Pipeline Development

Welcome to the Agent Leader Podcast. My name is Brent Kelly, your host. Thanks so much for joining me on another episode. The purpose of the Agent Leader podcast is to help you as an agency leader, whether you're the principal, a sales leader, if you're a producer out there in the in the marketplace, leading your clients and community to help you gain clarity direction on where you want to go to build consistent habits and to make that commitment to become your best version possible. Well, if you've been listening to the podcast over the past many weeks, I've been sharing some of the Sitkins profit or professional fitness strategies. These are our key strategies, our core strategies, whatever you want to call them, that are fundamental to agency success. So today I'll be sharing the sixth profit strategy with you. It'll be on future ideal client pipeline. So if you want some ideas, first of all, what's the difference between a future ideal client and everything else? And also, what does a pipeline mean and what are some things that you can do as an agency or, and, or producer? If you're individually trying to build your pipeline, what are some things you can do to have a pipeline overflowing with more opportunities than time? Pretty good situation to be in. Before I dive into the content today, I do want to share again that if you have not yet registered or looked into our profit net event, March 11th through the 13th, it's coming up pretty quickly now. Depending on when you're listening to this, make sure you take time to go to sitkins.com profitnet this is our premier event. This is the last time we'll be doing this event publicly. So if you want to be in the room with other agency leaders, coaches and speakers who are gonna help you not just share ideas, but execute those ideas at a very high level. Proven ideas, proven strategies. Definitely want to take some time to go to sitkins.com profitnet all right, let's talk about pipelines. Who doesn't want to build their pipeline, right? In fact, this may not surprise you, but when I travel around the country and I do different training sessions and I see how many you have just pipelines just overflowing with more opportunities than time that you just don't even know what to do with. All these great, amazing opportunities you have each and every week, not shockingly, very few, if any hands go up in the air, right? The importance of pipelines, we all know the importance of having the right people to talk to. The question is, what are we doing about it, right? To actually execute that, one of the questions I always Ask is what does a full pipeline mean for you as an agency? What would it mean for you as a sales producer in this industry? And pretty obvious answers. Well, it helps me talk to more people, it helps me make more money, increase revenue. Absolutely. It does all those things. You know what else a full pipeline does that sometimes we miss is that a full pipeline allows you to have what we call WAP W A P walkaway power, Right. Where you're able to better qualify. If you have a full pipeline, this may not be surprising. Think about it. If you have a full pipeline with future ideal clients, you're less likely to work on accounts that you have a very low chance of writing. Right? Because what happens is, well, I'll work on it because, you know, I may get lucky and at least I'm looking busy and at least I've got a chance. And so it really want to change this idea of pipeline development not just as far as just numbers, right? Just quantity, but the true quality. And to get really specific on what that means, we use the term at Sitkins, future ideal client. And everything that we teach and train around is about future ideal client. Future ideal client. Future ideal client. Now, we do this for two reasons. One, we think you should identify your future ideal client, know who they are, specifically who you want to go after, so you can really dive deeper in how you can differentiate and just be a better advisor, add more value to them and their life and in their business. But at the same time, we also say future ideal client because we just want to get rid of the head trash of suspect and prospect. Now, if you use a CRM system of some kind and you've got a funneling thing, I get that those are some terms that are used. So it's not about all the technical aspects. What I really want to share today is future ideal client. Again, it's a mindset and a philosophy, and then there's strategies around that to say, listen, we're not going to work with everybody. We're not all things to all people. And I'll talk more about that in a minute. But we've got to really identify who our future ideal client is, why they're our future ideal client. Do they meet a minimum account size? Are we working on any account of any size? Do they meet some demographics right, that we have? Have we looked at our other clients? And this is something to consider for every agency. If you've not done 80 20, and I've talked a lot in this podcast about 80 20, but just going through your book business and saying, what are the top 20% of our clients that typically produce 80% of our revenue? And start to say, wait, is there some patterns or trends that we see around that top 20%? It probably is, right? Maybe the number of employees, location, philosophy, all these kind of things to identify what is our future ideal client is so important. So let me just walk through some different areas that I think as an agency, and certainly if you're an individual sales producer, you need to think about when it comes to pipeline development with your future ideal client. Pipeline number one, if you just have a bunch of people on a list, just names that you've randomly. Whether it's a database or whatever the case may be. In fact, this reminds me, I was doing a training one time and had a really great lady who was in the room, a very successful producer. But it was funny, we got in a pipeline and she was saying, well, actually I have thousands in my pipeline. I said, you have thousands of people in your pipeline? She goes, yeah, I've got a whole database of it. And I said, well, what are you actively doing with that database? I mean, are you specifically targeting, Are you having conversations? How are you differentiating? How are you getting in the door? And she goes, well, I don't know any of that. I just know I have them on a list. And I said to her, I said, listen, I don't mean to sound critical here, but it sounds like to me you don't have a pipeline. You have a database of hope. And I think with producers and agencies, we often have these databases of hope. They're just names in a system that make us feel good, that we've got something there, but what are we actually doing with it? So when you have a future ideal client list, and I'll talk about the numbers in a minute, what that may look like. First of all, to understand who they are, you've got to do research. And too often we guess you understand the patterns, the trends, the concerns, the desires of your future ideal client list. And I think we want to do that. But again, because we're not sure on who they are and we're not understanding how our value system aligns with theirs, we often don't take the time and energy to do research. It was interesting too, when it comes to identifying future ideal clients, One of the programs that we have is an elite mastery level for producers. So all the producers who have been through our Sitkins producer training camp we invited back and they pay an additional fee to be part of our elite group, our mastermind group. We had our first session this past fall, and it was very interesting listening to these producers tell their stories. And by the way, they range, you know, our top producers in that room, you know, we did our top list range from somewhere to a half million up to over 4 million in commission revenue. They're doing pretty darn well. And so not only was I part of doing some of the presentations and having conversations, but more importantly for me is I want to learn from these people. What are you doing? Right? It's a great aspect of my job. I get a chance to meet a lot of great agency leaders and great producers and just pick their brain, right? Ask questions and learn from them so I can share to other people that we coach. Out of 30 people that I talked to specifically, right. And got information back, 28. 28 out of 30 of these elite producers, again, these are large producers doing really, really well. Success. 28 out of 30 of them were specialists that they identify a specialty or two that encompass at least half their book of business. Now, if you are a generalist, if you're a full service agency, well, we just can't do that. Listen, you run your business however you want, right? And you can have some success being a generalist. But I will tell you, the days of the proud generalist, it's dying, right? It's dying. And again, you can do okay, you can do good, probably even in this industry, in your business, if you are a generalist. But to really be great, you've got to be known for something. You've got to be the expert. People don't pay for average. Unless you want to be another transaction, commodity, type of broker or agency. People don't pay for average. And so you got to start to figure out what are you going to specialize in, what are some things that you could do as an agency? And now if you're an agency, obviously, you may have different producers, that you may have different niches within your agency. That's fine. If you're a producer, hopefully you've got one or two that you're looking at. And if you don't have one yet, it could be a process for you. You have to start to understand the marketplace, understand your demographic, your location. Are there certain carriers you work with that can help you with this? What are the things that you like to do that interest you? And kind of put these together, because the last thing you want to do is have a niche of a type of business, for example, that doesn't produce any revenue or that everyone else is working on. So you want to think outside the box a little bit, but you got to find what's right for you. But you've got to understand that you've got to be the expert that people don't pay for average. And I've talked about the law of compensation before, but the law of compensation simply says this, that people buy things or you make money as an agency or producer by the fact that there's a need in the marketplace for what you do, that you have the ability to do it. But the third part is what is the difficulty in replacing you? And when you become a specialist, it becomes harder to replace. And you can just use specialists of any type of field. Certainly in the medical field. Do specialists make more than general practitioners? Yes. Well, does that mean general practitioners are bad? No, but it means specialists make more. Why? Why do specialists make more? Well, people go pretty simply. Well, because they do things that other people can't do. That's one of the main ones. They have deeper knowledge in certain areas. And by the way, especially if you're into benefits or commercial lines, do people care that you know about insurance or their business? Well, they assume that you know insurance you better. You're out there having a conversation. So they assume you know about insurance and risk management. But if you understand their business deeply, it changes the game. So be the expert because really it's about their value system, not yours. We think about pipeline development. You start to develop your pipeline, you have to start to think. And again, this is why it's important to go deeper, deep versus just plainly wide and just scattered, right? We want to go deep. It's not about your value system, it's about theirs. So what do they want? When you understand, when you have a specialty, when you're an expert and you've identified future ideal clients in different areas, you can answer the question, what do they really want? What are they really frustrated with? What are their goals? What are their outcomes? Now, one of the things that if you can simplify, and again, if you're working with business owners, this is a little bit easier. If you're working with personal lines, it may be a little more specific in certain areas, but typically, what do people really care about in personal lines? Well, it's typically their time and it's their treasures. Now they have different type of treasures, but that's really what people are looking at. And you could dive deeper in those areas. For business owners, what do they really care about? Well, I can tell you most business owners really care about profitability. Are they going to be in business next year. So how can you as an insurance producer, or you as an insurance agency, help them increase and improve profitability? They also care about their clients, the people that actually pay them. Right. Just like we're in business, they're in business and sometimes we forget that. And lastly, they care about their employees, the people that help support them. So it's these three areas, profits, employees and clients. So we want to understand that. Now, here's where I want to get a little. Again, I'm not going to go that deep on this podcast, but I want to share something with you. What if you actually had a Future Ideal Client pipeline based on a certain number of Future Ideal clients, certain number of names of businesses or individuals that you specifically wanted to work with? Would that be helpful? Now, my answer to you is yes, of course it's helpful. We actually teach and train around a concept called the Dream 20. Now, if you want Dream 30 or Dream 18, go for it. But I think a 20 is a great number. We've seen it from our research that We've got a dream 20 list, 20 future ideal clients that we've identified. We understand they fit our target account size that we want. They fit a niche or specialty that we're part of. They fit the demographics, they fit location, whatever it may be. Right. But they fit and we're actually going to write them down. Now here's the cool part. We've got one of our partner agencies that does this. I think it is just so cool. As an agency, how cool would it be to have like your entire dream list? Or you have a big poster at the top of your agency, it says Future Ideal clients of this agency and they're actually listed. It's pretty powerful. As an individual producer, how cool would it be to have a list of 20 that are there on your desk or in front of you? Maybe you laminate it, maybe you do the logos of each business, if you're working with businesses. But it becomes very, very visible that everywhere I go, I'm always thinking about this dream 20. How am I going to get with this dream 20? And if you listen to my other podcasts in the past talking about 8020 and you understand target account size and that I'm not just going to go after every account because I've written some and I can replicate the best, I'm going to find the best. It doesn't take that many to write to have a heck of a year. Certainly for the agency as well, it's that power of 80:20. But we have to get focused. And so again, when I talk about pipeline development, I don't mean just a big number. I mean it's great to have quality and quantity. I'm talking about quality. Say these are the people we want and this is how we're going to get them. Now, better yet, now this is a tool that we use specifically for our private client members, but a target account strategy plan. So not only do we have the names, we actually have a plan for each one of these clients. Understanding who the influences are, understanding why we have a competitive advantage, understanding the next steps we're going to take, understanding all these different things about the account so that not only do we have them visible and listed, but we actually have a plan of attack around them. That's a different philosophy than just, well, we'll just do some cold calls today. No, specifically, what are the things we're going to say? What are the pain points? Who can introduce us? Who are there at Network? By the way, can we use LinkedIn, right, to build bridges, which most agencies and producers don't do a very good job of. It can be a great tool, LinkedIn and others to help connect, to build the bridge. We want to keep the list visible, we want to keep it updated. And then most importantly, we start to put this together in pipeline development. We have got to be able to tell our story, tell our story with confidence. If you're out at a networking event, right, if you're asking for referral, specifically who are you asking for? If you're meeting with a center of influence in your, whether it's an association or in your community, are you positioning yourself to tell your story and ask questions that go back to identify who specifically you're looking for in your future ideal client list? I truly believe where your focus goes, your energy flows. And I've seen the most successful agencies and producers, they don't guess on who they want. They're very specific. There's a marketing concept out there. It's been out there for a while. You'll see some of those big funnels which again, I'm not any type of marketing thing that works for you. God bless you, go make some more revenue. But it's kind of a different technique where instead of having a big funnel at the top, where we just put random names and people and businesses and then hopefully we have enough conversations that someone comes out the bottom, we actually flip the funnel. It's a concept called account based marketing. And this is really what I'm talking about to a degree. Getting very focused of hey, we're not going to have everybody that's going to fit in the top of the funnel, but once we get them in, we're actually going to widen. Right. Actually, as we go through, because we're go deeper and deeper with them. And by the way, because we're working with future ideal clients that we have targeted and we have specific questions and value that we want to share with them. Guess what? It's much easier for us to replicate that through referrals. If we find the right people, there's probably more people like them. Right? So you want to replicate our best, not replicate everything in our agency. As Roger Sitkins always says, you're going to replicate something, right? Shouldn't it be your best, your best clients? So that's the idea I want to share today in pipeline development. I want to share one more idea or concept with you. Not everybody uses this. And again, anything that I share, we always say at Sitkins, listen, you can agree or disagree, you're not going to implement all of it, but hopefully you can take something back with you. And one of the concepts of pipeline is how do you monetize it? How do you know you've got a full pipeline? What's the way that we could actually measure it? This is always a question that we get. It's a fair question. And I've talked about being specific. And certainly if you've got 20 of your target account size and you understand what that is and you're doing it the right way, you're going to hit, right, the goal of your monetized value of the pipeline. But here's something that we look at that I'll share with you today. So a monetized value of the pipeline, or mvp, are we working with enough? Do we have enough in the pipeline? And working on that, we know that if we do the right things, we're going to hit our goal, because that's really what we want, right? We want success to be predictable and guaranteed. So let's just say, for example, that right now, if you look in your pipeline, and I don't mean database of hope, but I mean pipeline, you have $300,000 of potential revenue sitting in your pipeline, right? So $300,000 of potential revenue sitting in your pipeline, you've actually gone through, there's 20 clients here that I'm actively pursuing and doing things with. It adds up to $300,000. I'm just keeping the numbers simple here. Then what you need to do is you need to understand, and these are some things that Maybe you are doing in your agency, maybe you're not, but I want to bring them to your attention. Number one in your track record. And if you're tracking this in your history, what's your conversion rate? Meaning how many of these first appointments have you had in the past that actually lead to a second appointment? Because sometimes we have our first appointment and we call this an executive briefing at Sitkins, but we have our first meeting, and it may not be a fit or they may not be interested at that point before you even get to any type of discovery or presentation. And that just kind of where it ends. So first of all, what's the conversion rate? How many first appointments do you have that go to second appointments? So let's just say for make numbers easy, that looking at your history, you've concluded that you're at a 50% conversion ratio. That meaning that first appointments to second appointments, half the time, you move on, Right? So we've got $300,000 in our monetized value of the pipeline. We've now realized that 50% of those go to first or second. So our actual MVP is 150,000 in our pipeline. If we're actually measuring this right, looking at our past record, then when you determine what our closing ratio is, now, many of you do track closing ratio. It's more common, which is pretty simple. The amount of presentations that we give to the amount of people that say, yes, we want to be a client of your agency. So conversion ratio is pretty easy to track. I presented this option, presented solutions. Now you may say, present a quote to my client, to my future ideal client, and they bought or not. Now, let's make the numbers easy. Your track record says that 50% of your presentations lead to sales. So you've got a 50% closing ratio. So now our monetized value of the pipeline has gone from 300,000 to 150. 50% conversion rate, and then we do another 50% on closing ratio. So our actual monetized value of the pipeline is $75,000. $300,000. 50% conversion ratio, 150. 50% closing ratio at 75. So what does that number mean? You go, that's interesting, Brent, you numbers. I have no idea how that applies. Your goal, your goal, your monetized value of the pipeline should be two times your annual goal. So when you set up your annual goal, hopefully you're doing some annual goal planning for yourself, your agency, and certainly for your producers. You want to make sure that that number is two times the annual goal. And you'll find out pretty quickly. You have a couple options. Either you need better accounts in your pipeline. You need to find ways that your conversion ratio is higher, meaning maybe you're not telling your story well enough, or you're not doing a good job in discovering your closing ratio is not high enough. So as your conversion ratio and your closing ratio increase because you're doing a better job right, guess what? Your pipeline number at the beginning doesn't quite have to be as big, right? Because the monetized value will be higher. If you're currently struggling, you're going to need a bigger number. So again, be honest with yourself. But it gives you a realistic picture of if I do the things that I have been doing and hopefully you continue to improve upon them, I will hit my goal for the year because I understand my monetized value of a pipeline. So I said all that. I may have just confused you in the last five minutes. If I did, I apologize. But I want to share that with you because again, pipeline development to me we teach at Sitkins is not just about I've got, you know, 475 names in a database. My pipeline's full. No, it's not right? You just have names. I'm talking about specifically identifying, not suspects, not prospects, future ideal clients doing your research, specializing in a certain area so that you are the expert, understanding that it's what's in it for them. It's their value system, not yours. To actually list names, to find ways to build a bridge through associations and LinkedIn, to keep lists visible. Right. And updated. And to be able to tell your story with excellence. You start doing those things, guess what? Pipelines become a very powerful thing. And last but certainly not least, and I've talked about this before, one of the best ways to build your pipeline is ask your best clients for referrals. Earn and ask for referrals. And I could do a complete another podcast on that and maybe I will at some point, but earning asking for referrals. So hopefully this this podcast episode today, the Agent Leader podcast, was helpful to you. If I can help you have any questions, you can reach me brentitkins.com It's B R E N T at S I T k I n s.com and please don't forget there's still time. March 11th through the 13th. If you want to be part of the premier masterminding event that we're going to have, Cape Coral, Florida, March 11th to 13th, please go to sitkins.com profit net to learn more and register today with that. I wish you all the best in your success. Thanks for listening.