Three Ways to Be More Interesting

Welcome to the Agent Leader Podcast. My name is Brent Kelly, your host. Thanks so much for joining me on another episode. I'm excited to be with you and really excited to share some impactful information with you today. In fact, it's information that I really want you to have a pen and paper ready, take some notes, because I want this information to become transformation for you in your business. Now this is the Agent Leader podcast and I've talked about this before. Leadership is about influence. So whether you're an agency principal, a sales manager, an insurance producer, a service professional, if you have influence, and guess what, you do, right? Influence with those around you, this podcast, this episode is going to be hugely impactful for you. Because what I want to talk today is how can you become more interesting? How can you as an insurance professional become more interesting? You may think, well, geez, why is that so important just to become more interesting? Because maybe you've dealt with this. I have. If you're not interesting, right? If you're not compelling, especially in today's noisy, distracted world, you really don't have a chance, right? Or at least you've got a competitive disadvantage, right? You're at a disadvantage against other people who are more, more interesting in different ways. And you know, what does this mean? Well, this means as an agency leader, as a, as an, if you're the insurance principal of your agency, guess what, Being interesting means you're able to have greater influence with your team, you get greater buy in with your team, you can make more of an impact with your team. If you're an insurance producer, this seems obvious, but if you're more interesting, if you're more compelling, guess what, you can get into more doors, you can keep accounts for longer. You, you can be more compelling with centers of influence. All those kind of things are important. At the end of the day, you make more sales, right? That's pretty important. And same thing for service professionals or anybody else. It's just the fact that you have a higher level of communication. Now, before I get into the content, just a couple quick reminders, I guess I have good news, bad news with some of the things going on in our programs at the Sitkins Group. And I guess it's not really bad news, so to speak, unless you were a person who was trying to get into our producer fit program. Because the doors are now closed for our March 30th. And again, you may be listening to this after that date Anyway, but that March 30 program, this is going to be the largest producer fit our sales training program that we've ever run at sitkins. We have 160 people producers registered and starting this program on March 30th. To say that we are pumped up at Sitkins is an understatement. We're actually slightly over capacity. We made a few exceptions, but now doors are closed. But here's the good news for you. If you're an agency that want to get your producers involved for our next camp or you're an individual producer or sales manager, want to get your team involved, our next one starts on May 6th. So not that long away, we're going to be having another producer program. The demand continues to increase. We continue to see great results. We continue to build momentum in the virtual producer program, get more producers involved, be very interactive. And at the end of the day, I said earlier, it's about transformation, getting producers to transform their mindset, their skills and just get them in a better environment to go out there and win in the marketplace. So if you're interested in learning more about the one that starts in May, or if you're an agency that wants to get your entire team involved with our programs, a couple ways to learn more go to sitkins.com profit for our producer, that's P R O F I t sitkins.com profit or if you're interested in our all inclusive membership, that's sitkins.com aim so make sure you check that out because then one in May is going to fill up before we know it as well. So let's get into the content for today. And I've kind of led in talking about being a interesting the impact of what that means and I want to start off by sharing just a personal story that I had in this area. Now, you know, for many of you know, I spent 15 years in insurance production and had a successful career in many, in many ways. Also a lot of bumps in the road like anybody. And as I went out and started my own company about five or so years ago, before I joined Roger Sitkins and the Sitkins Group, I was out there trying to get in the marketplace as a coach and a speaker and a trainer. And although I'd gotten pretty comfortable on how to do that in the insurance marketplace, what I would find, and I hear this from a lot of insurance producers in particular today, is I would reach out to places where I wanted to get indoors to open doors, to have deeper conversations, to be able to show the value I could provide. And before I could ever get to that, I would hear these words. I'm not interested. I'm not interested. And my guess, if you're listening to me now and you've ever been involved specifically in insurance sales, you've probably heard that more than once, right? I'm just not interested. Not interested. Let's face it, insurance isn't an exciting, sexy thing, although it's vital, it's important. And you know, we could talk forever about that. But if you can't get in the door or if you can't have a longer, more meaningful conversation, it doesn't matter what value you can provide if you can never have the opportunity to talk about it. And for me, about five years ago, I was struggling with this as well. And I call up a mentor. I'm part of a mentorship group. I had a coach. Again, I would ask all of you, who are your mentors and coaches? But I picked up the phone in a mentorship call and I asked this gentleman who has built several multi million dollar businesses. I said, listen, I'm doing all these things, but I keep hearing I'm just not interested. Or maybe too busy, right? That could be the other one. But just not interested. And he stopped me in my tracks by asking me this question. He said, brent, let me ask you a simple question. I said, sure. He said, are they not interested or are you not interesting? I said, oh, that's a good point. Because here's the thing, you know what, in my communication, I was saying all the things that you're supposed to say and doing all the things other people do, but it wasn't interesting, it wasn't compelling, it didn't make people go, you know, that's, that's interesting. Let's talk more. And so when I work with insurance professionals, certainly producers, but again, this is true for getting buy in with your team, dealing with difficult clients, whatever the case may be, is that if, if we're not interesting, we lose their attention. And we lose their attention, we can't add value. So there's three ways that I want to talk about how you can be more interesting. Kind of move from not interested to, hey, this is interesting. And this is communication 101. And although it may be communication 101, I can tell you most of the insurance professionals that I speak with aren't at communication 100 yet. And I don't mean to say that as a slam, but the truth of it is is that the most vital skill that you as an insurance professional, you as an insurance leader have is the ability to be a compelling communicator. Right? Ask really Great questions. Be able to present or persuade with power to be an active, engaged listener. To use the right body language, whether it's on video or face to face. Right. These are all things. So I just want to share with you three ways that you can be more interesting in your professional endeavors. Now again, if you don't have a pen and paper, take some notes. This is not complicated, not complicated to understand. But I will tell you, most insurance professionals don't think or practice in these specific areas. So I'm going to give an acronym. We have a lot of acronyms at Sitkins. If you've been through any of our programs, you know, we love acronyms. It helps you remember things. But here's an acronym I'm going to give you. Sma. Sma. So if you got a piece of paper write S and then somewhere middle of paper write M. At the bottom write A. And I'm going to talk about each of these and what they mean to you. Number one is S. If you want to be interesting, you've got to keep things simple. You've got to keep things simple. So often I see insurance professionals that over complicate the matter. Their biggest goal isn't to connect with someone, right? To really help them understand where there's going to be a mutual agreement. It's to pound them over the head with a bunch of techno garbage. We do this. This is great. Have you heard this? All these kind of things. And guess what? That's not interesting to most people. You know, one of the skills that we teach or specific skills within our programs is to be able to leverage a compelling 30 second commercial you could call an elevator pitch a quick infomercial, I don't care what it is. But the bottom line is if someone said, hey, what do you do? And better yet, why should I continue to talk with you? Right? That's the ultimate question. Most people aren't prepared for that question. Well, I'm a insurance agent with such and such and been in business for a few years and we help blank, blank, you know, or a little bit. That's probably better than most, quite honestly. So I would ask you, do you have a conversation around that question? What do you do? Do you have a statement that's interesting? You know, in fact it talks about 30 seconds. You really have about eight seconds. Now one of the things, and I'm not going to go through the whole template, but what is the biggest frustration of the clients that you work with and how do you help them with that frustration? How do they win if you can just think about that. You could turn this really quickly, right? People come to me when they're frustrated with blank. I help them to do blank and it results in blank. Right? That would be an example of a very basic template you could use. And we go in depth in this with our, within our programs. But that's something you could, you could think about. What's that number one frustration that you solve for your clients and future ideal clients? Or what's the frustration you solve with your team? How can you help them understand that? And here's something else that you could think about. What's your big fat claim? That was a term I learned way back in one of the early sales training I did about 20 years ago, and I still love that term. It was the BFC big fat claim. Because again, you may have not even 30 seconds, but 8 seconds. What would be the one question that you could ask that would be intriguing to someone you're talking to? What's the one big stat or statement that you could provide that would go, ooh, that's interesting. This takes preparation. But you've got to keep it simple. Don't over complicate it. People don't want to hear a five minute monologue on why your agency is great and why your people are so nice and that you've got all these markets. That's not interesting. That's just more insurance mumbo jumbo. So ask yourself, how do I, and this is something. How can I keep things simple and capture attention quickly? What's one question? What's one statement? And I can't answer that for you because whoever's listening to this, right, and you're listening to this, you may have different backgrounds and experience and specific roles, but what's something you could say that's simple? So that's, number one is the s. Keep it simple. Number two is memorable, right? Memorable. Well, how do you make things memorable? There's a lot of things to think about in this area, but I think the best way to be memorable is to be able to share stories and examples from real life. You know, there's a reason why kids, this includes my kids and when I was a kid, why we love stories. Why do we love story? Why would we rather hear a story than a bunch of facts? Well, because it's interesting. We can see ourselves in the story. It draws us in. So one of the things that you can think about, and this is an example, if you're an insurance producer, what's a transformation story of one of your clients and if you can't think of one, well, borrow one from someone else in your agency or talk to your insurance reps, right? Your insurance carriers, your marketing people, and start to collect some stories that you can use. Real stories. I mean, just for an example, I'm not going to go in detail on this, but let's just use something as boring. Let's face it, it is but important of business interruption. One line of coverage. Well, if you were to say, well, let me share something with you. One of the things that we do is, you know, we have a business interruption worksheet that we go through and blank, blank, blank, blank, and all these things, that's maybe okay to start. But what if you ask a question around this specific topic, in this case, business interruption. So if you were to say something as a producer, for example, hey, let me ask you a question. How do you currently calculate your specific business insurance needs today? And could I see a copy of the worksheet that you use? That's just one example. Again, depends on the account. But if you were to ask a proactive, engaging question, and they would say, well, I'm not really sure, or I think it's something like this. Is it better to spew a bunch of facts on business interruption, how important it is because you think it's important, or could you say, hey, you know, let me share a quick story with you. I was working with one of our clients last year, and then you go on and tell the story. Is that more memorable? It is, right? So you have to be able to understand that. You also have to understand why you're different, right? And then here's something else about being memorable. How are you being perceived? Now, this is true both in the virtual world, in person, but how are you being perceived? How are you being. How are people thinking about you and feeling about you? One of my favorite quotes comes from Maya Angelou, who said, people won't remember what you said or what you did, but they'll always remember how you made them feel. So when you're thinking about being memorable, what's a feeling, an emotion you're trying to trigger in a conversation? I think you should be thinking about that before every phone call, before every appointment. How do I want this person to feel after our conversation is finished? Start with the end in mind. If you don't know or never thought about it, you just hope it works out, right? I really want them to feel intrigued. I really want them to feel uncomfortable. Maybe in some cases, right, with what they currently have, that's fine. But what is the feeling that you want to convey and how can you do that? I can tell you one of the best ways of doing it is through real stories and real examples. I can tell you most insurance professionals are not very good storytellers because I hear it all the time like, well, I don't know what to say. And I just say this. And they ramble on the same stuff. It isn't memorable. I have given, I don't even know how many speeches and keynotes and trainings I've done. I know in the last year, I've been online for over 200 hours doing trainings, right? And we're very successful at what we do. But one of the reasons why, and one of the things I hear from people that attend programs and I have learned, and I'm learning, I'm still learning, I'm trying to get better at this skill is telling the right stories at the right time because people don't remember. You know, I remember, Brent, I remember when you talked about point number four last year. Now they say, you know what? I remember when you shared that story of that, of that producer or that agency or whatever that was dealing with that situation and how they overcame it. That really, really hit me. I'll never forget that. Are you doing those things in your communication as an insurance agency leader of any capacity to draw that emotion, that feeling out. So simple is number one. Memorable is number two. Number three is actionable. Actionable. One of the things that we have to think about, I just talked about in getting ready for any conversation that you have, how do you want them to feel? Well, here's something else. What do you want them to do? And this depends on the conversation you're having. Obviously, sometimes you don't really want them to do a lot, but what's the next step? So often we leave loose ends in our communication and it's not interesting and it confuses people. I don't really know what the next step is. It may not be the final step, but what's the next step? And let's make it easy, right? As we, as we conclude this call, let me share with you the next step that I see us taking. And I'm going to do this and this. Does that work for you? Great. Let me put that. Let me confirm that. Right? We need to make sure that if we're going to be interesting, that we give people a tangible, actionable next step. If people are confused about what's next, they'll just feel like, forget it. I don't remember right it's not their job. You need to help them make it easy and make it tangible. Now, if I had to take these three areas that I talked about again, three key three ways to be more interesting, right? To move from. I'm not interested to, you know, that's really interesting. What is something you can say very quickly? It's simple. What's the biggest frustration you solve? What does that look like? What's a big fat claim that you have that goes, you know, if you said something like, for example, back from a sales perspective, you know, what we found is that 71% of the people that have experienced our unique process have left their current agent, have come with us. Now, you got to have a real number, whatever that may be. But what's your compelling stat that you have? Maybe you've helped in profitability, maybe you've helped in lowering the true or total cost of risk, whatever that is. They go, wow, that's interesting. That would apply to me. It's simple, I get it. Just one thing that stands out. And then, of course, what's the story you're going to be telling? The stories you're going to tell that make you memorable, that people get. When you tell stories, people see themselves in that story. They can relate. If you're talking about another person, another business, whatever it is, and something that you've dealt with and helped someone with, for example, they're going to say, well, I could see ourselves in that position if it's the right fit. And then lastly, what's the actionable thing you're going to do? Just S.M.A. simple, memorable, actionable. Now, this goes back to some of my John Maxwell training I've done in leadership. And John, instead of one of the books, there's three questions that you'd want to ask yourself in every interaction. And this goes along with what I just said, but I think it'll help you as an agency leader get ready and prepare for any conversation that you have. And it goes, I said it earlier, I'll say it again. If you go into any interaction, any meeting, any phone call, whatever the case may be, and you haven't thought about some of these things ahead of time, you're at a competitive disadvantage and you're just hoping that you say the right thing at the right time and maybe you will, maybe you'll get lucky. But these three questions have really helped me and it goes along with the sma. And here's what John said in one of his books. He said three questions to ask yourself before any interaction. Number One is, what do you want them to know? If there's one thing to be more interesting that you want them to know, what is it? And this goes back to the simple part, right? Like, here's the 17 things I need you to know. Here's the one thing that if I could share with you, one thing that makes us unique and different and compelling, here's what it is. Number two is, how do you want them to feel? And I talked about that in memorable how do you want them to feel? What's the emotional state that you want them to have people buy? And this is ideas, products, services buy with emotion. They justify intellectually. So we've got to make sure that we're hooking them emotionally. So how do you want them to feel? What's the feeling you want to convey? And lastly, this goes back to the action is what do you want them to do? What is to get in that next step that you want them to do? So those three questions, what do you want them to know? How do you want them to feel? What do you want them to do? Communication is the most overlooked, underappreciated skill for insurance professionals. I can't tell you how many times this isn't a pick on insurance professionals, but I get to see a lot of them that we ask, hey, how would you ask for a referral? How would you address your team in a big meeting, right? Whatever it may be, how would you present your 30 second commercial, whatever it may be? And it's, well, you know, kind of, well, here's what we do. And I, and then here's something I always tell insurance professionals. I'll tell you on this podcast, if you can't do it during practice, if you can't do it there in your office on video, you can't do it out in the real world. It's not just going to magically come to you. And so when I share these three ways to be more interesting, it's to help you become a better communicator, it's to help you raise your game to the highest level. Because when you can raise your skill of a communicator, when you can be more influential, when you can ask the right questions, when you can be some of those people that, man, I'm really attracted to this person. Not physically attracted, right? Attracted in the business sense to this person, for whatever reason, they have this magnetism. You know why? Because they know how to communicate. So just think about, how can I be simple? How can I be memorable? How can I be actionable? So if this podcast, other podcasts that I've given have helped you as an agency leader in any capacity, I certainly would appreciate a review on whatever platform you listen on. And if you want to learn more about our programs and services that we have at Sitkins, Visit our website, sitkins.com As I mentioned earlier, our upcoming producer fit program. 160 producers are joining us. Cannot wait for that. And that's full and that's done. But our next one does start in May. Go to sitkins.com profit or if you want to get your entire agency team involved at one low price, we're having great success with this. You go to sitkins.com aim I wish you, I wish your agency all the best in your success. Thanks for listening. Sam.