Episode 36 : Ankle Biters Not Allowed

Welcome to the Unstoppable Profit Podcast. This podcast will give you all the tools to grow your business and live life on your terms. Millionaire agents and entrepreneurs think and act differently than others. This podcast will give you a simple, proven three step blueprint to grow your business. Over the past 31 years of research in your industry, Mike Stromso has created a unique philosophy called the three people Process and production Motion. This outside the box thinking and guidance provides agency entrepreneurs just like you the knowledge and tools you can quickly implement to explode your agency business. He has been there, done that, and he's still doing it. 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.

Hey everybody, this is Mike Stromso. Welcome to podcast number 36. And you are coming.

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Hey everybody, welcome to episode 36 of the Unstoppable Prophet podcast. This is Mike Stromso coming to you live from the Living Agency Laboratory. And and today we will be talking about ankle biters. And the topic today is ankle biters are not allowed ever, ever, ever. And we just got done talking about your destination. So part of our vision for our organization that our leadership creates is a one year vision, a three year vision. We have actually out to a 10 year vision and it's not a vision. In fact, I will pull out the sheet because I carry it with me all the time. It is a target. All right, we have a 10 year target. It's not necessarily a goal or a vision, but we have a target out there, 10 years. So part of what we are doing as a leadership team within an organization, a business organization that just happens to operate as an insurance agency business.

Our goal is to have the majority of our clients to be triple A clients and that means they are of a certain segment. In other words, we have at least three policies for these people. They are coachable, they are of a good attitude, they pay their bills on time, when we need something from them, they reply, we don't have to chase them, etc. Etc. We have a complete description that is written out with regard to our triple A clients, what they look like, a full description of our ideal client, if you will. And the people that are not included in that list are ankle biters. So we affectionately call, or we're not affectionate towards them, but we affectionately call them internally, ankle biters. These are people that are constantly wasting our time to constantly have a problem with this. That constantly have a problem with that. And price shoppers are normally included in that segment or. Alright, so we also have something that would be a topic for a future podcast.

It's a disqualification.

Five question segment called the triple no go in our world. And one of the five questions on that triple no go is why'd you call us?

And one of my favorite comments if you heard me in any place before is, you know, from a leadership standpoint, good leaders ask great questions and they shut up. Alright, so ask that question. Hey Joe, why'd you call us today?

Because I also learned in sales, the first one to talk loses. So you got to shut up. And you got what? You have to wait for them to answer, right? Because if you let them answer, they'll tell you everything you want to know and everything you don't want to know. But ultimately what you're doing is you're making sure that everybody that gets onto your list is of the type of ideal client or the triple A client that you want to have within your book of business. And if you want to learn all about client segmentation, go back unstoppable profitpodcast.com unstoppableprofitpodcast.com and listen to podcast 14. It's all about client segmentation and you'll understand more of what I'm talking about. So now that your clients are segmented, what the heck do you do now? Well, most importantly, you got to take appropriate action to move. If there's any single A or double A's in your book of business, you got to take appropriate action to make sure you move them up to a triple A or fire them. Okay? Trust me, you will have a better life if you've got nothing but the majority of your clients being AAA clients. And it will be nothing but opportunity. Let me give you another side note. We just talked about this yesterday in our leadership meeting. AAA clients hang around AAA clients. Let me say that again. AAA clients hang around AAA clients. So if you want more triple A clients, build a herd of AAA clients and they will refer other AAA clients to you friends. It's that simple. So let me answer this for you because this is a conversation that's going around a lot right now. Okay? So once you have this whole herd of AAA clients, I believe in our book of business we have six or seven hundred AAA clients. Once you have these, what the heck do you do to nurture them? Nurture them on another level because I'm sure You found this. If you have done this, segmented your clients and you understand the mentality of a AAA client, they don't bother you, they don't call you, they don't have claims and you rarely hear from them because they're always paying their bill. Alright, but you need to do something to take care of them, to put your arms around them, to give them a big hug and say, I love you. I want you to know that I don't ever want you to forget that I love you, AAA client. I want more of you and I want to be closer to you all the time. Alright, so what are you going to do? Okay, let me give you some tips. Get ready to write this down. Hopefully have something to write on and write with. And here we go. Okay. First, and we have a mind map for this. So it gives us a nice visual of a lot of ideas that we can do. All right, we email, nurture our AAA clients. We thank them for being one of our top clients and we want to ask them a simple question. Is there anything more that we can do for you? Don't complicate it. We're just checking in today to make sure that we're continuing to provide you service of unequaled excellence. And we just want to know, is there anything more that we can do for you? We actually make calls to that effect as well. We email and call, email and call, email and call. And we have a whole series of direct mail pieces as well that go out to our AAA clients. All right, so that's the first thing we do. Second, we snail mail our newsletter and we email our newsletter and our newsletter follows the 602020 formula and it's about 60% solid content. 20% is mindless stuff and 20% is insurance stuff. That's our newsletter. That's the content, thought process for our newsletter. We also do voice broadcasts and I will tell you friends, we get so many comments from our community people about the voice broadcast. I run into people all the time, say, Mike, I love your messages. Thank you so much for caring enough to leave me that message. On Valentine's Day, on Mother's Day, on Father's Day and on Thanksgiving, that's when we send the voice broadcast to our clients. We have all kinds of social media outreach to our AAA clients. If we can identify them on social media, we remind them about our referral drawings and the winners in our referral drawings. Normally, the people that are our AAA clients have more slips in our referral drawings, so they tend to win more. We take pictures of them. We tag them, we share their posts for events. We're connected to them, we respond to them. Okay? They also receive special things within our welcome Kit series that are different from others. We have what we've affectionately for years called an OCT gift in our particular world. It's a box of cookies with balloons and all this kind of stuff. It goes out to them and it arrives on a spontaneous basis. And if you wanted to take one thing away from this call today that you can do for your AAA clients, be spontaneous. Be spontaneous. Let me say it again. Be spontaneous. You want to show up like nobody else all of the time, on a spontaneous basis, wow the crap out of them. And if you don't remember, the definition of wow is without words. Without words. All right? You've got to wow them all the time. Most importantly, you've got to continue to deliver all of the time. Because at the end of the day, my friends, and they don't need you, they don't have to use you, but they are. They've been kind enough, generous enough to continue to do business with you and you've got to remind them of that all of the time. So build things into your welcome Kit series. Another thing that we do for our client of the month, we have a handwritten letter. In addition to that, we recognize them in the newsletter. And by the way, our client of the month is always a AAA client. By the way, if you need somebody that you can huddle with, brainstorm with, get more information about the marketplace from do a marketplace researcher with etc, etc, etc, use your AAA clients. They are your best source of information. You know, you can go out to agency forums and all these other places that are a bunch of agents sitting there and that's fantastic. There's a lot of smart people out there, don't get me wrong. But. But if you want the right answer, if you want the best answer all the time, go to your clients. Go to your clients. Go to your Triple A clients. They've got all the information you need. They'll tell you what you need to know, what you don't want to hear, but it's what you need to know. Your Triple A clients, we also send Harry and David, which is easy, sensible. We have some of our very largest AAA clients on a monthly Harry and David program. They get fruit of the month every single month. In addition to that, we send avocados and we have a whole list of things, just unique gifts, spontaneous gift that we send to people. We send avocados because it's part of our story. It's part of my story. My grandparents bought land not too far from where I'm at right now in the early 1950s, a long time ago, last century, my dad actually planted the avocado orchard with his own bare hands. So it's part of our story. I can tell the story. Remember, facts tell, stories sell. So that's part of that story. Okay? So that's just something unique. Come up with something unique that's part of your story that you can tell a story on that nobody else can duplicate. All right? So be uniquely you. Be yourself. Be you. We send birthday cards. We make a birthday phone call to our AAA clients. We do special email posts, special social media posts to our AAA clients. They feel the love. They feel the love like nobody else. Okay, Another idea that you can use for your AAA clients. You can do an edible arrangement. You can do lunch and learns. If there are commercial clients and they have a lot of employees. We do Thanksgiving cards with a $2 bill in them, thanks to one of our UPP members who gave us that idea years ago. We just simply implemented it. And by the way, how many Thanksgiving cards did you get at the most recent Thanksgiving that went by?

That's the answer that I get from most people. They don't have an answer because they don't get one. All right?

So no disrespect, but we don't send Christmas cards. We send an 8.5 by 11 Christmas visual. But we send Thanksgiving cards because it's a message of gratitude. And the people that we start with on that mailer is our triple A clients and our COIs, our centers of influences, and our prospects. Those are the three that we start with. And every mailing that we invest money in, our AAA clients, our prospects, and our centers of influence is our key prospects. Because our prospect list is over 5,000 people, we look at our key prospects, all right? We know who Our top top 100 are all of the time. Okay? We got our eyes on them all of the time. How? Because that's what we plan for. We plan for success. We actually still send calendars out to our. To our clients. And we always start with our AAAs and making sure they get them. We have created unique magazine covers for our AAA clients. It was a phenomenal program that was so successful. It's one of those old marketing stories. It was so successful. We don't do it too much anymore because we had so much success with it. But we've got a sample for that. We have swag bags that are all built around our specific branding. We showcase our AAA clients digitally on our walls in our office. We've got pictures of our AAA clients throughout the office. We why? Because those are the people that we serve and protect all of the time. You know, friends, there is an opportunity every single month for you to continue to wow, put your arms around and show the love to your AAA clients. So have you taken one of your service representatives who has a direct telephone line and made a card for your AAA clients and sent it to them and say, hey, this is a private direct line for our teammates. If you need anything, please call this number. Our teammates have agreed to contact you back within two hours. And when you get putting that in somebody's hand, that's phenomenal. And now you have to position the three P's within your organization. And as a reminder, the three P's are people, processes and promotion in that order. So your first P has to be in complete order. You, your people have to be top notch. But secondly, the second P, which is processes, they have to be trained in order to respond in these cases. And if they're going to be out of the office, then their phones and their emails have to be forwarded to somebody who also understands how these people expect to be treated all of the time. Okay, claim situations, do you have a specific claims process for your AAA clients or, or all of your clients in that particular situation? Do you have an around the clock phone number that your AAA clients can call and get a response? Yeah, anybody can call and leave a message, but do they actually get a response within a certain amount of time? I mean all of these things are important and once you do all of these things, you've got to make sure that you share the story all of the time. You can put together digital case study stories, I mean online, offline, video, I mean the sky's the limit, my friends. Put the story together and get your people out there sharing it with the world. Use your AAA clients as the basis for the case studies. The ideas just go on and on and on. So profile, promote your AAA clients. You feature. I mean, years ago in the early days of our newsletter, I used to have a full page story about one of our clients, one of our commercial clients. I used to actually get in my car and drive out to the client and interview them and I would write a full page profile on that specific business. I would take a picture of me and the owner of the business, put it inside the newsletter and I would promote that to everybody. And I would do an email Promotion individually of that business and it just goes on and on. I mean, why don't I do that anymore? It's just time, nothing else. But I mean that's something anybody could do. I am actually in the process of recruiting somebody who's going to specifically be doing that kind of stuff, so. Because I'm going to get back to it. It was working so well. We just don't do it as much as we used to. So we got to get back to it. Right. So let me give you a couple of encouragements as we wrap it up today. Okay? Again, be spontaneous. Be spontaneous. I mean think about your personal life. What do you do for your spouse or your loved ones? Like if you were out shopping for Christmas presents, what's that special, special gift? That's the kind of thing that you want to do for your AAA clients? Think of it like that. Come up with something special, that's unique, that's awesome. Alright? Be spontaneous and most importantly, continue to deliver. Continue to deliver every single way, every single day. Because if you continue to deliver, you are earning more referrals. And keep in mind, AAA clients hang around AAA clients. You see, great customer service is an everyday practice. And I learned from Rudy Rudiger of the great movie Rudy Rudy that never giving up lasts for the rest of your life. So you've got to be spontaneous. You get to deliver every single day. Great customer care is an everyday practice. It's not just for the holidays, it's not just for the summer months or during times when you're launching a new product or working your promotion. It's got to become an ingrained trait and characteristic of your total protection team. It's a non optional behavior, is what we say. Thank your customers often. Be a problem solver. Solver as much as possible because a problem solved is an opportunity for sale. Get creative. And if you're studying the unstoppable mindset, which is something that we're launching an entire one year program on, this particular year, the unstoppable mindset. At the very, very top of that, the agency entrepreneur, the leader, the brainchild of the entire organization should be investing 80 to 90% of their time on the third P which is promotion and marketing. You've got to separate yourself, get out into that creative space where you're creating these awesome ideas and then most importantly, work to go way above and beyond anything that anybody else is doing. And you want to exceed their expectations, blow them away at every single opportunity. What does this mean for you? You will be mentioned. You'll be thought of. You will create an amazing, rock solid fence around your herd. Your herd meaning everybody that you have contact with in your sphere of influence. My friends, yes, some will leave, but the majority will stay and they will continue to give your money. Okay, give you their money. Here's the bottom line, and we haven't taught about this in great detail. It's in an upcoming podcast, E, which is experience, plus F, which is feeling, equals connectedness. When you give them the experience to create that feeling in their heart and in their soul and in their gut, you've got connected, relate, you got a connectedness. The next one is R, which is relationship. So you're connected. You're beginning to build a relationship. After you begin to build a relationship and you do this consistently over and over and over again, you're going to build the trust. Once you build the trust, money follows trust, my friends. It's that simple. But you got to do the work, you've got to take the action and, and you've got to have the people, processes and promotion in place to make it consistently happen every single day in every single way. To be spontaneous, to be creative, to over deliver like nothing they've ever seen before. Candleing transparently. I was on the phone with the AAA client today. I heard it through the grapevine. Like Marvin Gaye said, I heard it through the grapevine. I heard it through the grapevine that he was getting out of his business. Got a hold of him on the phone today and I verified that he was getting ready to move on. And he told me something that I hear a lot of from our Triple A clients. He said, mike, I've got an insurance agent up in the middle of the United States, North Dakota, that he's got a bunch of property up there that handles that and we handle everything down here. We have 20 to 30 policies for him. He said, I've had lots of insurance agents in my years. You and that one up there are the very best insurance agents I have ever had. Why? Because we are spontaneous. We deliver, we take care of them, we nurture them, we remind them that we love them. You see, it's a basic human need to be appreciated, friends. Just simply show your appreciation for people and it will continue to happen for you.

Friends.

This is Mike Sharmslow coming to you live from the Leaving Agency Laboratory. We've not been there. We've been there, done that, and we are still doing it and we're still going to continue to bring it to you, every single podcast. So stay tuned. Same bat station, same bat channel and I will see you next time on episode 37. Until then, make a difference, be unstoppable, leave no regrets and go take action.

Thank you for listening. If you would like to listen to more episodes or share this podcast with someone you care about, please visit www.unstoppableprofitpodcast.com now go out and make a difference. Be unstoppable and leave no regrets.