The Italian Approach to Sales: Less Stress, More Success

Scaling is not about doing more, it's about being more effective, which at the end of the day will help you grow your book of business with a lot less stress, which I feel like the Italians do a lot better than we do.

Hey. Hey. Welcome back to the accelerate your insurance sales podcast. Andy Neary here, CEO and founder, complete game Consultant. How you doing? All right. Today I'm going to try to bridge the gap between a recent trip I took to Italy with my fiance Amy and simplifying your sales process. You ready? I might absolutely fall flat on my face in attempting to do so, but heck, let's give it a shot.

As I record this, I am about a week, a little less than a week removed from returning from a 10 day trip Amy and I took to Italy. Now, for those who know the business, this is Amy, my fiance, not Amy Essig, who is also on the team. Don't want to create any confusion. So Amy and I took a 10 day trip over to Italy and this was my first trip to Italy. And what I want to do in this podcast is share three observations that I made about the Italian culture and how you can apply these observations to your sales. I know I'm going to do the same because leading up to the trip, the weeks leading up to our trip, things in my world in my business felt really easy, especially sales. We had a lot of opportunity coming in, a lot of great conversations, pipeline was full, and I remember even commenting to my business coach just how easy things felt. And now that I've had a chance to take a break, I also had a chance to kind of look at why was it so easy. And I'm going to break down for you because I think it can be super helpful for you. So I'm going to share three observations I made in my time over in Italy and how we can apply it to each other's businesses. Sound fair? So let's start with, with number one, consistency. One of the things I noticed about the Italian culture is how consistent they are. And what I mean by that is when you look at the folks over there running businesses, they are extremely consistent. Now let me take a step back quick. The trip Amy and I took was a part of a group run through a gentleman by the name of Stefano Patti. He has a great organization called Eye for Italia. So if you've ever wanted to take a trip over to Italy and want somebody to help you plan the trip, I highly recommend you get in touch with Stefano. He, he does a great job. It was, it was a pretty booked Agenda. But we got to see a lot of villages, a lot of towns. Now, we spent the entirety of our trip in a lesser known area of Italy, the southeast part, if you think about the image of Italy, the boot. We were in the heel of the boot and spent some time in Leche Italy, and then the surrounding towns and villages around that off the Adriatic Sea. It was awesome. Every day we were exploring a new village, a new town, getting a guided tour about it, its history, just taking in the local culture in every town we visited. And one of the things I noticed was just how consistent it is when you look at the typical Italian and how they approach their day. It's pretty much a repeat, rinse and repeat. You know, every morning it's heading to the cafe to have your cappuccino, your cafe.

Mid afternoon, you're taking a pretty extended lunch break. And you're also spending a lot of time with community, family and friends. It's not about how many hours can I work, how fast, fast can I scale my business? No, these local artisans have mastered a craft, but they don't let the chase to some imaginary finish line take them over. They get up every day, they do their thing, they provide a service to the local community, and then they get up the next day and they rinse and repeat. We visited a business, a paper mache business. We visited a bread making business, a cheese making factory, so we got to see an olive making factory. So we got to see a lot of different local businesses in this southeast part of Italy. And it was just fascinating to see how consistent every day was in their world. And when I look back at the weeks leading up to the trip and I think about why things felt so easy, it was because of how consistent I was. And when that comes to sales.

When I say consistent, it was how consistent I was in the act of developing business. I'm here to tell you there is no secret to sales other than consistency. When I look at my calendar in the weeks leading up to our trip, I saw things on my calendar Monday through Friday that were the reason why sales came to us so easily. Number one, every day there was time blocked in my calendar to develop business, to look at my pipeline, see who is in my pipeline, determine what step I need to take to make, move them forward. And I did this day in and day out. Now, for me, I. I did that first thing in the morning. This is something I learned from my sales mentor I've had in this business, which is there's no better time to look at the pipeline and keep the pipeline moving before the day gets started. Now, I don't have kids, but I love doing that first thing in the morning, even before I hit the gym. 6, 15 in the morning can find me with my coffee. And I'm looking at my pipeline going, all right, who's in it? How do we move people forward? Who do we need? Who do we need to get out? Because if you consistently manage your pipeline, you will create sales. I consistently pumped out content every single day for our followers on our social media platforms. Now, we've been doing that for years, but I have developed a process that has made our content not only easier, but absolutely dialed in on our ideal prospect. I'm going to talk about that here in a little bit. And so our content is speaking to our prospects 24 7. Our email campaigns are speaking to our prospects 24 7. And it this consistency of prospecting across various distribution channels is why we continue to bring in qualified leads and have a full pipeline. It actually feels easy. So look at your calendar. Are you spending enough time consistently developing business? And I don't mean just picking up the phone. I don't mean just sending some random email to a cold prospect. Are you looking at the pipeline? Are you managing the pipeline? How are you trying to figure out how you're gonna move people forward, how to get people out? Are you putting out content on LinkedIn consistently? Are you sending out email campaigns consistently? Are you hosting webinars consistently? Yeah, it requires work. But the more consistent you are, the more you're going to have a full pipeline, which gives you more sales confidence than anything else. And it comes down to consistency. The next observation I had in our trip over to Italy was their level of focus on quality over quantity.

And to give you an example, I'll focus on the Italian cuisine. You know, as somebody here living in the States who has to pretty much be gluten free and dairy free because of how shitty our food is in this country. I found it absolutely fascinating that for 10 days I ate more bread in that time than I've had in years. I had more dairy in that time than I've had in years, drank more wine than I probably have in a year. And I felt great. Do that here in the States, laying in the corner of my office in a fetal position because my stomach is about to explode. And when I look at why or how that's possible, it is because.

Italians focus on the quality of the food, not the quantity of the food they can produce. We actually did some workshops while we were over In Italy, we did a bread making workshop, and we actually did a focaccia bread and pasta making workshop while we were there. And one of the things the gal said who was leading the pasta workshop that I found absolutely fascinating was when it comes to the quality, number one, they use a lot less ingredients over there than they do here. But two, when it comes to making things like bread and pasta, the amount of yeast they use in their recipes is a fraction of the yeast we use here in the United States. Here, it's about the quantity. In fact, she said, if I heard her right here in the States, the typical recipe for bread and pasta calls for over 20 grams of yeast. In Italy, it's seven. So think about that. If you're eating bread and pasta that has that much yeast in it going into your stomach with the right temperature and the right environment, that yeast is literally expanding in your stomach like it would in an oven. So when you feel bloated, you feel congested and irritated. That's why I ate more pasta and bread in those two weeks than I've eaten in years. And I felt great. I didn't feel bloated. So what the heck does that have to do with sales?

When I look back at why we have been having so much success growing the business, especially as it relates to new business development, is we too have gotten so locked in on quality over quantity. Growing your business is not about how many more prospects can I go after. It's about how can I elevate the type of prospect I can go after. What does the quality of your prospecting look like right now? Are you just hoping anybody says yes to you, or are you absolutely dialed in on who your ideal prospect is and do you have the courage to say no to everybody else? You see, we've gotten absolutely dialed in on who our ideal prospect is. It has drastically shifted over the last 12 to 18 months. And we are saying no to people today that I would have died to have as clients 18 months ago. Because we know who our ideal prospect is today. Do you? So if you want to continue scaling your book, growing your book, it's not about quantity. It's not about doing more. It's not about going after more of the same business. It is about elevating the quality of your business. At some point in your sales process, you're going to have to elevate the type of client you go after. Maybe today you're selling groups under 100 lives. If you're a benefit advisor, you're focused on 10 to 25,000 revenue accounts. If you're commercial someday you're going to have to elevate that to 100 to 500 lives. $50,000 in revenue and then it's 100,000. We work with producers today that will not talk to a prospect unless they have 500 lives, unless it generates 100,000 in revenue. But at some point they got there because they continuously elevated the quality of the type of prospect they're going after. So the quality over quantity is a huge part of successful sales and simplifying sales. If you have a million dollar book of business today and you want to get it to three, four or five, it is not about going out and writing more of the same prospects you have today, more of the same clients. It's about elevating the type of client you obtain. You want to go from a million to five, do it in bigger chunks with less new wins. You can't continue to do more and expect to scale. It's about quality over quantity. And again, you got to have the courage to say no to everybody else. This episode is brought to you by Trucaptive Insurance. What if you could take full control of your healthcare strategy without the financial burdens of traditional insurance? At True Captive 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. True Captive's fully customizable plans and cost saving strategies ensure you never have to choose between affordability and quality care. It's time to break free from the limitations of conventional insurance.

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The vastly difficult, different level of stress that they have over there or don't have over there that we have here in the United States. Now maybe some of these artisans we had the chance to interact with didn't show it while we were in front of them. But I can tell you in general, looking at the culture over there, it is a lot less stressed out culture than you see here running around in the United States because they simplify things. Life is much more simple over there and I don't say that in a degradating way. What I mean is they value things differently. Again, it's not about a chase to how rich they can get. It's not about a chase to how fast they can scale their business and their life. It's not about having the toys and the houses and all that stuff. It's about living a rich life. And rich does not mean money. But they have a very sophisticated way to simplify things, if that makes sense. And so when I look at sales and I look back at why sales felt so easy leading up to the trip, it's because we have been continuously putting things in place to simplify our sales. And it actually plays off of the first two observations I just gave you. Number one, it's making sure you are consistently focused on business development. Number two, it is focusing on quality over quantity, even if you're a new producer starting out. It's focusing on bringing the right prospects in, not just any. But then it's initiating strategies and steps that are going to make prospecting easy for you. I'll give you one real life example, one that we've been leveraging here to great success lately. When I conduct a sales call with a prospective client, I record every one of those sales calls. Now we do all of our calls virtually and yes, I get their approval that it is okay to record it. I tell them we use it for sales training, which we do. And it makes note. It makes the follow up a heck of a lot easier if I have it recorded. So I can be 100% present in the call. But we record every sales call we do. I would encourage you to do the same again, get the prospect approval. But I would encourage you to record every single call. Now why do I do that? Well, number one, it makes the follow up with the prospect a heck of a lot easier. We use a tool right now called Fathom Notetaker. We purchased a subscription of it which gives us access to the AI feature of it, where we can go back in and write the email we need immediately after the sales call that will be highly focused on the conversation itself. So in a matter of a few seconds, I have a beautiful follow up email to send the prospect. It creates a summary of the entire conversation in an easy to digest note format. But here's the other thing we've been doing. We've been using these sales conversations to create our content. Because of this AI feature, I can go in and I can ask the AI component of Fathom to help me come up with a very clear LinkedIn post based off that conversation. Because think about it. If I'm on a sales call with a prospect, they're telling me about their goals, their challenges, what they're trying to accomplish for their teams, how they want to build a brand and why they want to Build a brand, whatever that might be. And if I'm talking to an ideal client, quality over quantity. Using the call transcription to develop content is going to speak directly to our ideal client because it's coming out of the mouth of our ideal client. So I use that to turn around and create very effective social media content. And guess what? When you look at the engagement, we're getting LinkedIn from the social media posts we've been making. Sure enough, who's commenting? Agency executives, CEOs, sales leaders. Why? Because these are the conversations I'm having with people. I'm having conversations with agency executives and sales leaders. This has simplified our sales process because what used to take me a half hour to an hour to follow up on sales calls, to try to come up with a good strategy for follow up now takes minutes. When I used to struggle to try to figure out what content is going to resonate with our ideal client profile. Done. It's little tools like this that we have access to today that we didn't have five to 10 years ago that make sales so much easier and so much more effective. And that's what I wanted to share with you today. Maybe it was I just wanted to share parts of my Italy trip with you as well because we had a great time. But my point is this. If you want to make sales easier, if you want to simplify your sales.

Please listen to the three observations I gave you today. Number one, you have to be consistent. Go look at your calendar right now after listening to this episode, go look at your calendar. Is there time blocked for business development, content creation, whatever you're doing to market yourself, is there time blocked Monday through Friday? Number two, are you focused on quality right now or are you spraying and praying and hoping somebody says yes? Get focused on who you are meant to do business with and say no to everything else. By the way, that doesn't happen as you become more successful. The most successful producers have done that from day one. And then the third thing is what are you doing to use the tools we have at our disposal, like AI, to make sales easier, to make the process of selling easier AI. If you're not using AI right now to give you sales training after recording a sales call, if you're not using AI to record the calls, to provide effective follow up, to provide effective next steps to create content that resonates with your ideal prospects. If you're not using AI to help you develop proposals, you're missing a huge opportunity. Scaling is not about doing more, it's about being more effective. And tools like AI are going to help you scale a lot more effectively in a lot less time. Which at the end of the day will help you grow your book of business with a lot less stress, which I feel like the Italians do a lot better than we do. So do what you want with the advice today. If you ever have the desire to go to Italy, if you haven't toured it before, I highly recommend you get a hold of Stefano Peri for Italia. He books tremendously epic trips with a lot of different experiences I think you'll love. Most importantly, I, I loved the fact we got to immerse ourselves with the local culture. That was, that was phenomenal. But for now, use these tips to elevate your sales. Make sales simpler so you can scale faster going into 2026. Be good sales Podcast One of the most valuable things you can do to help us and other new potential listeners find our show 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 Linked 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.