Are They Not Interested, or Are You Not Interesting?

Agency leaders and professionals. Have you ever heard this phrase, whether it's someone from your team, a future client that you're trying to bring on, or maybe even a current client that you're working with, here's the phrase, are you ready? Thanks, but I'm not interested. Thanks, but I'm not interested. Of course you have, if you've tried at all, right, to become a influential person in your marketplace or within your team. Of course, at some point, whether directly or indirectly, we've all heard some form of the phrase, thanks, but I'm not interested. On today's Agent Leader Podcast, I'm going to share with you the why, the how and the what to move from not interested to you as a leader or professional in your marketplace to become interesting, to get more people to buy in, lean in and say yes. Welcome to the Agent Leader Podcast. My name is Brent Kelly. I am your host. Thanks so much for joining me. As always, the purpose of this podcast is to help you, the agency leader, whether you're a producer, whether you're a principal, whether you're a service team leader. If you have influence, you are a leader and want to help you become more educated, to equip you with tools and resources that can help you and of course to empower you to become your best version possible. Now I want to remind you all that the best version possible Fast Track from the Sitkins Group is now live and ready to go. This is a 90 day catalyst program for your entire client facing team, your producers, your account managers, your sales leaders to finally integrate in a common culture and language to help you get the best results possible in the shortest amount of time. And that's over a 90 day period. The best version possible Fast track. You can learn more and get your team registered for January of 2024 by going to sitkins.com fast track that sipkins.com fast track. Now let's get into the content today about becoming more interesting. Now I want to share the background of this because there is a story behind what I'm going to be sharing today. And then again we're going to dive into the the why, the how and the what. Several years ago I was part of a mentorship program, I still am to this day, a mentorship program on leadership and sales. And there was a number of mentors that you could call into and have conversations with. They may share some ideas and and then they would open up the queue to be able to ask some questions and they would mentor you on a specific situation, problem or issue that you may be dealing with. And I was a consultant trying to grow my company, get more speaking events, work with more clients, just like you and your agency are trying to do today. And I got on the call and I basically asked some form of this question. How do I grow my business? How do I get more people to say yes? How do I, how do I get people to stop saying, brent, thanks so much, but I'm not interested? And this mentor, his name is Paul Martinelli. He's a fantastic mentor, a fantastic business leader, has run several multimillion dollar companies and is a great trainer, a great mentor, a great coach. And he said something, after all my whining, so to speak, of why won't they do this and why is this not happening? How can I grow this and write all the things that we want to do and we're trying to grow our business? And he said something very simple and very powerful and that shapes the way I think about things today. And I hope I can transform this into your mind as well. He said this, Brent, are they not interested or are you simply not interesting? And I thought, wow. Now a few things about that question. Are they not interested or are you not interesting? Number one is it puts the emphasis on who, me, right? The fact that it's very easy for all of us. And I'm raising my hand if you're watching the video, a version of this podcast, but it's very easy for us to blame others again, whether it's direct or indirect. Well, they didn't do this. They don't understand what I really have to offer. They're not smart. Okay, whatever it is right to say it's their fault. Now, by the way, not every client is a right fit client. I get that. Right? Not every employee on your team is a right fit employee. So there's aspects of this, but just in general terms, it's easy for us to push this off to someone else. It's not my fault, right? It's their fault or someone else's fault. And so this idea put it to me, number one, that it's on me. Number two is that I have got to find a way to become more compelling, engaging in the marketplace to get those right fit people that I want to bring into my life or in my business to engage at a higher level. See, here's what I believe. The ability to communicate is the number one skill to success, specifically in the insurance business. Now this is true in a lot of financial type of businesses or white collar type of businesses, right? Because it's how we communicate. Certainly with insurance, there isn't even a tangible product that people are going to take home and play with and feel and look at. Right? So to be able to communicate, to be able to listen, to be able to ask questions, to be able to present with a high level is the vital skill for your success. Now, what it gets into is why are we not thinking about this as much as we should? And you know, with the agencies that we work with, we certainly push this and talk about this in different ways and how to be more captivating, how to be more interesting, how to be more engaging. But when you think about the landscape of insurance producers and professionals and insurance agency leaders, we just kind of think that we either got it or we don't, or we just kind of think that we're going to get a little bit better because, well, I do talk every day, Brent, so aren't I'm getting better, right? Maybe, right? Depends on what you're practicing. It depends on what you're working on. So let me go through a few areas here I mentioned. I want to go to the why, the how and the what of this idea becoming more interesting. But I just want to make sure I start with the why. Because if you don't buy into this, I guess you're probably not going to listen to the rest and you shouldn't listen to the rest of this podcast. But here's something that I believe that that communication is one level. It's a starting point. But the best influencers move from communication to connection, right? They understand that their goal is not to communicate with somebody. They're communicate, their goal is to connect with somebody. There's a difference, right? Communicate to or connect with. So thinking about this is how do I build better connections with people? Because if we have higher level connections, we have higher level influence. And that makes every single thing that you do easier, right? One of the things that we focus on or one of the questions that we ask oftentimes comes from the book the One Thing. What the one thing so that by doing it will make everything else easier or maybe even unnecessary. It's a great book. The One Thing book by Gary Keller. What's the one thing? The focusing question. What's the one thing so that by doing it will make everything else easier and necessary. And what's interesting is you think about this and I was preparing some of the content and some of the discussions we've recently had with our Sitkins group members and you think about this is this is a pretty darn good choice if I can work on how I communicate, how I better connect, how I have greater influence with people. It would make everything that I do easier and in some cases, maybe even unnecessary. Presidential historian Robert Dallek, and you may not know the name, but as a presidential historian, he did a study on what makes successful United States president successful. And I'm certainly not going down the road of politics here. I'm just talking about connection with the people, right? And he's done some studies on this and he found there's five things that stand out of successful United States Presidents. Vision, consensus, building, charisma, pragmatism, and trustworthiness. And I'll say those again. Vision, consensus, building, charisma, pragmatism and trustworthiness. Now, four out of those five are directly tied to high level communication. And I would argue that pragmatism is pretty darn close, right? Can we be succinct? Do we move things forward? Right. As far as the conversations, the meetings, what have you. So you look at this and you have to ask yourself, when I'm communicating, is my vision clear? Am I doing a good job of building consensus? And we're going to talk more about this with some of the skills. Do I have a level of charisma? Now I would say charisma is something that you. Certainly some people have a higher level. But here's my thought on charisma. There are some people that when they walk into a room, the lights get dimmer. I know that sounds mean, but it's true, right? The energy goes down. There's some people that walk into a room, lights go up and the energy goes up. Right? That to me is how I get. That's my definition. Describe charisma. Can. Pragmatism is getting things done timely. And of course, trustworthiness is pretty straightforward, right? Did you do what you said you were going to do? Now, here's another reason why this is so important. It does and will separate you in the marketplace, right. If you're able to communicate at a high level, it will separate you in the marketplace. And one of the things that we talk about at the Sickens group, the time is points of differentiation. And we talk specifically in terms of risk based ideas, right. Or around benefits, whether it's personal risk, benefits or P and C. We get into specifics of this, but let's take it a step higher. Just being able to, and I say just is a big word because you could take this one thing out and it makes that big of a difference. Being able to communicate with influence with conviction. Being able to connect with people is absolutely a differentiator. Just think about relationships and people you've met. There are. Sometimes you don't even know why you're having a meeting or why you bought something or I mean, you might know why, but there's something that you just like about someone at a very basic level. You know, know, like and trust. I know them, I like being around them, I trust them. What they said has been true, right? There's that it factor when it comes to communications. Why it's important you become very hard to replace. Now let's take this a step a little bit deeper on this. When you think about the insurance industry, there are different ways you can dispense ideas, right, that you want to communicate to someone. There's data and there's information. Let's face it, computers do that way better than humans. From just a practical standpoint of data and information, especially with AI. I mean, AI is crazy. It's going to continue to rapidly accelerate. If you're going to play the data information game, you're in deep doo doo right now. I think you take it a step further and you begin to really understand the subject matter at a deeper level. Not just quotes and facts and figures, but you get a deeper knowledge of specific things, right? This could be with, you know, marketplace stats, this could be around risk management ideas, right? It could be a lot of different things, but you gain a deeper knowledge within a certain niche, right, or industry. But to me, the highest level of what communication can do and should do is that you're able to communicate wisdom. Wisdom being that I can take information and I can intake data and I can take these ideas, I can take knowledge and now because I can go much deeper and I can connect with emotional components, right? I'm a human being and we all know that one thing that computers will never be able to replicate from humans is emotion. And if you don't think you're emotional creatures, you're lying. We all buy from emotion to different levels. We buy ideas, we buy products, we buy service. Things that we do based on emotion, we may justify them intellectually. Certainly we need to be able to do that. But emotion is what drives us. And of course that comes to pain or pleasure. You as a high level communicator can dispense that through wisdom that has deeper pain or pleasure that people can relate to and associate with. If you don't build your communication skills, you're just like everybody else. Now here's the good news. The bar's low here's the bad news. If you want to become your best version possible, being a high level communicator is essential, right? And it's this idea of what you're going to do. So let's go a bit deeper. That's the big picture of why. But let's get into how. How do you become more interesting, right? As my mentor said to me, are they not interested or are you not interesting? Well, let's talk about how to become more interesting. Of course, I love those old beer commercials, right? The most interesting man in the world, right? Those are funny commercials, but we laugh about this. How do you become more interesting where you're having a phone call with someone, a Zoom meeting, an in person meeting, right? You're in the marketplace, you're having a conversation, you're at a networking event. How do you become more interesting? Where people go versus, here's the. I talked to. Versus I want to talk to this person. I would be interested to talk to this person. Here's the first thing. This is kind of a bit of play on words, but Dale Carnegie said something very smart, by the way. Dale Carnegie has some great books, right, about becoming a person of influence and all these kind of things. But here's a quote that he had to be interesting, be interested. To be interesting. Be interested. By the way, if you're not writing anything down, that might be a good one to write down to be interesting, be interested. Well, that may seem really simple and it is, but most of us really stink at doing it. I know for me, as someone who has a billion ideas in my mind and we got that smartphone in our pocket, right, and there's people all around us. It is super, super easy to be distracted, to have a conversation with someone, be thinking about someone, something else, whether that's in a room and we're looking over someone's shoulder across the way. We're on the phone, but we're not really on the phone. We're also checking email, we're on Zoom, but we're looking over here somewhere at our, you know, whatever it is, notes for something else, right? That is not being interested. You're somewhat present. But here's what I believe. The greatest gift you can give another human being in today's noisy, distracted world is your complete time and attention. That's the number one gift you can give someone. I'll tell you what, we experience this in business. We experience this at home. I'll give you a personal example of this, which is painful to say because it still bothers me And I still struggle with it quite, to be quite honest, many years ago now I say many years ago. I know, six, seven years ago, sitting at the dinner table with my family. And if you ask me, Brent, on this physical earth, who is the most important thing in your life? I would say my family, because they are love. My family, my wife, 20 plus years by five kiddos, right? Incredibly blessed. Yet we can take things for granted that we get to be around a lot, unfortunately, right? So I remember several years ago, I was sitting at the dinner table. We're all having our dinner. In fact, one of our rules, especially today, is there's no phones anywhere near the table. But this was six years ago. I had a phone in my pocket. I pulled the phone out of my pocket because it was uncomfortable, quite frankly. Put it to the side, out of the way. At least I thought. Of course, the phone buzzed several minutes into dinner and what do you think I did? I picked the phone up because it catches your attention. You have to. It's like a, like, you know, it's like monkey see, monkey grab the phone. There it is. Got it. So I grabbed the phone. I look at wasn't urgent, it wasn't important, the message. But guess what? I still reply just because, hey, I get it. Knock it out. My daughter, who was nine years old at the time, pretty smart kid, walked around the table, I didn't even notice her. And as I turned my head, her little puppy dog face said, daddy, do you think for dinner tonight we could be the most important thing in your life? Yeah, that one still stings today. But it's a great reminder, if you're not 100% present of where you're at, not only is that rude, but you are telling the person across the room or on the phone or on the zoom call that I really don't care about you that much. As Dale Carnegie said to become interesting, right? Be interested. Be interested in what people are saying and thinking and doing and be 100 present. Well, what are some barriers? And here's some practical things, and I want you to think about this in your own life, because we all have shortcomings. This isn't easy. It seems like it's easy, but it's not. Because we're human, there are barriers that prevent us from finding common ground and really being as interested as we should be. Here are three things that jump out. Number one, we assume things too much. I'm sure you've heard the phrase, when you assume something, it makes a what out of you and me, right? We Assume things. Now this often happens when, whether we're a leader, talking to our team. I just assume you thought this. I just assume this was happening. I just assume. I assume. And we often assume incorrectly, we're talking to a future client. Well, I just assume you wanted this coverage. I just assumed this was important to you. We never really asked. Number two is arrogance. This kind of goes aligned with assumption, but arrogance is I have a lot of credentials, I have a lot of experience, I have a lot of knowledge in this area. So I'm just going to tell you what you need to do, right. Because I know more than you. And whether we say that, I don't think it's usually malicious, but it does happen and people can feel it. And number three, this one's a pretty simple to, to follow up on. It's actually what I just was talking about is indifference. Indifference is when you're there, but you're not really there, right? You just kind of, I, I care enough to maybe be here for a few minutes, but I don't really care enough to give you my full time and attention. Right. So indifference. So I would just ask yourself, do you ever struggle with any of those in conversations you have when the people that you struggle to connect with, do I have too much assumption? Maybe I'm displaying some arrogance where I don't realize it, or maybe I've just been too indifferent, too nonchalant. Here's another thing of how to become more interesting. Prepare. Prepare. Now, I've done entire podcast around preparation and practice. So I'm not going to go too deep into this, but I will say this, and this is a bit corny, but preparing is caring, right? When you show up to a meeting or event, whether you've got an agenda, whether you got an outline, whether you say, hey, listen, in preparation for this meeting, I've done some homework, I've done some research, whatever that is, guess what that says to the other person right away. Wow, you cared about this meeting. Now we talked fact just yesterday on a meeting I was part of was with account managers. We talked about this all the time. The fact that so often that, you know, producers come in, in many cases and this could be on both sides, but there's no agenda, right? And there's not a lot of buy in in that conversation and they hadn't really prepared, right? So it's like, oh, what are we talking about? And immediately that signals this time, this event, this meeting, this conversation is not that important, right? So here's some things about a preparation. I believe that every opportunity. And I would change this. I believe that every meeting you have, every conversation deserves your very best. And here's the thing. If it doesn't, don't have the meeting or conversation. Right. Life's too short. But if we're going to set something up, and I know this is a challenge, but let's prepare for it, because every opportunity does deserve our very best. And when we prepare, we can begin to identify before the meeting what are some of the frustrations, what are the challenges? Maybe who are some common connections that we both know. Right. Depends on the conversation. What's the vision? Where are we trying to go? What's the purpose of this conversation? And now, specifically, if we get into like, you know, the producers or those that are out there soliciting business, preparing is about taking the.