The 4 Pillars of the Bulletproof Insurance Agency Marketing Plan

You have probably seen me, some of you probably see me draw this out over the last couple of calls. But I'm going to go into depth in this. If you are a visual learner. What I'm laying out for you guys today is I. What I believe with 100% conviction is the marketing and sales system every agency in America must build to win. And the larger your agency, because I see names on here and I know what agencies they're tied to. The larger your agency, the more important this is, because what happens at large agencies, whether large can mean three producers can mean 12, is every producer has their own prospects, which is fine, but they also have their own way of doing things. And instead of having an agency process, everybody's doing their own things. Everybody's recreating the wheel with every new opportunity, and that doesn't work.

So what I want to go through today is what I have done with my own business over the last seven years that has helped me get really clear and simplify things.

But I truly believe, and I do it with the clients I work with. When you build this system and lock this in, guys, it is game on. I am not a smart man. I need to keep things simple. And I think this is going to help you guys out tremendously today. So I'm actually going to go through a little presentation. I called it the four. What did I call it? The four pillars of the marketing plan. The marketing playbook for 2022 for every agency. And by the way.

If you are not an agency, you're an industry partner. This is going to be just as effective for you. So whether you sell a service to the industry to brokers or you're an advisor who works with employers, this system works for your entire agency or company.

When I think about sales and marketing, like I said, I'm going to do this backwards. And by the way, if anybody has their cameras off and I pick on anybody, I'm picking on the people without cameras on.

There we go. There we go. See what happens. Like, everybody turns cameras on. It's amazing. And I'm going to be letting people in as we go here. All right, so we're going to work backwards on this, guys. The first thing you have to develop as an agency or as an industry partner, industry partners, it's going to be a little easier for you. This will make sense. Here is the worst drawing I've ever had of a sales funnel, guys. You guys have seen me do it. This is your sales funnel. The first thing you have to create for your agency.

And I'm going to pull this up because I know it's hard to see. First thing you have to create. It's breaking now is a playbook.

When everybody to draw this on your paper.

What do I mean by playbook? What I mean by playbook is when you think about your ideal prospects you work with and want to work with. What is the playbook you give them access to? What is it you guys do that's better than everybody else?

I know some faces on here. Some of you do a lot of self funding. Some of you love the cost containment strategy. Some of you focus on HR and technology. Whatever it is. What is in your playbook? Now don't think of this as we literally have to build a playbook. No, it's just. Okay.

What do we do that helps our clients win the most?

And here's the secret, guys. This is the important part. I was just having this conversation with an advisor about this. The days of all revenues, good revenue is over. You have to identify who your target prospect is. You can't just say we handle all people. No, because what happens is you bring in the wrong prospect. What does your account management team think of you about three months later?

Gretchen, you're an account executive, aren't you? If the wrong client comes into webito, what do you think?

Thanks a lot. Yeah, thanks a lot. This is the worst client. And so my point is, guys, what a playbook starts the process of is you identifying who the perfect prospect is. Because not everybody is qualified to get their hands on your playbook.

Now let's take a step back. If the goal is playbook.

The next thing you have to have in your process and great, my markers are dying.

Is.

An assessment.

You have to have a way to qualify or disqualify your prospects. Because remember, not everybody's a fit.

Some of you on this call I know represent UBA firms. UBA has partnership with Chad Jenkins who talks about the blueprint selling. That's a form of assessment. What are you using as an assessment to qualify or disqualify? Here's the secret, people. Make sure those assessment questions.

Tie into your playbook.

Because here's what you want from an assessment and this is why where I think assessments can be super impactful foreign.

I'm not going to ask a bunch of questions on my assessment that require straightforward answers like how many employees do you have? What carrier with? When's your renewal date? I'm going to ask my assessment questions because I want to know how you think.

So I love for those Who've done workshops with me or worked with me. You know, we talked about the scale 1 to 10 questions. Why I love scale 1 to 10 questions is that gets me an idea of how you think. Think.

So here's a great example of a question I might ask if in my playbook I do a lot of self funding.

Scale 1 to 10.

Rate your level of tolerance for risk. 1. Hate it. Try to avoid it at all cost. 10. We love it because we know the return on investment.

If that CFO or whoever I'm meeting with gives me a 2, does that mean I'm not going to sell self funding? No.

But now I've got ammo. How to talk about self funding because I know that guy's really risk averse or that woman's really risk averse. So I need, if I, if I think self funding is part of my playbook, I just, I know that I have to sell it to this gentleman or this woman in a way that sounds safe because they're risk averse, but if they gave it a nine.

Let'S go. So the questions you want to ask in an assessment is get a feel for how this prospect views their plan and how they think, because it sets up ammo for your proposal, which.

Leads to the next part of this. You have to have a sales process.

One thing I do with my clients is every agency has a standard operating procedure for the sales process. Meaning from the minute that meeting is set with a prospect, what happens next? An email goes out confirming the meeting. 24 hours before the meeting, we're sending out the agenda.

So the prospect comes to the meeting prepared. We conduct the meeting, and then after the meeting, we're going to send them a summary of the meeting with next steps. 24 to 48 hours after the meeting, then we gather data. Step two is we gather data if we need to. Maybe for some of you, it's medical apps, whatever. And then step three, we come back with a proposal customized for that prospect. That is a standard operating procedure.

Versus what's happening with a lot of advisors I talk to is there's no operating procedure. Every prospect feels like you're recreating the wheel. You're going back and forth with them five, six, seven times. And finally they're like, this is too much work. We're out.

You got it. Because. And here's the other thing I learned when I created this for myself.

It allowed me to stay in control of the process as long as possible.

Has anybody ever felt like, if you think about prospecting historically in Our industry. Who's had the control? Us or the prospect?

Prospect. And that's why we're waiting for them to get back to us. Why aren't they getting back to us? Because they're interviewing nine other brokers. We have to control that process.

So if you go in and meet with a group and from the minute that meeting was set, you have this boom, boom, boom, boom, boom process. What they're seeing is, wow, that's legit. This is a. That's a consultant. That is not a broker.

And it allows you to stay in control through the whole thing.

Here's the key to this process, though. If there's one thing you write down right now, write this down. When you meet with the prospect for the first time, there's actually two keys here. In that first meeting with the prospect.

You need to clearly lay out what this process is going to look like. Hey, we're meeting today. Here's what we're going to go over the agenda. After the meeting, I'm going to send you a summary of the notes with what next steps are. And next steps will look like this. And if you like everything that's going on, the following step is we're going to come back with a proposal built for you.

What you just did in that is laid out your entire sales process for the prospect. They know what's next.

If we don't tell them what's next, that's when they get caught in the pipeline.

The second key is when you come back and you provide a summary of that first meeting. Because I think that's so important. I used to literally create a PDF branded to our agency, send out the meeting notes, the summary. But the key in the summary was next steps. And I would write down what the next steps are and who's responsible for, because maybe it's something I have to do, but it also might be something the prospect has to do. And just that touch of clarity, guys, is what's going to get that prospect to keep the process going.

Now.

The fourth asset that every agency has to build happens right above the funnel.

And this is what makes your sales race. Closing ratios go up. And that is community.

What are you doing to build a community around your prospects.

Historically? And I'm looking at some faces. Wade, I am going to pick on you. Wade, how long have you been in the industry?

Almost five decades, Andy. Kathy, how long have you been in the industry?

Oh, she. Four decades. Four decades. I'm going on 20, guys. When I got in the business, you know what I was taught See prospect, sell prospect. Go pitch a bunch of product at them and hopefully something sticks.

Guys, that's not how they buy anymore. Those days are over. They want value. You have to bring value before they're ever going to hire you. How can you bring value to them through your community? So this is. Think of your list of prospects you have today instead of extracting sales from them as quickly as you can think of it. How can I bring value to them? Maybe you do videos for them. Maybe you provide a good newsletter that has content that brings them a boatload of value. Some of my clients are having massive success interviewing, like a podcast, interviewing prospects and clients and sharing the interview with their prospects. What can you do to bring massive value to your prospects? Webinars.

Because if you do that consistently.

What'S going to happen is over time.

They'Re going to come in your sales pipeline. When they're ready to buy, they're going to raise their hand.

And they already know you and like you.

Who would love first meetings with prospects who already know you and like you.

If. Yeah, if somebody didn't raise your hand, we got to talk.

But this takes patience, guys. This doesn't happen overnight. But my point is this.

If you focus on now, I'm going to go in the right order. If you focus on community going, okay, what are we doing as an agency or as an industry partner to bring value to my community? I tell this, every industry partner that I've worked with, in my opinion, has to become an education platform, an education company that happens to sell the solution they sell.

Because if you bring so much value to the broker community, if you work directly with the brokers, you're going to guilt them into doing business with you. They're going to want to sell your product. It's the same thing for agencies. What can you do to bring so much value to your employers, your prospective employers, that you almost guilt them in doing the business with you?

And I know some of you heard this from me before, but I want to share this quickly because this is when the AHA happened in my life. 2015.

At that time, I was working for an agency that was a UBA partner. Again, I know some of you on the call are UBA partners. And you know what our email newsletter consisted of to our clients.

Let's go copy and paste a bunch of stuff from Zywave.

Who's been there? Raise your. Come on, admit it. Admit it, guys. People don't read that stuff.

So what I started doing, and it looks like every other agency that's bombarding them with that stuff. So in 2015, I said, I'm going to try something different. At the time I had a list of about 50 emails, mostly HR directors.

And I said, you know what I'm going to do every month? A lot of these cost containment strategies that were kind of new at the time. Back in 2015, I said, I'm going to put a PDF together and all the PDF is going to be is what is the solution, what is this thing, how does it work and why do you need it? And I'm going to take this PDF. I'm laughing because this is how basic this was. And I'm going to attach it to my email. Everybody on my list, all 50 are BCC.

And I'm going to say, hey guys, here's your February newsletter. Enjoy.

And I started sending that out and I worked on growing the list from 50 to 75 to 100. I wanted it bigger and bigger and bigger because now my community's bigger. Some want it out. Perfect. You were never going to buy from me anyways. Well, here's what started happening for about four months in I would get replies. Hey, this is awesome. Thank you.

Five months, six months, started getting emails. Hey, really love what you're providing us. We'd love to meet with you.

In that first year, gang, I wrote 180 grand on that newsletter that was a frickin PDF attached to an email.

Because it was value to them. I took the risk that they could literally take this PDF and give it to their broker and say, go implement this.

They didn't. But what happened over time, they saw the value because there was value being brought to the community. So that's what I guys, this is the game changer. If you can think about what are we doing right now for our prospects. We have their list, we have the emails. What are we doing to bring value to them? And if you just apply patience and consistency to it, it is going to drive people coming into the pipeline who know you and like you.

And if you run your process, your sales process, which includes an assessment to qualify or disqualify people quickly.

You now have a process that allows you to realize who is the best fit for your playbook.

So why I said this is a great one for visual learners, is think about this community.

People start raising their hand, they've come in the pipeline, we run our process, walk them through our assessment and now we can really determine who is a fit for our playbook.

And whether you're a sole, sole entrepreneur, solopreneur. You're the only producer or you have an agency of 10 producers.

They may all have different ideal prospects, but you can. They can all run this system.

Now. The only thing missing from this system is what are you going to do to attract the attention?

Because if you need.

To get people in your community.

You need to create.

Awareness. Hold on, I need to mute somebody. Then you generated the invoice after the payment. There we go. You need to create awareness. And if you've been on the webinars for a while, we have definitely talked about awareness, which is marketing. What are you doing on LinkedIn? What are you doing with your webinars? What are you doing with public speaking, with email campaigns? How are you generating interest.

From people who don't know you today?

Is it O P T I M.

To get them in your community?

What I just shared with you guys right here is literally the marketing and sales system.

That I used seven years ago and slowly built over time that allowed me to build a big book in a market where nobody knew who I was.

Hold on, guys. We got people unmuted, doing other things.

Okay, he's muted. So.

What questions? Let's start here. I wanted to go over this because I've been sharing this at the beginning of each webinar I run, but I wanted to go in depth with this, look at where you guys are right now and go, what do we have as assets already?

Marketing or sales? But what do we need to build to fill out this system? What questions do you guys have or comments do you guys have around this? This is your chance to ask.

Andy, it's Michael Godwin. I have a question.

Hey, Michael.

Hey. Apologies. I'm in the car. So it's kind of clunky with the video. So anyway, hey, in terms of. So the assessment, you know, you expressed that as. That's a way for us to qualify a prospect. But do you also pitch that as a. As one of the deliverables? Meaning meet with me, because I'm going to. I'm going to walk you through an assessment that's going to help you assess the value of your benefits as well. Is that, Is that part of the angle as well?

Yes. That's a great. That's a great way you could promote that. So when I send out going back to the standard operating procedure I talked about, Michael, when I would send out the email 24, 48 hours for the meeting, that would include the agenda. Here's what we're going to go over. I would include what we're going to do. With the assessment, this is your chance to assess your current benefits. So yeah, almost sell the assessment as part of the solution.

And here's the key guys. Great question Mike. Here's the key with the 2440 hour pre meeting agenda email is I don't know about you but I used to be afraid to confirm the meeting with the prospect because that's their chance to back out. Right. And so what a lot of people do is when they send an email to confirm, they'll send an email that says something like this hey Kathy, Andy just want to confirm we're still good for tomorrow.

That's a very easy lead in to let that prospect back out.

What I would say instead is hey Kathy, it's Andy. Super excited to meet with you tomorrow at 2pm here's the agenda, here's what we're going to go over. I'll see you tomorrow.

A lot different than hey, want to confirm we're still good.

So for anybody here who's a producer, your team, tell them that that's a very key component of this sending that pre meeting email out but doing it with excitement. Hey, excited to meet you. Here's what we're going to go over. We'll see at 2pm tomorrow. Very important.

What else guys, what are the questions?

Andy, do you have some assessment questions that you use for.

More of the smaller level funded market?

Yeah, great question.

If you think about your market because remember assess. My, my point, my, my opinion is you want to build the assessment around the type of health plans or your, your playbook. What is what, what is it that. Well and so Stacy, if you work with small group level funded, are they mostly with the carrier self level funded like Cigna, UnitedHealthcare, stuff like that?

Some, some don't even have insurance. I get all kinds of crazy referrals. Most of mine's construction and it.

Okay, so I would be asking questions around things like controlling cost. How important is controlling cost to you? If you're working with people who don't have benefits today, Ask a question like what is going to be the biggest factor when building a health plan? Or if you are going to offer a health plan, what is going to be the biggest factor for you?

I loved asking how important is ongoing communication.

For your employees? 1 don't care. 10. Oh, it's paramount. Just remember Stacey, whatever you want to ask number one, you don't need 30 questions to ask it. Break your assessment down to eight, 10, maybe 12 questions. Keep it simple.

But ask questions that allow you to gauge whether or not this is a good fit for you. So I knew by asking the communication question, if they don't care about educating their employees, man, I'm gonna have a tough time with that group.

They don't care. Yeah. If they don't care about controlling their cost, I'm gonna have a tough time with that group. That's the purpose of the assessment questions. You want to be able to filter out whether you, whether or not this could be a good fit for you.

Here's the best way to do that, guys. I'll quickly do an add on for you.

When you sit down and identify who your ideal prospect is.

Look at who your favorite clients are today.

Who lets you do your best work today, and what are you doing for them.

And now imagine you're going to go out and rinse and repeat and go find groups like that.

Okay. Knowing that, how could you build assessment questions to identify whether or not that group's like your favorite clients? That is a great way to build an assessment.

I did this on a. Here's the other purpose of the assessment, guys. I did this on a previous webinar.

Disqualifying or qualifying prospects can be done easily based on demographics. So company size, number of employees on the planet, CFO or involvement or not, HR involvement or not, renewal dates. You can make quick qualifying decisions on demographics.

You can't make quick qualifying decisions on psychographics. How do they think? How do they view their benefits? How do they view their employees? How do they view cost control? You can't qualify them until you meet them. I used an assessment to be able to filter or diagnosed based on their psychographics.

Because it drew. It drew a picture for me of the ideal prospect and whether or not they were in that bucket or not.

Couple more questions.

Schweissel, you got any questions?

Sorry, I was gonna say no, no real questions. To kind of build upon what you know, the other prior webinars. And it just kind of gives me a better picture of how it all formulates because the community piece was one thing. I wasn't sure, quite sure. I thought it was more LinkedIn. But the PDF ideas is real neat.

Think of LinkedIn to. Tom, you bring up a great point. Think of LinkedIn this way, guys. Your job on LinkedIn, yes, you can definitely build community with good content, right? But really what you want to do is eventually pull people off the platform into your community. What does that mean? I got your email now, and now I can send you stuff. Send you stuff like my newsletter or videos or webinar. Invites, whatever. That is really what the goal of LinkedIn is. I want to create. I want people to get to know me with my content, like me with my content. But really I want to pull them off into my community.

Sure.

So the people that I have signed up for this content, or it's not like the prospect I'm already calling on, I'm just all sudden adding, include them.

Include them, but continuously grow the community. Go on LinkedIn and find more that you want in the community.

Gotcha.

Perfect.

Thank you.

Yeah, guys, your goal is to build your community, whether it's 50 people today. Grow it to 100, grow it to 250, grow it to 500. Because the bigger the community, when you're pumping out the content, guess what? It's a percentages game. If you got 500 people on the list now there's a certain percentage, they're going to raise their hand.

Any other questions? Got one. Time for one more.

Can you go over, like, stuff that you put in your newsletter just so I can have some ideas of what to do for, like, if I was to do a newsletter, type.

Yeah, honestly, guys, keep it. Who gets my newsletter right now? My weekly inside pitch. Okay. If you've noticed, I want you to start observing what I do every week. It has two components, a coaching video and my podcast.

Coaching video, podcast, coaching video, podcast. And then once in a while, I'll put a call to action in. Hey, I'm doing a webinar. Hey, I've got my academy launching. Let me know if you want it. If you just keep the same consistency over and over, whether it's a coaching video, some video, or an interview you did, keep it consistent, same content. And guys, right now, you could do it just once a month and it works. But bring value one way, shape or form, and then keep the newsletter consistent.

And I will, I will share this. Absolutely. Tom. I'm already getting interest. If anybody wants to learn more, let me know. I'm already getting interest. I was going to do the second academy live here in Fort Collins in June, but I think I'm going to run it virtual starting in early May. We're in the middle of the current one and I've already got people who want in. If you want to learn more about the next academy, shoot me an email. You all have my email. You're going to get one from me following up this, because I'm already starting to take deposits, $500 deposits to lock seats in. Because there's people who want in. If you want to learn more Hit me up, because the next academy is going to start in early May. But, guys, I'm telling you, and last thing I'm going to share, and then we're going to rock and roll. The best thing you can do about this, this ecosystem. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Give it a name.

If you brand and name this ecosystem, what happens now is you're not selling health insurance, you're not selling dental insurance and products. The product is your ecosystem.

And you want to go find prospects that are a fit for that ecosystem. Because what's going to happen is you're going to find the right ones most of the time, and they're going to be your favorite clients, and it's going to make your life a heck of a lot easier, and your book's going to grow.

Brand the system.

All right, guys, if you want to know more about the academy, hit me up. Otherwise. Kathy, quick question. Sorry. What now? I got more. Is the newsletter the same as the text? No. So I send. Some of you are on my text community and I send messages out that way, but I also have an email that goes out every Friday.

Good question.

All right, gang, here's the last thing. Here's what I'm doing. Don't jump off quick yet, guys, because I'm getting a lot of questions about the newsletter and stuff. Do me a favor, because I had to jump on another call right at this. I literally just put my email in the chat. If you want in the newsletter, just shoot me an email. If you want to learn more about the academy, shoot me an email to that address right there. Just copy and paste it real quick.

But I'm telling you guys, you do this, it's game on.

Go kick butt. Thanks, andy. Hey, guys. Thank you.