Unlocking Insurance Success | Wisdom from the Expert Andy Neary PART 1

The wildest thing that has ever happened in my agency was trying to help a poor employee consumer get the health care they need at the right facility, at the right provider. Unfortunately, I sent them to a place that was not covered by insurance. Little did I know I was absolutely putting the employee in a bad position until the day they showed up at my office cubicle to absolutely wring my neck. That was one of the scariest moments and in my career because I thought I was going above and beyond. But all I was doing was creating more problems for somebody who was, let's be honest, living paycheck to paycheck and relying on my advice to, to get the care they need. One of the lowest moments in my career. Hi, my name is Andy Neary. I am with Complete Game Consulting in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin and I'm an insurance dude.

Insurance dudes are on a mission to escape being handcuffed by our agencies.

How?

By uncovering the secrets to creating a predict consistent and profitable agency sales machine.

I am Craig Pretzinger.

I am Jason Feldman.

We are agents.

We are insurance.

Boom.

All right, all right, there we go. Why dive a little deeper into that? That's crazy.

Oh man.

Somebody stormed in the office.

It was so I, this is going back 15 plus years and I was, I had sold a health plan to a group here in Wisconsin. This is before we moved to Colorado. And I knew there could be network issues because they were looking from some cost savings. So we went with a specific plan that helped save a little money but was an adjustment on the network of health, health insurance, the healthcare hospital providers. And I knew this couple needed help because they were seeing they were going to a certain facility that wasn't going to be covered. So I tried to help them, steer them to another facility to help them make sure it's covered. Unfortunately, I steered them to another one that was not covered. It was something for their child and I thought I was doing the right thing, but I wasn't. And yes, the father, the dad ended up standing behind me in my cubicle one day and somehow, somehow was able to walk his way into our office. And man, you fast forward to today, it probably would even be scarier with as much angst and stress that there is in the society today.

Yeah, I don't know if they'd get in now.

Yeah, that's a good point.

So this is way back, right?

Yeah, this is 2000 probably. 0809.

0809. So you were like 21?

No, I was 18. I would have been pushing 30. I was about, I was about a good 10 years.

I was trying to, I was trying to help you there.

No, man, I'm willing to admit when I'm wrong.

Well, I think we've all had.

Unfortunately, stories like that where, you know, whether or not we were early in the insurance career, I came in, man, I had only worked in an office for a little bit in an insurance office. And then I came in and I'm trying to. I took over an agency and I had to like, pretend like I knew what was going on. I had zero clue at all. And yeah, steering people in the wrong direction was. Definitely happened a few times.

My issue is I used to be a horrible people pleaser and I still have that from time to time. And I think what, what happened in the past is I would want to help people so much. Yep. To help them avoid a problem or, or if I knew I had potentially created a problem, I'd go above and beyond to try to solve it.

Yeah.

But more often than not, it just created a bigger problem. Right.

And eliminates your ability to effectively do anything.

Right.

Because you're spending all your time on all this.

It locks the office down.

Micro crap.

Yep. Yep. Yeah. Y.

Have you done the disc profile?

Years ago.

Were you a high eye?

Yes.

Yeah. Same here. It's so funny too because it's like there, there's like a, like a dichotomy to that.

Right.

It's like you're, you're such a people pleaser and people like you and you're like, you're worried. Like you get people to like you. You want people like you, so you're willing to do anything. And, and, but with that, there's a lack of honesty too because it's like you're not willing to just say like, no or I don't like that because.

You know, you think you're doing the right thing. Yeah. But you're not. And like you said, it only negative. It only hurts your credibility and trust. I talk about it now, you know, early in my career from a sales perspective, I always won the likability game. So prospects liked me. They take meetings with me. I never, I, I had a problem establishing the credibility to get hired early in my career. But I was a likable guy. So I always got caught in the friend zone with prospects and that's a bad place to be.

Oh yeah. You didn't push hard enough at the end.

You didn't push hard enough. They always, they like you. They'll take meetings with you. But they're never going to take you seriously enough to hire you.

Yeah, it's like, it's a balance. Right? You have to. You have to make them like you.

But not too much, 100%, but you have to. It has to be mixed with credibility, for sure. Yeah.

Well, so in working with agents so often, like, how do you. What do you see out there with.

That's a big problem. I think there's a lot of advice. I talk to a lot of sales directors in this industry right now, and the biggest challenge they have is their producers are good when they get referrals. It is so hard to find pure hunters these days. People wanting to go out and find their own business. It is a big challenge in the insurance industry right now.

So do a lot of people want them, like the agent to go find business?

Yeah. So you have a lot of agencies today that hire a producer, right? Yeah. And it's. Let's face it, one of the reasons I. My business exists is there's just a. There's a lack of training, there's lack of good coaching in the industry. And I think a lot of agencies just hire a producer and it's almost like this, all right, go get them. And. And they want them to go find their own business, rely on their own network. And what they're. What they're finding out is this producer they've hired is really good if you give them a lead or give them a referral. But to ask them to go find their own business, it's. It's a challenge. There's not. There's not a lot of producers who have that drive and that discipline to go find their new. Their own business. What.

What do you feel about that? Because I'll tell you how I feel about that.

Yeah, go. I'd love to hear your perspective. Yeah.

The, like, what business says, hey, you know, I got this business, I'm not gonna get leads or anything. I'm just gonna. You go get the lead and then you close the lead. And like, that's like, why not just start your own? You know, like, no other industry does that, right?

Yes, but you understand marketing, my friend. A lot of this insurance, I'm just gonna say it. Insurance, I think, is way behind the times. On marketing. I agree with you. Yeah.

What about on technology 100?

A good, a good agency, right. In 2023 should have a marketing strategy to be constantly providing good leads for producers to go close. But they're not. They're. They're relying. That happen, man. I don't know I, I've, I've seen it for a long time.

I, I, I call it the traditional insurance two step. I see the marketing strategy in this industry being buy a big list of leads, you have no idea if they're qualified or not, and then hammer them with phone calls versus what can we do from a marketing perspective to create a lot of name recognition, a lot of brand recognition, but also create inbound leads for our producers?

That's the goal.

There's not a lot of that going on. Yeah.

So crazy.

And what about the pipeline? Do you think that agents have an understanding of what they, how many quotes they need to do? Like, so we're pnc, right? That's been our, our, our world is the PNC world. I know that there's a lot of, you know, health care and life agents and all that listening to because it applies. But in the PNC world, the name of the game is quotes, right? We, we need quotes. And for many years I had no under, I had no understanding. And it, and it's interesting because the math is very simple.

Right.

But for some reason it's not something that everybody talks about or we figure out or maybe because it's so obvious you don't even put it together. But it's very easy to determine. If I want to write X, I need to do Y.

Right. Then you just fill it in 100%. I, I, someone was, I was just talking to somebody over the weekend about this. Had I gone to college knowing I was going to get into insurance, Right. Because very few of us got in this by design. Right. I would have gotten two degrees, finance or finance, which I did. Because you got to know numbers.

Yeah.

And I would have gotten a psychology degree because understanding the buyer is so key. But going back to your point about the math, this is a game of math, isn't it? I mean, if you want to, if you know your numbers, to hit the certain level of revenue you want to hit for the year is going to require X number of wins. Right. AORs.

Just reverse engineer the math. Okay, so I need how many proposals then to generate that number of AORs.

Cool. How many first meetings do I need to generate that number of proposals? And I tell producers at that point, throw away the sales number, the, the revenue number, throw away the proposals and just focus on the number of intro meetings you need or whether your KPI is quotes. Just that is your KPI. Focus on nothing else.

How come?

I was just saying how, how come? Yeah, how come. Why, why do we want to look.

At that I think because too many producers, in my opinion, every year, every January, they sit down and they create a big sales goal, right? And it's usually a revenue number. A quarter of a million dollars, 300,000, 500,000. Let's be honest. Most of them do not have a plan of attack to get there. They just set a big number, and then the whole year, they sit there and they stare at that number, right? And they. After about three months, they start getting nervous. If they would just say, hey, I know that If I get 30 quotes this year or 50 quotes this year, I'm gonna hit that number. And all I do is I focus on that 30 or that 50. I think it makes the goal definitely more palatable and more realistic. And as long as they pair it with an actual plan of action to get to those 30 quotes, it's gonna happen.

It's like they're. They're only focused on the result, but not the steps it requires to get.

What do they call that? The leading indicators versus the lagging. Yeah, they're focused on the lagging without saying, wait, but what are the leading indicators to get there?

Would you get in a boat and look at and go, okay, I want to go to Italy. So you take out the map, and all you do the whole time is stare at the map as the boat is driving.

Exactly.

We'll get there. I'm looking right at Italy.

The wind's blowing the right way, isn't it? Yes.

Craig, I would not get in that boat with you if you were. Listen, you were driving the boat to Italy across.

I am driving the boat to Italy, and I have a map, and I'm looking at Italy. I see Barcelona right here. Italy. Barcelona, Italy.

Well, there's our. There's our first problem. We're not going to Barcelona, Italy.

Oh, no.

I know. It's jokes. Come on. I had to take the same classes you guys did.

Sydney.

Whatever.

So this is cr. This is such a good topic in the sense of, like, there's so much delusion. First off, I would have to say.

Because of the reoccurring revenue and we have a retention, like, it's. It's one of the only industries that we can actually not have some sort of way of acquiring business, because that is so important that we can actually not have that in place and still have a business. Most of the time. If you don't have a way to get sales, you don't have a business.

Thank you. So I would hug you if I could right now, because I need more agencies to Hear that?

You know what I think, and this is my opinion, and I'd like your take on it is I think that there are a lot of agents out there and this is not going to be a popular comment. Oh no.

Oh no.

Automatically losing, losing viewers or whatever. But like they're just employees, they're not business owners. And it's like time to like take off. It's time to put on the big boy pants and become the business owner and realize that dude, if you want to like double your income, take out half your income this year, put it into marketing and make it happen.

100. Yeah, I, I couldn't agree with you more. If we got more producers to think like entrepreneurs, even if they don't own the agency, they do much better. You're running your own business. It might just be under somebody else's roof.

Right.

But you're running your own business. And what you just said, you know, if you go into most agencies today and let's. What's the rule of thumb? 10% of your revenue should be spent on marketing. Most of them are probably spending 2 or 3%.

Right.

If that. And most producers here, here's where I think the problem starts.

And that when 10, I think is. Is low.

And I agree. I agree. Yeah. But I think another problem that's been created in the industry, and I was a recipient of this at one time when I was a producer, is a lot of these producers get hired with these huge salaries, two year guarantees, so they come out of the gate comfortable.

And they might even be handed a book of business. So to your point, because we're an industry that is so recurring revenue rich. You have producers getting hired and I, I put air quotes around producers because let's be honest, they're not really a producer.

Right.

They're coming day one. They're comfortable with a salary and some business revenue coming in from existing business. They were handed. How are you going to incent that producer to go out and build a great book of business? It's difficult if they don't have the drive or the discipline.

Right. Because there's no pain.

There's no pain. They're coming. There's no pain from day one.

Well, yeah, look at it. Where's the pain? The pain is doing work. So hey, over here, I'm making money. I don't care.

Yeah, right.

I mean that's not everybody. But if you're not entrepreneurial, seems like.

Yep. I had, I have a friend of mine who runs an agency in Indiana and I love how he Views it. He says, when I hire producers, Andy, I view them as intrapreneurs. Right now. They don't own their business. I do. But they're entrepreneurs. And if Sunday they came to me and said, hey, you know, thank you for what you've done for me. I'm now going to go start my own agency. He's like, I couldn't be prouder of him.

Entrepreneur. That's a Patrick bet David word.

Oh, yeah, he's been on here. Has he really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now I feel honored. Gee.

Got mad at Jason.

Wow. Yeah.

I love that you're shocked. And it's probably because of Craig's Barcelona comment that we could get him on, but that's okay.

And you made him angry.

You know, I, I, I am familiar with the fact that Barcelona is the capital of Spain. Okay, I do know that. And I didn't Google it or look.

I, I, I, I just saw a video on YouTube this morning with Pat Patrick bet David. He was on somebody else's podcast and the thumbnail said, patrick bet David may have just gone too far. So I'm curious to what he said in the video.

Oh, that's marketing, though. It's beautiful. That is good.

That's awesome. Congratulations for guy you guys. Get you guys to have guests like that on the show again. I'm honored to even be here.

It's been a, it's been a while. But yeah, he was a good one. He was fun.

He was fun.

Yeah.

Good dude.

Super cool. I love this topic because.

We run a program where we help agents get their.

Sales agents leads.

Awesome.

So what we've seen, I mean, there's two types of agents that come into this. Those who understand, hey, you gotta spend a little bit and like.

Make, make.

It flow, fill the pipeline. It takes a little bit of time and that's the way. And those agents are the ones that just blow up like, or selling a ton. I mean, and then we, we still have some that are smaller operations, but like, they, they feel the pain a little bit for a while and then, dude, that's when they fill the pipeline and then the consistency happens. But you got to invest.

Yeah, I, I couldn't agree more. You know, when we work, we take a little different angle from coaching and training with producers. We, we really focus on the message. I tell people, I think the core pillars of a good marketing strategy and in our industry, insert the word prospecting for marketing. Right?

Yeah.

You got to know four things. Who are you talking to? What are you saying to them? How are you Saying it? Where are you saying it? If you have a clear picture of what you're doing with those four things and you apply the work to it, whether you do it or you help somebody help you do it with leads, you're going to do well as long as you stay consistent. But the word you just used, Jason, consistency. That's where people struggle. It's. Are you willing to get up? I just put a post about this out this afternoon. Are you willing to get up every day and do the boring shit every single day?

Yep.

Nope.

Yep. It's just like working out. Like who? It's like the crazy people at the beginning of the year that work out for a week. Start feeling the pain, which of course you always go backwards. It's a lot more pain and, and a lot of breaking down of muscles and it sucks. And no results were like the. Well, the results that you're getting are horrible.

Yeah.

Your feedback, your instant gratification is pain.

Pain. You're in pain. You're in a worse spot than when you started working out.

You know, I tell, I tell our clients when they hire US, about 90 days in, after doing what we teach you, you're gonna say, this nary guy's full of crap. You're gonna think like, this doesn't work. But then all of a sudden, something, right? No, I don't lead with that. But.

When we start working with them, I'm like, it takes time. This takes patience. And you're gonna hit that point where you don't believe it's working. And then all of a sudden you get that one sign, it is, and then another, and then another. And before you know it, you have that hockey stick effect.

Yeah.

And we've seen it with our clients. That 90 day mark, they kind of start questioning, and then all of a sudden it's like, ah, I get it. And then they take off.

Have you read the Dip?

I have not.

It's a little book. It's. It's cool. It's called the Dip. And I can't remember the author's name now. It was around here somewhere. I don't know where it is, but we talk about that a lot because it's you. You get the thing because you want the results and you're super excited and you start doing it, but nothing happens. So either, either you give up and eject, right? Or. Or you keep going, but it's still. It takes a while before the hockey stick happens.

Right.

And that's the dip, like, Right. Typically, we give up on things. Right. Before we're about to break through. And you know this, I mean, you've coached people. So you see, you know, if they, when they drop off, they were right there, right? And they were probably in the most pain that they've been in the whole time, but it was just about to happen. And we see it, we see it a lot. You know, it just depends if it's not a good fit or whatever. But they don't want to do the work, right? Because you have to do the work. You have to put in, you have to understand how the thing flows. It's, it's, it, it takes time. Like, like you said. So how do you, how have you now, now understanding the concept or the understanding of the dip? How do you navigate that with your clients? And what would you say to anybody that is starting something and, and maybe not seeing those immediate results?

You know, I think it comes down to starts with, it starts with what is your weekly plan? You know, when it comes to the, what activities are you doing from a prospecting perspective? And what we, what we try to coach our clients to do is, you know, the three of us have all been taught how to create, let's call it linear awareness, right? Cold calling. I know how to call one prospect at a time. That's what I was taught early on, right? I've got, I can, I can email one prospect at a time. I was taught how to go door to door in industrial parks, right? I can knock on one door at a time. Today, with all the technology and the tools we have, you got to create exponential awareness with it, which is what can I do to get one message in front of many prospects at one time, right? Email newsletters, email campaigns, social media content, public speaking, webinars, whatever it is, podcasts. If you mix the exponential with the linear activity you're doing, you will create activity you almost can't. Not, I really believe that. But, but, but what is that plan of action every single week? Because here is what happens if you don't have a plan. If you don't have a plan, you will always resort back to what's easiest. And believe it or not, picking up the phone and dialing is easy. You may not get any results, but at least you can check off those 25 calls you made, right? And so what we really try to get them dialed in on is that weekly plan. What are you doing every week? Yes, you still have to pick up the phone, send out some messages directly to prospects. But how are you mixing the exponential awareness in there to create the credibility and the recognition. And if you do that every single week, you will create activity for yourself. And the icing on the cake is when you start creating inbound activity, when somebody actually reaches out to you because they're getting, getting your emails or your social media content.