Andy Neary, an insurance salesman, argues the industry wastes money on cold calls and door-to-door pitches instead of brand building. He started an email newsletter in 2015 that generated $180,000 in business, showing how nurturing prospects through consistent content beats direct selling.
Questions this video answers
2015.
$180,000.
Federated Insurance.
Chapters
In this video, I'm going to share a tip with you that the insurance industry fails to teach you. When I got in the industry 21 years ago, I started my career with Federated Insurance. At that time, Federated had one of the best sales training programs in the industry. They still may today. I'm not sure. However, back then, here was their number one sales tip. Get in your car, go drive to a specific part of your territory on a specific day of the week, park your car in an industrial park and go door to door to dropping off Federated Insurance marketing collateral. Now that was effective 21 years ago. Is that still effective today? One could argue that it's not. You see, the one thing that the insurance industry completely fails to teach you when it comes to growing your business is how to leverage brand marketing. Everything you have been taught to do is direct marketing. Pitch after pitch after pitch. Every activity you spend when it comes to prospecting is focused on trying to convince a prospect to take a meeting with you instead. If you would leverage more brand marketing over time, it's going to make your direct marketing, those cold calls, those emails, those door to doors, even more effective. So what is brand marketing? Well, let me give you an analogy. Every year farmers harvest crops, right? So what does their annual calendar look like? Well, in the spring their job is to plant the crops first. And as they nurture those crops over the course of the summer, when it comes time to harvest them in the fall, if they have spent enough time nurturing those crops they planted, they're going to have one heck of a crop to harvest come October and November. Now I know Mother nature can determine what that crops going to look like, but here's my point. When it comes to your prospecting, are you planting the crops? Are you nurturing the crops? You see, the odds are you're spending all of your prospecting time trying to harvest crops. You pick up the phone every day of the week and you're trying to convince a prospect to take a meeting with you. Yet you've done nothing to plant the crop, to nurture the crop with that prospect so you can harvest it. So what does planting crops look like? Well, if you look at your weekly calendar, is there time on your calendar to get on LinkedIn and create content that educates your prospects? Is there time on your calendar to send out emails not asking for a meeting, but simply to nurture the relationship with your prospects by sharing emails that provide quality education to them? You see if you're, if your calendar is entirely focused on prospecting Activities that are just done to harvest crops. You have no crops to harvest in the first place because you haven't planted any. You see, back in 2015, I made a decision to start planting crops. In 2015, I made the decision to start my email newsletter. So every month I would send out a newsletter to my list of prospects that didn't ask for meetings. It was simply to provide education and I was giving away a lot of good stuff for free. But what happened over time, six, seven months later, just like a farmer nurturing his or her crops, I had prospects reaching out to me saying, andy, I've been really enjoying your stuff. Can we take a meeting? Our renewals coming up. We'd really like to have a conversation with you. And that year alone, I wrote $180,000 of business on my newsletter alone. That is what it means to plant crops and nurture those crops so you can harvest them down the line. So my advice for you today is when you go and look at what your game plan is going to be for next year, make sure your prospecting activities on a week by week basis are spent with as much time on planting and nurturing crops as they are on harvesting them. If you do that and you go at it with a little consistency, I shouldn't say a little, a lot and a little patience, you're going to be amazed what kind of crop you will be having to harvest when it comes time to grow your book of business. So this is the one thing the insurance industry doesn't tell you. They tell you how to pitch a product. They don't tell you how to crop or plant crops. So take the time, plant those crops, harvest and nurture those crops. Then you will have one heck of a crop to harvest at the end of the road. Enjoy.
