Andy Neary describes transforming his insurance prospecting strategy from cold calling and door-to-door to activities he enjoys—educating prospects via LinkedIn articles, an email newsletter, and public speaking. By making prospecting about education he increased consistency, booked more meetings, attracted inbound prospects, and regained enjoyment in selling.
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What if you could actually build a prospecting strategy you love? There's a really good chance when you look at your weekly activities that evolve or revolve around prospect. I'm willing to bet most of those activities right now you do not enjoy. Really easy on a Monday morning to get psyched up and say, I am going to dedicate two hours on Wednesday morning to cold calling. And then Wednesday morning rolls around and you go, because you don't want to do it. And two hours quickly becomes 60 minutes. 60 minutes quickly becomes a half hour. Before you know it, you made eight, nine calls. You gave it a half assed effort. Rewind it to 2010. I almost got out of the business because at that time I was running a benefits division for a PNC agency selling primarily small group because that's what our resources allowed us to do. And my only strategy at that point was to pick up the phone or literally pick a geographic location in our market and go drive there for the day and go door to door. I hated it. I woke up every single day dreading what I was about to do. There was not one ounce of what I was doing I actually enjoyed. And it led up to a pivotal moment in 2010 when I actually thought about getting out of the business because I hated what I was doing that much. It had nothing to do with the company I was working for. It was just I did not enjoy what I was doing. Fast forward now. Here I am in Colorado. I didn't want to go back to that strategy I hated. And this is when I started leaning into things I loved doing. I told myself, if I'm going to enjoy the process of the, the chase, the prospecting, I want to participate in activities I love. And when I looked at what I absolutely loved to do in the business of selling insurance, it was educating my prospects. And it was something I felt I was really good at, something I felt I had a gift do. I'm the son of two teachers, so maybe it just comes naturally to me. But I love educating prospects. I loved walking into a prospecting meeting with a prospect who looked like a, to me was like a clean slate. They didn't know what they didn't know. They didn't know what their problem was, but they were open to learning. Oh, I love that. But when I looked at how I prospected, there was nothing I was doing that was educating my prospects. Right When I pick up a phone and I call a prospect to ask for a meeting, I'm not educating them. I'm asking for their time. When I would send out emails to prospects to try to book meetings again, I wasn't giving any value. I wasn't educating. I was asking. Same thing with going door to door. So I said, what if I spin my prospecting strategy and make it all about education? Because I love education. I started getting on LinkedIn, and the way I could let my education, my yearning to educate, come out was writing LinkedIn articles. That's what I started doing in late 2014. Just popping on LinkedIn about once a week and writing articles. Then I added my email newsletter in 2015, and the purpose wasn't to ask for meetings, the purpose was to educate, because I loved educating. So I added my newsletter, sent out a newsletter via Outlook, by the way, not some fancy email platform like we have today. And I started that, sending that out to about 30 prospects. I didn't have a big list at the time, but the one that took my prospecting to a whole new level was public speaking. And I'd always had a desire to public speak. You know, I think there's two types of people out there. Ones that completely shy away from a microphone and others that run towards it. I happen to be someone who run towards a microphone, and I. I knew public speaking could be a big component of my prospecting strategy because it would give me an opportunity to stand on a stage and educate again, something I loved doing. And what I realized by adding these components to my prospecting strategy was I was getting an opportunity to do what I loved every single day. Think about this for a second. When you are in your zone of genius, let's say your zone of genius is like mine. You love being in front of a prospect, educating a prospect often about things they don't know, right? This is where you get to display your subject matter expertise. The challenge with that or the problem with it is you don't get to do that every day. You don't have five prospecting meetings every day. And if you do, you are a prospecting ninja. You, you don't even need to listen to this podcast, but you're probably not having five prospecting meetings every day. And that was my struggle. I'm like, man, I love educating prospects, but I don't get to do it very often because I'm not in front of them very often. So I said, this is an opportunity to start doing it every day. If I write an article on LinkedIn, what am I doing? I'm educating my prospects. If I send out an email once a month, what am I doing? I'm educating my prospects. If I go proactively, find places to speak, Sherma conferences, Financial executives International, CFO roundtables. If I can go speak, I am educating and what happened was all of a sudden I started loving my prospecting strategy. Now, not every one of those activities lead to overnight wins. However, what I knew was that if I made sure those activities were a part of my weekly prospecting strategy, I would be living the best version of me. Which means I am going to love the art of prospecting and you know what happens next. When I started enjoying the prospects process, the number of meetings I booked started increasing. I started talking to the right prospects and when I realized that if I educate enough, I'll actually start having prospects come to me. And that's exactly what happened. There is no secret to this. There is no perfect prospecting strategy. It's about participating in the activities that you love to do that put you in the best position to be the best version of you. And if you just do that, you will wake up every day fired up, ready to get after it. You will be more consistent than you have ever been. Because when you look at your calendar, you are going to see the activities that light you up.
