What Separates Insurance Professionals From Amateurs

Of all the sales tools and resources you possess as an insurance agent or agency leader, what's the most powerful tool you possibly have? Well, I'm going to talk about that today on the Agent Leader Podcast. The Agent Leader Podcast is brought to you by the Sitkins Network. Sell even more, retain even more, earn even more. You can learn more@sitkins.com that's s I t k I n s. Well, welcome to another episode of the AgentLeader podcast. My name is Brent Kelly. If you are a returning listener, thank you. Thanks for being a listener. Appreciate that. Always feel free to reach out to me. You can shoot me an email@brentidkins.com that's brentitkins.com, love to hear from you. If you have any challenges or things you're working on or success stories, always love to hear that from agent leaders out there in the marketplace. And if you're a brand new listener, the first time you've ever listened to this podcast. Well, welcome, welcome. This podcast is devoted to agent leaders and as I've said many times before, leadership is influence. So regardless of your title, your position, your stature within the agency, if you have influence on your clients, on your team members, on your community, and every one of you listening to this does in your agency, then this podcast is for you. It's all about leadership and sales ideas and retention ideas, productivity ideas, any way to help improve you and your agency. That's what this podcast is designed for. And as I said on the intro of today's episode, I'm going to talk about the most important or the most powerful sales skill for insurance agent leaders. The most powerful sales skill. That's saying a lot, right? There's a lot of things out there, I think, you know, salespeople are always looking for the next resource, the next tool to help build better rapport, to help differentiate from the competition, and of course, duh, to make more sales, right? And I always think of, you know, of sales people in general and certainly agency producers. You've got this. Again, this is hypothetical, but you've got this quiver and these different arrows in your, in your quiver. And there's different tools and things that you can use when you're out meeting with a prospective client or whether you're meeting with a client or really anyone, anyone in your community. And I think there's one arrow in your sales production quiver that stands above the rest. And it's very simple, but it's underutilized all the time. You ready? Are you ready for this? Questions. Asking great questions. Now, here's something to think about. You may even want to write this down. An average question, not a great question, just an average question is still better than a great answer. An average question is still better than a great answer. You know, early in my insurance production career, I quickly realized, especially in my early days, that I didn't have the experience, I didn't have the knowledge. I certainly didn't have the talent of other seasoned insurance producers. And early in my career, it caused me to lack confidence. This is true for a lot of young producers in particular, I mean, regardless of age, just as you learn in this process us, when you feel like you don't have all the tools and knowledge, you come in sometimes a little bit scared. Like, I don't know what to say. What if they ask me this question? What if this happens? What do I do? And the lack of confidence really bothered me and it hurt my performance until I discovered a secret. And this really isn't a secret. I don't think it's a secret to anyone. But it was a secret to me. And this was the secret that people didn't really care how much I knew. People didn't really care how long I was in business. People didn't really care about all my insurance expertise. You know those letters at the end of your name? They didn't care about those things as much as they cared about themselves, as much as they cared about their business, their clients, their profit, their employees see the power of building rapport and differentiating from the competition and making more sales. It wasn't based as much on the quality of my answers as nearly as much as it was based on my ability to ask the right questions. Now, let me just take a quick aside here, because what I don't want to do is downplay the fact that you shouldn't learn more about insurance products and you shouldn't improve yourself with insurance expertise and knowledge and skills. Of course, you need to be doing that right. You need to be continually improving in those areas. However, this is the point I want to make. The most successful sales producers spend much more time learning about their future ideal clients than they do telling their future ideal clients how much they know. I'll say that again, and you may want to write this down as well. This is really powerful. The most successful sales producers that I have spent time with and that I see have phenomenal books of business and great relationships. The most sales. The most successful sales producers spend much more time learning about their future ideal clients than they do telling their future ideal clients how Much they know. Now, you might have noticed something else. I've said this on previous podcasts is when we work with our members and our clients within the Sitkins network, we don't talk about suspects or prospects. We talk about future ideal clients. And there's a reason for that is because we think you should know who it is you want to do business with. Not anyone who fogs a mirror. But you understand what the future ideal client looks like and feels like and what they need. And I'm going to talk about that in more detail. But the point of it is how do you ask great questions? How do you get to know someone if you don't know who it is that you want? So let's talk about the power of questions for a minute. You know, questions really are the lifeblood for insurance agency producers and really anyone in the insurance agency system. This is true with a service team. This is true with agency leaders. It really is. The lifeblood is asking the right questions. So before I get into some of the how, some of the what's, you know, type of questions asked, let's talk about the why. The why is crucial. If you don't understand the why of questions. Well, the how and the what's don't really matter. So let me go through some of the why's. The power of questions. Number one is this, is that you only get answers to the questions that you ask. That may seem obvious, but think about this. How many times have you assumed something about your future ideal client only to find out that you assumed wrong? Maybe you assumed something about their program, their coverage. Maybe you assumed something about the relationship that they had with their current agent or carrier. And you went through this process, the sales process, whether it was a short process or a long process, and you got to the end and you were like, oh, I didn't know that. I had a really early insurance mentor of mine, a trainer, loved this guy. His name is Jeff Jelona and he passed away several years ago. Really sad. But Jeff would always have the term of when would you like to know? And he would say, now is good, now is good. So you want to. You only get answers to the questions that you ask. You can't assume things. You've got to ask questions. That's why they're so powerful. Number two is questions. Lower walls. Even if you get a quality introduction or referral into a future ideal client, there's always going to be some form of a wall. We're just naturally conditioned to that as buyers, aren't we have Anything that there's got to be some wall. But to lower walls and to quickly earn credibility and trust, ask questions. When you ask and you don't tell, you will quickly lower walls. You can come in and ask questions and people begin to trust you much quicker than they would if you come in and say, here's what I do and here's how we do it and here's why we're so great. Here's why you should trust us. Oh, really? Really? Number three, questions are the most effective form of communication. There is nothing more power in conversation than questions. Have you ever had a conversation with someone? In fact, just stop for a second and think about the greatest conversation, the greatest conversations you've had in the last few weeks. I really enjoyed that conversation with such and such. And if you really think about it, unpack it, I'm guessing it's probably because they were listening to you. They were really listening to you. You were feeling appreciated. The conversation was open, the conversation was honest, There was engagement in the conversation. And that's because there was questions being asked that did those type of things. So questions are by far the most effective form of communication. Number four questions. Cultivate humility. You know, as an insurance agency, professional, insurance agent, professional. Again, whatever your title or position is, there's some complexity in the business, isn't there? It can be easy to get caught up and we call techno puke. You know, of all the coverages and endorsements and exclusions and this and that and whatever the case may be. And sometimes it's easy, especially as you gain more experience. This happened to me. The more that I went to classes to improve my knowledge, the challenge became how did I not speak all that stuff to people or tell people what I thought they needed to know without asking enough questions? See, no future client, no current client wants to be talked down to do that. I mean, who wants to be talked down to. Have you ever went into some place and there was a know it all salesperson, and before they really got to know you or what you wanted or your needs or just, gosh, in some cases, what your name was, they were telling you what you needed and why you needed it. Now, here's a trick. Even if you are 99% sure of the answer, there's a good chance you should ask another question to know more. Because guess what, if it's your idea, it's your idea. If it's their idea, it's their idea. Think about that for a second. I could tell someone what they need or I could ask Another question, let them tell me what they need and then I'll be able to help them better. And by the way, it cultivates humility. I am not talking down to them. Alright, last why number five of why questions are so powerful. Questions help you engage in rich conversation, in meaningful conversation. You know, most conversations between insurance agents in particular and future ideal clients are very superficial. They're how you doing, your typical rapport questions, you know, typical who you, who you currently with, you know, all that kind of stuff. Do I can I kind of look at your policies, you know, all that kind of basic stuff. Now I believe the two most important areas in an insurance professional, the two most important things your job is as an insurance agent leader in particular, if you're an outside commission salesperson, should be two main things. Number one is your job should be providing risk advice. I'm going to talk about what a professional is here in a second. But risk advice number two is building relationships. If you just did those two things and you asked the questions to allow yourself to do those things better, to ask great questions that lead to deeper relationships and ask great questions that show that you are a risk professional, that you analyze risk. One of the things that we often say, and we always say in fact with our producer training camps to insurance agencies is that insurance isn't the only solution. Insurance is one of the solutions we provide. If all you're doing is providing insurance, then you're like everybody else. So when you ask questions and you dig deeper, you're actually able to provide some risk advice. And I'm going to get to that deeper just in a minute. So I think I've hit home the power of questions by now. But the purpose of your questions is to gather information to determine their value systems, not yours, and learn the decision making process. And lastly, I've already stated this. When you ask great questions, especially up front, you quickly differentiate yourself from the competition. You know you've asked a great question, you know you're onto something really good. When the future ideal client that you want stops, thinks and looks at you and says, you know, no one's ever asked me that before. That's when you're on to something really powerful. In his bestselling sales book, the Little Red Book of Selling, I love, love Jeffrey Gittamer, a lot of Gitamer books. He has seven powerful questioning success strategies. And I'm going to go through this quickly but here's the seven that he mentions. He said ask questions that make the buyer evaluate new information. That's What I just said. Ask questions that qualify needs. Ask questions about improved productivity, profits, or savings. Right? That's what they're interested in. Ask questions about the company or personal goals. I love to ask questions, especially to business owners, about where they visualize their business in three years, what do they want to do? Because when you know their future and what they want, you're able to protect it. You're able to help with their risk. Number five, ask questions that separate you from the competition. Ask questions that make the prospect think before giving a response. And ask power questions to create a buying atmosphere. So, again, these are all kind of similar things, but here's an idea that I want to share, and it was a very easy analogy for me when I started to think about it. Hopefully, it'll relate well to you. And if you've ever played the game Scattergories, this will make perfect sense to you. If you haven't played the game Scattergories, I'll briefly give you a highlight. But the game of Scatter is. It's a board game you play with multiple people. And the idea behind the game is that you have a list. There's different lists, and you stick it in the little cardboard flap thing, whatever you call it, that opens up, and you stick a list in there, and it's got a few things. Just for example, it might say US Cities, it might say food or whatever it is. There's just different topics. And then you roll this big, gigantic die that has all the letters of the Alphabet on it. And. And whatever letter comes up, that's what you answer. So, for example, if I roll the letter P and I have US Cities, I may say Pittsburgh or write down Pittsburgh on my thing. If it says favorite food, I may write down pizza. And you go through a list. I think there's like 10 or 12 answers. And when you get to the end and you try to fill out everything that you can, the timer stops. And then you go around the room and everyone gives their answer. And here's the trick of Scattergories. And what's the point of why I'm explaining this is if your answer is the same as someone else, you have to cross it off. You don't get any points for that. So if I said Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, there's a good chance that maybe someone else might say that, because it's a very common city. If I say pizza, that's a pretty common food. However, if I said maybe something like Paducah, Kentucky for my city or Pistachio for my Food. It's different. Here's the point and here's why this is relatable. When you ask questions, I want you to think like Scattergories. What is every other agent asking? What is every other insurance producer asking? Their future ideal clients, or as they all say, their prospect? Anyone that can fog up a mirror. You don't want to ask those questions. How are you differentiating yourself if you're asking the exact same questions that every other insurance producer is asking? See, here's the thing, and I mentioned this briefly earlier, you are a professional. I hope, I hope and pray that you listening to this podcast, consider yourself a high level professional. It's imperative that as a professional that you sound like a trusted advisor, not just another insurance agency, just agent. Just like I said with Scattergories, there's a reason when you ask insurance buyers to go, well, you guys all kind of look and walk the same and they're conditioned to do the same thing. Well, 90 days, time for a quote, here's my policy, here's my loss runs, you know, go to your market, see what you can do. Maybe it'll work out. Who wants to play that game? How are you different? How are you adding value? See, professionals are world class. Professionals are prepared. Professionals are committed to their craft. That means you must ask questions based on helping your future clients control their true cost of risk. Think of other professionals, like medical providers. Let me just think of a doctor for a second, right? And we could think of a lot of different professions, but would it seem weird to you that a doctor, if you came into a medical office and you had some, some problems, some issues that they would say, oh, what did the other guy say? Or what did someone else say? What'd your friend tell you you should do? And they just take that information and prescribe something based on what someone else said without asking you questions. One of my favorite statements from Roger Sitkins, who is my boss, CEO of the Sitkins Group, and truly, and I say this with love and all truth, the greatest consultant coach I've ever been around, just amazing. But he says this so well, prescription without proper diagnosis is malpractice. Would you think that's true? Prescription without proper diagnosis is malpractice. How many times insurance professionals, and I use that term loosely, sometimes, are we actually prescribing something for our clients that came from proper diagnosis? By asking real risk questions? By asking questions that get your future ideal client to stop, think, analyze information, answer in terms of things that risk professionals do and ways that you can Help. So here's just some examples and I don't want to go through all of these. I made a list the other day, so I wrote them down so I wouldn't Forget them of 10, 11 things. If you want some more examples, just email me brentidkins.com and I'll send them to you. Because here's the bottom line. When you're asking questions to your future ideal clients, a couple things. Number one, it's pretty obvious, hopefully you've heard this before, but ask open ended questions, not closed ended questions. If you asked, are you happy with your current insurance program? What can they tell you? Yes. No. Oh, great. What does that tell you? Whereas you could ask a question of how would you rate the effectiveness of your current insurance or risk management program? Right. Just something like that. How. Here's some other examples of questions you could ask. How often do you currently conduct your organization's risk assessment? Now, as I continue to read a few of these. Stop for a second. This is really important. If you're asking questions about things that your agency doesn't do. Probably not a great question either. Right? How often do you currently conduct your organization's risk assessment? What's that? Oh, a risk assessment. Well, that's, you know, where you go and we actually diagnose some things within your specific industry. Oh, you guys do that? No, no, we don't. We don't do that either. I was just curious if you did it. So hopefully with these questions you'll also start to begin to think about some of the things your agency needs to do or should be doing that go beyond just we sell insurance, we go to our carriers, we got all the major carriers, and we go out and we get you a quote and then we give it to you and we hope and pray that you buy it. So make sure your questions are open to number one and number two, that your questions relate to the services that you do that are different than other insurance agencies. So hopefully you're doing some of that. So here's a question I love to ask because everyone generally insurance is focused on premium and price, which certainly is an issue. But I love to ask the question outside of premium, which by the way, is only one aspect of the true cost of risk. What do you value most in your insurance program? So you take premium, you put it aside and say, and then, by the way, phrase it and say, understand that premium is only one part of true cost of risk. See, when you talk about true cost of risk, you understand that there are admin expenses, that there are opportunities where there are unpaid claims, that there's self insured retention, AKA deductibles. There are a lot of costs to true cost of risk. We could do a whole different podcast just on that. But most insurance agencies and agents only focus on premium. That's only one aspect. So make sure you inform your future ideal client of that. So there's lots of questions that you can ask. You know, you can ask questions about how do you determine the amount of retained earnings for your business to survive should a major loss occur? I don't know. Let me think about that. I love thinking about the future. I talked about vision questions. Let me ask you, Mr. Future Ideal Client, if you and I were having this conversation three years from today, what must happen to ensure that you are happy with your risk management and insurance program? That does a couple things right. It puts them into the future and think about what they would like to have and expect over three years. It also puts you in a position where they could maybe imagine working with you. And one more I'll mention again, I've got a number of these questions that I've written out and these are just mine. You've got to come up with yours. And I'll talk about that just in a second. But I love the one thing question. You can use the one thing question really anywhere. Certainly when you're talking with a future ideal client, what's the one thing you wish you could improve in your risk management insurance program? What's the one thing? And I love to reference this. This is something we share oftentimes in our trainings. But imagine that a server at a restaurant comes out to you to your table and they often do this and they say, you know, how was your experience tonight? Did everything go okay? Was the food okay? Or whatever the question they asked and you say, oh, yeah, it was great, fine, good. You know, whatever the case may be, how would it be different if the server came out and said, thanks so much for dining with us tonight? Can I ask you a question? Certainly. What's the one thing we could do to improve your dining experience? Right. Doesn't that just change the game completely? I want to take this a step further because what we often see as coaches and consultants, with insurance agents in particular, producers who are working with a future ideal client is that you ask a question and you feel like, okay, I asked my question, I got an answer. Now let's solve it. Let's puke all over the future ideal client with all the solutions we can provide. Now, number one, what that does is oftentimes you're doing unpaid consulting because you haven't established enough rapport or rules of the game to where we know where this is going. And they take all this information back to the current provider. That's probably happened to you in the past. But number two is that you're missing out to really diagnose properly. You may be missing out on more information. For example, if you ask a question, how effective do you feel your current risk management program is? Just kind of a generic question. And they say, oh, you know, it's been pretty good. We've been pretty happy this last year. Do you just say, okay, great, or do you ask another question? There's always a question behind the question. You'd say, well, great, well, tell me what has made it so great. Tell me more about that, you know, and they tell you more. And then you say, oh, interesting, you know, tell me some more. So you can always continue to ask further questions to dive deeper into the areas, because oftentimes the first question only scratches the surface. And if you struggle with asking a question behind the question, first of all, this is a skill that you should be constantly improving and working on. Is there something that I call the ultimate question? The ultimate question. Now, I'm the father of five children all the way from a teenager down to a six month old baby. And if you're a parent, if you've been up, you know, if you've got older kids and you remember having younger kids or your grandparent or, you know, if you know kids, you know that kids are a great source of wisdom even when they don't even realize it. Because children, among many things that they are, they're naturally curious. They're curious about everything. They want to know more. And they ask a question, they ask another question. And sometimes as adults, we get annoyed, like, oh my gosh, another question. And if you are a parent of young children right now, like I am, you already know the ultimate question that your kids ask all the time. Are you ready? What's the ultimate question? Why? Why dad? Why dad? Why dad? These three letters are magical, especially when it comes to asking great questions and having deeper conversations with future ideal clients. As I just mentioned, if you just. If a future ideal client gives you an answer to a question, you just go, okay, great. You know, you want to know more. Now you're not going to sit there like your kids do with a future client and say, why? Why, why? Why? Right. Obviously it gets pretty annoying, but you can use things like, well, tell me more. About that and how does that make you feel and what else should I know about that? You always want to dive a little bit deeper in the conversation. There's always a question behind the question. All right, I want to wrap this episode up, put a bow on this episode with one really important foundational idea and concept, and that is the best of the best. We work with insurance professionals, in particular insurance producers who have already have large books of business that are doing really, really well. They're always looking to how I can improve myself, how do I get better? And just like any skill that you're trying to develop, the best, continue to improve upon it. So asking great questions, improving that skill set to provide better insight, specifically risk based questions, is not something you're just going to suddenly show up and be great at. Now, can you get better over a period of time just by going on more and more appointments? Of course. Of course you can, certainly, if you're intentional about it. But are you doing the work beforehand to prepare? Are you doing what we call low risk practice? Are you working with your sales team in your office? Are you working with your own smartphone by recording yourself, asking questions, how do you sound? Maybe even videoing yourself with your body language? What are you doing to relentlessly prepare yourself to be the best? Because as I mentioned at the very beginning, of all the sales tools out there, I really believe that the ability to ask, ask great questions, ask a question behind the question and to intently listen, not with the idea of I'm going to give my canned response, but by what they're really saying, you're really listening because you ask great questions and it builds amazing relationships and allows you to be a true risk professional. In fact, if I were your sales manager, here's what I would do. Every producer, before they go on appointment, they go on their first appointment, they must have their first three risk based questions. What are they going to ask based on that future ideal client's needs, their industry, whatever it may be, and have they practiced and rehearsed it? And would they rehearse it in front of me? It's amazing to me how we go out into the game time, right? We go out to where the game is on, the lights are on and it's the first time we've done it. Do you think professional athletes just show up on the field and they've never run that play before? Think about it, right? Relentless preparation is what separates amateurs and professionals. This doesn't happen by accident. To be a true professional, to build rapport, to provide true risk analysis. You've got to master the art of asking questions. Professionals invest their time and energy in becoming the best. And if you're listening to this podcast, you're devoted to your professional development. Why else would you be listening to it? You could be doing anything else. You could be watching Netflix. You could be looking at your smartphone. You could be scrolling through Facebook. So spend time to be the best because no other sales skill will serve you better. At the very beginning of this podcast I said an average question is better than a great answer. What would happen if you begin to ask great questions? Great questions. I wish you all the best in your success. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Agent Leader podcast. My name is Brent Kelly and you can contact me@brentitkins.com if you have any questions and I can help you and your agency. Brentitkins.com or just visit us@sitkins.com that's S I T K I N S dot com.