Marketing Your Agency for Growth

Welcome to the Agent Leader podcast. My name is Brent Kelly, your host. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode. And we have a great episode scheduled for today. I have a great guest who I'll introduce in just about a minute or so. She will blow you away. No pressure. Guest who I'll introduce shortly. But I have a will have a great background and just different level of experience in looking at agency development and growth and marketing. So if that's something you're looking for, stay tuned. Before I get into the guest and do a full introduction, I do want to mention, as always, the purpose of the Agent Leader podcast is to help you, the agency leader, regardless of your specific role, to help you gain clarity, build consistency and to make a commitment to become your best version possible. And for those video people, I always have to hold up a copy of our book, Best version Possible. We continue to expand enhancements. The best version possible experience. Oh, good. My God. Well, I'll ask my guest here in a second about that. She's got a copy of the book. But our goal is we enhance the best version possible experience with our agency partners. Which one of those you're going to hear from today is to always improve the alignment of the agency, the culture of the agency, to help with that, to help be a guide and navigate to get producers in the green zone, which is producer producer productivity, to retain and replicate your best clients and to help install a playbook that your agency can use can be repeatable and effective. Another thing that our agency guest, I don't know if she'll talk about it today or not, but it's something they've done in their agency as well. So I do want to introduce formally our guest today, Mary Savage, who is director of marketing at the UNICO Group based in the great state of Nebraska. And I, depending on when this gets released, we've had a few of our wonderful UNICO partners with us. Why? Because they got a lot of great people that can share some great knowledge with you, the agency leader. So, Mary, welcome to the Agent Leader podcast.

Thanks, Brent. I'm happy to be here today.

All right, well, Mary's got many, many skills and we'll get to some of them, but we're not going to get to all of them because some of them probably, you know, we're not going to discuss on the podcast, but Mary's multifaceted and I, I did, I was very excited to get Mary on. She's very involved, obviously in different ways at UNICO and Marketing, but. Well, I haven't beyond what I would think many people think of marketing from that perspective. And I was actually talking to you, Mary, before we. We were having a conversation before we started recording. I said, you're not directly in sales, but you're always directly in sales. And so I want to talk a little bit about that. And maybe if you could just expand on what you do at Unico, your role, how it's involved. Obviously, you're a large. Your top 100 agency, your best practice agencies. You guys do things really, really well. Explain to me your role, how it fits in, and what's your superpower?

Well, thanks, Brent. As you said, I'm. My title is director of marketing at Unico. But as you kind of mentioned, we take marketing a little bit, maybe outside of what some other agencies might consider the role of the marketing team. And that was really just an evolution of realizing what Unico needed to be able to grow and to be the best sales organization that we could be. So the marketing teams, we kind of talk about having four pillars. Right. But primarily it's to foster growth and profitability for the company. Right. So, I mean, you could say that about a lot of different departments within an agency, but specific to marketing, that's new business retention and to protect our brand. So there's some very traditional marketing things, obviously that fit within that. But also we've kind of taken that to how do we directly make sure that we are supporting our sales team so that when they're out in front of the prospect and the client, that they look their best, that the materials that they put in front of them don't necessarily get in the way, but they also help lead the conversation in a way that we have it aligned with our sales process. So, you know, there's a lot of other things outside of marketing, but I think that's where my role has kind of evolved. And then I'm in a lot of those conversations as we're going in to sell with new prospects, is talking about how can I align the pieces of marketing or any of the collateral we're going to show to that prospect or client to align that with the way that we want to sell that, and so that it helps lead. Lead us to being able to close that.

I love that. And again, you are, I know, in our relationship and coaching calls and conversations we have and getting to know you in different aspects and some of the networking events that we're part of, you're involved in a lot of different aspects, which I think is great. But what you said there really hits home because, you know, again, there's a lot of ways, I guess, that people could define marketing. And maybe this is what I heard and what I see you do. But basically it's how can I help the salespeople sell more? And there's a lot of ways you think of traditional marketing and some of the things and you know, I think it's all can have a positive effect. But you're very, you and your team are very directly involved. Like you said, like for that advisor, you know, you producer advisor at Unico, the term you use basically every step is how can I make this easier for them to do that? So I want to, if I could kind of, I always ask about, you know, challenges that agencies have. And so I want to get into that because I know that as well and great of a year you all just had at Unico, which was fantastic. It doesn't mean there's not challenges and even specifically challenges in your role of marketing and what you see from your perspective. So when you think of the challenges that you're facing at Unico and even in your role, what jumps out at you and what are some things that you are doing, your team is doing at Unico to address them?

Mary sure. When I was reflecting about this, I kind of thought about this from a marketing standpoint. But I think that this could apply to other places or other roles I have at Unico as well. And I think this is a rut that a marketing team specifically can get into. And what I wrote down here is one of our number one challenges is from a marketing team is to be seen as an order taker. And so one of the ruts and I talked to some of my colleagues in the industry and this is something that we often think about is you hear from an advisor or a leader at a team and said, we need X and you just order take, you know, and you're just a short order cook. You just do it and you provide it. And so one of the challenges that we have and we continue every, you know, all the time to try and get better at this is how do we then become part of the team. And I think at Unico, between some work that I've done with the relationships I have with our advisors, being on the sales leader team of those kind of things, it helps that. But how do we be part of the team? Okay, you're asking for X. Okay, why are you asking for X? How is that going to support you in selling this, this? Well, it's because X, Y and Z does it. Okay. That's maybe a good place to start. But let's ask some questions about how's the best way to provide this. You know, I need this thing on a template. Why are you sending it in the first place? Does this already exist? Some of those kind of things. And so one of the ways that, you know, I've done and my team as well is just building relationships with our advisors so that we're seen as a trusted team member and not as a service center. So again, like I said, UNICO has come a long way when it comes to this. I've been at Unico for seven years and when I came in we were still operating really as a smaller kind of small town agency. And we. That was when they brought on a director of marketing. They did that because they knew we needed to take some steps if we were going to get to the next level of our agency. Right. We had, we had really made a commitment to really refocusing on being a sales organization. And in the last seven years we've had an extreme amount of growth. And I thank our leadership team for thinking proactively about that. We thought about hiring some marketing teams, we hired some additional operations leaders that we hadn't had before. So we did a variety of things over that. But when I came in the marketing team, we did have a couple of people there, but they were order takers, they were, put this on this template, here's the content, make it look pretty and really working through to how does that actually integrate in the sales process? And are we just creating something that's just going to get thrown away? That wasn't what I wanted. I wanted it to actually be a piece of a piece that they could then use to actually help sell the account. Right. And so we've done a lot of work on this, but it continues. New advisors come in, people get back in the rut. And you have to keep reminding people, you know, we're part of the team too. You know. Yes, we want to give you what you need, but I want to make sure that we're giving you the right thing and not just the black and white ass that you gave me.

Yeah, well, there's a lot I could unpack in that. A lot of wisdom there, Mary. See, I told you listeners she'd be great, you know, but what I wrote down was interesting and I have to be careful here because every, every year I have my own word of the year and it's become pretty popular out there. I know, but my word this year is impact. And so now I hear it more often, even when I don't hear it. And just something fall off your wall. This is real time, folks. I couldn't, it wasn't that loud. But that was impact, for example. That was good timing. I said impact and boom, there it was.

I actually did that on purpose. I had like a button and I just pushed it. It fell.

It's a special force. But, but, but it really is. And what, what you do and your team does around marketing. And I love that it's like, it's, yes, we'll get stuff done that we need to get done, but I love it's like, but what's the impact of actually doing this? And there is a lot of things that we see in agencies that, you know, that's the way we've always done it. Whether it worked or not, I don't know, it's. That's the way we've always done it. And I love that, you know, you and your team have challenged the advisors and challenged leadership to say, listen, why are we doing this? Which seems like a pretty innocent question. You know, I've got a, I've got a five year old at home and I still get that. Why? Why? And there are times as a parent that you're like, well, just because. Right. And then you realize when, if you're really being honest with yourself, you're like, why? Why am I doing that? It actually doesn't make any sense. It doesn't do anything. So I think what I love about that, Mary, and you guys as a sales organization, have you really brought that as part of the culture, to question yourself, to challenge each other internally, not just to be difficult. And by the way, I do know very well your team at UNICO likes to give each other a hard time. That's good, that's fun. Right? And the right way. But part of that too is because you want to get better.

Yes.

And to get better, we've got to challenge each other. Well, tell me why you're doing that. Does that make sense to me? And if you can explain it, great. Maybe I missed it, but it comes back to this idea of, you know, just doing a bunch of tactics without strategy is a bunch, a bunch of noise sometimes. And so I love that you as a sales organization are doing that. And also the relationship we talk about as Sitkins of appreciation and respect and trust goes a long way into that. So anything else you want to add to that dynamics? I think it was a really important point you brought up.

No, just bringing it back to that relationship is, you know, I think insurance is about relationships. And although my. My client is probably the advisor versus my client being, you know, the external client, it. It's all about relationships when it comes to that as well. If I, If I hadn't done some of the work to prove that I was going to do what I said I was going to do, and by taking the approach that I take towards some projects and ending with a good product at the end, if I hadn't proven myself along the way, you know, that's. You could. It's easy to say if you just walk in a room and be like, I'm just going to ask why. Well, that didn't work as well early on as it does now. And that's because I have a personal relationship with most of these advisors. We've created some trust. They know I'm part of the team, all of those things.

That's. That's a great point. Right. Coming. Why? You know, because. Be quiet. Right? You just got here. So you do have to earn that, you know, earn the right. And it is about the relationship. And it's interesting because there's a lot of sales within a sale. And you know, we've said before, there's two sales. A sale to the underwriter, the sale of the client. I actually think there's probably three or four. I think there's the sale.