Episode 202: Cloning Your Clients (Part 2) with Kevin Donlin

Welcome to the Unstoppable Profit podcast. This podcast will give independent insurance agents all of the tools to grow your business and live life on your terms. Wherever you are today, if you're starting with nothing or 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 Stromsol.

Foreign.

Welcome to the next episode of the Unstoppable Profit podcast. And I have back back for another round, a very special guest because had Kevin on client cloning systems and we had such phenomenal feedback about the gold nuggets. Yes, the gold nuggets. Kevin was dropping these, but they were real gold nuggets on the podcast. And I said we need to bring Kevin back and because I know he's got more. So, Kevin, welcome back.

Hey, Mike, thanks. Just really good to be back here. I'm looking forward to today.

Yeah. And since you and I, we were talking before we went on today about quote, when we grow up, etc. Etc. We can also say welcome back Cotter, right?

Yeah. That puts us squirrely in the 70s and 80s.

Yeah, exactly. So. And John Travolta and Vinnie Barberino and. And the rest. Horse Shack. On. On we go. So, Kevin, we were kind of wrapping up on the last podcast, all things promotion and marketing. And that's your area of expertise. But in case somebody missed the beginning of that, give everybody one to two minutes. Who's Kevin Donlin and why should we listen to anything you have to say?

All right, Mike. Well, thank you. So my business, my company is client cloning systems. What I focus on is helping people grow without paid advertising, without a whole lot of paid marketing, really a lot of internal out, inside outgrowth. And I started in marketing 1994. I may have sold the first ebook on the Internet. That was in 1994. It was called how to find a job on the Internet. You had to send me a check for $10 and write your email address on the memo line and then I would email you the product. That was some fun beer money. And I get introduced to e Commerce in 1994. Then I was webmaster for FedEx.com for about two and a half years until 1998. That's when I struck it out on my own. Since 1998, I've been doing marketing, advisory services and copywriting for clients around the United States with a lot of sales gains for a million dollars and more on multiple occasions. I'm the author or co author of five books on marketing and including the upcoming book later this year, the Client Cloning Blueprint. So what I'd like to talk about today would be a couple of ways to grow your business from the inside. One would be retention, which I know is really important to your audience. And then second would be a more general, just collection of marketing tips that require little or no ad spend. And it's more about thinking smart as opposed to working harder, you know, working smarter instead of harder. And that's what's available to everyone. If you just, just get a little creative and look outside your own little world. There's a whole bunch of things you could be doing and we'll talk about some, some of those today.

Yeah, and I learned that this morning in my own time of personal development. They were talking about getting away from the herd.

Exactly.

Because, you know, everybody's part of a herd and sometimes we can't get our mind out of the herd mentality because we're in the herd. But really the next big wins are what's away from the herd. And that's exactly where you're going to take us today.

Yep, that's part of it.

That's fantastic. And you know, that's our encouragement here. If you just get one, two or three ideas from these podcasts and you actually take action on them, that's when everything's going to change. And sometimes there's going to be massive wins, sometimes there will be lessons. But it's the lessons that make us who we become. So, Kevin, let's get into helping some people. Sound good?

Cool. So let's talk about retention real quick. So Ken, tell me, from your insurance perspective, what does retention mean to the typical agency head? How much of a big deal is retention?

Well, I can tell you this because I have a formulated spreadsheet that is plug and play. And if we put in a half million dollars in revenue as the annual commission income in an agency and they move the retention number from 85% to 89%, okay, that will mean over a 10 year period. Let me think about this for a minute. It could mean as much as 3 to $400,000. And if they move the needle from 85 to say 89 to 93, four more points double that. So that's another 7 to $800,000. And I've seen that same example on a million dollar commission income agency.

Huh.

So they moved the needle from 85 to 89. That's probably at least.

I've seen it as high as 8, $900,000 and more. And you move it from 85 to 93. I've seen it over $2.1 million in additional commission income over a 10 year period.

So we're talking about basically funding your retirement if you let those funds, you know, accrue for 10, 20 years. That's what it is, right? We've just funded your retirement or paying.

The tax bill once you decide to move on. One of the two.

Yes. So it's funding their retirement. Absolutely true. But I mean, it's good to have all that extra money. And the thing is, you know, it's the investment.

And I'm not sure if it was Ben Franklin or Warren Buffett said, the best investment you can ever make is in yourself.

That was Warren Buffett. Yeah. So about retention, let me talk to you about my insurance agent. He's a state farm guy. And I've heard from so many people, you know, you're probably overpaying. You're probably overpaying. Yeah, I know. You know, I have a 10th grade education and, and I say, you know what? I really like Marty. I've had other agents. I just like the guy I call and everyone's friendly. Has nothing to do with insurance. It's nothing to do with money premiums. I don't know, I don't know what I'm paying. I just know that when I got a problem, I call Marty and he fixes it. I've known the guy for over 10 years. So the, you know, the simplest thing you could do to increase retention in my book, is to be connected to your clients in a personal way. Retention is a form of connection. We're retained by a business if we're connected to them. If you think about it, if you're, if you're a free agent, you're off. You're off looking for another agency. If you're a free client, if you're connected, you're retained. And so what, what connects you to other people? It's not the price. Nine times out of ten, price is often secondary. It's usually secondary. You and I were talking earlier. A lot of the things that connect you to other people are personal. So you and I were talking and I, I got to look at your office there and just quickly, I saw an Oakland Raiders helmet. And that is, like, cool for me because I'm from Detroit, I'm not from California, but going up in the 70s, as we just talked about earlier, the Lions have been bad since 1957 was their last championship. They've been garbage. They just got good in the past year. So growing up I was actually an Oakland Raiders fan. There's no way on earth you could have known that at all. But it made me, I was just showing you this, the scientific graphic. Here's how much more I like Mike now because he's a Raiders fan. Growing up like me, it's just, it's unexplainable, it's totally irrational. But I like Mike more now because we shared a, you know, we were fans of the Raiders back in the 70s. How weird is that? So can you plan for that? No. But you can make it happen more predictably if you just put more of yourself out there to your clients. Whether it's the, it's the simplest place in the world is your about page on your website. It can also be on your LinkedIn profile. Put in things about you personally. You don't have to tell your whole life story. You don't have to over share, don't talk about your blood sugar or you know, the fact that your mother in law is dead and you're really happy about that. You know, that's over sharing. But if it's your personal stuff about your hobbies, for an example from my own business, I post it almost every day on LinkedIn. And I did a post back in October about a spartan obstacle course race I had run. So that's one of my personal favorite things to do is I run obstacle course races. There are mud races, there's barbed wire, you know, rope climbing, you carry a hundred pound rock and it's, it's tough stuff. And you, y', all, there's 100 chance of getting injured. The last one I'd lost four toenails and know my wife is going, why do you do that? I said, it's fun. And then she's looking at my, my foot and I've got, you know, six toenails and four just appendages that look like sausage. And she says fun, fun. Anyway, I posted about the, the, the Spartan race I'd run and I got more comments, more likes, more interaction than any brilliant marketing stuff I have written about ever. It was like the most highly interacted with posts I had done and to me that's a success because people were looking at my profile. I was starting conversations with people totally unpredictable. But because I'd put something personal out there about me, bam. All these people reacted to it and you know, go figure. So I've retained more people in my orbit on LinkedIn. They're coming back. We've, we've had connections as a result. So if you can do that on your about page and your website, your newsletter, if you're sending one out and you should be in some form, the web page that, the communications, your LinkedIn. All these places are opportunities to just make a personal connection to your clients. And the more of those you can make, it's just like Velcro. The more teeth that hook on to the, to the fabric, the closer you're connected, the more tightly you retain. So that's a first, easy tip. The cost to you is zero dollars to be more personal and engaging and to be more real. People don't want to do business. I don't want to do business with a quote machine online and just type in my age and my income and get a. Get a quote that's complete. I don't know where that's coming from. That's completely inhuman. And as we get more into, you know, artificial intelligence in the coming days and weeks and months, how about. I would really enjoy a little bit of human intelligence and human interaction. And that's what you can do to retain your clients is to just be personal and be personable, you know. Now the way to be interesting is to be interested in other.

Let's pause on that. The way to be interesting is to be interested.

Yeah, like most of my best ideas, that's not from me. That's from a guy by the name of Jay Abraham. I learned that back in the 90s from him, one of my marketing mentors. So be interested in your people and you can use this thing. It's called a CRM. I don't know what every specific agent's going to have in their, in their business. A customer relationship management software. I use Salesforce. And I got all these things from every, every phone call I make with someone. I put in another little note. So I know where they live, I know the names of their kids, I know their hobbies, where they went to school. And after we hang up here, I'm going to open up Mike Stromsel's file and it's going to say raiders fan in the 70s. And that's my new addition. And so that's how I never forget stuff is I don't have to worry about forgetting. You got technology. Use the technology to be more human. Use the technology to make better personal connections. And you can, you can't help but set yourself apart. So that's a quick little tirade on retention for you.

Deep, significant, meaningful.

Hi, relationships.

Human interaction. Human.

I love that. Human intelligence. Human interaction.

Numbers were fantastic. I've never heard you say that. I've heard you talk a lot about retention. I would like to see that spreadsheet or you and I have to talk later because I'm going to write that up in an upcoming article. Those are some fantastic. You funded your retirement if the, if that money just doubles once.

Jeez, that's incredible.

It's proven, in fact, recently had an agent here, we were working on their business and had proven numbers that their retention uptick was continuing to go up. And part of the key strategy was their newsletter program. Super online and offline. She said that's the only thing that's changed that in our business practice. We've continually improved our people. We did two things. We continue to improve our people and we started the newsletter program.

Right. Let me talk secondly about newsletters. That's an area of expertise for me. I am a copywriter. I do a lot of direct mail. And when I say you, do you mail a newsletter to people? People here. Do I email something. And so they'll say, yeah, I say with paper, on paper, with a stamp. No, I email. So mail and email are different verbs. And certainly you can and should use email as a supplement to your offline, to your print newsletter. And I've been mailing one off and on for close to 17 years to my clients. And it's not, it does not need to be expensive. In fact, it shouldn't be at the beginning. And anything on paper is better than nothing. And so let's just deconstruct the word newsletter. It's news in the format of a letter. So news can be about insurance industry development. And that's fine and good. But we just spoke earlier about making a personal connection. So I want to challenge anyone's, you know, idea about what should go in a newsletter and really challenge you to put about 50 to 70% personal information in the newsletter and about 20 to 30% about your industry. Because just think of the most boring newsletters you get. They're 100% industry related. And I'll tell you one that almost everyone gets. If you've got a cpa, you get something from your CPA every quarter and it goes straight in the recycling bin for me because it's all about taxes. And I pay you to think about taxes so that I don't have to think about tax. You're, you're just completely missing the boat here. So if you want to tell me about insurance industry developments. No, because I pay you to do that for me. Now, if you want to tell me about a way to save on my boat insurance that I may not know about. Cool, I'm up for that. But don't tell me about something in Congress that's going to impact my, my prices because I don't want to ever hear about Congress. And I want you to do that thinking. You know, that's like sausage making. Hey, come watch me make the sausage. No, no, I would rather just have the sausage.

Right.

So, you know, don't invite your, your clients in to watch you make sausage, I guess, is my strategy. I just developed that and the way to make a personal connection with people in your newsletter. So this is the second part now, letter. I write mine in the format of a letter. I certainly do some, you know, nice layout tricks to get more text on the page. But if you do nothing else and write a letter to people, maybe with some subhead headlines so that they can read through it quickly, a letter is better than nothing at all. And a letter is often going to be more personal than something fancy laid out that you can get from a template or from a company that does your newsletter for you. Oftentimes those stories are written, you know, overseas or people by people who have nothing to do with you or your clients. There's a lot of stuff in there about, you know, 10 ways to make a quilt. I. And I suppose there's a, you know, some people want to read that, but, you know, include things and if you're stuck for what to talk about Interview one of your best clients have. If you have a client of the month in your newsletter, it'll get incredible readership because everyone's going to be looking to see if they have made it this month. And more importantly, People, it's the reason why People magazines sell so much is People. You know, it's not Insurance magazine. Yeah, People. So if you can make your own little version of People magazine, you're off to the races. And why stop there? What I do is I'll thank clients, clients who have just sent me a referral the past month. And this does a couple of things. It gives people recognition. It also trains them to know that, hey, Kevin gets referrals. Maybe Kevin's doing something right. And it, it's a, it's a reward to, to see your name in print like that is a reward. I could send them money, but they'd rather, you know, it's just as good to get recognition. People love to be appreciated for things. My wife was just, she just got a big award for Delta. She works for the airline and she was showing to me on her phone and she was skipping around the house because she got recognized by her big faceless company that's got, you know, hundreds of thousands employees. I don't know how many people Delta Airlines has, but she's still like, you know, I can hear upstairs skipping around on the floor. Not really that, that was five minutes ago. But she is over the moon because she was appreciated and recognized. You can do the same for your clients. Just put their names in your. And any excuse will do. Hey, they have a new house. Congratulations on an anniversary. It's there in your database probably. If you call up your, your people and ask, can I put you in the newsletter? What are they going to say? You're going to say, sure, that's great. And so you've started a conversation. So don't stop at just referrals. Find an excuse to feature your, your clients in your newsletter and you can cycle through your whole book of business probably in a year or two that way. So have one of your people do that in their off time. So.

And the bottom line is, you know, if you cycle through, what do we do when we get to the end? Start over again. Because they're not going to remember. We get it in our head that, you know, oh, we already did it once. They're going to remember.

Right.

You know, Kevin, you know as well as they don't care that much about you.

No.

Everybody's playing their favorite radio station. W, I, I, F, N. What's in it for me? And that's where you want to enter the conversation. You want to enter that conversation, right?

Yeah, exactly. So you can, so that's, that's a, Anything you can do to get your client's name into your newsletter. Then you've got content, you've got the story. Stories are. They write themselves. If you've just got a specific set of things that you recognize people for, referrals, new homes, anniversaries, kids graduating, kids getting their driver's license. Hello, there's another, you know, name on the policy. So things like that, milestones, you can just, that could be half a page there. And then talk about your own. Talk about your pets. People love dogs and cats. You can have a pet of the month from your office. So there are all kinds of human interest angles that can go into your newsletter and then of course put in one little bit from you about how you're helping people. And of course, if there's a new couple of Google reviews about you or reviews on Yelp. Yes, those can Go in there too.

You know, we're so social proof.

Absolutely. So as you're starting to see now, that's really there. You're at. There's no shortage of ideas for what to put in a newsletter and you want to put the thing on paper. However, now let's say that you've got, got, you know, hundreds, thousands of clients and you can't afford to mail everyone or you don't want to or don't think it'll work for you. Just pick your top 5% of your, of your clients, the people who really matter, and mail something to them and then email the same thing to everyone else and see what happens. If you just do some triage here and take your five top 5%, you can roll it all the way up to the top 20%, let's say, but test it on a small scale and see what happens on the people who are already ideal clients, are already sending you referrals. Test it on them and you'll probably get a lot of bang for your buck that way. So this doesn't have to be something that you roll out to everybody initially, but it should certainly be something that you should be mailing to your top 5 to 20% of your clients as a test case. And quarterly is kind of a bare minimum. I would suggest monthly because as you just said, my people forget about you. They don't care about you. And I, I love my agent, but I, I haven't got anything personal in the mail from him in about five years. How long in five years? It was a thank you note or a referral I sent him and so maybe I need to do more referrals. Fine. But you know, I can't recall anything in the mail from him. I'm not in a hurry to leave Marty, but he could be doing that a little bit better.

Got it. Well, if you ever are, just let me know. I know know lots of people in and around the country.

So let me give you sidebar and then we'll wrap up this idea about retention. I had a life insurance policy from an agent who lived down the street from me. I saw him every day, or at least walk by his house walking my dog every day. I never got a personal contact from him. He, we would wave, but he never said, hey, you know, thanks for not dying, you know, I don't have to, to pay out. I, he never talked about my policy. We never did anything. He never, he was, was a good guy, but he was not personal with me. Never made contact or anything. And I switched I, I rolled my life insurance. I, I switched it over to Marty's agency. I gave him that because I never got appreciated. I never got recognized. And, you know, how can you, how can you lose a client who lives 10 houses away from me while he did? And it's because I just didn't feel appreciated.

I, I, I was reminded with the two by four of that exact thing when I was studying the Nordstrom company. In fact.

I still have it right here. It wasn't your wife's airline. Forgive me in advance.

Okay.

But I, I still have the boarding pass.

Wow.

And I was studying the Nordstrom company on the plane, and people want two things more than sex and money. Right?

Okay.

Recognition and praise. Bingo.

Yeah. And so you were just talking about that. I mean, they want to be praised and recognized. And it's not all about money. It's not about tangible things. It's really about that praise and recognition. And that's what, you know, everybody's clamoring for. And you have to be careful not to overdo it, but you have to do it in the right strategic way. And that's where you come in. You position it the right way. And, and I couldn't agree with you more in the fact that the g, the agent that I just referring to has the uptick in retention and is really doing a lot of things moving in the right direction. Incredible. Agency.

Has also segmented their clients is what we call it.

Okay.

And in some areas, the company, they call it tiering clients, really intending the same thing with that being said, in tiering their clients or segmenting their clients, she only direct mails the newsletter to the upper echelon.

Bingo. Bingo.

And then everybody else gets what they get. But it's that the 8020 rule, the Pareto principle, right. Always in effect. Right. So it's that upper echelon of people that are driving the majority of the revenue. And that's who you want to build that depth of meaning for that, that deep, significant, meaningful relationship.

I want to feature you and her in my upcoming book, the client cloning blueprint. And so you and I have to talk. I gotta get in touch with her. That's fantastic. So that's how you do any new idea that you want to, to test. A lot of what I do involves testing, which means a lot of failure. Right. I do direct response marketing. What I write requires a response. I don't write clever stuff that you see on the side of a bus driving past it. What was that? No, I, I'm asking you to call or click or visit or you know, scan this QR code. So I know what's working, I know what I track my LinkedIn posts and that was garbage. And so, and that time of day was bad, so I'm adjusting continually. So the way to do this, to test and to learn in your business is what you just said is tier it. Do I say triage? So it's the same idea. Pick a segment of your client base and test these ideas out. And I couldn't agree more with the idea that mailing anything. Start with 5 to 10 to 20%, see how it goes and then roll it out.

Exactly, exactly. Great stuff. Fantastic. So we talked about retention and it's part of the super complicated business plan. Everybody pay close attention. You don't want to miss this. Get clients, keep clients. This is the keeping clients part of the business plan. Thank you, Kevin for supporting that and to your offer. Thank you for the consideration. I have the formulated sheet which I'll be happy to talk to you about more. And I also have 22 years of a history of sending newsletters based on the 602020 formula. Similar, similar to your 7030 formula. You said 70% personal information and relationship, 30% industry. I learned the 6020 20, which is 60% relational, 20 industry and then 20 mindless.

Okay, yeah, that can work.

What's that platform? Face.

Face.

We have face.

I'll just leave, I'll just leave that on the table there.

So anyway, cat videos. Yeah, so yeah, there's a place for that.

Yeah, comics and other fun stuff that you know, crossword puzzles as an example, whatever. So. And I also have the entire arsenal documented and I have all the samples. So that'd be a really fun thing to dive into sometimes. So let me know. Super excited about that. So Kevin, because you're in the third piece, specifically promotions, which is part of the simple three step proven blueprint that we help agents with in UPP the promotions. And that's what you do. So Kevin, what other marketing strategies are working to sell a high trust service or product? And that's what the insurance industry is. They need to be able to trust you. Because what we're doing, we're protecting assets and we're protecting something that people work their entire life for and they all work so hard for. So we're protecting those assets. Sometimes they don't want to hear about it. So what could marketing strategies do? You share a couple tips on that.

So I'm going to give you a strategy and then a tactic and you start Waving your hands. If we're going over time here, I want to be conscious of our. Our timeline here. The strategy is a concept called funnel vision, which I also got from my mentor, Jay Abraham, back in the 90s. What we all suffer from, naturally, is tunnel vision, the opposite of that. We look at the world, you know, with. With like the. Through it. Through a pipe, let's say. And we're just looking at what our competitors are doing. It's really limited. We're doing. We're copiers copying the copycats. The. The opposite of that is funnel vision, which is like holding up, you know, a funnel that you would pour liquid into or a satellite dish, and you're just collecting input from everywhere. The application of that is just look outside your. So what you did, you. You got an idea on an airplane about Nordstrom, you wrote it on an airplane ticket. That's funnel vision. You exemplify that you're pulling ideas from other industries. And so I make a good living doing that because I get all my best ideas or other people's ideas, A and B. Most of the best ideas for a specific client that I apply have come from another industry. And so it's completely different when it's applied to another industry.

Can I throw a seed in there for everybody watching or listening? Kevin makes a very respectable living. I'm here to tell you that I created generational wealth.

Implementing the key. These strategies that we learn. Back to you, Kevin.

Yeah. So let me get into something that you're very good at, which is niche marketing. So the idea of niches. And I'll let you expand on this. I want to throw this idea at you, and then we'll have some back and forth. The who's the highest paid person in Major League Baseball? Would you guess.

Not?

I don't follow Major League Baseball. Let me think about this, Aaron Judge.

Good guess. No.

Okay. I only hear that because he's pretty successful now.

Now we could go on. It's. The hint here is it's not a baseball player. The. The most. The. The. The person who makes the most money every year in baseball is an agent. His name is Scott Boras. He makes about.

Oh, yeah, yeah, I've heard about him.

$120 million a year. He and his agency. It could be more by now. And the reason he makes so much money in baseball is because he originally started in his own little niche. He became an agent back, I believe it was the 80s, and he got his first two clients who were baseball players. He said, I'm the only Agent you're going to find who's a former pro player and an attorney because it turned out he played minor league ball. And so these guys go, well, that's interesting. Yeah, I'll go with Scott. You know, there are all these agents pitching them. But Scott Boris, he, I don't know if it was necessity or a genius or whatever, he created his own little niche. I'm the only baseball agent who's a former player and an attorney and bam, the rest is, you know, hundreds of millions. He's probably over billions in revenue now. So he created a niche not both in who he was going after and his unique qualifications. So he got. So you, you can take this idea and run with it all day. You, you specialize in helping agents, you know, pick niches that turn into riches for them. And your own agency is an example of that. But you can get ideas. Like if you're stuck for. How do I pick a niche, for example? Well, just look at other people in other industries who have done it. Get out of your own little trench and look at some funnel vision here. And I think Scott Boras is example should give anyone some excitement and some new ideas in the way of looking at niches. So, you know, do you want to expand on that?

100% agree when you stay in funnel vision. And classic case in point, one of my partners that teaches agents about niches, his name is Chris, he had an idea and he broke away from the herd. In fact, I'm not going to go too deep into his story. I always want him to tell it, but the idea said we need to go to a truck stop at 3:30 in the morning and spend time with these people and learn what's going on. And they showed up at the truck stop and guess what? They were the only insurance agent within miles at 3:30 in the morning that day.

Right.

So they built relationship. They learned what was going on. They learned how to serve, serve the marketplace in a higher and better way. And nowadays.

You've heard of FedEx. You mentioned FedEx. You used to be their webmaster.

I was, yeah.

Yeah. So FedEx is one of them. And what's that company that my wife hires to show up at our house four to five times a week? You might have the same issue.

The florist?

Oh, it's run by the guy Bezos.

He starts with an A. Yeah, that's Amazon I just ordered.

Yeah, Amazon. I mean, facetious everybody, but you know, FedEx and Amazon is who they serve and, and it was those early morning sessions where they broke away from the herd and now they've created dominance, complete dominance in the industry. Not only that, they, they are bigger than niches. They write programs and they have what they call the pen.

Yeah.

And that when you have the pen for an insurance program and all of you in the industry know exactly what I'm talking about. You have the power and you have the control and you have the ability to not only dominate but to completely control your destiny and the future of a given point. So just like Scott, I mean he's got it and he controls it. And people clamor to work with Scott because, well, you know, all these independent drivers for both those companies clamor to work with Chris and his company because they have something nobody else can offer.

That's incredible. He's created his own little gravitational field. At some point your success gets so big that you achieve liftoff. I'm mixing my metaphors. I'm going from a planet to an airplane here. But Scott Boras now has a gravitational field just like Amazon. Just like Chris now he's attracted so much success. It's self fulfilling. It's your game to lose at that point. And that's right. Gosh, I mean, I think, you know, whether he knew it or not, Chris borrowed an idea from, you know, private, from the FBI or from local police is showing up to interview suspects or you know, persons of interest at 3:30 in the morning. Who does that?

You know, that's, well that's, here's the other add on for anybody watching or listening out there. He did something that nobody else was willing to do.

And there's the game changer. What can you do to change the game that nobody else is willing to do?

And you know what answer is you going to get? 3:30 in the morning, 100 truth. Right. No one's gonna be, they're gonna be too groggy or incredulous. Who are you? Why are you here? You're gonna get nothing but the truth.

Well, you know, yeah, I'll share something with you. Another thing from my past that you don't know about. I used to drive trucks and I used to drive produce trucks into the LA market in the middle of the night.

Wow.

And you get all these semi drivers who have been up for days and you know, back then in the what, late 70s and early 80s, they were on some kind of enhancement program to keep themselves awake and they were in a bad mood all the time. So you know, it is what it is. So back to strategies that can help agents. So the first thing is, you know, you want to be gravitationally pulling in a marketplace, right.

That comes after your success has snowballed to the point where you're, you just got success feeding on success. But it starts with a good idea and willing to do something that other people won't do. That costs you nothing. It costs you zero to go somewhere at 3:30 in the morning and be brilliant. And that's just creativity and, and just a little bit of coffee. It costs you nothing to pull an idea from another industry. These are all zero cost ideas here.

And they're, these ideas are circling around people all day long every day. I mean, everywhere I go, I mean, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. And my wife says, come on, come back to me. My mind is constantly marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing. What can I do with this to create this explosion?

Right? All right, so let me give you a quick other one here. Now I don't know how it could apply given specific regulations for specific policies, but the idea of an endorsement letter is something I want to leave you with. I advised an insurance agent about 10 years ago and he was telling me about, he, he was on a run of selling life insurance just hand over fist. And he said it happened because he had a story that just happened a few weeks earlier. Guy came into his office, quoted him a policy and he said, I want to think about. He drove home and a day or two later he was killed in a car accident. And his family had to relocate. They had to downsize their whole lifestyle because they couldn't afford to do, to live the way they had been doing. And you know, their life was upended and it was a terrible story. And it was the guy who could have bought a policy and should have, but he didn't. He wanted to think about it. So he turned this into a little story. And it wasn't particularly well written, but the ideas were so powerful, it didn't have to be. And he started sharing this with prospects who came in. He started closing policy after policy and this, the story did the selling. So the concept was, you know, a client's. This is not a success story. It's the opposite of a success success story. A client having an incredible failure in their life. And it wasn't even a client, right. The guy hadn't bought the policy. So a story of the outcome that was so horrific and it sold these policies. Well, that's kind of an endorsement by another name. It's, it's a, it's a warning sign, right? And so I said, are you mailing this to people at all. He said, well, just to a couple people. I said, you know, could you maybe mail? And he ended up mailing it to more people and closed a lot more policies. Now, I don't know what the, again, the legal requirements are for different policies in different states. But what I've done In my business B2B is I have taken one client who had. They were stuck. They had no sales going on. It was right after Covid and I took one of their clients success stories. This is the opposite of, you know, the warnings, the warning sign. It was a big success. I turned their client testimonial into a two page letter. And it was written in the voice of the client who got the success. And they agreed to this. And so the client of my client agreed to let us tell their story. We put it on paper, mail it to I think only 30 companies. We put $300,000 in the sales pipeline in about 60 days. And they're still opening new accounts, they're opening new states across. They're still mailing this letter. And I just did a version, an updated version of it, and we just mailed it again in December and we mailed it to 13 organizations and got three sales scheduled. There's about $150,000 in the pipeline. It's an endorsement, right? So the principle here is instead of you selling to people, it's let your clients do the selling. And it's a peer to peer conversation which is a completely different dynamic than a company or an agency selling down to a customer or a compliant. It's person to person. And so there's no sales resistance when you get a letter from someone else saying, I want to tell you about. This was an example. They said, I want to tell you about my. This company that wrote this software for me. Well, what's to stop you from having one of your best clients may be the author of a letter that says, I want to tell you about my insurance agent, Mike, my insurance agent, Chris. I'm sure it's eminently doable. I haven't checked on the legality again on this in about 10 years since I last worked with this particular agent. But if you can come up with an endorsement letter from one of your top clients and have them agree to be the author of it and, and mail that to people, you see, if that doesn't convert some more sales for you, it's almost always going to work for you because it's an endorsement, it's a referral on stilts is what it is. It's the letter, it's the words of a very happy client going out to groups of people, dozens, hundreds of people, however many you want to mail to. And it's going to move the needle for you, especially if you make a phone call after it, depending on who you're selling to and what contact information you have. So the concept here is an endorsement letter instead of a lead generation letter or a sales letter. You see, if that doesn't change the dynamic for you and increase your sales, I'm willing to bet that it will.

100% it works and I've done it. In fact, the people that gave me permission to do that not only gave me one of their envelopes, gave me their letterhead and everything else, and I just converted to the list and started sending it out. The lesson there's we either win or we learn, right?

Yeah.

The first batch, I forgot to change the phone number on the letter head and everybody started calling his office.

So I quickly said, throw those away, let's get some new letterhead with our a direct line in our office as the response phone number. And all the calls started coming to us. But the bottom line is the call started coming and the power of that. Absolutely, it works. And that was more recently than you mentioned. And it works because it's not what you say you've done for other people, it's what other people say you've already done for them via an endorsement letter, via other forms of social proof. The sky is the limit. Absolutely. It can happen for you. It just simply takes one word.

Action. Yeah.

Kevin, you've got ideas upon ideas to help people in the promotional and marketing realm. You're an expert at what you do. Billion dollar. Billions of dollars in sales generated because of your efforts. Author of five books. Thank you.

You're welcome. Like I would, I would say hundreds of millions. I wouldn't go to billions with the B yet that I can track. But I can confidently say I know of one client who grew to $100 million in sales mailing one of my letters. It wasn't all due to me, but yeah, I've been there and help people and yeah, it's just a matter. You've said what's nice about this and we'll wrap up. As you know, if you've got testimonials, then you've got the seed of an endorsement letter. It's just a matter of expanding on it, getting permission and if you've just.

A different drilled down add on to the entire social proof arsenal.

Got this stuff already. And if you've got one happy client, you can have two and then four and then eight and then 16. That's what client cloning is about. So you've got all this stuff in your business now with the right moves and some creativity, if you're willing to do as you said, which is a brilliant way to end this, do what other people are unwilling to do, you'll get success that they're not deserving of.

Do what others are unwilling to do. Bingo.

That's you've got. There's no one in front of you on that road.

Exactly.

Guaranteed. There's no.

That's why there's very few people up at the top of high achieve of the high achievement plateau because most people aren't willing to do the work.

Yeah. So I'm gonna wrap up here because we could talk for another hour and a half. I apologize for anyone who needs to take a bathroom break. Can I just tell people where to find me and.

Yeah, I was gonna. You read my mind. Quit reading my mind, Kevin. How can people find out more about Kevin Darling?

I know how these things end. So the the best places in my website. It's clientclothingsystems.com is www.cloning client cloningsystems.com. you can request a free client cloning kit there. I'm happy to mail that out to you. I practice what I preach. I mail this thing to you. If you give us your mailing address and it comes in a interesting package, I'll leave it at that. And people can also find me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to connect with you there.

Fantastic. Kevin Donlon, thank you. Thank you for pouring in to Unstoppable Nation strategies on effective promotions that work.

Thank you.

I can't wait to work with you and figure out some more stuff to help everybody out there in Unstoppable Nation and in the independent Insurance Agency channel. Thank you again.

You're very welcome. Delighted. Out.

All right, everybody. Hey, thank you for joining us on the podcast and if this is your first time on the podcast, welcome. My name is Mike Stromso. I'm widely recognized as the leading author, speaker and coach for the independent insurance agency industry. You can learn more about me atunstoppable profit producer.com and if you're looking to attend one of our live or virtual events, our live event portal is be unstoppable boot camp.com and of course, we run our virtual events at up fast start dot com. All of our events are designed to share with you our best money making strategies developed over 35 years of research in your industry, 100% of the time as a proud independent insurance agent. And we share it all with you to help you grow your business, create wealth so you can have more freedom to live life on your own terms. And if you got great value out of today, please share this podcast with somebody else you care about, another agent, even another business owner. And it's easy to do. Just go to unstoppable profit podcast.com go up to the top, click, subscribe, copy the link and just send it to them, text it to them, email it to them, whatever. And they will be involved and they can continue to learn because we publish this every week to help you grow, create wealth and have more freedom. That's our goal. Thank you for joining us today and make sure that you join us on all the podcast channels we're out there on. Apple Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon, Tom and more. And of course, of course @unstoppable profit podcast.com make sure you subscribe. Kevin Donlon thank you sir.

You're welcome, Mike. Thank you.

Get out there and make a difference. Be unstoppable and leave no regrets. Remember this. You got this. We believe in you. I'll see you in the next episode.

You love the podcast but don't know where or how to get started. Come join our next virtual training while.

Seats are still available.

Register now at UPP Fast start.

Com.

That's upfaststart.

Com.