meet with me, let's talk about it. Let's see if it's a fit for you. And then next week or excuse me, in two weeks, we're going to dive into step two of the 2023 marketing playbook. And that's capture. All right. You know what happens when you mix clarity with confidence. You do massive things. So go do massive things with today's strategy. Have a beautiful weekend, Sam.