Episode 127: 100 to 1 Million
2 Oct 2021 · 19 min
Mike Stromsoe (Unstoppable Profit Podcast) advises independent insurance agencies to employ a broad, mixed online/offline communications strategy to reach their entire marketplace — summarized as 'if you want to reach 100% of the marketplace, you've got to use 100% of the ways.' He lists specific channels (phone, snail mail, email, text, video, social, slide messages, voice broadcast, lumpy mail), emphasizes manual human contact (phone, voice) and persistent follow-up (warm leads typically require 5–12 touches), recommends starting win-back efforts at 'day zero' and continuing until a sale or death, and points to voice broadcasts conducted quarterly (Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day) as nurturing tactics. Episode ends with calls-to-action to visit Unstoppable Profit Producer sites and subscribe.
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Welcome to the Unstoppable Profit podcast. Wherever you are today, if you're starting with nothing or are well on your way to the success you desire, with the right people, processes and promotions in place, you will be unstoppable. And now I'd like to introduce your host, Mike Stromso.
Greetings and welcome to the next episode in the Unstoppable Profit Podcast. I am excited to bring this to you because it's long overdue and at the end of the day, I have conversations with agents all of the time. I had a couple of coaching sessions today for some of our platinum coaching members and it came up again. And it comes up again and again and again. And a Definite part of UPP life, up life is if you want to reach 100% of the marketplace, you got to use 100% of the ways. Let me repeat that. It is so significant. If you want to use. If you want to reach 100% of the marketplace, you've got to use 100% of the ways. And you might be wondering, Mike, what the heck are you talking about? Let me be specific. It has a direct correlation with your bank account. And the simple facet of the independent insurance agency business, and any business for that fact, is new business and retention. The simple business blueprint, the simple business plan is super easy. Get clients, keep clients, get clients, keep clients. It's not more complicated than that. The activities and the strategies and everything below that has a little bit of complexity to it, but ultimately, at the end of the day, it's not that complicated. Is very simple. You've got to hustle, you've got to have a plan, you've got to execute the plan. You have to. You get to. I should say, you don't have to do anything. You get to have a plan, you get to execute the plan, you get to enforce accountability. And you simply just need to lead people as the leader of organizations. So it's been my observation, and I observed it again within the last hour working with a Platinum coaching member. They were talking about the marketing program that they weren't getting the results that they were looking for. I was talking to another Platinum coaching member after that. They were getting results and we were talking about how they can explode their results to an even higher level if they will do just some of the things that I am going to share with you today at the end of the day. The first agent, we will call it Agent A and then Agent B. Okay. Agent A was simply relying upon email. Yeah, email as the sole communication. Start to A marketing program, and they weren't getting the results they were looking for. Why think about your own inbox? I know what I do with my inbox when I get to it. And it's not the first thing I do in the morning, in fact, is well after I start my day. But when I do, I'm deleting everything that I don't need to look at. Delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. And I will suggest anybody that you're attempting to communicate with is doing the same thing. And think about it like this, from the mindset of the consumer. And that's where you need to have your understanding, your emotions, your strategies. All of that need to be in the mindset of the consumer. It doesn't. I'm going to tell them. I'm going to tell you the truth here, my friends. It doesn't matter what you think. It does not matter what you think. It matters what the consumers think. Because ultimately, at the end of the day, they're the ones that you're looking to gain the business relationship with or.
Increase the business relationship with the consumers. So you've got to operate within the mind of the consumers and what's going on in their minds, what's going on in the back of their heads. You need to enter the conversation that's going on in their minds. And when you do that, then you're going to get their attention. Okay, so the answer for that particular Agent A, we need to increase our efforts as far as our overall effort to reach their entire list. And we created a game plan. We dialed it out, divided by the number of the people on their team that were involved in the effort, and. And we walked away with a game plan. A game plan that they could easily start right now, right here, starting today, with no super extra effort. It's just about getting organized and dialing in. What I'm going to speak with you about today, Agent B was getting the leads, but same thing. They've just got to organize their online and offline platforms. Key point, they need to organize and execute their online and offline platforms to further penetrate a marketplace. So I've got a visual for you. And if you're watching this on YouTube, great. If you're not and you're listening to this, driving your car, keep both hands on the wheel. Ten and two, we learned, right? Ten and two. And you can go back and look us up on YouTube. Just go to YouTube.com and search Unstoppable profit producer click videos. And all of our podcasts will Appear before your eyes. So you can go back and look at this visual as well. But here's the, here's the bottom line, my friends. At the end of the day, if you want to reach 100% of the marketplace, you've got to use 100% of the ways. What does that look like? It looks like this. Okay, so the campaigns that we were putting together, the framework of the campaigns that we were putting together for our coaching members, we're really around phone, snail mail, email, text, video, social media of all types, slide messages, voice broadcast, build in some lumpy smell, AKA a wow, shock and awe package. And there could be more. This is just the starting list of the ways to design a campaign. Now, how do you know which of these to use? And the other response that I get, and I've experienced this in my own business journey over 47 years, roughly getting all of these done in every single campaign 100% of the time. It's a challenge. So if you can't get them all done, that's fine. Pick the top ones that you can do that you can build into your online and offline communications to further penetrate a marketplace. Now, the other thing that you're going to have to know, and it's not for this particular podcast, we'll cover it in another podcast, is what's your content and what's the context of your content that you're sharing with the particular marketplace. In fact, I may have covered that in a recent podcast and we'll come back to it again. Okay, so, but the missing piece, the missing piece to a lot of this can be either automated or non automated. It can be both. Is this top one. It's the phone. I mean, I'll just say it. So many people in today's marketplace and I talk to agents all the time. I said, tell me about your efforts to call these people. They're like, what? I said, yes, pick up the damn phone and call them. I said, tell me about those efforts.
That's exactly what I get. Silence. And that means they're not doing it. It's got to be a part. Now that's kind of where the, you know, go down here to slide messages. The other thing that's not on here is voice broadcast as an example. Voice broadcasting is something we still do. We've been doing it for years. We do it a minimum of four times a year to our entire current database that are not customers. It includes some prospects. It includes all of our customer database, our COIs, etc. Etc. We do four voice broadcasts a year, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, and Father's Day. They are specifically designed messages to be nurturing only, but they hear a voice. And the thing with your voice, you have the ability to inflect the H2H formula. And by the way, the H2H formula was just born last week. Stay tuned. We are going to be sharing a lot more with you about the H2H formula. Back to today's training. So at the end of the day, that human voice that you got has the ability to soften, to strengthen, to care, to not care, etcetera, etcetera. You get the gist, right? See, that is the power that an email, a text message, and a lot of other things can't land.
And that's why people are not getting the conversion that they want, because it's got to meet every one of the human needs as far as communicating with you. See, at the end of the day, there's four horsemen, if you will, out there in the world, the four big companies that are dominating things. But see, the good news is, my friends, you've got something that those four horsemen will never have, and that's that ability to have a human relationship. So at the end of the day, if you want to use. If you want to reach 100% of the marketplace, you've got to use 100% of the ways, or as many as possible. And so what does that look like? Well, at the end of the day, first of all, you've got to do your marketplace research and understand how a particular marketplace likes to communicate. And you have to have a decent understanding of that. And we've got all that information available to help people, you know, go into a marketplace and understand how they like to be communicated with. Then you build your online and offline communication systems. So let me give an example back to our list here. Okay, so if we took this list and we wrote here, is it online or offline? Phones that can be offline. A live person picking up the phone and dialing a number? Or it could be. It could be offline or online. Online mean automated. Okay. Offline or automated. Offline or automated. Phones can be offline. Live phone call or automated as well. Okay, it can be both. Snail mail, that's an offline strategy. Email, that can be. That's an automated strategy. Okay. Text messaging, that can be both. I mean, that could be a manual situation or it can be automated. You have to be extremely careful. However, if you're going to automate text messaging, you got to know your Marketplace. And you got to be very careful. You don't want to ever get shut down.
Okay.
Video, Video could be a manual situation, one on one, very, very personalized, or it can be automated. Okay. By the way, one of the things that I've really gotten a lot way down the road with is just learning how to navigate video and record video and get it into YouTube, like that and all that kind of stuff. So that's cool. Social media, that's mostly automated. Slide messages, that's mostly automated. But you got to do some manual work behind that voice broadcast that's also an automated function. And then lumpy mail or wow, shocking off packages, that's offline. So this is a mix of offline and automated strategies that you can use to bolster the response rate in any marketplace. The other thing that came up today, in the conversations with Agent A and Agent B, I reminded them that, look, we are currently in the middle of a noisy, polluted, extremely busy marketplace. And what does that mean for you? When trying to penetrate a marketplace? You can't rely on one or two touches and think that you're going to penetrate the marketplace. It's not going to happen. As good as a marketer as you might be, it's not going to happen many times. You've got to hit multiple times. And my recent study and ongoing study of marketplace and how to reach people in communicating and promotion and marketing, a warm lead. You need to hit them from five to 12 times. Five to 12 times, possibly before you're going to get them to raise their hand. So that's why it's important to have a sweet mix of online and automated communication going on at all times to reach out to them. Let me show you with you another little tidbit from Agent A.
Part of our strategy that I talked about with Agent A to, you know, really get them into the consistent growth patterns that they need to be in and to upgrade their patterns was not only do they need to have all of this going on within their existing, if you will, acre of diamonds, this beauty, which is your business, that you need to continue to polish all of the time, you need to continue to polish your existing acre of diamonds all of the time, but your referral programs and your win back programs, your lost soul programs. Their question was, at what point should we start going after the win backs and the people that might have left us for whatever reason? My answer was day zero. Day zero. And if you want to know more about lost souls and win backs, go back and find a prior podcast that I'VE done on that. There's one out there recently. Okay. So at the end of the day, day zero is when it starts. And they said, how long do I pursue them? I, I said until one of two things happens. They either buy or they die. They either buy or they, God forbid, pass away. That's it. Until then, you pursue them all of the time, vigorously. That's the beauty of having a good strategically planned and executed.
Offline and automated system going on all of the time simultaneously. Okay? And ultimately at the end of the day, you will earn a ton of credibility and confidence from the marketplace by doing your fiduciary responsibility of continuing to pursue them at the end of the day. That's what it takes, my friends. And if you think that you're going to get down the road with the kind of growth and everything else that you're looking to achieve with just sending out one or two communications and hoping that somebody responds, I'm here to tell you it ain't going to happen, my friends. You've got to do the work. You've got to get organized. You have to create. You get to create a plan. You get to create people who are going to execute the plan. You get to enforce accountability, you get to have consistency in your efforts of output and you get to have a full on game plan. A follow up. The fortune is in the follow up happening all of the time, executed by excellent people working within world class processes and systems. That's the bottom line, my friends. It is not super complicated. You have to, you get to put all this together and the bottom line is this. If you want to reach 100% of the marketplace, you've got to use 100% of the ways. And if you don't have 100% of the ways organized, that's okay. The other good news is, regardless of your past, you have a spotless future. So get organized. Drop everything else you're doing right now, invest a couple of hours with a pen, a piece of paper and maybe some of your top team members and sit down, create a plan and go execute it. Because it only starts with two things. A decision and action. A decision and action. With those two things, you are well on your way to all of the success that you are looking to have. I hope this has helped you. This is Mike Stromso coming to you live. And I am widely recognized as the leading author, speaker and coach for the independent insurance agency industry. You can find me at Unstoppable Profit Producer. That's unstoppable profit producer.com if you're interested in attending a virtual or a live event to learn to grow your business, create wealth and have more freedom to live life on your terms, just visit us. Our virtual event is at uppfaststart.com uppfaststart.com we hold virtual events throughout the year. You can go to that site, find out the next upcoming virtual event@uppfaststart.com or you can visit our live event portal at bunstoppablebootcamp.com that's Be Unstoppable Boot Camp.com both events are designed to share with you some of my best money making strategies proven over 35 years of research in your industry to help you grow your business, create wealth so you too can have more freedom to live life on your own terms. It's been such a great privilege and pleasure to spend this time with you to help you grow your business, create wealth and have more freedom. But none of it's going to happen unless you're willing to a Make a decision b Take action and the action will lead to your next wins. They're going to lead to your next lessons and until the next podcast. By the way, if if you are not subscribed to our podcast, if you enjoyed what you heard today, go to unstoppable profit podcast.com that's unstoppable profit podcast.com make sure you subscribe so you'll be automatically notified at the launch of every podcast. And of course we're out there on all the podcast channels. Stitcher, Google.
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