The Ultimate Guide to Sales Training in the Insurance Industry, with Kareim Cade

Hey. Hey. Welcome back to the Bullpen Sessions podcast. My name is Andy Neary, and this is episode 313. In this episode, we are playing another replay of a recent webinar we hosted with dear friend Kareem Cade. If you don't know who this man is, you will love him. By the time this episode is over, he is full of energy. In this episode, we talk about how to develop future sales leaders in the insurance industry. We cover three topics you, you will love. Number one, why is sales training in the insurance industry so outdated and what can we do to fix it? Number two, how do we define or redefine the role of the sales leader in the insurance industry? And number three, how do we bring more diversity of thought into insurance agencies? So to shift from this is the way we've always done it to embracing the evolution and the change we are going through in this industry when it comes to marketing and sales. So whether you are a sales leader inside an insurance consulting firm, you own your own agency, or you are just a producer looking to improve your sales skills, you are going to love this episode. I'm also excited to share. We've got a lot of changes coming up in the near future to the Bullpen Sessions podcast that I will be sharing more details on in the near future. And I am headed back to Dallas to do some live episodes that you are going to fricking love. I can't wait to share them with you. So further. No further ado. Here is episode 313 with my dear friend, Kareem Cade. How do we develop the future sales leaders of tomorrow? This. This webinar, I know we've got a mix of producers, sales leaders, agency owners. This one was kind of geared for everybody. Today I wanted to bring Kareem and some of you. If you've never met this guy, you're going to absolutely love this guy in the next 60 minutes. I promise you that. As you notice, it's not obvious right now. The man is a Chiefs fan. And when you're seven and, oh, you're going to tout that as much as you can.

But Kareem and I came together. What? Kareem. About two years ago.

A little bit longer than that. A little bit longer.

And. Well, with this idea, with this idea. Two years ago, you and I met. I think it was seven or eight years ago. I'll share this, guys. About seven, eight years ago, I was actually selling a captive insurance program, and Kareem was one of the agencies out of Detroit that we had identified as, hey, they think. I think they'd be a good fit for this. So we, as Kareem's rule is, in business, I don't do business unless I come visit you. He came to our office and we had him in. And I'll just tell you, we actually had to shut the door to the conference room because this man was so gregarious and loud. So you're gonna love this guy.

Two years ago, we came together, we said, hey.

See some common problems right now in the industry, and let what can we do to attack them together. And so we had developed, some of you probably saw our black and white truth about Benefit advising videos that we had created. And that's really what we're going to kind of do today is take a look at some of the things we see right now going on in the industry, whether it's from the producers, how producers can be better, or the agency sales leaders and the agency owners, what can they be doing to be better leaders, build better teams, things like that. And so, Kareem, if you want to take a minute, just introduce yourself, and then we'll just dive right into it.

I like it. Andy. Well, welcome, everybody. Glad to be here with you all. I greet you in my native tongue, what up, doe? That's what we say back in Detroit, and that's just our way of saying hello. And I see. I actually see someone on from Detroit and I'm laughing because I'm in this. All this Chiefs gear, I catch a whole lot of flack. But I've been a Chiefs fan since I was 13, so don't hold it against me. But with that, I've been in the industry 25 years, as Andy mentioned, been an agency owner. And we normally joke and start this off and saying it's about perception, right? And we look at it and we'll look at the two of us and say, which one of us was an athlete, a former athlete, and which one of us an agency owner? And perception would lead you to believe that I would be the athlete and Andy was the agency owner. And it's the furthest from the truth, right? I've been in this space building a business and employee benefits as again, well, over 25 years, we've had a lot of success in that space, doing business in about eight states now and having a satellite office in Tampa, Florida. And so just excited to share with you what has worked for us, things that Andy and I have talked about and really to give it to you from a different perspective. And so I think even from the shock factor of how I look today is going to be different than what you see from a traditional agency owner. But I think that sets the stage and the tone that this will be different than what you've seen or heard before. Although the concepts of course be in the same line of what, what you're accustomed to. So we're excited to get started with that. Andy, I'm gonna push it back over your way and let's jump in.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So guys, we're going to run this not. It's not your typical workshop webinar. I'm not throwing up a big slide deck and walking you through it. This is going to be. We have noticed our, our most well attended or most successful workshops have been what we call more of the fireside chat kind. So that's what today is. This is going to be a back and forth. We're going to go walk you guys through. If you are an agency owner sales leader, you're going to get a ton of insight from Kareem on how to run a high performance team. If you're a producer, you're also going to get a lot of key attributes on how to take your business to the next level. On a side note, guys, on a humorous side note, Kareem was an athlete in high school, but a lot of people would think he was probably football, basketball, maybe track. This man was a swimmer.

I was freestyling, backstroke. I mean, that was my deal.

Like I said earlier, guys, Kareem and I came together two years ago and we saw three glaring problems right now in the insurance industry. Number one, sales training is horribly outdated. And when you look at the way we train producers today, we train them like we did in 1995. And a lot has changed. Not every producer has been, is created equal. And you have to train producers. We like to say you have to build a prospecting strategy around the producer's personality. And we're going to talk about that today. Two, the definition of leader is often misguided in our industry. Often the the man or the woman who sells the most becomes the sales leader. Well, that's not always the best decision in the world. So we're going to talk about how to create a great culture inside your agency, inside your team. And then when we talk about a lack of diversity in thought.

What we see often inside agencies is the traditional. This is the way we've always done it. And you bring producers in, you bring a team in and you just, this is how we do it here without allowing them to bring in their ideas, their thoughts. Especially if you're at a position right now, you're hiring some young producers, they're going to come in with new ideas, they're going to come in with new ways to do it. That millennial Gen Z is the one coming in going, why are we doing it this way?

Exactly.

And you gotta be open to those, those changes get things, guys, changes. Things are happening, things are changing and we got to adapt to it. So where do you see right now? Let me ask you this, Kareem. Why don't we start with your story?

Yes.

You know how you got in the business and that aha moment you had when you realized as a sales producer you got to step up your game.

Yeah. Well, that's a great question. Great starting point, guys. I came out, came in this business. My mother been in the business 30 some odd years. So I am one of those legacy kind of scenarios. And she was involved with voluntary benefits with colonial life. And so that was kind of my start. But what she did for me on the front end was said, before you come here to colonial life, I want you to learn the industry. And so she sent me to New York Life where I learned the insurance industry as a whole. I went from New York Life over to Northwestern Mutual. And part of what Andy is talking about is that some of the traits that I had at that time, lazy, not willing to work, zero work ethic. I mean, those things existed. And so I was unsuccessful, period. I mean, that was the deal. I went to work for my mother and she fired me. The best thing that ever happened for me was that she fired me because she understood that I was not going to be successful. So I don't come from this scenario where somebody handed me an agency, they handed me a book of business, she fired me and said, you need to go do something else until you realize that you really want to take advantage of this opportunity. And I wasn't taught schools for two and a half years, so why is that important to my story? I was very good at being able to talk. I was a horrible freaking listener. I did not listen to anything. I just thought that my sales ability to talk, that I could out talk people. But I never understood what the problem was. I actually became a teacher and I taught special education, third and fourth grade. And any of you, all that are married to teachers, have family members that are teachers. That is a real profession that requires a lot of patience, a lot of listening, a lot of understanding, a lot of empathy because you're dealing with a ton of things there. And I learned that at that space. During that time, I continued to think about why I wanted to come back into this business. And as Andy alluded to, I really kind of followed other sales organizations around the country to see what they were doing. And at a point, after two and a half years, I came back into the business and I was focused though. But I realized that there were things inside of me. So I have a saying. I have a saying that I've said for years. And my saying simply this is that you're the same you, no matter where you take you, unless you change you. And I don't care where you go. So when I look at producers that say they're going to go to another agency, they could say another agency and guess what? They took them same sales with them to another agency and they get the same results. And so until I decided to actually work on me and change the habits that I was working with and look at what were my strengths, how could I focus in on them? I wasn't successful. Once we got that underway, Andy, it was game on. We haven't looked back.

Yeah, you're going to definitely share some insights on how you have built Great Lakes into a powerhouse not only in Michigan, but now in Florida. You know, I look at it from the other Spectrum guys. You know, when we came together, Kareem and I came together, we kind of came at it from. Kareem runs an agency, so he's the agency owner. I'm the guy who used to work for the agency owner. And my. My story was, you know, I grown came up the ranks in the insurance industry, selling, by the way, my first 10 years in sales, I was terrible. I was brutal. I blamed everything but me. My market sucked, my boss sucked, my prospects sucked, but I never created the right results. What changed my life was when we decided to move from Wisconsin to Colorado in 2014. And what happened is I found myself in a market nobody knew who I was. And I had two choices. I could do it the way I was taught, the traditional way we sell, or train in this industry, or I could try something different. And it was there I made a decision, a decision to do something different. I said, I'm going to build a brand. I'm going to get a lot of people to know who I am in a short amount of time. And I'd be honest, a lot of my peers, my team were like, what are you doing? We don't do this in the insurance. This is not the way we do it. I said, you know what? I'm going to do it anyways. Watch. And I built a brand, grew a nice book of business in a market nobody knew me. And I look back, and that's where I realized that, okay, we can't train producers the same way we did 30 years ago.

There is a different way to do business today. And the thing that I realized that made me so successful with that model, guys, is because I built a prospecting strategy around my personality. I'm here to tell you, not everybody's designed to make 500 cold calls a week.

I work with an agency right now that has a producer model that is very unique. They hire a lot of former risk adjusters and underwriters for producers. Think about that. These are introverted people being asked to go sell. So what they have done or what we have helped them do is build a prospecting strategy around their personality. And you know what happens? They start liking how they're doing what they're doing. And when you start liking how you're doing what you're doing, you start doing it more consistently.

Yes.

And when you do it more consistently, guess what? You win. And so that's what we're talking about today. The game has changed right now. What Kareem and I are trying to solve is we see too many agencies right now that aren't growing because they're. They're not adapting to the way things are done. This is why we're seeing too many agencies sell right now. Nobody knows how to grow organically. Two, we see too many dang good young producers come in the industry and burn out, and they're gone in two years. Sell payroll.

Absolutely.

And so that's what we really want to change, is we want to give you guys some tips and ideas right now to adapt your own book of business. Your team, your culture, everything. And so, Kareem, here's where I want to go, guys. We're going to focus on a couple things this today. Number one, we're going to talk about how to build a more solid marketing and sales process.

So, number one, if you're going to grow organically, you've got to have a solid process. We're going to talk about that. Two, we're going to talk about how to build, how to find better sales leaders. Now, we don't necessarily mean you're looking for director of sales. Just you want a team of producers who all have the capability of being leaders.

And number three, we're going to focus on how you help your producers build brands.

How you mean you actually have to do that actually have to help them, Andy?

Hate to tell you, Kareem, it's. It's a crowded market these days and you have to stand out. The days of we just hung a sign on a shingle where an insurance agency, come one, come all that are over. You have to let your producers build brands. The best agencies understand this. They're renting the brands of their producers. The producers are not renting their logo.

Absolutely.

So, Kareem, with that being said, let's kick off with marketing and sales processes, how to build more effective processes. When you look at what you guys are doing at Great Lakes Benefits, whether it be in Detroit, I'm going to ask you a question specifically to the new market you've entered. Florida, Right. What do you. What do you think has made your team so successful from a marketing and sales standpoint?

I'll tell you, you hit it right from the beginning. It's been branding and authenticity. I can tell you those have been the two things that, that have allowed us to stand out, was that we had a brand. So I remember coming into the market and of course, our company is Great Lakes Benefit Group. And people said, you can't come into a Florida market stating Great Lakes Benefit Group. And I'm like, well, why can't I? You know, that's the brand that I've built. Why would I not? I think it actually lends towards a greater story of where we've come from and now where we are today. And so that brand, it preceded us, even though we know we were coming down and we were saying, hey, we're going to a new market. We continue with that same brand along the way. And so the first thing I say to everyone that's looking to build, if you don't have a brand, you don't have anything. Everybody has a brand. Anybody who's successful in our business, they have a brand. The other side of that was what was the authenticity behind the brand? And so for many years, in the front end of my career, I was always trying to be compare and function like other people. And so with me functioning like other people, I say at that time that I was in a space that I was looking to assimilate. And so in that space of looking to assimilate, I did what I thought everybody did. I had no facial hair. I had. I did all the blue suit, the red shirt, red tie, the white. I did all of the things that I thought was the reason that was my brand. When I got to a space that I understood who I was and what My brand was. Then I focused on the authenticity of my brand, that I did not have to change who I was in order to be able to go out and have a great marketing strategy. Because there were going to be people that I attracted that if I'm looking here in this list that I see right there, there may be. Rhett wouldn't attract that. You wouldn't attract Andy. And so I had to look at how do I focus on that market that will respond to how I look at things. You know, what was that? So that authenticity changed the game. That now I said, I am going to be Kareem Kate. I'm loud, I'm gregarious. You know, I'm the fun and the part. Everybody doesn't like that. And I'm okay because I'm not for everybody. I tell people I'm like Dr. Pepper. You know what I mean? Dr. Pepper is not for everybody, Andy. You know what I mean? It's an acquired taste. Right. And so I'm an acquired taste, and I'm okay with that. But part of the way that I work around that is who I hire, bring around me to round out to make sure that we've got all the other colas that people want to drink as well. Right. So it doesn't become strictly about the brand and my personal brand. So there's my personal brand and there's my agency brand. And I think from a marketing standpoint now. Now, do they coincide? Absolutely. Right? Absolutely. However, I want to make sure that my producers still have the ability to fall within my brand. And I may have that adjuster that is not going to be loud. I may have that underwriter that does not have that same skill set that I have. And that's something that I had to learn as a leader that in the beginning stages, all I tried to look for were people that were like me. And I kind of have this saying, the office. Now, if we all think alike. So all of us are not necessary here. I mean, if we don't have any other thought processes there, then we get the same results from the same type of people on a regular basis. So I was trying to hire me, and that was a problem. Right. So when I start thinking about marketing, I'm looking at marketing strictly from the beginning, talking about that brand. The second thing that I would say with you, and I learned this a lot in being around you, Andy, was what content was. I also involved with whether that was content, looking at it from the standpoint of LinkedIn or social media platforms.