Andy Neary argues that salespeople—particularly insurance advisors—must stop treating prospects as a list to extract sales from and instead build a community by providing value and nurturing relationships. He states the sales landscape shifted in 2020 and buyers are savvier; advisors must give value now. Neary gives concrete pipeline examples (e.g., to write $250,000 in sales you likely need about $750,000 in pipeline) and warns against inflated pipelines filled with low-quality prospects.
Questions this video answers
2020
About $750,000
$150,000, $250,000, $500,000
Chapters
So what the heck do I mean when I say it's time for you to build a community? Andy, isn't my list really just a list of prospects? Yes, and that's your problem. You see, if you are looking at your long list of prospects, which might be 50, 100 prospects, long as one big list you can win business from, they've all got dollar signs over their head. You've already lost. Everything changed in 2020. I know I've said this repeatedly. The way you connect with your prospects, the way you build a relationship with them, the way you move them through a pip, it all changed, and we're not going back. More importantly, those buyers you're trying to win business from are smarter than they've ever been. You can't hold everything inside until you get hired. You have to bring value now and more value than your competition. That is what I mean when I talk about building a community. I've been having a lot of conversations with insurance advisors here in January who have some pretty slothy sales goals this year. I'm hearing numbers of 150,000, 250,000, $500,000. If you're going to have that kind of goal, do you realize what kind of pipeline you have to have? Here's an example. If you want to write $250,000 this year, you probably need a pipeline of about 750,000 to get there. So my question to you is, what are you doing right now to nurture your prospects to create a thriving pipeline totaling $750,000 of potential revenue? No, no, no. Not a pipeline where a third of your prospects are horse crap. I've been there. My early insurance sales career was filled with pipelines of prospects that were never going to do business with me. But it felt so good. It felt confident to go in the sales meeting and say, look at my pipeline. Even though a third of them were crap, you have to stop that. You see, when you look at your prospects just as nothing more than a list, you're just trying to figure out ways to win business from them. A community is something you bring value to. A list is something you just try to extract sales from.
