3 Strategies to GROW Without New Overhead

I just got done reading the book who not how and they talk about when growing a business, the first thing you need to ask is who not what or who not how Things have changed. It's maybe not who now, it is what or how. Instead of saying who do I need to go higher to be able to achieve the scale and the growth we want? The first question should be how do we use AI to do it? Shift your mindset.

Hey hey. Welcome back to the accelerate your insurance system sales podcast. Andy Neary here, founder and CEO of Complete Game Consulting. Welcome back to the show. Today we are going to talk about how your agency can use AI and automation to scale without having to add overhead or overwhelm. Welcome back. How are you today? Oh, it's been a long week. We got a lot going on here at Complete Game Consulting. A lot of exciting stuff that I'm going to share in this episode because we are talking about AI and automation, which is a very top of mind subject today for most agencies. Week doesn't go by where I am having a conversation with a CEO at a top agency who is asking and talking about how they can be using AI more effectively to continue growing the agency organically but not have to go out and hire a bunch of new employees. And that's really what I want to talk about today. I'm going to share three three ways I think you could be using AI right now to your advantage. Now I am going to set the stage by saying by no means am I an AI expert. Not even close. But I will share how we are using it for our growth as well as helping our clients that I think are going to be very useful to you. Because when I look at a lot of agencies today, historically we have been an industry that likes to throw people at a problem. If we don't have enough sales, go hire more producers.

We're bringing in too many sales, go hire a bunch of new account execs. But today I would say more agencies are actually trying to grow and get by with less, which leads to less overhead but a lot more overwhelm. I see a lot of account exec teams right now that are burnt out and I share this because I'm recording this episode on the cusp of Q4, especially for benefit agencies. We know how crazy Q4 gets. In fact, I don't even want to say it's on the cusp. We're already in the thick of it and this is the time of the year more account execs question whether or not they want to Keep doing what they're doing more than any time other time in the year. And there is a real burnout crisis in the insurance industry right now, especially on the client service side. There was a study done by Liberty Mutual Independent Agents at Work study that found that more than half of agency employees feel overwhelmed by increased workloads and that 51% report feeling burned out. Think about that. There are people, there are age AES and AMs right now that are burnt out and we haven't even started fourth quarter yet. And the last thing you can do or last thing you can take on as an agency right now is to have employee turnover in Q4. And worse yet, I see a lot of agencies I've worked at, agencies that didn't have a good game plan for Q4 and all of a sudden it became this all hands on deck which is chaotic, stressful and again even just creates more overwhelm for the agency. And this is where AI and automation can come in. And I'm going to start by saying if you are an agency executive right now that isn't full on studying, researching, investigating how to use AI right now your head is very deeply entrenched in the sand.

This is not something you can ignore. You know when, when the recession hit in 2008 the industry came out out of that just fine. I think we thought we were recession proof and there's probably a little truth to that then for the benefit folks tuning in 2010 hit and the ACA came around and you know, really didn't ultimately didn't have a huge impact on our, our careers. So we felt we were ACA proof. But I'm here to tell you no one is AI proof here. You cannot ignore this topic and think that your agency is going to continue thriving without leveraging it. And there's a lot of ways you can use it to your advantage. But the thing I'm going to start by telling you is you can't ignore it and you need, you need to be deep in research on it right now if you aren't already and hire somebody who is skill. Think you can assign this to your marketing team? You know, we have been deeply entrenched in figuring out how we are going to use AI and I'm going to share a couple strategies we're using that I think are going to be advantageous for your agency. But what I've learned about AI to this point, I'll give you an analogy. I'm a baseball guy, so this will make sense for my baseball fans out there. Thinking that because somebody understands a portion of how AI works, you can't say, well, I've got somebody who understands AI. Just because they understand one fact, feature of it or one. One particular piece of AI does not mean they're an AI expert. That would be like calling a pitcher a pitcher. If you understand the game of baseball, you know, all pitchers are not created equal in Major League Baseball. There are starting pitchers, there are relief pitchers, there are long relief pitchers, there are short relief pitchers, there are setup guys and there are closers there. They are all pitchers, but very different kinds of pitchers. You can't just label all pitchers pitchers. Same is true for AI. Just because somebody works in the AI field does not label them an AI expert. They have an expertise in a very specific skill set of AI. And I'm going to talk to you about that today. Who you could be seeking to help your agency leverage AI to your advantage so that you can continue to scale without thinking you have to go hire a bunch of people. And there are three ways I really see agencies leveraging it today. And we're still on the, we're still in the early stages of it, but I want to go into this. You know, the three strategies I want to talk to you about are three strategies we are using today are in the depths of beginning to use or are researching. And I know we are technically not an insurance agency, but we serve the industry and we are incorporating these AI tools because. Because we want to test them on our organization first. Because if they are effective, they are strategies we are going to deliver to our clients. And I, for the sake of this conversation, I don't want you to. I need you to expand your horizons of AI bigger than it's chat GPT that you prompt to do an exercise or an assignment for you. There are so many different ways to use AI today that if done right, your agency could explode in the next two to three years. Check out these statistics. A digital insurance survey revealed that 78% of insurance leaders are expanding their technology budgets as we speak. 36% are directing the bulk of those funds to AI. Think about that. Technology has been a big piece of our industry for quite a while. CRMs, sales and marketing platforms, anything we're using today, compliance technology, you name it, enrollment technology. We've been using those for years. Now comes AI technology. And 78% of the insurance leaders out there today are expanding their technology budgets and a massive chunk of it is going towards AI. Now, as I dive into the three solutions here, here is what I ask you to do. In order for you to consistently create organic growth in the future, I need you to to get rid of the mindset that says we are proud of all the manual work we do for our clients. I know I had to do that. A lot of agencies are very proud of how above and beyond they go for their agencies and you should be. But it also requires a ton of manual work. This is where you have to hire more people or the existing employees had to put a ton of more work in. I need you to get out of that mindset and start asking yourself how can we use AI to to create the wow experience that doesn't require manual labor? So let's dive into three strategies your agency can use today to continue to scale without creating overwhelm and a bunch of new overhead. The first one is I foresee a day where every agency will have its own clone. Now let me share the backstory to this. Digital clones are becoming mainstream in the world of AI today. Three months ago we went to work with a buddy of mine, Jim Carter, who works at Delphi. Delphi is one of the leading players in the AI digital clone space to build out my clone, a digital version of Andy Neary. We did that because a lot of people want my time and my time is very limited. And in order to create and expand access to me, we went about creating a clone that is a duplicate of me. Just a digital duplicate of me. So what we did is we dumped five years of all of my social media content, all of my coaching call recordings, in any link to any kind of video I have done in the last five years into building this clone so that when people interact with the digital version of me, they are going to get a response that sounds like it's coming from me. And when we finished building the clone, I have to tell you, it was impressive. To date, this clone has access to more than 3.3 million of my words. And because the clone is linked to my LinkedIn profile, my YouTube channel, my coaching calls, my Google folder where our coaching call recordings are housed, it's only going to continue expanding as we move forward. But this is a way we could give our clients access to me via text or phone call without me having to actually be there. So how does that relate to you? We have arrived at a time where you need to start thinking about how your agency can leverage clones to do the work and respond and react and reply to clients through day to day mundane activities that doesn't require your AES or AMs to physically be there. Think about that. How could you build a clone that could service your clients, provide the quick response you're proud to give, the service that your agency touts it delivers without actually having a human being do it? It's here. So I see clones being a very, very common part of any successful agency in the next one to two years, if not faster. So if you have not investigated how a clone could leverage, could use, could, could help your agency from a service standpoint, I highly recommend you start doing that research today. Reach out to somebody if you want contact information to my buddy Jim Carter at Delphi. I'm happy to give it. But man, clones are going to become a fixture to every successful agency moving forward. This episode is brought to you by True Captive Insurance. What if you could take full control of your healthcare strategy without the financial burdens of traditional insurance? At Trucaptive Insurance they make that possible. As the only captive in the nation that puts up the majority of collateral on your behalf, they provide financial flexibility from day one, making them an advocating partner for their customer success. 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Take the next step today. Visit trucaptive.com and discover a smarter way to manage healthcare that is truecaptive.com Number 2 Using AI for lead generation this is a tricky subject, but it's it's one that every producer better be cognizant of right now. When I look at the insurance industry as a producer, and I was one for, for a couple decades, we have always had received a very what I might call rich compensation package for the work we do. I know there are plenty of agencies that paid me pretty damn good salary plus commissions to do what I do. And if you think about how agencies hire producers, they're often given a nice salary guarantee for two, three years plus commissions and then at some point they're taken off the salary guarantee and moved to commissions with the goal being at that point their book is big enough that they are living off the commissions alone. But I believe we offer producers very large salaries for for one main reason. The insurance industry is unique from a sales perspective in that we are paying producers to generate their own leads and close their own leads, generate and close, open and close. That's actually pretty unique in the sales world. If you look at other industries we have people who focus on inbound who lead generation and then people who focus on sales closes and we pay both to do that job. In the insurance industry we typically pay one producer to do both. Therefore we pay them a really nice salary to do it. Moving forward, you need to figure out how you're going to start utilizing AI to generate the lead. And when you can do that, guess what, you're going to start paying producers less, especially when it comes to their salary. Because now you're just asking the producer to close the business if AI is generating the lead. And this is something we have dug into deeply and are entrenched in it right now. Not only for us, for our clients. Let you in on a little inside project we're working on. We have a program here we call the Expert Membership Program where we do content for our clients. We make sure they show up online every day. Building brand, online brand awareness. We take the work off their plate. Well, one of the things we are going to be testing out is some AI driven lead generation using email and LinkedIn automation the right way where we could start helping some of the clients we do content for actually generate leads. Now we as an organization believe in the we go first mentality. So we are testing it on ourselves before we launch it to our clients. We got to make sure it works. But we have hired an organization that specific skill set in AI is operational workflows, including lead generation. Notice what I just said. We have outsourced the help of a organization whose specific skill set is using AI in operational workflows. Notice how different that is from my buddy Jim Carter, whose AI skill set is building clones. Remember the picture analogy? So you need to think about how you are going to start using AI in marketing and sales lead generation. Whether that be how AI can interact with your email list, how AI can interact with your social media connections. Heck, how AI could potentially start making outbound calls for your organization and setting appointments. It's here. It's not even a it's coming, it's here. And if you're not thinking about how you're going to leverage that, you need to really start paying attention to what's going on. Which leads to strategy number three. How are you using AI to take the workload off of your client service team? I just talked about having a clone, but where else can you be using AI to reduce the workload for your service team? Especially in a season like Q4, there are operational workflows out there you could be incorporating via AI that could.

Monitor every one of your AES and AM's email inboxes and divide up their emails appropriately so that when they go to their inbox. They're not overwhelmed. How many of your day to day mundane activities does your agency do for your clients? Whether that is claims reporting, quoting, you name it, that could be fully automated. With AI, we have clients we are introducing right now to some of these AI experts to help them build out these automations to service their clients on a timely basis. Whether that is providing quotes, whether that is studying claims data, whether that is acting as a concierge for their navigation team they have created. AI can take this workload off of your team, but it will require you to let go of the pride that comes into all of the manual work you're doing right now. You see, it's our mission at Complete Game Consulting to make organic growth cool again. I as much as I am, I commend the men and the women out there who are selling their agencies and making the money they deserve because they have crossed the finish line. It pains me to see how much M and A is going on right now. And one of the main reasons I think it's going on is because nobody knows how to grow organically anymore. So they've in a way kind of given up and made M and A their growth activity. But AI is going to make it so much easier for your agency to scale if you leverage AI the right way. So take the three strategies that I shared today. It's the strategies we're considering and using right now within our own company. Clones. Think about how you could bring a clone or several clones into your agency to act as act like another employee that could be servicing and interacting with prospects and clients that doesn't require a human? 2. How are you using AI for lead generation? How can you develop more inbound leads for your producers so they can do what they do best, which is close. And number three, how can you use AI to take the workload off of your service team, especially in a season like Q4 so they can continue to service more clients without all the work and all the stress. Whether that be automating their inbox, automating the mundane day to day claim reporting and quoting they do. This isn't about going and finding another person. I just, I just got done reading the book who not how for the second time and they talk about when growing a business, the first thing you need to ask is who not what or who not how. Right? Well guess what? Things have changed. It's maybe not who now, it is what or how. Because this is where AI comes in. Instead of saying who do I need to go hire to be able to achieve the scale and the growth we want. The first question should be how do we use AI to do it? So that's my advice today. You know, again, when I look at the top agencies in the industry right now, they continue to grow at a very rapid pace. A lot of it is through M and A. But I get excited to know and see how they could continue to scale the revenue if they could create more consistent organic growth. The agencies and I believe today it doesn't require hiring a bunch of new people, new humans, but scale can be achieved if you put the right AI driven workflows in place. So I'm excited to see what they're going to do for us and for our clients and I am super excited to see what they could do for you if you take advantage of them today. Don't put your head in the stand. It is here. It is not going away. It is only going to continue to impact our agency as we move forward. 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 and is for you to rate the show and leave a review. So as a special bonus for you if you leave us a review, take a screenshot of your review and send it to me as a DM to my LinkedIn profile. I will send you a free copy of our LinkedIn Diamond Playbook, our proven four step strategy to grow your business on LinkedIn. So go right now, leave us a review, screenshot it and send me a DM on LinkedIn. Also, please share this podcast with anyone you think would enjoy it. That's it for now.