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On this episode of the Insurance Agents Think Tank Podcast, Todd invites Jeff Hogue (QuoteWizard) to discuss what top P&C agents are doing to scale their agencies using QuoteWizard leads and internet leads in general.

Tune in to learn:
- How to use smart automations to increase your agency's ROI on leads
- How to sell more premium with QuoteWizard leads
- What types of systems you need to use in order to have success with internet leads
- How to increase your contact rates with leads
- Much, much more!

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FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Because if somebody has a 10% contact rate and out of those 10% of contact, maybe only half get a quote versus you have somebody with a 30% contact rate and only half get a quote, which company should you invest your money into going forward? It's a no brainer, right? The one that let you quote the most

Hello and welcome to the insurance agents think tank podcast. I'm your host, Todd McLean. Today's topic is one that I hear all the time. Hey, Todd, what do you think about this marketing source? Or what do you think about doing this kind of marketing? And so I really wanted to dive into a fundamental difference between passive marketing and active marketing.

It's a subject that many agents don't even consider before building their marketing systems in their office. So don't forget, you can check out this podcast out on agentsthinktank.com. Let's dive into the differences between active marketing and passive marketing. So when I was a new agent, something that I wish I would have been taught upfront is I need to consider, am I doing more of an active marketing type, or am I doing more of a passive marketing type?

And let me kind of like dive into what I mean, because this is really marketing 101. If you're not considering, you know, anytime that you get into a different marketing source, you should consider. Is this active marketing or passive marketing. And do I have too much of either in order to hit my goals?

So let's go into a different couple of , Examples of what each might be. So passive marketing means you're waiting for someone it's passive to raise their hand in order to get a quote, things like referrals, direct mail, a door to door, right. You're asking people for something in order later, at some point.

To get them to reach back out to you now with passive marketing. What I like to tell agents is be careful about passive marketing, depending on how competitive you are in your market. I've seen way too many agents struggle to, you know, for example, build referral relationships, in the Dallas area as a farmer's agent.

If I try to build mortgage referral relationships, I'm going to get my butt kicked because we're just not that competitive on home in my current market. I'm not saying don't do it. I'm just saying you want to be cognizant of your competitiveness in your market for passive types of marketing campaigns.

The other type of marketing campaigns that you can do are active type of marketing campaign. So you are actively trying, you know, going out there, shaking hands, kissing babies. Careful post COVID world. Right? But you're actively asking people for a quote, you can control your destiny. You can control the amount of quotes that you're doing because of statistics.

So that again, with passive marketing, you're waiting on active marketing, you're controlling because of the numbers. Right? So with active marketing, Well, technically with both, you want to know your numbers, both active marketing. It's really important to track your results and so forth in order for you to scale.

So let's go into some examples, active marketing for newer agents. I see all sorts of agents when they get into the, to our industry, they start buying internet leads day one, right? So internet leads are active. There are people that are going online, filling something out, raising their hand for a quote.

But again, there's being sold probably the three to five different agents, especially newer leads. Right. And one of the things that I want you to be really cognizant of with internet leads is buying them from multiple lead companies up front, do not pick one lead company. You need to have at least two, I recommend three and test them out for 60 to 90 days, because what I want you to track is what your contact rate and your quote rate is for those carriers for those lead providers.

Because if somebody has a 10% contact rate and out of those 10% of contact, maybe only half get a quote versus you have somebody with a 30% contact rate and only half get a quote, which company should you invest your money into going forward? It's a no brainer, right? The one that let you quote the most, but if you only tried one company, you would never know that.

And you'd just say internet leads suck. And I'm never going to try that again. Right. But at the end of the day, you're able to control your quote volume because you can put the. You know, just a click of a mouse book pad, you can turn up your volume or turn it down. And so how I do it in my office is I have direct mail through smarketingmail.com, a mail provider that I created due to with direct mail, passive marketing.

Passive marketing that you can kind of control based on the volume that you send out. So with a passive marketing system, like direct mail, you have to be really careful about not sending enough volume, because if you're contact, rate's not there. You're not going to get the volume, the quote volume you need in order to even break even, or get a good ROI.

You know, say 18 months down the road with direct mail. So what I do in my office is with direct mail. I sent out about 5,000 mail pieces per producer. That's, that's the number that I found in my market with my contact rate, with my ROI, in order for me to break, even on that marketing campaign. By my 18th month, I'm sending out 5,000 mail pieces, but I, you know, on a, on a good month, I'll get about a half a percent contact rate on a great month.

About 0.7, 5%. But what I can do is every morning when my producers come in, If they're noticing that they're not getting the, the colon volume that they need, they can easily turn up my internet lead volume. And then if they are getting good contact rate and they, maybe they can't even keep up with the quotes that they're getting on the call, inbound calls, they can simply just click a button and pause and turn down my internet leads.

So it's really important that you have a balance of both passive and active because on the passive side, it's kind of like a, a breather for your staff. It's it's easier to close leads, but I do want to disclose with something like direct mail, those, those cost per lead cost per inbound call is extremely high.

So you had never let a brand new producer work. Direct mail inbound calls, right? You want the best closers, the people who can close those expensive call-ins uh, to work those with the active marketing, like your internet leads. That's what I put newer agents on, making sure that they learn how to quote that they're getting their sales pitch down.

The other thing with passive marketing. So a lot of people like to build referral relationships, mortgage brokers, realtors, it's, it's one of the best marketing sources that you can do. Now again, I'm going to go back and say that if you're not competitive, if you're in a bad rate cycle, I would spend more time on the things that you can control because in a bad rate cycle, you need higher volume.

You can't get good high quote volume from referral source because the more they send you, if you're hurting their, their DTI and their. The requirements for the payment to be lower your, your, your Mo volumes going to drop, right? So in bad rates cycle environments, you really need to focus your time and energy building active marketing campaigns.

Telemarketing, you need to be able to control your contact, rate your speed to contact. So using a dialing system, and then you can figure out just as an example, with telemarketing, if I put a telemarketer. And by the way, you can get scripts and things like that in our files section of our insurance think tank Facebook group, just click on the files.

But with the telemarketer, I know that if I load a thousand leads and a dialer system, and I figured out over time, my, my telemarketer can make a hundred dials an hour. I can see that she made 10 contacts. And one quote on average from 10 contacts. If you know those statistics, then you can get reasonable expectations and kind of forecast what you're going to make off telemarketing.

Same exact same thing with internet leads. Once you track over time, you can start to figure out what your expectations should be. And once you know your numbers, I mean, your eyes kind of open up. It makes the world a lot easier place to live in because you know what your expectations should be. Given the results over time, uh, things like events.

I've seen people at success with both shows with wedding venues, with all sorts of things. Just make sure that with events, it is a type of action, active marketing, because you're trying to, you're physically in front of people. Sure. What post COVID events are going to look like? Hopefully they come back in the fall, but events are going to get you that face to face active marketing.

And we'll talk more about each topic in depth on what to do, but this really is all about how you should think about structuring any type of marketing source that you're going to get into. So just in summary, if you're thinking about doing marketing, okay, whatever type or source of marketing that you're doing, I want you to first ask yourself, is this passive or is this active?

If it's passive, do you have reasonable expectations on the results you're going to get. Right. Do you have the right contact rate? If it's any kind of like outbound ad that you're going to send or direct mail that you're going to send, do you have the right expectations? Do you have the right people working it?

If it's a passive referral source, are you competitive in your current marketplace? If you're not competitive? You might not want to spend too much time in energy and trying to build referral relationships until you can compete in your market with those, with the numbers that they need to hit on their DTI.

If you're in a bad rate cycle, then I would totally focus my time and energy on my active marketing sources. And if I'm going to do an active type of marketing source, Am I tracking the metrics that I need in order to scale this, which is my dial rate, my contact rate and my quote rate. And I might be buying leads from the best source after trying at least two or three sources for each.

So hopefully this just got your brain juices flowing. You're thinking about, am I doing active or passive? And am I tracking the results that I need to be tracking in order to have a successful marketing platform for my agency. Again, you can check out our podcasts on agentsthinktank.com and I look forward to many future podcasts.

We have some exciting podcasts with guests going over each type of marketing system that they do in their office. And hopefully give you guys some great tips and ideas that you might have not thought about. Have a great day.

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Craig Pretzinger and Jason Feltman are The Insurance Dudes, host of The Insurance Dudes Podcast, the best resource for agents in the industry. They help agents compress their learning curve to achieve exceptional results.

Craig and Jason built the #1 podcast in the industry from scratch by dedicating their time and energy to delivering episode after episode of actionable content.

Today they talk to Todd all about a hot topic: telemarketing. Tune in, and you’ll learn:

• The biggest mistakes to avoid when telemarketing.
• How to reduce turnover in your agency.
• Tactics to turn normal agents into superstars.
• Keeping your agency going (and growing) even when you’re on vacation!

Links & Resources

• Merrill - Online Investing Solutions, Trading, Guidance & Tools
• Sales Genie

The Insurance Dudes’ Links

• Website: TeleDudes
• Podcast: The Insurance Dudes Podcast
• Facebook: The Insurance Dudes Group - Facebook
• Instagram: @insurance_dudes_podcast
• LinkedIn: The Insurance Dudes Podcast

Episode Transcript

Jason Feltman: [00:00:00]
Here’s the thing: the old school of cracking the whip, coming down on people, it doesn’t work. It de-motivates. You’re the coach. You have to coach them into it. The most expensive thing in an agency is turnover, and then the retraining. So that would be the skill that I would get good at before constantly hiring and firing.

Todd: [00:00:27]
All right. I am here with the Insurance Dudes, right? That’s what you guys call yourselves.

Jason Feltman: [00:00:33]
We are the dudes.

Craig Pretzinger: [00:00:34]
That’s what they call us.

Todd: [00:00:36]
Well, Hey, Jason and Craig, really glad to have you on. You guys are listening to the Insurance Agents Think Tank Podcast, I’m your host, Todd McLain. You can find us at AgentsThinkTank.com to listen to all our podcasts.

Again, Jason, Craig, thanks so much for coming on. Today’s podcast is all about telemarketing. It’s a hot topic, right? And over the years we’ve slowly been getting hit with TCPA, with different kinds of calling laws, it just feels like it’s getting more and more difficult to telemarket. So I’ve been getting inundated with people asking, how are you doing it?

How, what are you doing? And so I thought it would be really good to have a podcast on telemarketing and you guys are experts way more experience than I have in telemarketing. So I’m really glad that you’re here. Thank you very much.

Jason Feltman: [00:01:28]
Thank you. This is awesome.

Craig Pretzinger: [00:01:30]
Thank you, Todd.

Todd: [00:01:31]
Tell us a little bit about yourselves, Jason, and then Craig, can you tell the audience who you are and what kind of agency you have? A little bit of background.

Jason Feltman: [00:01:41]
Yeah. So my name is Jason Feltman. I live here in Huntington Beach, California. started, in the insurance industry about a little over four years ago, bought a struggling book. didn’t know how to sell anything. At first and really try to figure that out my first year, towards the end of the first year, realized that we could actually maybe even bonus.

So, took some money out and invested into some live transfers, that was able to get us into bonus territory, which could make this thing actually, give us enough capital to, to, to start rowing the boat here. So once, once, we were able to do that. we realized real fast that live transfers were expensive.

They were in short supply that the, super inconsistent I would pull out my hair every time one didn’t work out or, you know, one dropped and, and my, you know, the agents didn’t get it or something. And, so it kind of freaked me out. So, as I was talking to some of the, Some of the lead companies, they were saying that they basically buy these leads, right.

They buy internet leads from, from all these aggregators and then they, they have a pool of them. They can’t sell them all. There’s more supply than demand, but they’re also there. No, they’re not only selling to seven other agencies. They’re also calling on them, generating live transfers to the leads that they’ve already sold and then transferring them to the agents for, you know, sometimes over a hundred bucks a transfer.

With that being said, he said that they’ll never run out of supply of internet leads. And I said, it makes sense, right. Everybody’s filling out stuff online, which is only, come more to truth in the last year than ever before. so, at that point we started going deep into internet leads in the agency.

But we would just have the agents call. Well, it was all great. We have some of the best systems. to, to follow up with those leads. but we got some major, burnout from our agents, right around month three, they’re making, they were making about 400 dials a day, which is 2,000 a week and 8,000 a month.

And then they thought that they were glorified telemarketers. even though that they were doing well with them. it just wasn’t something that was sustainable. So that’s when we started going deep with telemarketers and then really putting together a funnel of having someone on the front end, get these people on the phone and then getting them over to the agent.

So the agents could do a ton, more quotes, a ton more sales, and we could, you know, since then we’ve more than. Quadrupled the sales of, of our average agent, from back then. So, you get more from your agents. Your agents are happier. We’ve our agents don’t ever want to leave because they, they now have, you know, a virtual line out the door.

So. it really helps. So within that, we started getting that going about year two in the agency. And then ever since then, that’s, that’s all we’ve done. And we’ve, our agency has been able to, you know, get best in company with the, the, the captive that we’re with. And they’ve been able to always be at the, at the top of the maximizing, the, the bonuses and all this stuff, all the stuff they give you.

So it was pretty cool. So that’s my little story in a nutshell, Mr. Craig,

Craig Pretzinger: [00:05:25]
You took all my son, daughter. All of that, just all of that stuff. I, so I’ve been an agent for about 12 years. and I came in, with, from the financial financial services background. So I was at Merrill Lynch and then, then came to a big captive carrier and I was really good at, at selling and hustling.

But not really good at managing people and, and, you know, the whole structure of, of running a business. And so, it was, it was a big shock coming in, and it was right after 2008. So you can imagine what happened at that point. So, it, it really was a struggle, trying to figure out what would be the best strategy to, to generate new business and like many Asians, you kind of chased, the next shiny object.

Okay, let me try this. This doesn’t work. Let me try this. This doesn’t work. I dabbled in internet leads, but sort of like any other agent where it was, I called them a couple of times don’t have results. These leads suck. Right? So, I found myself, keep going. I kept coming back to telemarketing in different forms.

We had, we had a center in the office at one point with, I think at one point there were 10 of them, but that was at night and it was, it was a real, It w it was taxing on the family because I was, I was then at the office till late, because they had to be babysit. You couldn’t really trust anybody to do it.

And the amount of interviewing and, and just shenanigans that would happen as a result of having 10. subhumans in the office at night. Like, it was just crazy because, you know, the, the kind of people that you can get to do this here in the States is much different than the kind of people that you can get when you outsource.

And these people, you know, it was, it was like having criminals at the office. So, after, after that didn’t necessarily pan out and it did get results, right. It did get results, but this was, this was. Earlier, you know, 2012 to 2014. So the time was different, you know, the TCPA, wasn’t a thing you could just basically call nobody cared. And, and now it’s a lot tighter, obviously. So I’ll,

Jason Feltman: [00:07:37]
Right.

Craig Pretzinger: [00:07:38]
And this is a true story. The cleaning person said, Hey, I don’t want to clean your office anymore. There was poop on the floor in the bathroom. And I’m like, what? And it was the night after one of the, you know, it was somebody pooped on the floor in the bathroom.

I mean, how does that even happen?

Jason Feltman: [00:07:58]
Misfire.

Craig Pretzinger: [00:07:59]
Missy. Yeah, I guess. so anyway, I mean, that only happened at one time, but, you know, stamps would go missing and just, just all kinds of crazy stuff. So, so fast forward, kept trying different things and, and we’ve always, we always did decent, but, but never knocked it out of the park.

And, and yeah, we got inner circle a couple of times in there, but, but not consistent. So we never had these consistent or predictable results and it about. 2000, I guess it was 2017 or 18. Jason, I met, started talking on the phone and we were having a lot of fun talking on the phone. And I started hearing about what he was doing.

I’m like, Oh, okay. I think I could do that. But I was real slow to figure out, put the pieces together. And we were having fun on the phone, decided we’d start a podcast because we’re like, Hey, this is decent. You know, maybe we could have some fun doing this. And we, at the back of our minds, it kind of the driving force.

What it became was, Hey, if we have a podcast, we could talk to all the top agents, learn their secrets, share their secrets to help other agents. But at the same time, we’ll learn and add solidify. What. How we could really market it and crush it. And so what we found with, with a lot of these agents was it was very, very similar across the board at Jason, got a headstart on it.

Cause he’d been talking to a few of them anyway, but it was the same thing. They would have a tele team. So they had, they had, they had tele, tele Tape, low costs. Do we, the, the repetitive. Activity that did it require a lot of skill to it, right? It’s just, it’s just activity. But to Jesus’ point where, you, you have turnover with U of M across the board in agencies, there’s tons of turnover.

And I think it’s because we, we push them out there and say, look, you have to cut your teeth, go make the dials. Well, nobody wants to make dials. Right? It’s the worst. And, and on top of that, 85% of the time with good leads, right? With a good contact percentage of 50%, 85% of the time you’re just dialing. So you’re not even talking to anybody.

And so all that time is being spent and the agents are be burned out. And so, so we’re like, Oh, okay. This makes sense that this is what all the top agents were doing. You know, they’re buying leads because. You could insert buddy, you get the, you get the thing from it. It’s not a guest. It’s not guesswork like mailers or whatever, where it’s harder to quantify.

And so what they’d done, we saw it over and over and over again, there was a certain cadence. There was a certain way they did it and they just bought them. They dumped them into this funnel and rifled through them, had a whole system. And so as, as. Agent or, Jason started this agency, a scratch agency, October, 2019.

And I said, I’m going to do one November, 2019 with our carrier. And we did it. Like we, we put that system into place. He had a headstart because he’d been doing it about a year. I had a meltdown about 45 days ahead. Cause it wasn’t quite right. Working. And there was a lot more going out there coming in.
but it tipped in January of 2020, and now we’ve just been off to the races. So he, I did get best a company, but I was number 45 of my carrier out of 10,000. So we, we pulled it off. It did pretty well. And we’re consistently, both of us were like fighting to beat each other. At around two 50, 250,000 of premium above.

So we know it works and we know by what we put in, what we’re going to get out, it just it’s consistent.

Todd: [00:11:29]
Craig, me and you had the exact same background. I started my agency in 2009. I was a financial advisor before, and I instantly jumped into telemarketing with an in-house team. So it’s, it’s kind of funny that, timing and background is,

Craig Pretzinger: [00:11:46]
Yeah,

Todd: [00:11:48]
You know? no, but I had extortion and drug dealing, so

Craig Pretzinger: [00:11:54]
There was probably some of that too.

Todd: [00:11:56]
I got some screenshots of her trying to extort me on Facebook, laughing about it. And I was like, Hey, do you know blackmail’s illegal?

Craig Pretzinger: [00:12:04]
Yeah. I have screenshots of some crazy texts from old employees or

Todd: [00:12:09]
Yeah. So when people say telemarketing is tough, They ain’t kidding. Like we, we get it right. We understand. Yeah. And when people say people burn out, yeah, we get it. but there’s a lot of truth to building the, all of, you know, and cutting out. You know, unfortunately, I, I don’t want to blow up my partnerships that I have out there with agency MVP, but the live transfer calls are exactly what you said.

They were, they’re basically buying a ton of online aggregated leads at wholesale cost. They’re the ones calling them and they’re just transferring the call to you. So you’re taking a $3 lead. They’re probably buying it wholesale and they’re flipping it for a hundred bucks just cause they got someone on the phone,

Craig Pretzinger: [00:12:54]
That lead to seven other agents too. You know, the funny thing is those other seven agents have a better situation because they actually have the data, the live transfer, you don’t even have the data.

Todd: [00:13:06]
Oh, I did not know that.

Craig Pretzinger: [00:13:07]
So you lose your equity, right? I mean, if you miss the call or, you know, whatever happens, I mean, or the producers have the, put it in to their system, but you don’t have the data.

Todd: [00:13:16]
So if we were going to, if we were this, show’s all about educating people on telemarketing and you know, if they wanted to go off and do it on their own, hopefully we can give them some insights in how to do it. What would you say? You know, would you say that data is the first thing that you want to look at?

What kind of, who are you going to market? Who are you going to call? Can you guys give some insights on, on the source of data that you guys recommend?

Craig Pretzinger: [00:13:39]
Well, I think you can get data that that’s not the hard part. The hard part is, is building the team. And so you need to make sure you have people, right? So you need to make sure you have a dialer that’s legal, right. A compliant dialer that, that has a human intervention in between each one. So you gotta make sure that’s happening and you need to have, you need to run interviews every single week.

So week in, week out, you need to sit and either you do it or you hire a telemarketing manager. So there’s a lot of cost that goes into it. And Todd, you having one, you know this, right. It was two weeks. Somebody lasts for two weeks and then they’re gone. They just, and they don’t call it. They just don’t show up.

So you don’t even know. It’s like one night you had 10, the next night you have three. And you’re like, Oh, this is awesome. So it’s very inconsistent. Anything Jason, that you think, along those lines,

Jason Feltman: [00:14:28]
Yeah. I mean, the, the, the one thing with, with data is. Did that we found that you could really figure out. The one thing is, is the contact rate. so we’ve really, we’ve really like in, in both Craig and in my agency, we really look at that heavily. We don’t really care about. You know, I, I mean, I guess I hope it’s accurate information, but I don’t really care about any of that stuff.

Because to Craig’s point that we, that we spend so much time training, we’ve pretty much have it down to where as long as somebody on the phone, we can probably talk them into a quote. so. The, the contact rate is, is huge. So most of our, like with the tele dudes, most of the, our callers get five to 700 calls, calls a day.

So if you look at contact rate, contact rate is, is huge because if you get. Let’s say you have a decent data source and you’re getting 10 to 15% on day one, which is really good. that for, from our experience, 10 to 15%, well, we generally see a 10% of contacts that we can get transferred over to the team, and quoted.

So. Yeah. So with that data, I mean, you can, you can figure it out. Like people come to us sometimes and they really want Sales Genie or Kollek States or these, leads that are first off. They don’t have talk about TCPA. They’re not digital certificates. So you literally, I mean, you’re very lucky if you don’t get snapped at some point with those, But they’re, they’re not opted in leads.

So you’re constantly scrubbing them and hoping that they’re, you know, that the, the scrubbers working and everything, but, but let’s say like X dates or sales GAP, you might get like a 2% contact rate. Well, on 500 calls, that’s only 10 contacts, which means you might get one transfer. So even though those leads were free, The, the amount of fixed costs that you have either with your telemarketers or even worse, your agents, the amount of fixed costs that it just doesn’t make any sense where in turn, if you have a 10%, let’s, let’s up that to 10%.

Now you’re talking about five quoted transfers a day from those people. if you, if you’re getting a 10%, contact rate, so. Then your costs go way down. So seems like even though that you’re paying more for the leads that it seems like it would be, it would be more advantageous to pay less for the leads, but the contact rates is the key and those fixed costs aren’t going away.

So buying a better dataset based on contacts will definitely lower your cost per sale.

Craig Pretzinger: [00:17:34]
Well, and, and the other dimension to that, to that, that people don’t think about is time. So. If you have a 2% contact rate, well, there’s actually two parts to it, right? There’s there’s there’s the time. And then there’s the funnel itself, right? So if, if you have a two P and really on coal X days or whatever, it’s going to be closer to a 1% contact rate.

So you’re really, really crippling yourself to save. You know, whatever you save. I mean, it’s just, you’re paying for garbage. So who cares? But, but, so, so if it’s, if it’s a one, let’s say it’s a 1% con let’s be nice. It’s 2% contact rate. So, and then let’s be mean to the internet leads and say, it’s a 10% contract.

It’s going to take five times as long to get the same result, but you’re not going to get the same result because there’s no intent. And. The other issue is since you have to put in five times the amount of data you clog the machine up. So really at the end of the day, you need, you don’t have capacity to sift through all that data.

So you need maybe twice as many, five times as many telemarketers just to crank through and do the dials. Cause the top of the funnel is dials, right? If you don’t have enough dials, you don’t get to contacts. Well to get them out of context, you need out of that data. You have to do five times as much activity.

So you may save. On the front end on the data, but you don’t because you lose time and it requires more people and it just, it falls apart. Yeah. Anybody that comes to us and they’re like, Hey, I got sales genie. I’m gonna upload lists. We’re like Write, well, you shouldn’t do that because it’s not going to work.

No, no. I’m like, look, we’ve made 19 million dials. We have it. No pun intended. We have it pretty dialed in from an analytic standpoint. And. So the best thing you can do is spend upfront and we actually calculate it. We broke out the numbers on it, and the cost per sale off of $4 know real-time leads is about half, as much as the cost per sale using coal X dates, where it’s almost free for the data.

Todd: [00:19:38]
If I could nail home like a takeaway here and I’ve been drilling it cause ever since I started doing telemarketing, I always had a a hundred ten one rule. For every a hundred dials, we have to have 10 people answering and we have to sell one of those quotes, or we have to quote one my bed. so yeah, I’ve always had the 10% rule ingrained into my brain since 2010.

And you’re on the money about, you know, Kollek States or Sales Genie versus intent leads have an, even if there are old, you know, old internet leads at a big discount, at least there was some intent there in the past, that was. Somewhat decent. And you have certificates on, hopefully you have certificates to be careful about what you’re buying, what kind of data you’re buying.

Right. But, but agents are always so cautious about what they’re spending on marketing. It’s like stepping over a dollar to pick up a dime. You know what I mean? Like you think you’re saving some money and you’re got this great deal on data, but you did not realize the open up the can of worms that you just opened.

And your contact rate and what you’re going to get out of that list and how much effort and energy and money it’s going to take to actually generate something out of that list.

Craig Pretzinger: [00:20:52]
And I think agents are of very shiny object syndrome. So, and, and I’ve been there and I still catch myself doing it, but you’re, you know, Oh, I D I I’m going to try this and you do it a week or two weeks. And you’re like, this doesn’t work. And then you go to the next thing and you’re never going to get results.

If you’re not consistent, it’s like anything else, you know, if you want to. Go meet all the lenders in town. It’s going to take you three months to a year before they’re really sending you stuff and you have a steady stream. You know, even with this, you’re not going to get immediate results. You know, I mean, we’re good at it now.

And our teams close on first call closes about 16% of, of everything we write. So if we write 500 items, you know, 16% of it came from first call closes. The rest of it went all the way out to a hundred dials. And, you know, 16%, if it’s a bell curve, 16% of it’s between 60 and the 90th, you know, nobody’s doing that.

And I, I love when, when somebody will say, well, how’s your retention, you know, you can’t have good retention. It’s like, dude, we call somebody 90 times. They’re staying with us. Cause nobody else has called them 90 times. You know? I mean, it’s so, my retention is no different now than it was before we did it.

In fact, it’s moving, it’s trending up. So.

Todd: [00:22:08]
Yeah, 60% of our revenue comes after the 12th call attempt. So we have, yeah. And so we have a you’re you’re constantly driving these hard to achieve leads, hard to close leads. Right. And then you’re just going to give up on them. What the hell? You have to have a sales process in place to continue to market to those people after the first transfer or, or.

Right. So what would you say scripting wise? Let’s give some, let’s give some juice to people. what would you say you’re telemarketing? You found somebody who’s, you know, doesn’t poop on floors. Doesn’t do drugs maybe. And they are gonna, they’re going to call from, let’s say four to seven 30. And they’re dialing a list that has high intent or not high intent, somewhat intent.

Like they asked for a quote in the last 90 days may being, you bought old internet leads to feed into the Machine. any, any advice you can give on what, what the best opening, because we know that you have five or 10 seconds to grab somebody’s attention or you’re screwed, right? What would you say that 10 seconds needs to be?

Craig Pretzinger: [00:23:15]
Anything, but insurance.

Jason Feltman: [00:23:18]
Yes. And I would say wherever you are, wherever you’re from, how would you call your buddy? Like, so if it’s, Hey man, what’s up? How you been or something like that, or however you talk to your friend, I would say that almost anybody that jumps on a phone call a phone in a professional setting sounds horrible. They sound like a robot. I don’t know, like we’re normal people. Then we get in these business positions and then we sound like a telemarketer. We sound like a robot, like an insurance Write, Hey sir, how you doing? Like it’s, that’s immediate rejection because we, we, we are trained to. Reject sales, even if you want.

I always tell the story. Like if I went to living spaces to buy a couch, first thing that happens, I walk in, somebody comes up to me and they go. can I help you with something, sir? No, even though I wanted to buy the couch, I just don’t want to deal with that. Right. Because we all know what comes with that.

It’s like that immediate it’s like, you know, somebody running after you with the baseball bat, you’re going to just run, like, it’s that kind of reaction. so. You want to catch them off guard? You want to catch like, Oh, is this a friend you want to get them thinking something other than this is a sale?

So the first thing that I always tell agents to do is how do you call your buddy? Like, who’s your friend. Okay. And what do you say to him when you call him? Hey, what’s up, man? How you doing? Hey, Hey, what’s up man. Start with something like, that would be the first thing I’d say. The second thing I would say is no matter what in the conversation, Go to the next thing.

So I don’t have enough. Time is a big one, right? Oh, I don’t have time. I don’t have like all of those initial, rejections. I would say steamroller. Okay. Yeah. I don’t have that much time. Anyways. It’s only going to Tape, but that’s great. Cause it’s only gonna take two seconds and then just keep going with it.

That’s the other thing is that it’s not like talking to your mom or your grandma or something or your friend, so it’s a, it’s a business position. So. Who cares if, what they say the whole goal of you to be on that phone is to get the transfer over or to get the quote you, I mean, this goes the same with insurance agents as well.

So just keep doing it, keep talking. And if the other person wants to hang up, let them hang up. Who cares? But just keep talking, keep the momentum going on the phone no matter what they say. And we’ve realized that with that method in the agency, whether it’s the telemarketing portion or the agent side, that one out of two P one out of two people that say, no, we’ll do the quote because people are easily led.

People are our natural followers. You know, we see it every day. So that skill to be able to get over the, you know, the uncomfortable. Feeling of like, you’re talking to your mom or so I don’t know. They said that they’re busy or they said they don’t have any money or it’s like, it’s all BS answers. So if, once they understand that and they just keep asking the questions they skyrocket in their position, whether it be a telemarketer skyrockets and their position or your agent.

So those would be the two things I would say.

Todd: [00:26:44]
Absolutely. So would you say that, I’ve never actually tried to use the, Hey, how are you doing? Or like, I’ve always thought that getting straight into the meat and potatoes of it. we just lower rates in your area, would love to give you a competitive quote. So you guys don’t use any kind of pitch like that.

How, how do you open up that you want to give them a quote? Is there a specific line you train your people to use?

Craig Pretzinger: [00:27:09]
You got to drag it out a little bit at the beginning. So it’s that whole, Hey, Hey Tom, how’s it going? And just wait, you know, like make it, make the awkward. Pause and then, Oh yeah, we had your information. We, and we, we quoted you in the past and then, you know, then, then into it, but, do you still live at, do you still live at this, but you never, if anybody can take one thing away from this, don’t ever ask them for, if they want to get a quote and you hear that.

All the time, you know, like we, we hear calls, especially new people. It’s because they’re uncomfortable and they want to ask for permission. You cannot because just think to yourself, if somebody called you and asked you if you wanted to do something or you, you know, some person you don’t know what’s your answer anything, right?

Todd: [00:27:55]
Leave me alone.

Jason Feltman: [00:27:57]
That would be like the dentist saying, do you want a root canal?

Craig Pretzinger: [00:28:00]
It. Right. It’s the same thing. No, but you need it. I don’t care. I’m leaving. Bye.

Jason Feltman: [00:28:07]
Yeah.

Todd: [00:28:08]
So what about, consistency? What’s your team? Like? How do you, how do you motivate? Because we know it’s a burnout position. How do you find the best ways to motivate your team in, in telemarketing?

Jason Feltman: [00:28:23]
I would say across the board. It’s it’s how you, every position in the agency, you’ve got to have daily meetings. You got to get out of the monotony of an agency. I mean, I came from the restaurant industry that I worked in for 10 years prior to, prior to, jumping into a desk job. I, I don’t like a desk job per se because it’s, you know, it’s, it’s so mundane.

You’re doing the same stuff over and over again. But the cool part is, is during meetings. You know, you can talk about stuff, you can run fun. I mean, man, we, we used to, when we used to do meetings here every once in a while everybody be tired and something, so, so we’d, I’d make everybody do I’m a little teapot.

So you’d have to stand up and do the whole thing. I’m a little teapot and it wakes you up. It gets you going, but meetings are fun. I mean, you can make them fun and it gets everybody on the same page gets you talking, gets you to, you know, you can, you can kind of vent a little bit and it kind of pulls you out of that day and it really solidifies your team and a team people work hard when they know that they’re going to let other people down.

So, if you can really create that team environment, where they don’t want to let each other down, because we’re all on the same train, we’re all in the same boat rowing to the same goal. And they know that if you’re not rowing that you’re going to be the weak person and you don’t want to let everybody in your boat down.

So I think meetings are key.

Todd: [00:29:53]
I like that.

Craig Pretzinger: [00:29:54]
Yeah. W in our, we have, in our Facebook group, our Elite Dudes group, we talk about it all the time, but most people that, that, uh, you know, working with us or whatever, will. Not be doing meetings and it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s over and over and over, you know, that you see the same things as you talk to agents like nobody does meetings or they do it once a month.

And I can tell you at my agency, one of the biggest game changers for my team and results was. Do we have a daily meeting and it’s not, it’s not some BS or you sit there cause we’ve all had that job where it’s like, ah, the BD, like they, you know, to, to Jason’s point, we, they have fun. Like it’s fun and they get something out of it and it gets them ready for the it’s their cup of coffee for them.

For their sales job, you know, they come together, work on something. I mean, we got the, the wheel that they get sped sometimes it’s it. We load it up with lotto cards or whatever. And then, sometimes we have objections audit, so they spread it. They have to overcome the objection. And a lot of this stuff is just muscle memory, right?

They’re afraid of this, this world, especially our producers, for whatever reason. They’re very inconsistent with how they do their sales process. And that’s why we. We use a script in the agency has because you have to have something that you can get consistent with and then just be ready. Right. I don’t know why, because you could go to idiot, idiot agency almost and talk to one of the producers and say, Hey, what do you say?

When somebody says, I need to talk to my spouse and they won’t have an answer. And you’re like, I mean, you hear that 10 times a day and that’s the ultimate, you know, get out of this conversation. Over, you know, objection. That is a true cause who actually has to go ask their wife if they could change it.

Insurance is, is that a bag? You know, if I asked my what she’d be like, what? Like you can’t do that yourself.

Todd: [00:31:47]
Bag? What? Okay.

Craig Pretzinger: [00:31:49]
Exactly. Exactly.

Todd: [00:31:51]
I get, well, I, you know, I, I struggle. I’m one of the dummies. I struggle just because I have multiple offices and I think you guys do too. Right. Do you guys have multiple offices? How the hell do you have, do you have a meeting for one office? Do you zoom everyone in? How do you handle multiple offices?

Jason Feltman: [00:32:10]
Zoom everyone. And, and, and half of my team is remote. So they’re, they get to work from home. If they’re trending over a certain amount, then they get to work from home. So. yeah. Yeah. So, I mean this whole year really taught us how to do that well, but it’s those consistent meetings. We were doing them twice a day, which really helps if the more, segregated people are and the newer, the team is the more frequent meeting helps, but we’re on a one a day, 9:00 AM in the morning every morning.

It really, I mean, it really helped.

Todd: [00:32:46]
The meeting should feel like reset buttons, I guess then Write, wake everybody up. Reset. Not, not a bitch Fest where you’re saying, you know, cracking a whip, it’s meant to like motivate and promote.

Jason Feltman: [00:32:56]
That’s it. Here’s the thing nowadays. The old school of cracking the whip, like coming down on people, doesn’t work. It de-motivates. Yeah. And then they just don’t work as hard. I mean, I w we always, Craig and I always tell people, you’re the coach. You have to coach them into it. And here’s the thing you like the most expensive thing in an agency is turnover.

And then the retraining in the new position, I hate doing that. It’s much easier to take somebody that might not be performing well or something and motivate them into that position. so that, that would be the skill that I would get good at. Before you’re constantly hiring and firing. And if you say that, you know, there’s, you know, all employees, like all my employees suck, you’re not a good leader.

Like just. At that point, if that’s how you feel, then how can you gotta really have the introspective look of how do I get better? How can I, how can people want to work for me? You’re, we’re all in sales, right? So the, the, the agency owner is selling himself. He’s selling his dream. He’s selling the, the, the vision of where you’re going, the, the overall outlook on the agency.

So you’re selling that to your, to your staff all the time. And. If people are constantly leaving you, you, you need to re redefine that, that vision and stuff, because it’s obviously not that great of a vision. If nobody wants to get behind it, or you’re not conveying it, maybe you’re not having meetings or maybe you’re not being vulnerable and explaining those things, that are important to you that, that, you know, everybody can get behind.

Todd: [00:34:47]
Well, let’s, let’s get some, some more content around. I wanna, I want to know mistakes you’ve made because I I’ve had a lot of mistakes, telemarketing. I mean, I, I even had one where I didn’t know spam numbers. Like your phone number could get marked as spam. And my contact rate went from like 10 to 12% to zero.

And for a week, I thought everybody sucked. And then I found out, Oh crap, you, you have to actually know if your phone number it gets marked as spam or not. so yeah, go ahead, go into what’s some mistakes that you went along the way to some of our listeners, don’t make the same mistakes twice.

Craig Pretzinger: [00:35:31]
Just, just not following the clues that are inherent in the process. So to your point, if you’re, if your contact rate is 12%. Consistently. And the next day at zero it’s, you know, that that’s something, or, you know, you look at the, at the outcome, Oh, they didn’t get any transfers what’s going on. Right. The first thing that we, as humans want to do is, Oh, they suck.

But you know, it’s like, okay, let me look at all the pieces. Cause there’s, there’s five different spots along the funnel. Where did it break down? And if you, you can, you can see it, you know, it was contacts and usually. If, if down at the end of the river here, you know, it’s not producing results. Something happened upstream and.

It happens all the time, you know, especially with new folks that, that we’re working with, we’ll say, you know, ah, I’m not getting any transfers. I go, what is your contact percentage? That’s the first thing that we looked at? Cause you gotta, you don’t somebody doesn’t come to the mechanic with the thing and say, Hey my, my, you know, it’s, it’s not, it’s not running well.

Oh, well let’s, let’s replace the agent. You know, they, they, they diagnosed the least. Expensive and most obvious thing first, then go to the other, the extremes. So usually if transfers aren’t happening, something happened up here and you could, and you could troubleshoot. And that’s why. That’s why for me, this has been the best thing that you could do to create predictable predictability of the agency.

Is it just as, Hey, there’s something wrong? So, so to your question, it’s not looking at the numbers would be the biggest mistake. I don’t know. It was a few months ago, Jason. I said, God, I was complaining about my team. They’re not closing anything. And I, he said, well, how many leads are you getting? And I go, dude, I’m the same as I always have at well, Craig, hadn’t been looking at, what a lead companies did, which was they throttled back by my delivery.

And, you know, I had about half as many leads coming in. It takes two weeks before you really notice. You know, if, if your lead, if you drop your leads, leads, and that, that affects you for the next 60 days after the two weeks. So, you know, so that I just overshot it. So I just pumped at a ton of leads and that it kind of fixed itself, but, yeah, that you got to watch it, you know, you don’t have to be there every day.

I mean, we had our best month. I was in Cabo all December, but. I was watching, you know, I logged in okay, what leads? Okay. The leads are work working contexts. There everybody’s at work. That’s it? You know, you just have to make sure that that you’re watching what’s going on. You don’t have to do everything.

Todd: [00:38:00]
A hundred percent. Jason, is there anything that mistakes you made along the way that

Jason Feltman: [00:38:05]
Yeah. I would say the, one of my biggest mistakes is, is, Inconsistency, anytime there’s inconsistency, whether it is with the meetings or checking in the leads or, you know, meeting with the individual agents or anything, anything that there’s inconsistency falls apart and any time, I mean, I would say every problem in an agency is because we’re, we’re only as good as our systems.

So whatever system it may be, whether it’s, You know, the follow-up process, it can be sales service or whatever. If there’s a system in place, then you can have success doing it with that being said, if that system’s not constantly being looked at that’s when it falls apart. So everything that I’ve, you know, I mean, there’s, there’s a million, things that I’ve screwed up on.

You know, what, what putting all this together, to what we have now, there was probably, you know, 10 to 20 failures per thing that eventually came together that we stuck with. so I’d say consistency. And then, when I first started, it was not failing fast enough. Like, and I always tell my daughter and stuff now, cause she’s kind of a perfectionist.

I used to be kind of a perfectionist is, you know, you, you can let that stunt your growth. The best way to learn is to learn fast and to just screw up, get good at screw, get good at failing because it it’s the ultimate. it’s the ultimate gasoline to get to your destination. you can always. If you’re actually doing something screwing up at it, it’s the most, it’s the biggest motivator to fixing it.

You know what I mean? Or you can just keep putting it on the back burner. Oh, it’s not perfect yet. It’s not perfect. Get like, like script development or something. I tell everybody just. anything’s good. Like anything you write down will be better then whatever’s being done without there being anything written down.

So, so just write anything, write a script, and then there you go. And then as soon as you write that us as humans, like, ah, this could be better here. This could be better here and then you keep making it better. I mean, it’s, it’s so easy, but our brains stop us from, from any kind of real growth. So I. I like this.

The second thing is just fail. Fast.

Craig Pretzinger: [00:40:43]
Don’t predict what’s going to happen. You know, you don’t know what’s going to happen. Oftentimes the thing that works is this is the thing he didn’t think was going to work. So just do you know, you, you like Nike nailed it. You just have to do it and then you could adjust. Nobody’s dying. We’re not, we’re not flying a plane.

We’re not doing brain surgery here. Right. It’s like, just try it, stick with it and then assess and readjust.

Todd: [00:41:07]
Yeah. That’s, that’s been my pet peeve ever since I started of writing down goals, expectations, monitoring those goals, expectations, rinse, repeat, but it’s but I hate it. Like I don’t, I don’t know why I hate it so much. I think it’s because you have to look at your own. faults when you’re doing it, like you thought you were going to hit this point, you didn’t hit it now you got to suck it up and figure out where you screwed up and fix it.

Right. So you definitely have to fail fast B and realize your mistakes as you go along. for telemarketing, for generating leads through telemarketing, what would you say? A good cost per lead? It’s like a range of should be at

Jason Feltman: [00:41:52]
I mean, I’d pay a hundred dollars if I closed every single one of the leads. So I, I always look at the cost per sale. I like to keep the cost per sale under under 200. If you can get it under 200, then you could probably get it close to a hundred. So that’s good. Yeah. And then I would say the sales cycle too.

Don’t expect that on month one, you know, or yes, you like, we do get it under that at month one, but don’t expect to get that under month one at first and a real sales cycle on internet leads is at least three months before you have the real data of what those leads can, can do. It takes a while to get to those 90th

Craig Pretzinger: [00:42:32]
It’ll don’t switch after a week because you have garbage, you know, like your cost per sale, the first week is going to be 700 bucks. That’s just the way it works. You know, and that, that don’t, don’t have a panic attack, you know, in two weeks it’s going to be a 403 weeks. It’s going to be at two 50 and then all of a sudden you’re going to be down.

Like we get them down close to a hundred, just by the number of dials we make on them. They convert. And so, you know, I guess. The other thing people will look at at I, Oh, I went to buy the good leads, right? I’m going to buy them really filtered and all this stuff. And they’re paid 15 bucks for it. Well, dude, the contact rate is still the same on those leads.

So all you’re doing is making your you’re increasing your cost. For sale on the backend by pain, something that you don’t need to, I’d rather have some garbage in there, but be able to just rifle through all that data at a better, more affordable rate, you know, four bucks or four 50, whatever it is,

Todd: [00:43:26]
Yeah, I think it, it, it does matter somewhat for your carrier and your appetite, right? So like if I used to filter cause our carrier and every carrier wants the preferred type of customer. Right. but I learned quickly. It’s relative to what rates are in my market. Like every it’s cyclical. So I just want a homeowner because I know they might have cars.

And so like my filters have gone from a $500,000 house built in 2014 up and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. To do you own a home. Like, do you own a home? Because if you own a home, I’m going to go after you. And then if I can’t write you today, you go on my smart system and I’ll follow up when I’m supposed to in the future.

Right. So now I’m just creating a data set. So absolutely like you can filter way too much and still have the same contact rate

Craig Pretzinger: [00:44:18]
Yeah. Yeah. The only filter I have on byte is prior. That’s because that’s, that’s no, it’s, it’s a no, if we, if they don’t have prior, but otherwise it’s pretty wide open

Todd: [00:44:28]
Well, you guys have built TeleDudes, so kinda tell, so for our people who don’t want to go through. The interview process, the poop on the floor. you know, tell us about kind of what you do and, and the service you offer agents.

Craig Pretzinger: [00:44:45]
Yeah, I’ll jump in. So, a lot of what we’ve said in what we built in our agencies is, is what we did, typically, and I know that you’re, you’re crushing it with your carrier. as soon as you’re doing well, everybody starts to hit you up. And, and we realized, okay, well, yeah, we could, we could, we started helping people.

Create the same type of thing in their own agencies. and this was right when COVID happened. So, something interesting happened. We were worried because we launched, and, and, and I’ll get into exactly what we do, but we launched it and. And we thought, Oh no, what’s happening. You know, w what’s going to happen.

And we actually ended up taking off and doing very, very well during COVID cause contact rates went up, you know, back to the whole contact rate. So, what we, and we learned also because, we wanted to make it where it w where it works. People will come to us and think, Oh, is this a live transfer company?

No, it’s not a live transfer because you own the data. So with, with our tele dudettes, you, you get the, to it, to debt. They will be either on your phone system, preferably if it, you know, it depends on what the phone system it is. or we can put them in a, in a dialer. We have a couple of partnerships that they are not partnerships.

We have recommended dialers that they use. And, and they’re going to make the dials. You, you, you, along with that, get the other important piece, which we learned from having telemarketers that are agencies is a telemarketing manager. So there’s a manager that’s gonna, that’s gonna monitor. Hold them accountable, train them, make sure that that they’re, that they’re producing the results and doing the things they need to do to get the quoted transfers.

That’s the other metric. We don’t hold them accountable to transfers. We hold them accountable quota transfers. So there’s a little bit of, of. accountability from the telemarketer to your producers too. and then we also want to ensure that everybody is super successful. So we created a, a training around it and it’s not fluff.

It’s, it’s exactly what needs to be done in order to be successful with it. Anybody that hasn’t got results. The first thing that we say is, did you do the, the peak performance challenge? No. Like nobody that. And anybody that hasn’t got results has not done the peak performance challenge. And it’s as simple as that because it’s, it’s there.

It gives all the every little piece. we have, uh, like today it’s going to be at a, in six minutes. Actually we have our, our weekly coaching call with agents. So they, they jump on, they ask a billion questions. We get through, we talk about wins. We talk about challenges. And so really it’s an entire community around the notion of the intelligence.

So you could have telemarketer or you could have. Intelligence and intelligence takes it to the next level. Cause we were agents. We know what it takes and we want, we know what you have to go through to do it yourself. And we just, we want people to be successful, where to fight, right, where to fight against the carriers and the, the geckos and the flows.

And we need to make sure that we come out on top. Right. I think that we could say we’re in a fight for our lives here and we want to help, help agents win

Todd: [00:47:56]
How can they find out about you what’s your website and, and things like your costs and stuff like that.

Jason Feltman: [00:48:02]
You can go to, just TeleDudes.com that’s TeleDudes.com. Yeah, inside of, for more information, we do a webinar. We’ll probably have a reoccurring one by the time you guys hear this. So, yeah. It’s well, it’s more of like a web class, so you will get, you will get a bunch out of it if you just watch it.

So even if you don’t use our service to check it out and, yeah,

Todd: [00:48:34]
Awesome. Thanks for coming on guys. Jason, Craig, it’s been a pleasure and I’m sure we’ll hear more from you soon.

Craig Pretzinger: [00:48:40]
For sure. We’ve got to get you on The Insurance Dudes.

Jason Feltman: [00:48:42]
Todd. Thank you so much. This was awesome.

View Details

Watch the video version of this show on YouTube »
On this episode of the Insurance Agents Think Tank podcast, Todd tackles a question he gets often: What should a producer’s daily tasks look like? The answer is key to your agency’s success. Getting your producers working on the right things—with the right systems in place—makes the difference between stagnant sales and a skyrocketing agency!

Tune in to learn:

• The #1 mistake sales agents make when hiring producers.
• How many internet leads you need to close one household.
• What should you do when your direct mail contact rate is low?
• The peak times to reach prospects and maximize your contact rate.

Todd gets super tactical in this episode—don’t miss it!

Links & Resources

• Insurance Agents Think Tank on Facebook

Episode Transcript

Todd: [00:00:00]
The moral of the story is you have to have a system set up in place. You have to know what the statistics are. You have to be willing to commit, to invest in a marketing plan and payroll in order to see scale that generates the returns. They’re not hiring a producer without a marketing system in place, and really wasting their time trying to get it to work with a new producer without statistics.

Hello and welcome to the Insurance Agents Think Tank podcast. I’m your host, Todd McLain. And this podcast is all about how to grow and scale your agency. Today’s topic is a question I get often: Todd, what do your producer’s daily tasks look like? What do they do on a daily basis? And don’t forget, you can check out this podcast and all our other podcasts on our website AgentsThinkTank.com.

Be sure to search for our Facebook group on Facebook. It’s the Insurance Agents Think Tank. So let’s dive into our producers’ daily tasks. This is a really complex question, right? It’s there’s so many variables and it all depends on what is your producer do. Okay. Meaning, do you already have set up marketing in place or did you hire a kind of producer slash hybrid?

Meaning, are they going to also produce their own marketing? Because this is probably the number one issue I see agents make when they hire producers, you don’t already have a marketing system in place that’s generating a set amount of quotes.

So you don’t know what your closing ratio is on average and your contact rate is on average for that marketing type it becomes impossible, or you make unrealistic expectations from the get go, because you might be having that producer generate their own leads.

And in reality, what you really created was a position where somebody is not only a producer, but they’re also a marketer. And when you give somebody that much responsibility, You have to rethink what their goals need to be and what their daily tasks look like. So, I mean, back in the day when I started my agency, I also had a producer/marketer until I got to the point where I realized, okay, I just need one marketer and they’re going to generate leads for me because now I can statistically find out, all right.

If I have them on a dialing system and they’re using these scripts and I’m coaching them on those scripts, they can generate. You know, out of a hundred calls, they contact 10 people, they generate one quote, Then I quote it call it because I’m the producer as the agent. And then what I ended up doing is then building out departments within my office.

I built a sales team, which is my producers. I built a service team, my CSRs, and then I have a marketing team. And by departmentalizing that I was able to really dive into numbers to help me understand how to scale. Who needs, what type of training, and really dial in on what things I need to look into.

So first and foremost, for this podcast to really help you, is, do you have marketing in place or are you making your producer also be a marketer now?

What kind of leads is your marketer, or I should say producer calling is really important too. And I’m going to share my screen here. If you’re on YouTube, if you check us out on YouTube, you’ll be able to see my notes. If you want to, it doesn’t really matter. You don’t need them to go to YouTube. You can listen to the podcast, but the first thing I want to make sure we do before structuring a producer’s Day, we’ve got to figure out how many calls they need to make to make the sales that they need to make, to generate the premium they need to generate.

So, first and foremost, you need to figure out what are their goals. How are they going to pay for themselves? How’s your marketing structured. Okay. In order to do that, we need to look at, for each marketing type, what is the contact rate of that lead type? And what’s your closing ratio of that lead type to give you an example, and I’m going to go through these two examples.

I use both direct mail and internet leads, and there’s a dramatic difference between the two. For instance on direct mail, I have a hundred percent contact rate. They’re calling me, right? So there’s it’s, my producers are spoiled to death. They get a phone call. It’s the easiest lead in the world. on the other hand, they still gotta work internet leads, which are not that fun.

You have to generate a lot of leads or buy a lot of leads because it has a much lower contact rate. Meaning, you know, if you have a 5% closing ratio on internet leads, You need to estimate you’re going to have about a 10% contact rate. That means for every, close for every one household close, you need to buy 200 internet leads.

Most people think if I have a 5% closing ratio, I only need to buy 20 leads. That’s false. You’re not you. You’re not thinking through contact rate. Okay. So do not forget contact rate when figuring out the statistics, that’s a big one, people forget. And then also, will your producer be handling their own tasks throughout the day?

Meaning do they need to chase down documents to the Nate? Print ID cards. Do they need to talk to current customers? Are you making them handle service tasks along with sales tasks? That’s really important. If you are doing that. Even my own producers, they have to chase their own documents because I don’t want to CSR to screw up their sale.

It’s just a way to keep in-fighting out in the office. so they need to find they need to get signatures and make sure they have. Discounts that they said should be applied. but they, time block.

Time blocking is critical for a sales person that also has to deal with some service. Okay. And we’ll go through the time block at the end of this, on what I recommend doing for my producers.

And then you really need to look at premium goals for your producers. And this varies based on geographic area. For example, my goal, my ultimate goal. I want them to hit as a producer in my office is 40,000 in premium. but my minimum goal is 20,000. Because 20,000 in premium pays for that producer within 18 months.

And that’s my goal. So you’re going to need to figure this out before you send an offer letter to a producer, you need to figure out, okay, what’s their base salary.

What’s their commission schedule look like? Are you giving them renewals?

And does that, what is that going to cost me? If they’re making a minimum of 20,000 in premium, and I want that to return my investment on them within 18 months.

Okay. So you’ve got to figure out my minimum premium. They need to generate in order for what I’m going to pay them within an 18 month period to backtrack what is the premium? I need them to generate a month. And so what I want you to think about is now the lead types that you have within your office. I’m going to go over two examples just to kind of give you.

A rough overview of how my office works. So in order for my producers to hit the ultimate goal of 40,000 in premium a month, I know I have a 21% closing ratio on direct mail. Okay. It used to be higher. Our rates really aren’t competitive right now in my area. I’m sure they’ll go higher in the future. But right now I have a 21% closing ratio.

Now my contact rate is a hundred percent, so this is really easy for me to figure out in order for them. And by the way, my average annual premium, per household is $4,500. Okay. So in order for them to get. A, 40,000 in premium. I need them to quote and and pitch. So they have to sales pitch, 77 households.

If they pitched 77 households at the 21% closing ratio, they’re going to close 16 to hit their goal. Now I need to figure out how many. Direct mail pieces. I need to send to help that producer hit 77 quote attempts. And if I have a really good month in direct mail, the a really good contact rate is about 0.7, 5%.

A lot of people say, Oh, expect 1%. If they do say that, they’re just trying to sell you a direct mail. Direct mail does not have that great of response rates when you do mass bulk. Okay. But, so each producer I need to send 10,500 direct mail pieces at that rate. It’s about 61 cents. so $6,400 per producer.

On direct mail leads. And then you might say, Holy crap, that’s a lot of money, but at a 21% closing ratio, if they close 16 households with 4,500 in annual premium, do not forget to double the auto. If you have six months, a lot of people always forget that. And that’s a big number to miss. That means my producer will sell 72,000 in premium a month.

Okay. That’s over their goal. So I could back that down if I needed to. but you know, I like to shoot big, because there’s bonuses out there. I want them to achieve more than their goal. So, and I’m what I’m going off of is their 77 quotes to get 16 households. And my commission on that annual blended average, I’m going to be about 8,600 bucks.

So I actually made money. If I had a great month in direct mail and getting a 0.7, 5% return. Now your average contact rate on direct mail is going to be more like a half a percent, you know, months like December or right after school ends. And people are on vacation. You have these lulls that happen during the year in direct mail.

And I fill those in with internet leads. So I actually do both I both, I do internet leads and I do direct mail.

And so if I had a half a percent contact rate, which is more of my average and it costs me 61 cents, I actually need to send 15,500. And again, you might be thinking, wow, that’s a lot. It is. And that’s about $9,500 in costs for direct mail per producer.

Okay. So I spend a lot of money on marketing in order to generate hot leads, inbound leads for my producers to close. And the reason why is because I make money off of it. Because again, the 21% closing ratio makes 16 households sold 4,500 annual premium, still 72,000 in monthly premium generated I’m at $8,600 in commission.

I spent 9,400. So you might be saying, well, Todd, you lost money. Well, we’re in this business for renewal income by the second year. I’m definitely making money. Even when you factor in. Salary commissions, to the producer, right? I want to break even in 18 months. So even at a half a percent, I can break.

Even now. Here’s a big caveat if you ever want to dabble in direct mail. So I use marketing mail.com. Right? if you want to dabble in direct mail, you need to make sure that your producer is solid. Do not hire someone with no experience and throw direct mail on them because they are very expensive calls and you want to make sure the PR person producer handling these inbound calls has a very high skill set to close.

They can do one call closes. They can really generate the returns that you need in order for it to be successful.

So again, do not put a new person on direct mail. They should start more on your internet lead types of leads that are a lot cheaper and more activity to give practice. So let’s go into internet leads for producer.

So if your closing ratio on internet leads is about 5% remember you need to figure out what a contact rate is. And so I’m going to be kind of generous here, because if you use things like text automation, which we have in agency MVP. you know, our average call contact ratio is 10%, but when you factor in text messaging, it’s upwards of 25 to 30% in contact rate with that person.

So don’t forget that you need to have automation, text automation to engage prospects and leads through internet leads. It’s a big difference when you look at overall return. So at to try to get that 40,000 or, I’m sorry. In order to get those 16 households closed, I actually need to generate or buy 1,240 internet leads a month per producer to contact or actually get to quote 310 internet leads at a 5% closing ratio is my 16 households.

Hopefully that makes sense. I need to buy 1,240 leads. In order, because out of those 1240, I’m only going to get in contact with 310 And then out of those 310 I know my closing ratio is 5% to get me those 16 households to get my producers 40,000 in premium per month. Okay. And out of those 1,240 leads, if my average cost is $8, depending on what type of leads and where you’re buying them from, I’m still spending $10,000 in marketing.

Right. So the moral of the story is you’ve got to spend money to make money. Okay? I know a lot of agents out there might be struggling day to day. You don’t have to go this big because you can do it yourself. You can hire a part-time marketer to generate quotes for you. But the moral of the story is you have to have a system set up in place.

You have to know what the statistics are. And you have to be willing to commit, to invest in a marketing plan and payroll in order to see scale that generates the returns. And quite frankly, this is why you see agents. I’ve seen agents all the time where they’ll come in and you just see people just skyrocket in sales, they blow up their agency.

You know, and you have rockstar new agents that are out there. It’s because they understand the, the statistics. They understand that they have to figure it out quickly. They have to spend money to make money and they’re going about it in the right way. They’re not hiring a producer without a marketing system in place and really wasting their time trying to get it to work with a new producer without statistics.

Right. It’s almost like a mouse wheel. So you’ve got to get off that wheel. You got to figure it out yourself. First, backtrack into the numbers, get a go into what you need to the agent or the producer to produce a month. And that’s, it’s, it’s not that hard, right? It just takes a lot of effort because you’re building a business. so hopefully that helps give you some guidance. let me kind of show you how I apply that to my producers. On a daily task. So a rule in my office is I want you to have at least three hours of talk time per day. Okay. And if you don’t have three hours of talk time per day, there’s either two problems.

One. It’s my problem in that I didn’t generate enough quality leads for you to call. Or that you had, you didn’t have enough quality leads, inbound call. Cause I do both internet leads and I do a direct mail or two. You wasted time during the day. You didn’t time block. You didn’t spend enough time making outbound calls.

So I also have a call goal. Okay. On really good months on really good direct mail months. I only require about five households, a Day quoted. Per producer, because if I’m getting a lot of inbound calls, it only takes about five households a day quoted per producer in order to generate those 16 houses sold because of the 21% closing ratio.

So I really don’t require too many quotes per day. If I’m having a great direct mail inbound call month. Now, if I’m not having a great inbound call month, then what they need to do is if they’re not getting inbound calls, they got to start calling all the internet leads and we got to crank up. That’s the thing, that’s the reason why I actually like internet leads is because you can dial it up at any time.

So I can go from buying five leads per day. If I’m having great direct mail to. 25 leads a day, if I’m not. And that really helps us, you know, keep track of where the producers at, in the month. And again, so we’re tracking Daily what have you, what did you do yesterday? Where are you at with your goal so that we can crank things up or crank them down?

You know, if I have a lot of direct mail inbound, if we’re just crushing it with direct mail inbound, I don’t want them wasting time on the internet leads. I want them focused on those. Very expensive, but hot direct mail leads. Right?

So is a delicate balance that you, as the agent have to watch you and you have to talk to your producer and understanding, Hey, what’s your, where are you at with your goals?

Are you getting enough leads? Do we need to make any changes to the lead sources? And you’ve gotta be engaged in that marketing cause you need to be in charge of marketing and really making sure your producers have the marketing in place. To hit their goals. So I like to have time blocking for my producers.

What it really does is it helps them hit their goals. It takes away those random tasks or things that they are supposed to, they’re not supposed to be doing cause they’re supposed to be selling. And it, it helps also build expectations for customers. Let me tell you what I mean. So the very first thing my producers need to do when they get in the office is really organized their day and just look, have a goal set for their day.

Okay. For example, there they’re behind on their quote activity today. They might need to do more internet leads, right? We’re not going to be complacent if I didn’t get enough direct mail inbound calls. Then, you know, you have resource for internet leads, so you need to crank it up and you need to have a lot of activity that day.

You need to make a lot of calls and then about eight 45. So about 15 minutes of just figuring out your Day, where am I at? Where do I need to go?

Got my date set. This is the activity. This is my goals. Go at eight 45 ish. I want them to follow up with clients that they didn’t complete the day before. Okay.

One of the biggest problems that I’ve had with producers in past, I it the daylight rule. If you had somebody who called in for service and you didn’t finish their, their item, that that day, then you call them that evening before you leave explaining to them. I’m sorry. I didn’t get what I needed to get done.

I’m going to follow up with you tomorrow morning on that. Okay. And so the next morning they’re going to follow up and say, I’m working, or I finished that. Right. You need to finish your tasks that morning. So it’s not really follow-up calls. It’s just, it’s mainly follow up and saying that you finished the task.

Now on the, the switch. So you see here, I have sales calls on one side and tasks on the other. I want five hours of sales calls activity versus two and maybe a half hours of task activity from nine to 10. And what I really did is time block out peak sales times, peak contact times when a sales person is more likely to get someone on the phone.

So you have 9:00 to 10:00 AM where you have maybe stay-at-home parents, elderly people that don’t work during the day, or maybe they work evenings. You can get ahold of them, usually between 9:00 and 10:00 AM. So this is when they’re doing followup sales calls—people they quoted in the past. They’re trying to chase them down, follow up.

New quotes that they just did. If they have to follow up with the call, maybe you were missing information or it took too long to quote whatever the case may be from 9:00 to 10:00 AM they need to be pitching. I need to be trying to sell someone a quote. Okay. From 10:00 to 11:00 AM is when you know, the, the contact ratio of people starts to fall.

and in that timeframe we’re going to be doing tasks and quoting. Now, if I have internet leads turned on, then those internet leads are going to be interrupted at any given time. If I don’t have a marketer working them, if my producers are working them, internet leads, you need to jump on immediately. So I’m going to have my producers between 10 and 11.

I’m not only doing tasks like service tasks, or up with current clients that they needed to do a task for billing issues. they’re also gonna do quoting.

So if you had you got a hold of and you need to quote them, here’s a big problem. just time management that people don’t pay attention to.

Like, let’s say you get a hold of someone between nine and 10:00 AM. Maybe it was an old lead and they agreed to let you requote them. You don’t do that right then and there. Okay. You don’t get off the phone with them and requote them immediately because you’re in your Twilight hour of between nine and 10.

I’m going to contact and get as many either quotes or sales pitches humanly possible. And then between 10 and 11, I’m going to do the data entry, the work in order to generate those quotes. Now, if you want to really scale in the future, I would have somebody maybe like a marketer who’s actually doing that work and data entry work.

So that way these sales calls times is straight pitches. All I do is try to get somebody back on the phone and then I’m actually quoting them right then and there and trying to sell and convert. So think about that, depending on your scale and size, eventually you want to get to that point where your producer has a live quote in front of them.

It’s recent quote, somebody else got someone interested, updated the quote and now, or there was a new quote and now they’re making that outbound call, right? Your producers should be doing nothing but sales premium generation. Eventually once you scale to a size where you can afford a team like that, Now, so 11 to 1:00 PM.

We’re doing sales calls. Again, pitches, new quotes, whatever the case may be. I want to talk to as many people as humanly possible about selling them a quote I already quoted or following up with order quotes to try and get them re-engaged in a new quote. And I don’t have my producers take lunch until at least 1:00 PM.

Okay. Because you’re trying to catch people on their lunchtime is the whole reason for that method. And then my producers take a lunch between one and two and then between two and three, they’re doing the tasks and the quoting that the generated in the time block before Write. So anybody they talk to between 11 and one and S got information, or to quote them again, we didn’t call them right back in 15 minutes.

We’re going to tell them, Hey, I’m going to call you back between three and whatever time they’re going to leave for the day, what time might be best for you to call you back. So does that make sense? You want to set follow up expectations with the person that just agreed to the quote at a specific time later in order for you to be able to time block that data entry work into either 10 and 11 or two and three.

And that’s when you’re going to do data entry focus, work. And when you time block like that, it makes sure that things don’t get in your way. Right? If it takes you 30 minutes to quote one household, how many outbound sales calls, because you have made in that 30 minutes during a peak contact time.

And so make sure that you’re time blocking your day and that’s really going to increase your efficiency and your activity levels and making sure you’re getting enough talk time and making enough outbound calls.

And right before the end of the day, our daylight rule, I have my producer follow up with customers, on tasks that they couldn’t finish that day for one reason or another. And they promise that they’re going to get it done the next day. Right. So always make sure anything that doesn’t get done follow up the next day.

So that’s really what my producer’s daily tasks look like in my office and make sure again, I can’t stress this enough, make sure you know what the marketing systems in place are going to produce. As far as contact rate, closing ratio and premium generation, before you stick a producer. Into the, into the equation, because if you don’t have that, it’s just a guessing game at that point.

And so I hope you enjoyed this podcast. I hope it was something of value to you and how I think about everything from marketing to what my producers should do on a daily basis. Don’t forget to check us out next week. I have a surprise for you, surprise guests, and we’re going to make sure that you are going to scale and grow your agency.

Have a good day.

View Details

Watch the video version of this show on YouTube »
Craig Wiggins scaled his agency to $40,000,000/yr, and he knows a thing or two about hiring! In this episode, you’ll learn all about how to hire the agents you’ll need to scale your agency, and how to avoid the “hiring emergencies” that push you into bringing on the wrong people.

You’ll learn how to cut the guesswork out of your hiring process, so you can bring new agents on with confidence. Along the way, Craig shares interview techniques from his years of experience, so you can understand who you’re really hiring.

Should you be looking for a specific personality when you hire? Craig has the answer. He’ll also share the #1 question to ask before signing a new agent!

Links & Resources

• Job Search - Indeed
• Team Hired
• Radical Candor — Be A Kick-Ass Leader And Empower Your Team

Craig Wiggins’ Links

• Website: Craig Wiggins Coaching & Consulting – Transforming Your Insurance Agency
• Facebook: Allstate Insurance: Craig Wiggins - Home - Facebook
• LinkedIn: Craig Wiggins - President/CEO - Wiggins Agencies, Inc. - Allstate

Episode Transcript

Craig: [00:00:00]
When you make hires, it’s not just the interview. It’s not just the pay plan. It’s not how you search, how you recruit. It’s how you onboard and how you truly develop these people so that they accomplish what they need to accomplish. If you will do that, you know, and Zig Ziglar said it before, right?

You help people get what they want and get everything that you want. I’m a firm believer in that if I take their goals and I look at the agency goals, chances are those things intersect and everybody’s good.

Todd: [00:00:32]
All right. Welcome to the Insurance Agents Think Tank show. I’m your host, Todd McLain. And this podcast is all about how to build and scale your agency. Today’s topic is all about hiring. That’s a big topic. It’s a hot topic right now, especially with agents trying to scale after this last year and a lot of changes going on in the industry.

So. There’s a lot about this topic, especially, you know, back in the day when I started, I would just like throw up an ad on Craigslist because I thought I needed to hire somebody. And I didn’t really go through all the befores and afters about, you know, the consequences of not thinking through hiring somebody.

And I noticed as a new agent, I was churning staff less than right. And so I, I think this podcast is really important to have somebody like Craig Wiggins. Who’s our guest, you know, an expert in all things hiring and scaling agency. So Craig, thank you so much for being on the program. And if you want. so if you want to check out this podcast and see all of our other podcasts, just go to www.AgentsThinkTank.com and you can see all the episodes and download all the episodes. So again, thanks again, Craig. Now can you tell the audience, for people who might not know you tell us a little bit about yourself.

Craig: [00:01:46]
Yeah, well, Hey, thanks. First of all, I appreciate the invite. I appreciate being, getting the opportunity to come on the podcast with you. I’ve started the insurance business about 25 years ago. Started scratch. really had no clue what I was doing. I scored low potential twice on their, on their entrance exam.

Had no movie, no education, no experience. I went to college, but as soon as I found out that you could leave whenever you wanted and they wouldn’t call your mom and your daddy. That that was pretty much college for me. So I don’t know how I even got into this deal. I don’t know how they, they approved me for contract, but they did.

And, you know, I got started in and, Didn’t take me long to figure out maybe they were right about that assessment. Maybe I was low potential. Cause it was really hard. And you’re talking about, you know, the struggles that you had. I had all kinds of struggles, especially with people, you know? So

Todd: [00:02:36]
Well don’t feel bad because I dropped out of college my first semester. So we did something right.

Craig: [00:02:42]
It took me a little longer. I’m like I’m sitting in classroom and this guy just gets up and leave. And I’m like, dude, that guy just left. He didn’t ask him. He’s like I said, in high school, you can leave. If you want to leave. I’m like, well, it’s like 75 degrees outside. It’s it’s there’s good fishing going on.

Right. I think I’m thinking I’m not here. So, so, you know, I struggled along the way, especially in the very beginning, with everything with staffing, with, you know, trying to be a leader, I was a terrible leader. but I started figuring some things out and obviously we’ll talk about a lot of those things in this, in this podcast, but.

Yeah, fast forward to today. And, you know, we built a $40 million book and made hall of fame. Last year, we won pretty much every award he can win. So we kind of figured out a lot of things through struggle and trial and error and making a bunch of babble, you know, bad decisions and a bunch of dumb mistakes.

But. Definitely have learned from all that, you know, and, and it’s turned out to be really, really good. So now I just, I try to help other people, you know, cause there’s a lot of folks that are going through a lot of the same kinds of things that I went through. And I’m sure that you went through and, you know, forum like this or something else, or we can, we can share information and try to help people.
that’s, that’s what I’m trying to do today.

Todd: [00:03:48]
Beautiful. And you know, for everybody listening, he said 40 million and he’s captive. Like that’s, I mean, Holy crap, good job. you know, that’s something that we all strive to hit, so I’m sure we’re going to learn quite a bit. So, you know, on the, on the hiring process, you know, I guess we should back up to the beginning of what do you do?
like what, what would you say? How do you know when to hire somebody? Because I think too many people just feel like, okay, I’ve got to grow my business. So they like jump into hiring let’s let’s back up to the beginning. When, what kind of advice would you give somebody before they actually start the hiring process?

Is there, is there anything that they should go through mentally, in that, in that regard?

Craig: [00:04:31]
Yeah. Well, look at you. You’re exactly right. I think most owners and I was one of them. You find yourself in these situations where you’re panicked, right. You know, someone’s quit. You find someone’s moving you had to fire them whatever. And all of a sudden you got to have somebody say, Oh my God, I got to have somebody.

So, you know what I would say to you, regardless of what your agency size is, how long you’ve been around, what your plans are always be recruiting, always have people out there that you have like on your bench. So to speak that, you know, you can go to and, and just constantly keep that, that churning because you never know.

You know, when you’re going to run into that superstar, that, that you’ll figure out a way to get them on your team if they’re, if they’re that good. but you just have people in the back of your mind. So I would say constantly be recruiting and it doesn’t mean that you’ve got to be placing ads or those kinds of things, but you know, like when you’re out and about in your community, you know, and you, and you see somebody doing a really good job and you know, it’s a stressful environment, maybe they’re working in retail or restaurant or.

They’re working on the weekends or nights, don’t be afraid to talk to those people say, Hey, you know, I might have a much better opportunity. I’d love to talk with you, see where that goes. And maybe it works out. Maybe it doesn’t, but some of the best hires I’ve made. That’s exactly how we got them.

We got one out of a tanning salon. One time that she was just doing a great job for a customer there. While my wife was there I said Hey, this this girl, you need to talk to her and introduce her to me. And we brought her on and she was a rock star for several years before she moved away. and then we had another one that I still have today that I hired over 10 years ago, there was an, a photography studio with someone helping a family with a little crying baby and upgrading all their shots and everything.

I’m listening to what he’s doing. I’m like, I would never be able to handle all that stress the way He is. If he can handle that here doing this, I know he could, he could work for us and probably have a much better opportunity for himself. So I would say you’re exactly right. Always be recruiting, always be looking, always be on the lookout for people that might be a good fit.

And don’t get yourself in a position where now you’re panicked and you feel rushed and then you end up making a bad hire as a result.

Todd: [00:06:35]
Yeah, we get caught up in the day-to-day grind of insurance. I mean, we’re always putting out fires every single second, right. Or trying to sell something to somebody. So I F I’ve found as well that, I will catch myself not recruiting. Right. Because I’m so busy and caught up. And a lot of agents, especially me when I started, it was like, I wasn’t even paying attention to people like I should have been, because if you really want to scale your agency to somebody likes the size of Craig, I got to start paying attention to everybody around me, listening to those people at the photo photography studio, listening to Starbucks, people listening.

Right. We want to start thinking about recruiting, giving them your car and trying to get their card. If you’re a, if you know, if they have one. So I agree. I think, I think it’s a really big deal to always be recruiting. And then you can also like, I’ve, I’ve been to meet and greets before, or like open houses or if I find another insurance agent producer, and they’re doing something and they’re out and about, they’re really active, they’re on Facebook marketing.

I’m going to introduce them, you know, introduce myself to them because at some point, you know, this is a really competitive industry. I might send them an offer. Like if I can tell that they’re a rock star, I might send them a huge base offer. A nice split. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, if we’re always recruiting and thinking about it, then your air is not on fire trying to hire.

So is there any other things before, you go to that interview process? People should actually try to figure out on that on, on who they’re hiring and why they’re hiring it for.

Craig: [00:08:12]
Well, look, God’s saying the first thing is if you’re truly trying to grow, the key to growth in this business is duplicating yourself, right? You you’ve got to, you’ve got to go out there and duplicate, duplicate what you’re doing now. And that’s a never-ending Process to be honest with you because you’re constantly specializing and evaluating what people are doing.

And if someone’s doing, you know, a volume of work that could be done at a lower pay grade, and there’s enough of that work to go hire at that lower pay grade then you need to go hire that person. Right? So I think a lot of this is just getting in your head. They look at you, you know, maybe, maybe you don’t have an immediate need right now.

Maybe you do have maybe somewhat of immediate need, but always be thinking about. Now, what is my organizational chart going to look like five years from now, 10 years from now? What would the ideal agency for yourself look like? If you just have two people right now, you know, how would that, what would the branches look like?

You’d have yourself, maybe a sales manager and operations manager, service team, admin assistants, whatever, create that chart on paper. Not just in your mind, but on paper and think about, you know, what would I like this to look like down the road? And then you start hiring for the most important positions that need to be filled on that organizational chart.

If you do it the right way, there’s there’s going to come a time where they’re paying for themselves, and then you can hire the next person and then the next person, and that’s how you scale. Most agencies, you know, they get to $3–4 million. They’re afraid to hire any more people they’re afraid to delegate.

They still want to be in the day-to-day. They still want to sell and service. I can’t, I can’t let this person handle that because they’re not going to do it as good as me. And before, you know, it they’ve been a $3–4 million agency for 10 or 15 or 20 years, and they never grew any because they were scared, you know, to take that extra step.

So I think the first thing is just kind of get in your mind. What is this going to look like five, 10 years down the road and start preparing for that, knowing that it’s not going to be perfect and it’s not going to look exactly like that. But if you’re making progress in that direction, That’s a whole lot better than just treading water, being stuck in a place where you, where you can’t grow.

So I think that’s the first thing. And then of course, and we can talk about it is getting your, getting your mind around what the process is actually like and why you do certain things along the way.

Todd: [00:10:24]
Yeah, high level, in processes before I hire someone at a high level, I first, you know, cause if somebody let’s say we’re going to hire a salesperson producer, a lot of people will, will put an ad out. They think they have a sales problem, which they probably do if they need to hire a salesperson.

But what they’ll do is they’ll just throw out an ad and start interviewing, before they think through. Okay. When I hire them, what is the consequences I got to, am I going to provide them marketing? Are they going to market themselves? Like they, they, or even a service person, do you even have the service needs or do you feel just a little bit overwhelmed?

And when you hire a full-time person, maybe they have two hours worth of work. So, you know, establishing that base. Of what are they going to do and what resources do you have for them? And the workload that they’re going to take on, I think is a pretty important process before you hire. Cause that will also too correct me if I’m wrong, help you think about the interview process.

So think about the type of person that you need in that role, based on things like your customer base, your processes, when you onboard, you know, if you have your service person doing more of the onboarding, or if you have your producer doing more onboarding, like. There’s certain types of personality traits that you should probably think about too, when you’re doing that interview process, right?

Craig: [00:11:45]
Absolutely man. I look at, you know, I fully believe in a specialized environment. You know, when I first started for several years, we were like, everybody was trying to do everything, you know, trying to sell a service, you know, everything. And, and, and, you know, I know there’s agencies that they, they they’re doing that.

Because they feel like they need to do it. The sooner you can specialize and start putting people in positions where they can really flourish with what they’re good at. I’m telling you the better off you’re going to be most equal. It’s rare to find somebody who’s going to be an outstanding asset to your organization on the sales side.

And on the service side, they’re usually, it’s like playing offense and defense. It’s like playing quarterback and linebacker. Usually that’s going to be two totally different positions, just to fill So you gotta, you gotta start thinking about those kinds of things. So, so you’re exactly right when you’re thinking about this person, first of all, do I have a need for this?

Do I have the support? That I can give them when they come on, to where they’re going to be successful Right And then you’ve got to start building that out, not just in your mind, but in a job description, not from just a results perspective, like a lot of people, they focus so much on results with say you’ve got to focus on what it takes to get there and talk about the expectations and the standards in terms of the activity that’s required for them to be successful.

So you start in the interview and we can go through that as well. Those are the things that you’re discussing, because you’re trying to, you’re trying to like peel back the layers of the onion and figure out who you’re really dealing with. Most people in the interview. That’s, that’s the best version of them you’re ever going to see.

Right. And it’s up to you as the owner. To drill down and figure out who is this I’m really dealing with. I would rather fire them during the interview. Then six months later when I figure it out, they’re not going to work out. Right. So the more we can do up front to first identify what it is they’re going to be expected to do, and be specific about that from a daily activity perspective.

And then we communicate that now in that interview, once we’ve gotten past the personality and you know, back when I did, it it was like, Hey, can you fog up this mirror? If you fog this mirror and you get a license up, I’ll bring you on now. We’ve got to change exactly right. If they, if they were alive, we’d give them a shot.

We’d just throw them in the pool and hope that they could swim. But now you have to really drill down and figure out is, does this person have what it takes? And a lot of times it’s just simply asking them questions about what you’re going to expect them to do and getting their feedback on that. And just how How does that make you feel?

When you’ve got to do X and a lot of times you’ll, you’ll get body language. You’ll get responses from them. That will help you figure out whether this is a good fit or not. And the minute, you know, once you go through that, if you feel like, Hey, in your gut, this person’s not going to work out, then they’re probably not going to work out Because again, that’s the best version you’ll see So I think you’re exactly right. You got to have the support, you got to build that job description out And again, not just in a general sense or even in a results perspective, but what are they going to do every day and really drill down to that. With the standards and expectations that you’re going to require and talk about that and see how they respond.

Todd: [00:14:44]
What about a new sales person? Let’s say, let’s say our, I’m sorry. A new agent. So I’m a new agent. I don’t really know expectations what to expect, what positions do, what in the office. So, I mean, thank goodness for, for, companies like here’s Craig Wiggins coaching, or you guys have a lot of coaching and mentoring and help in that aspect, but you know, is there, is there a way What you What kind of advice, would you give a brand new agent who’s trying to scale their agency?

They have a ton of unknowns, a lot of fear. what kind of advice would you give somebody like that? Because they don’t know what, what before is

Craig: [00:15:23]
They don’t and that’s, it’s a good question. And it’s what I What I would always try to do is try to back into the numbers. Okay. So if If you’re a new agent listening to this or watching this and. You know what your close rate is, right. You should know, even after you’ve only been here for a couple of months, you know what your close rate is, you’ve got your, she had an idea of that.

If you don’t, that’s another conversation that we probably need to have. You got to know what your close rate is. Once you know that, then you can back into everything. So if you think about, okay, this person’s close rate is 20%. You can take your average premium. You can take the comp plan that you have and you can calculate, what is it going to take for this person to make a living, to make the, with their name, to Mike, and for them to provide value where they’re paying for themselves and your agency, right.

Once you know that, and then, okay. How many quotes does that require how many quotes do they have to do every day to get to that point? Do I have enough marketing in place to make that happen? Are they going to have to do some on their own? Is it going to be a combination? What what’s going on there? Then you can back into that.

The number of contacts. So you can probably get a pretty good idea in your mind about what it is they’re going to have to do when they come in from day one, in terms of the number of people they have to talk to every day to generate the number of quotes to generate the sales that you’re looking for.

And you can start there. And it’s really important that you go through that with them. And you don’t just say, I need you to come in and run X dollars of premium a month because they don’t know what that, especially if they are new to the business. They don’t know what that means. I don’t know what a lot is.

They know what a phone call is. They know what it takes to make a phone call. So if you run all those numbers, and you’re like man, you got to make 150 phone calls a day to be successful in this. And you get any kind of pushback at all. That’s a lot of phone calls In eight hours I’ve got to make 150 then that person’s probably not going to work out right.

But was like, Oh, I do that all day long anyways. And the job I have now, or I, you know, I feel if they have good, there’s a good vibe there. Okay. Now let’s talk about the quotes. So let’s talk how many quotes, you’re going to have to do to hit it. And maybe it comes out to eight or nine quotes a day. You’re gonna have to take those 150 phone calls and you’ve got to generate eight or nine quotes a day.

You know, how does that make you feel? And then you start talking about that and those are the conversations you should have to figure out. Is this, is this person even capable or are they going to be willing to do what you’re expecting them to do Because that’s what about when I look back on the people that failed.

You know, it was my fault because I didn’t take them through that process. And a lot of them just had call reluctance. They wouldn’t pick up the phone. They were scared to pick up and you go in there at noon. You’re like, dude, you’ve made, you know, eight phone calls. Let’s talk Well I gotta do this shit. And you’ve got all these excuses.

Then you find out they’re just not cut out for, it you know, so that’s the very basics when you’re new and you’re trying to figure out. You know, how do I bring somebody on back into those numbers of what’s really going to what it’s going to take for them to be successful, not just for themselves, but also for you and then run to when you run all those numbers out, communicate that to them and see how they feel.

Todd: [00:18:11]
100 Yeah. There’s something that really kind of opened my eyes when I was hiring producers back in the day. And I’ll never forget my unicorn producer that I, that I ran into finally, like five years into my career. The difference was is that they, they started acting like it was a partnership.

They would come and tell me. why they weren’t hitting their goals. We would work together on solving what tools or scripting they needed. They were actually involved and wanted to be successful versus sitting in the corner. And you’re wondering what they’re doing. Right. So it, it definitely has to be a partnership with that kind of high production, high activity, goals.

So yeah, if you don’t have somebody that, that shows any kind of call reluctance or. Feels timid about things. They’re probably not going to be a good producer in this industry.

Craig: [00:19:04]
Let’s take that conversation one step further. It’s kind of like when you said that, because, you know, we, we just encountered this last week. There’s two chairs right here behind me. I got a hiring manager here and a candidate that he brought in. And this is a mistake I made for years. That is probably one of the biggest tips that I can give you as you’re trying to build.

Because what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to build a quality team where the culture’s right. People are successful. Everybody works together, all those kinds of things, right? This was, this is the step that I missed for a long time. When I finally kind of started figuring it out, it’s been so impactful.

So you go through and we’re kind of skipping ahead, but you said it. So I want to own it. Like I want to touch on it. You go through that interview. You figured out this is a good candidate. This is someone you want to make an offer to. Right. And you had all that conversation, you know, they’re going to be, feel like they’re going to be a good fit.

You’re about to get to the comp plan. Before you get to the comp plan. You You need to ask this question to them. Just need to say, look, I think you, I think you might be a fantastic fit for our organization. Tell me I’m talking to you today. Tell me what specifically do you want to do with your money? What are your specific financial goals?

And most people are going to say, well, I just want to provide for my family, or I want to make as much as I can or this or that. And I’m like, no, like specifically, like what do you, what do you want to accomplish? And I asked this question, to this lady last week, right. And Tyler is sitting here with me and, I asked her that and she, and she, at first she was kinda taken aback She was like, what do you mean? And I said, I’m like, I want to know. I want to know what is, what do you want to do? And she tells me that she’s in an apartment. And she’s got two kids, a two bedroom apartment, and it gets dark here about 5:30 So she’s like everyday when I go home there we live. We kind of live in a bad neighborhood.

I won’t let them go outside and play unless I’m home. By the time I get home, it’s dark. So I want to buy a house. I want to get out of the apartment. I want to buy a house. I’m like, you know what? We can make that happen. Tyler’s going to work with you. We’re going to look at the comp plan. We’re going to figure out not just from a production perspective, but what it’s going to take every day for you to make that happen.

And we’re going to hold you accountable and we’re going to work with you, be your accountability partner. To make sure that you accomplish that goal because it’s important to me aznd this is the important part. You need to say this guys it’s important to me that you accomplish what you want to accomplish.

If I help you accomplish what you’re looking to accomplish, chances are the agency’s going to get everything that we need and you, and when I started going through that and we got to the comp plan, she started crying and I stopped. And I was like, her name is Sam Latina, what’s wrong. And she says, you know what?

I’ve worked. She was about 35 years old. She said, I’ve had eight jobs. Nobody has ever said anything like that. To me, nobody’s ever told me that they cared about me as a person and it made such an impact on her. Right? And this is, this is some way we just met. So if you’ve got people on your team, this kind of goes in a little different direction, but you get people on your team now that you haven’t had that conversation with, you need to go through that process once they know you care.

Once they know that you’re in that partnership with them, trying to help them accomplish. What they’re trying to accomplish. He changes everything. And when you’re interviewing, think about these people, man, they got options that you’re not the only one talking to them. They’ve got options and you have difficult problems sometimes to overcome with licensing and everything else.

So you’re, you’re kind of at a disadvantage by skipping that step, you could lose somebody to a competitor, to another industry that may not be anywhere near as good as the opportunity that you have. But you didn’t say what you needed to say. And when, when we said that to her, she’s in man, she’s bought in, she’s ready to go.

And I, and hopefully she comes on and, and she spoke their license process now. And hopefully she’s, she’s great. So I would encourage you to make that a part of your hiring process is have that conversation and it don’t do it too early. You don’t want to do it obviously with people you’re not going to offer, but right before you get to the comp plan, Because that’s going to be the part that they’re really going to put a lot of thought into it.

Look at the salary commission, whatever it is that you get set up, they need to know this part. Then once you have all that, the biggest problem people have most owners have is holding people accountable. They hire these folks. How do I hold them accountable? They don’t like to hold them accountable because it’s a confrontation, right?

When you, when you make it about them, And they’ve given you their goals and you work together to come up with what they need to do to make that happen. Now, if they get off track, all I got to do is go back to her and talk to her about that house. Not the VC, not me, not our goals. Like how are you going to get, how are you going to get out of that apartment if you don’t do what we talked about the other day, right?

I’m holding it. So it just goes, it goes with everything that we’re talking about. Now, when you, when you make hires, it’s not just the interview. It’s not just. You know the pay plan and it’s not how you shop, how you recruit, it’s how you onboard and how you truly develop these people so that they accomplish what they need to accomplish.

If you will do that, you know, and Zig Ziglar said it before, right? You help people get what they want. You get everything that you want. I’m a firm believer in that. If I take their goals, And I look at the agency goals. Chances are those things intersect, and everybody’s good if I focus just on the agency side and I don’t show them that I care.

Do you think they’re really going to go that extra mile? Do you think they’re always, maybe looking for a job, do you think there’s this revolving door? So that’s probably the biggest tip I can give you as you’re going through this process to not only get good hires, you know, but to make sure that when they come on, they, they do what they need to do to help you grow.

Todd: [00:24:21]
That’s an amazing tip. I love it. I’m going to go back and just use that on my I own agency by the end of this week. So I love that. That’s awesome. Now what happens? Okay. So let’s back up. let’s say, yeah, figured out the type of person I need. I figured out what the roles, responsibilities figured out, how many of their support them with marketing or make sure that I have processes in place.

Like if you have a service person, where do you go to find these people? If you haven’t been recruiting all along there, I know there’s all sorts of different. Platforms out there, people out there are programs you can use, but let’s, let’s, let’s go through a couple of those. Like where would you say has been the best source of, new hires other than people that you’ve met? Day-to-day.

Craig: [00:25:05]
Okay. There’s there’s several. first if you have a current staff, okay. If you have people, people run with people that are there like themselves, right? Maybe you have a bonus in place for your staff. You have so many owners out there. So many businesses that pay a recruiting company, right. And they’ll pay him $3,000 a person.

Why don’t you just offer up a thousand dollars bonus to your staff? I said, Hey, you know, somebody that you liked that you work with, do you feel like he would work well together? Bring them in here. If I hire him, I’ll give you a thousand bucks, right? So that’s, that’s like the easiest place and they’ll get motivated about that.

And we’ve made a bunch of hires that way through the years. That’s the first place. The second use all the free stuff available to Facebook is free. Go post on Facebook, create a video. Did you get your phone out? Just get your phone out and walk, walk into your office, do a little video. Show them where they’re going to sit.

Maybe interview somebody else on your team. If you don’t have anybody on the team just real quick, Hey, what it’s all about? Make it very personable. Don’t be afraid. Don’t worry about, what’s going to look like it’s a good tool because videos are going to show up an algorithm of Facebook more than anything else that you do.

So do a quick video and tag people in it offer a referral bonus. So you say, look, if he knows somebody that’s looking. And you can say, you can say it in a way where it doesn’t really direct it towards them, but they could be thinking it. If he knows somebody slogan, you know, affirm to me and I’ll give you a thousand dollars and yes, she can for yourself, if you want to right.

Get that on Facebook, ask people to share that we’ve got a couple of videos that have 10,000 views on them. They’ve been shared all over the place and we’ve made several hires, made, made a couple hires or realtors one. It was a mortgage officer. They’re there. They’re on Facebook. Maybe they’re not looking for a job.

They’re not in an indeed. The resume’s not posted anywhere, but they see that video. And they respond. Okay. So that, that’s an easy way. Just, just leveraging the power of Facebook. LinkedIn, you can do the same thing. Get that content out there also indeed. A lot of people use indeed. You know, we set it up with the resume search alerts.

So when keywords are posted within someone’s resume, it pops the resume to us. Right. And we get notified. Here’s a little tip for you with indeed though. Instead of just sending out the template. You know, where you can communicate through that form or through email again, grab your phone and do a little quick video, you know, Hey Todd, I saw your resume on indeed.

I think he might be a fantastic fit for our organization. Give me a call when you get a chance, put your phone number, send that video to them as a message on Facebook. Try to friend them first so that it goes to the regular inbox, not the other inbox, but that will, you will stand out. You will look different than all the other people that are out there trying to recruit that same person.

So actually you can use Facebook. And then of course, you know, you’ve got all these hiring companies. I love team hire team hire does a great job getting candidates. We’ve used them several times. Like they started off doing group interviews now that do zoom interviews because of COVID, it’s a great way to shorten your timeline and get candidates in front of you really, really quick, you know, to, to make those hires when you, when you need them now, you know, so there’s a lot of ways to speak creative, you know, and be different than everyone else.

Cause you guys, you gotta remember these people, especially if they’re looking. They got all kinds of options there. You got real places that don’t require a license that don’t require binding authority. That don’t require all the things that we require that they can go start at tomorrow. Or you may be competing with somebody that is full sound, not commission or salary plus commission.

And maybe they don’t look at your opportunity near as good as what that is, even though yours, my butter. So your messaging, the way you come across, the excitement, the energy that you have, you know, all those things matter if you’re trying to get these people in front of, and that’s your goal when you’re recruiting?

It’s just trying to get people, right. It’s not to make a hire. It’s like, it’s like when you’re selling, you got to get somebody to quote first, before you can sell, which we’re trying to get a candidate that we can talk to, to interview just to pre-screen to interview, we’ll redo a pre-screen on the phone, but we need those people.

So the more you can do to, to create that conversation, the better off you’re going to be. So just be very creative about it. Think outside the box, you know, pushing the envelope with some of these things and, and, and drive the odds in your favor.

Todd: [00:29:00]
Absolutely. And I’ve, I’ve actually seen because when I’m posting on indeed or if I’m, you know, I used to post on Craigslist, I haven’t done it recently. something that I’ve noticed on indeed on, cause I’ll go look through entrance agents, job postings to see what, how they’re recruiting and, and their postings.

Guys. Don’t be boring. I’ve seen so many horrible job postings about just, no, I would not want to work for you if I read that job posting, right. It’s like going to work at a bank and dying, which I think a lot of these people, so what I like to do on my job postings, if they’ll allow it, so sometimes the algorithm will, will block your like job posting.

I, I, the best job posting ads that I’ve ever posted, the very first word in the subject line was unicorn. Like just, just trying to get something unique and different out there. I was looking for my unicorn and so be a little different, than everybody else.

Craig: [00:30:00]
That’s that’s also right. It’s just like on Facebook, these ads on Facebook all the time, where there’s a video or a picture, it has nothing to do with the company. And it’s actually advertising with their advertise. It’s designed to get your attention to interrupt, right? It’s the same thing. So, you know, you gotta be professional.

You don’t want to be like a clown on there, but you need to do things. This certainly helps you stand out because you, you have massive competition. You have so many things that were, these people have options. People love to, I love to bang on millennials all the time. Millennials are not bad people. They have options and there they are willing to exercise those options.

So you, as an owner, you know, you got to understand that and you, and you got to play in that world. Now, obviously it’s, it’s a two way street and you’re not going to like succumb to everything they want or anything like that. But you got to understand what you’re dealing with. And when you have that dynamic out there, especially.

With everything going on today and the people that are a hundred Pullman, all the other issues that you know, that we face challenges. You can’t just go about this. Like you did even three or four years ago, you gotta be different.

Todd: [00:31:00]
Absolutely. So, and let’s talk about the interview process, cause I think there’s, you know, you talked about the, the mortgage or getting somebody in house and what kind of questions or content can you give around like that interview process? Cause you’ve, you’ve put out the job posting now they’re showing up like what, what kind of, or maybe I shouldn’t say that.

Yeah. The interview process and questions. Can you give us some insights there on what you do?

Craig: [00:31:27]
What we do is we have a short prescreen on the phone. Okay. Because remember these papers are going to be on the phone nine and I’m showing the time. Right. So we want to talk to him on the phone just really quick, not, we don’t want to do an interview on the phone because it’s important that we just, your body language, you know, either on zoom or face to face, right.

So the phone interview is just like, Hey, can this person talk on the phone? Can they have a conversation or not? If you can tell in the first 20 seconds that this is not going to have a nice net, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re done. But if you feel like, Hey, they got a phone voice, you know, they can, they can conduct business on the phone.

Then you want to set up interview to get them in there or do whatever just where you can be. Face-to-face in some format. And then that process is all about, like I said, you’re peeling back the layers of the onion, what we do here, where we really spend some time, you know, our, our whole process, our whole system we’re captive.

Right. So we don’t have all these options. We really have to sell them value. We have to get around the price conversation. We have to really leverage coverage, relationships, advice, those types of things. So we’re going to ask them questions about their current insurance. We’re going to ask them about their liability limits.

We’re going to take them through kind of the same sales process we would use on a customer and see how they respond to that. And if we’d go through that kind of in a passive way, And we can tell they’re just not buying into that or it didn’t send off any alarms when they have, you know, 25 50 limits.

And they really need a lot more. If I can tell when we go through that, that this is going to be like trying to put a square peg into a round hole to teach them this. Not that they have to fully understand it, but if they’re not even grasping that, wait a minute, maybe this is something I should address.

How do you think I’m ever going to be able to teach them to talk to customers like that? Right. And actually. So it is so that’s really like the, that’s the cause look, a lot of times now, when I first started interviewing, he was like, Hey Tai, you know, tell me about yourself. Right. And you let them talk and they talk whatever.

Oh, he’s got a pretty good personality. I think he’ll work out. You know, there was like, there’s nothing there. Well, when you, when you get them in, why do they fail? What happens? They either won’t pick up the phone or they’re not buying into what you’re selling, not buying into what you’re going to teach them to do.

Right. Let’s deal with that. Now let’s talk. Let’s not wait to Monday when they come in, let’s deal with it. Now let’s just do it in a way we can kind of tell, maybe you won’t tell a hundred percent, which you, when you go through that conversation, if I asked you to talk to me about your liability limits, well, I don’t really know what they are.

We and we find out we lived together. We figured it out. And I’ll explain it to you. And you’re like, Whoa, you know, and you don’t, and you don’t think it’s that big a deal. And then I explain exactly what would happen if you got into an, into an accident and you maintain those limits and you still not grasping what I’m trying to teach you.

That’s the exact problem I’m going to have when I bring you on. And now I’m having to fight that battle on top of everything else that we got to deal with. That’s not going to work, but if I have that conversation and you’re like, wow, Nobody’s ever said, I got, I need to get that fixed. I need to get that change.

And they’re, you can tell they’re genuine about it. And they’re looking at that as, you know what this is, this is a legit problem. Nobody’s ever explained this to me before, and they’re buying into what I’m saying now. I know. Okay. You know what? They’re probably going to have the same kind of conversations with people when we teach them this process.

So that’s really like the focal point of our interview. Do they have a good phone voice when they come in? You know, can they get that part then the next thing, if I feel like, all right, he’s got that. Now it’s all about standards and expectations, and non-negotiables met and really talked about that, but you got to have non-negotiables too.

We’ll talk about that in a second. The next thing though, is the standards and expectations. You know, here’s what here’s, what’s going to be required. This is what we’re going to look for you every day is what you’ve got to do. And you’re getting their feedback on all that, you know, here we require 120 phone calls, 10 quotes, at least three items.

So three policies. So whatever we day, and we go through that process of how that works out. And, and, and, and we set those standards and expectations from day one. We also talk about the goal. They have to have their very first week. So the very first week we required 10 items sold the first week 10 policy sold that very first week.

We’re setting the stage where we’re having a sense of urgency about getting going, right. So it’s not a second week. Third week, fourth week, we have weekly goals. Then goals month, two month three. If they get through the first two weeks, they’re going to be fine, 99% of the time. But we talk about that up front.

Again, instead of just throwing somebody that deep into the pool and hoping they work out, let’s talk about all the things that they’re actually going to have to do to work out and see how they respond to them. Okay. Should we go through all that? And they’re good. Everything’s good. Now we’re talking about the non-negotiables no lying of cheating or stealing or forging.

No gossip. Okay. Really talk about those things because look, sometimes they’ll be like given to us. It’s important that you make it clear. You, you, you, you can’t, you can’t falsify an application. That’s a great way to ruin your career and put everybody in jeopardy. We’re not, we can’t do that. We don’t allow that.

No matter how long you’ve been here, what you do, you do that you’re gone. If you talk about somebody, I don’t allow that either. Again, I don’t care how much business you write or what you contribute. You start gossiping about people and you’re gone. Cause again, we’re trying to, we’re trying to build a culture here.

Yeah, we’re trying, we’re trying to do it the right way and we can’t have that. And a lot of times what’ll happen. What we sing happened. When you talk about that in the interview process, it makes you more attractive. Some of these people, that’s exactly why they’re leaving, where the lead in math. Cause it sucks and it’s toxic.

And then when you say that, sometimes it’s not always money. Sometimes it’s the way they’re treated in a way things are going on in that office. When you talk about that, not only are you setting that expectation for what goes on in your office. Now you might be appealing to somebody that’s dealing with that somewhere else.

Right? So we go through the standards, expectations, the non-negotiables, and then that’s when we would have that conversation. We talked about a few minutes ago about what’s important to them before we get to the comp point. That’s really the process that we go down and along the way, all that feedback back and forth, that’s where we can make normally a pretty good determination.

About whether this person is going to fit or not. You can go out there and Google all the fancy interview question. Tell me about a time that you struggled through this. You can do, if you want to. Okay. Live, remember these people have probably done their research too, and they’ve watched a lot of those same videos and they’ve already got these answers plan and they know what a, and that, you know, they’re going to make it as good.

You know, it just doesn’t help you. So, so focus again, the goal should be. It’s like, it’s just like their first day is Monday morning. They just showed up and now you’re walking them through what they’re going to have to do. Cause that’s usually when you find out, Oh, I made a bad hire. Right? Listen, during the interview, let’s not wait, let’s do it then.

And then at the same time set the tone for everything. That’s going to be required from day one, when it comes to what they actually have to do, because then if you make a bad hire and you said you got to do 10 items your first week, Right. And they don’t and it’s Friday and it’s, you know, 10 o’clock and they have one item done for the week.

It’s not going to be any surprise to anybody when they got to go. And that would only wasted a week instead of six weeks of time. So it’s really important that you frame all that up. And this is all honestly taught. It’s just, it’s a result of all. Every time I ever made a bad hire and I always own, they’re always made, it’s never, it’s not them.

It’s me because I’m the one that made the decision to bring them on. I always go back. What could I have done different? Where could I put into the process? And I’ll give you another example when you’re dealing with somebody, especially if they’re an older person, just being honest, you sometimes need to judge their computer skills.

I made hires. Maybe you have to, where you in there and they’re like freaked out. I don’t know where anything is. And I’ve lost my email and they have like 90 tabs open at the top of their screen. And 60 of them are their email and they can’t find any of them and they, and they can’t work through your systems and they can’t understand your technology.

And maybe they’re the greatest salesperson in the world. Maybe they got a lot of rumor, but they can’t navigate with the common things that, you know, we got to do every day. So, you know, we’ve done that like, Hey, Google, the nearest sushi restaurant. Write me an email about your favorite movie. You know, things like that, where it’s like, okay, let’s can this person actually function with technology or not?

You’ll tell a really quick if they’re, if they’re capable or not. So that’s the goal for us. And the interview is to not just figure out, do I have a good personality? Not just figure out, you know, are they willing to take this job? You know? Wow. Actually found somebody to take my comp plan. No, it’s more about, can they do, what’s going to be required on day one while we also set the expectations of what they’re going to have to do in order to be successful.

And if you do all of that, you’re definitely going to tilt the odds in your favor.

Todd: [00:39:57]
Yeah, I think my, my biggest takeaway there that I’ve never done and I just, I think it’s game changer. And so thank you. Is selling them or going through the value script of what they have, because you’re absolutely right. I have one producer who value sells all day long. And I have another producer who might be my rock star, but at the same time, she is not a value salesperson.

Even as much as I beat it into her eye, I should have done that. so I think that’s, that’s awesome. Like I’m going to add that to our interview process

Craig: [00:40:32]
It’s helped us a lot. And then when you, when you’re evaluating people, because. That was one of the biggest stumbling blocks for us. We find somebody to bring them on and they could not grasp that, or they just wouldn’t buy into it. I believe in nurses, it’s really, it’s hard to sell on value if you don’t believe that.

Todd: [00:40:48]
Yeah. Or those people that say, Oh, I want a job. I want this job because I like the idea of protecting people. And then if you take them through that process, you’ll be able to see hesitations or things like that. When you say, Hey, it’s $10 more, I don’t know about that. Right. so I. I think that’s awesome.

Now let’s talk about accountability after you hire somebody after you make them the offer, because I think you’re right. A lot of agents, especially myself, hesitate from the confrontation that’s going to come up. Right. It’s so uncomfortable and so busy. I don’t want to deal with this crap. What, so like for me, I have my new staff on all staff on my agency, MVP tracking their daily activity and what they’re doing.

What, what other than just, would you just recommend tracking activity and having them read through scripts or what what’s kind of your thought process on day one tire? What’s the management follow-up process look like.

Craig: [00:41:44]
Okay. Good question. And then there’s a couple, there’s a couple of phase two that I guess is it. Part of that interview when we make the final offers, depending on their licensing. Also, depending on them bringing 25 quote sheets on day one. Okay. The purpose of that is twofold. One can they prospect if they can’t gather 25, because remember these papers rather, they’re gonna have to get the license process, take, you know, two, three weeks.

If you can’t get 25 quote from your friends and family and in a couple of weeks, You’re probably never going to go to work, my wind backs or the leads that I gave you was strangers for the most part. So I want to see them prosper. Do you have the ability to prospect then when they come in? That’s what they’re going to use that first week.

To try and get those 10 items, right. We’re going to take their prospects, run them through the system. Okay. They’re probably going to give them a lot more leeway if they make a mistake or if they’re a little slow to get back to them. Right. So we’re going to use their leads, so to speak, to go through that first week.

So the first week is really more about production. Okay. We’re looking at an items. That’s, that’s what we’re looking for. Once they get off of their leads. Now they’re done with their 25 coaches that they’ve worked through all that. Then it shifts over to activity. So are they doing the work with the leads that we provide leads in our system, their own personal network, whatever are they doing?

The work required to generate the quotes required to get the production that we’re looking for. And that’s when the, that the accountability shifts over. So now it becomes more about. What they got to do everyday. And that goes back to that initial conversation. So hopefully when they come on, we already have a plan in place to help them get where they want to go.

Okay. And that first week again, it’s about using what they have with what they brought to the table. And maybe another first week, maybe they just go through that in a few days. Just depends on the person, how quality leads are, but then it’s now about, okay, let’s go back to that conversation that we had activity wise for you to get that house, to pay off that credit card, whatever it is you’re trying to do.

And we make it about that. So it’s never about what the agency has to do or what I have to do because look, man, they don’t care. They don’t care how much you, they don’t care how much I make. They don’t care how well the AC does on bonus or what’s in it for them. You know, how, how do we drive, drive this home to get to their why?

Right. So we make it all about that. Now, sometimes people will say, well, what if you do all that? And they still don’t, they still don’t do it. Well then that’s when you, as an owner, You gotta make a decision. Is this person contributing enough for you to keep them around based off of what they’re doing, where it makes sense for you knowing that maybe they’re not getting to the level that you’re looking for or, or, or do you need to let them go?

I mean, let’s say you hire them and 30 days later ask yourself, would I hire them now? Would I hire them again? If the answer is no. Then you probably should let go along, you know, and, and sometimes, and sometimes people have a difficult time with that because they get attached to people and look at them as people.

But man, if someone is not a good fit, they’re not a good fit. And you’re doing the service by enabling them. Everybody ought to go read the book called radical candor by Kim Scott, radical candor. By God, it will teach you how to hold people accountable and challenge them professionally. While you shoot, while you show them that you care about them.

Personally, most people, they fall in a couple of other categories. They’re like, they’re the ones that are saying Tom, and you’re a great singer. You should try out for American idol when you can’t sing worth a lick because we see them. TV every everyday, every year. Right. Who told those people to get somebody told those people that they were a good singer.

They were not right. That, or maybe they’re they’re cool, mom, you know, they, they just try to be their friend instead of truly challenging them or pushing them. They’re the ones buying them beer on Friday night. Cause they don’t, they’re not old enough. Right. We can’t do that. We gotta be like, Hey coach. We have to, we have to challenge them and push them professionally while at the same time show that we care about them while helping them reach their goals.

You know? So that’s, that’s the accountability conversation that we have here. And what we teach, you know, a CWC is when you’re working with your team, that’s the best way to get through to them. It, you know, and I did it the other way for years. I was a terrible leader. I wasn’t even, I was, I was a boss. It was a, you know, bang your fish on the desk kind of conversation or what a good conversation.

As far as I was concerned that doesn’t work. You just run people off. It’s a revolving door. You’re going to reach your full potential. You got to show them that you care. And part of that is pushing them, you know, to be the best that they can

Todd: [00:46:08]
I saw that so many times throughout the years, especially talking with other agents is I’ve seen plenty of agents actually make excuses for their staff. Like, it didn’t make any sense to me why, you know, they couldn’t hit their goal because, X, Y, or Z. And I’m like, okay, well, why do you have to make an excuse for them?

That doesn’t make any sense, like, So I, I agree the, you can’t enable your staff and I’ve also seen way too many agents tell me, you know, I sh you know, I’ve been meaning to fire them for like the last year, what that makes no sense. Like, why just let them go. Well, I’m concerned about taking on too much, like I’m going to get overwhelmed.

Well, good. Maybe that will motivate your butt to, to hire somebody,

Craig: [00:46:55]
Quick story. When I was down, when I was 5 million in premium years ago, I had a lady in my organization that was a cancer and I knew it. Okay. And I thought I could hire my way out of it. I thought I could just hire other people. I can’t afford to let this person, she goes, she knows all the customers. She knows all the systems.

I can’t let her go. And what happened every time we make a hire, she would affect that higher. Right? So we’re all sitting in a meeting room one morning and I’m trying, I don’t even remember what it was. I was trying to implement, but I was trying to implement. So I had this great idea, right? I always had all these great ideas.

Maybe, maybe I was wrong, but the way that they reacted to what I was trying to do was totally unacceptable. Right. It was so everybody got their arms folded by looking at the floor. She infected that whole group. And I asked him, I’m like, you know, I asked her, her name was angel says, that is, this is just how you feel.

You know what I mean? Is this, is this where we’re is this where we are really? You know, she, she wouldn’t say anything. I was like, is anybody else disagrees? Anybody else agree with what I’m trying to do? Nobody. I said, you know what, everybody just get your stuff and get out. And I fired all of them right then on the spot, 5 million in premium.

And I call my dad who used to be an 88 years old. My dad, you still got your license because I could use as a little help for a few weeks while I hired him. But man, and I’m not saying that you should go and do, I’m not suggesting anybody did because it was out for a few months, but honestly it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

When you have somebody in your office that is a cancer, because here’s the thing. Maybe they’re not even a cancer. Maybe they’re just not a good producer. Maybe they’re just not good at poli. Everybody there knows how you’re dealing with that. They see the way, your hand on that situation. And you’re either losing the respect or you’re gaining respect.

And, and when they know you’re not dealing with it the right way, you’re not, maybe not even saying anything to them now, you don’t even address in it. Right. You lose, you’re losing respect with everybody else on your team. And it’s causing problems. 99% of the time. When someone, when someone terminates a longterm employee like that, where they’re just like hesitant to get rid of the rest of the group rises up and then they come to you and they say all these things, I’m so glad that person’s gone.

Cause this, this, this, this, this, and what happens production. Just like you don’t miss a beat. So once you know your gut got you, where do you, where you are. Okay. What’d your brand know you’ve been here for 30 years. If your gut got you, where you are, your intuition’s important. When you know, you know, deep down, they shouldn’t be there anymore.

You gotta get rid of them, man. You get so, so that accountability portion and what, and what you’re talking about, making excuses for, you know, I’ve heard people say with all the been here for six months, you know, The only better from that 90 days, you can’t get them up to speed in 90 days, if you can’t get them up to speed, 90 days, there was a problem with your onboarding process.

We’ve had people hit a hundred in their first month, so it’s an old sound that you can’t get to 20, 30, 40 policies a month and 90 days, if you can’t, you need to go back and look and see what happened. Why. I mean it’s 20 businesses in most months, you can tell me, you can’t write two items a day in eight hours and Tupac.

I mean, come on. So yeah, people make excuses. And what I would encourage you to do instead of making excuses for what’s going on, have some self reflection, what could I have done different to get them where they truly need to be? And how can I implement that going forward with my future hires? And if you’ll do that, and be honest with yourself, you’ll grow as a leader, you’ll grow, you’ll grow your agency and things would go in a totally different direction.

Todd: [00:50:14]
Yeah. And I’ve seen people, you know, when they make that hire a couple of things, you know, so they might set up goals, like, do you need to hit 120 calls, 10 quotes? You know, they, they have those goals in place. And then I’ve heard plenty of times an excuse of, you know, I didn’t invest enough money or I don’t have enough money to invest in like resources or tools for them to use.

To hit those goals. And so that’s kind of like if you step back and hopefully a lot of people who, you know, I’ve had people who say they want them to make 200 phone calls and they’re not gonna give them a dialer or something to allow that kind of mass communication or activity that needs to happen.
so you’ve got to really reflect and look back at, okay. If I’m going to give them these kinds of goals. I have to be able to invest money, right? It’s not an expense. It’s an investment. If you think of things as an expense with. Staff, like, I don’t view staff as an expense unless they’re on non production side.

Right. but I mean, that’s kind of like a complex topic I don’t want to dive into. but it’s about giving the right tools to make things happen for that person. And so that’s, that’s something that I’ve seen and noticed when staff aren’t hitting goals and when the agent starts making excuses, it’s because the agent knows deep down inside.

I didn’t either hold them accountable or I didn’t give them the resources. In order to help them be successful. You know what I mean?

Craig: [00:51:43]
Spot on. It looks, whatever goals you have. They have to be achievable. And here’s a great, what a great litmus test for you is. Have you ever done it right? You’ve never written that many policies in a month. If you’ve never made that many phone calls in a day, then it’s your business. It’s your biggest asset, or it will be one day.

How in the world are you expecting somebody? We also do that, right? So you’ve never done it before. Probably a good idea to not require somebody else to do that. So that’s just a great starting point. So I look, you know, because if you have done it, I mean, I remember when I was an owner right. In life insurance, hiring people, everything, and I was still writing the book, the volume I was riding.

Well, if I can do all that other work and still do that within somebody that comes in, that just focuses on that work. They should be able to do that, right. I’ve proven that that’s achievable, at least from an activity perspective, maybe their ability is not as good as yours. Maybe they can’t close as well as you can, and you can coach them and teach them on that.

But from an activity perspective, it has to be an achievable goal. So a great place to start if you’re not sure. Have you done it before? So if you haven’t, you know, maybe it’s time to back off on that a little bit and make sure that it is something reasonable. And again, you gotta, you gotta go to provide them the resources.

They don’t have to, you don’t have to provide all the leads because we tell them up front. You know, look, you need to be able to bring some things to the table too. You’ve got a personal network. You’ve got Facebook, you’ve got friends, family, you can go and develop centers of influence there’s things that you can do to bring things to the table.

It’s not about just me handing you all these leads every month. So, you know, it’s a two-way street, but I think all those things have to be achievable. I think if you make it, if you think about it in those terms, when you start setting these goals, should people, then obviously it’s much more likely to happen.

Todd: [00:53:26]
I love it. Yeah. So tell me, so I know you have Craig Wiggins coaching CWC. Tell me like, w. Went through hired, before, after went through all the process of hearing, how can CWC help our agents, maximize results when you, when you’re hiring staff?

Craig: [00:53:44]
Well, we, we do a lot of things with our members. So we, we, we have a virtual platform that we use. It has. Thousands of hours, I guess now maybe not thousands, hundreds of hours of videos on it with all these different topics, you know, hiring sales, service, life insurance, the videos are short, you know, two, three, four minutes long, very consumable.

The key thing about all of our content on our platform is it’s taught primarily by my staff when it’s intended to be watched by a staff. So all the, all the sales and service content is taught by people that are here. They’re doing things at a high level, you know, high, very high level. Some of them writing over 200 a month.
and then I, I film all the owner content so they can, they can become a member and they get all this content. So 177 bucks a month for full access to it. 24 seven has all of our documents, all the internal documents we use in the agency, they’re all uploaded the platform. So they get access to all of that stuff.

In addition to all the live training that we do every month. So every Wednesday we have a club for staff. Every other Tuesday. We have one for owners. We have specialized training on building centers of influence on, you know, powering new people and getting them up to speed quickly on, developing a remote employees.

We do all these things all throughout the month, you know, to help. And then if someone wants one-on-one help, that can actually join a level where they work directly with me. And we have a call every other week to work on things that are going on in their office. You know, kind of like this conversation we’re having now, but taking a deep dive into what, what we need to help them with and make sure they’re making the right decisions and that time the thing.

And then we do live events. We have workshops here in the agency for sales, for coaching, for leadership. We just, we try to be that resource that is, you know, it’s just missing. You know, I remember when I first started and you probably do too. There wasn’t a whole lot of stuff there. Weren’t a lot of help.

A lot of support, maybe had a manager. Maybe as some agents in your market might tell you a little bit. They wouldn’t tell you too much. Cause they scared you’re going to do it with their they’re or whatever. And it was hard to really get good information about what to do, how to compete, how to, how to win when you’re hired or how to, how to make the right hires to begin with kind of like this, the stuff we’re talking about today, all these different things that people are struggling with.

So several years ago, I just decided, you know what, I want to put all this together to help people. Because I remember what it was like, you know, not being able to sleep at night, wondering where things were going to go and what was going to happen and what my business is going to look like. And, and I’ve seen so many people fail simply because they didn’t have good information.

So we started doing this and it’s, it’s been great. We work with thousands of people all over the country and, it’s been very, very rewarding to say the least.

Todd: [00:56:16]
That’s awesome. I have, I’ve actually had quite a few agents. They’ll message me. And they’ll say things like, Hey, that CWC thing does it work? And I, I tell them about my experience. I said, you know, if your staff or yourself don’t take advantage of it. Even the placebo effect works. I think, I think ever since I had my, my producers just having to be on the Wednesday call, so it gets them to think about training and needing to do better.

I’m pretty sure I’ve already made more than $177 that month. So I think it’s awesome.

Craig: [00:56:49]
Absolutely. People want to be trying. Mostly, they don’t have any structure. They don’t have, they don’t have the time. Some of them don’t have the resources or frankly, the knowledge to train on some of these things that we’re talking about. Your people want to be trained if they’re not being trained, you know, they’re probably looking for something else because when you, you know, that tells them, there’s other things down the road, but they’re going to get better.

There’s, there’s, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. There’s more opportunity, whatever you want to say. And if you look at the best companies in the world, And they train every day, you know? And I mean, just think about if you had a football team, you know, and you just show it to play a game every Saturday or Sunday, and you never practice, never look at any phones.

You never talk about anything. You just show up and you know, you get your rear end handed to you and then they show up again next Saturday and you want a different result. Well, that’s, what’s happening when your people are talking to customers and talking to prospects every day, they’re losing because they’re not getting any trend.

And you’re just hoping that they get better over time. So when you drill down and make it very specific and you give them that structure, Especially when they hear it from people that do what they do, not some other owner or some motivational speaker or industry expert when they hear it from Beth or Josephine or people in my office that have the same challenges, it resonates it’s relatable and they buy into it.

Todd: [00:58:09]
That’s so awesome. So how do they find you and your program?

Craig: [00:58:14]
My website is CraigWigginsCoaching.com. Anybody’s free to reach out to me directly. I give my cell phone out freely regularly. It’s (256) 520–6880. You can text me or call me. And again, you can go right to our website. There’s plenty of places there. You can contact us. And I’d be more than happy to help you and talk about whatever issues you’re dealing with.

I have a sincere, genuine desire to help people, you know, yes, we have a business, but there’s a lot of times I help people that, you know, they’re not even a member or mean they never even become a member. That’s fine. You know, if I can make a difference and make a positive impact on somebody, you know, and help them, that’s, that’s really my goal.

And that’s, that’s what we’re trying to do so they can reach me anyway. Any means possible. I’m all over Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever.

Todd: [00:59:01]
That’s awesome. And you’re also in our Insurance Agents Think Tank group on Facebook. I see you replying to people and commenting. So definitely love having mega agents like you in our, in our, in our Facebook group and helping out. So thanks again. I really appreciate, I’ve even learned quite a few things that I’ve known you for awhile.

So, this is a really good podcast. I actually liked it.

Craig: [00:59:23]
I appreciate you, man. You’re on you’re is one of the best on Facebook, if not the best, right? You do a good job of running it and, you know, keeping it on point and clean and you know, not letting it get word just gets out of hand. So you, you do, and I know it’s tough cause I have several groups to being an admin and handle all that stuff, guys, if you don’t do it, never done it.

There’s a lot that goes on. You gotta be the bad guy sometimes, but that’s how, you know, you create that same culture within that group. Like we’re trying to create an agency. So. No prophecy for that. I appreciate you letting me be a part of that and, and contributing and trying to help other folks.

Todd: [00:59:56]
appreciate it. Thanks everybody again. You can find this podcast at www dot agents. Think tank.com.

View Details

Watch the video version of this show on YouTube »

Vlad Cherchenko consistently wrote over 150 policies a month before he started Insurance Sales Lab, an online masterclass designed to help P&C insurance agents write more Auto, Home, and Life insurance in their agency.

Today Todd talks to Vlad all about Facebook advertising, and how you can use this powerful tool to generate leads! With billions of people using it every day, Facebook represents enormous potential for your agency. Tune in, and Vlad will take you through it step by step.

You’ll learn:

• How to tell if your ad performance is reliable, or just a fluke.
• The right way to spend your Facebook ad budget.
• The anatomy of a high-performing Facebook ad.
• Getting leads without competing against billion-dollar budgets!

Vlad Cherchenko’s Links

• Free training: Insurance Training Webinar
• Personal site: Insurance Sales Lab

Episode Transcript

Vlad: [00:00:00]
People who are not rolling with the punches and learning how to adapt, just won’t have a successful campaign longterm. And if you’re going to do any marketing, if you’re going to spend any more money in marketing, don’t just dabble in it for a few months, do it for an extended period of time.

Todd: [00:00:22]
Welcome to the Insurance Agents Think Tank show! I’m your host, Todd McLain. And this is a podcast all about how to build and scale your agency. Today’s topic is Facebook advertising. So why the topics really hot right now? And it’s been hot for quite a while, as you’ve been, I’m sure most of you, people who are following the Insurance Agents Think Tank on Facebook, our group, by the way, if you’re not a part of the group, make sure you join the group.

It’s I mean, we’re on Facebook, right? So the way constantly, always thinking about, well, I’m on this, social media network. How do I generate leads? You know, if I’m, if I’m browsing social media, how do I generate leads from the billions of people that are browsing every single day? So with that being said, my guest today is Vlad Cherchenko hopefully I didn’t hurt that.

Vlad: [00:01:15]
That’s exactly right. Vlad Cherchenko.

Todd: [00:01:17]
Cool. So remember to tune into the show on YouTube so you can see screens that we’re going to share today on the show, or go to www.AgentsThinkTank.com to see all the episodes. But again, thank you for being on the show, Vlad. Can you tell the audience about yourself?

Vlad: [00:01:34]
Absolutely. Thanks for having me on this podcast, Todd, my quick background: a little over six years ago, I was recruited to be a State Farm agent, and I was close to signing the contract and opening up my insurance agency. And I was coming from a completely different industry. And I didn’t know anything about insurance, but one of the things that I’m really glad looking back that I did was I talked to a lot of newer agents.

So get a perspective on what the first few years look like for them. And the same thing was said over and over again, where the first year they lost a lot of money. They went to major debt. Second year, they broke even third year, they started making some money. And then…

Todd: [00:02:15]
It’s not easy!

Vlad: [00:02:16]
Yeah, not easy. And I thought, geez, there has to be a better way.

So to a structured agency, build a sales and marketing system so that you can at least break even, or make a little bit of a profit in your first year. So I thought the only way that I could. Run a successful agency is if I come into it with a proven sales process and a proven marketing process, neither of which I had.

And I didn’t know anybody that had those two things in place. all the agents that I talked to were just giving some pointers and ideas, but no one really, we had a, a real plan that I could just buy or pay for a sub program. Anyways. I said, look, I’m going to be a team member. I’m going to work in an agent’s office for 18 months and try to figure out a sales and marketing process so that I could personally write a hundred policies a month individually as one producer month after month after month.

So it’s not something that just happens on accident one month. And then it goes back to like 15 some policies. I wanted to stay at a hundred or more, uh, consecutively month after month.

Todd: [00:03:18]
We call that a unicorn.

Vlad: [00:03:19]
Yeah. That one month where, where you do well or someone who does

Todd: [00:03:25]
Yeah. If the agent can hire a producer that does a hundred a month, they are my unicorns.

Vlad: [00:03:29]
Yeah. Yeah. People like that are rare. It’s like one in a thousand probably producers. Super super rare. So I didn’t know of anybody who wrote a hundred policies, but I thought there are people that are doing 50, 60. How much harder could it be to go from 50, 60 to a hundred? So what I did was I, I was calling old bleeds.

I, we had a lot of old leads, like ever quote, hometown quote leads that were just sitting in the database, collecting dust, people who were quoted six months ago, a year ago, but nobody was calling them because. You know how calling those leads goes, you call them. They’re not interested there. They already have insurance, but.

For me, I looked at it as an opportunity where nobody’s calling those leads. So I’m not competing with anybody. So if I can just have the right message to say the right things in the right order, then guess what? I could probably get someone to switch their insurance store agency. And that’s what happened. the script didn’t just all come into place in one day or one month or, a short period of time. So it could be six months of making a few hundred calls a day where I. Pretty much systematize the sales conversation, where I could call you Todd. And you were saying with Geico and I would get you to switch your homeowners and auto to our agency in the first call.

And you know how it is to be in a captive environment where you can’t run a quote with 10 different carriers. You only have one price. So our price wasn’t less expensive most of the time. So I had to figure out a way to get people to switch over. Even if our price is more expensive, which was the case most of the time.

Well, what was that?

One of your percent. Yes. It took me six months to come up with the sales process. And the finally, finally, when I had this process dialed in, I wrote a hundred policies or apps as we called it in one month. And that was on my six month. and. I felt pretty good about myself. I felt like, okay, I know if I make this many phone calls, I’ll get this many answers.

So 50 phone calls acquainted to five answers, which acquainted to four quotes, and then one of them would buy in the first call. And that was the whole idea. Get people to buy in the first call and then another person will buy through follow-up. But throughout those six months, I was building out a referral partnership with realtors, lenders, apartment complex managers, Mike, my past clients and people started sending me referrals.

And it, it was kind of like the snowball effect where you get a little bit of traction, then you get more and more and more and more. And that’s what happened between my six to nine ninth month where I just started getting a lot more referrals from my, especially like predominantly from my past clients. where I just started getting so many incoming calls that I didn’t have to make outbound calls anymore. So in my ninth month I wrote 152 policies and I just continued to stay there month after month after month at 150 or more. And that’s when agents in our area took notice and they’re like, flood, can I come see your office and record you?

Do the sales pitch that you do to your prospects. So they did that. It recorded the conversation, come back to their agency, transcribe it, and then use that same script and they too would get results. So I’d get these messages all the time with people saying, Hey, thanks for allowing me to sit in your office.

Your S your, your sales script works. I’m like what sales script. This is, isn’t this like, obvious what, what we do here. but. Yeah. So I decided to do a local workshop, first in our area. And then I traveled to Seattle LA. I wanted to see if this works in other parts of the country and, sure enough, the results were the same everywhere I did these workshops.

So I started doing workshops all across the country and it wasn’t just the company that I was with, but it was other companies as well. And the same thing kept coming up over and over and over again, this is about 2016 ish where. People were coming up, agents would come up and say, what, if you could figure out how to run ads on Facebook so that we could generate leads on our own, that people would pay a lot of money for and out of pay a lot of money for that they would say so.

And since I didn’t know anything about Facebook, I decided to buy courses. I, went on this like one year journey where. I bought every course that I thought was good. I attended every conference, every events, every meetup, hired a few coaches to teach me how to run Facebook ads. So I went all in on that Facebook, Instagram, and just online marketing in general.

And I would say eight, versus it was just insurance agents. Then it was real estate agents, lenders, and other small businesses. And I would just run their Facebook ads. And because I had so many different agents in so many different parts of the country that I was doing this for, I was able to experiments a lot of things at the same time.

So we were managing a budget. I don’t even remember what it was over $50,000 a month. of agents who were roughly spending about 500 to a thousand dollars per month. So we had a lot of clients spending a lot of money in total. So what that did was it, it gave me a, a really good idea of what doesn’t work when you, when it comes to Facebook advertising and then what does work.

And I systematize my marketing process. So long story short, I figured that man, this whole. Serve as business of running ads for business owners, like insurance agents, real estate agents, it’s just taking time away from the thing that I love to do, which is working with insurance agents and teaching them how to sell.

That was my passion. That’s what I wanted to do. That’s what I still do today. And what I do is I say again,

Todd: [00:09:06]
I feel you on that.

Vlad: [00:09:07]
Yeah. It, to me, it’s the, I feel like the most important thing that agents need to dial in is having a really good sales process. Because if you have a good sales process, then even if you give them crappy leads, they’ll still close them.

If they know how to, how to call those leads. So I just recorded a bunch of how to tutorial videos sent them out. to the business owners that I was working with, and I said, just follow these videos and you can manage your own ads moving forward. But, I basically closed down the digital marketing agency and I, and I don’t have any clients that I manage ads for right now. and I just went all in on, coaching insurance agents on how to sell and agents and their team members. So that’s what I do full time. Every now and then I help agents set up their ads. And, when you reached out not long ago saying body, you want to do a podcast on how to do a, how to set up a Facebook ad.

I was all in on that. So I’m excited to show the viewers who are watching this on YouTube, on how to go from, start to finish and creating an ad.

Todd: [00:10:09]
Awesome. Thank you. So let’s, let’s, let’s dive deep into, not deep, deep, but Facebook advertising in general. very first question. I get a lot on this topic is should the agent themselves, because a lot of agents will start up a marketing campaign. That’s turnkey. You know, when they buy direct mail or by internet leads, they just have to flip a switch and it starts, and they don’t really have to do anything.

So do you think when agents are getting their agency into Facebook marketing, they should be the ones controlling and owning that marketing campaign? Or is it better to hire a marketer? Who’s the one who’s always in charge of it, because the agent might not have the time or needed to dedicate to it.

What, what’s the kind of setup that you would recommend in an agency?

Vlad: [00:10:58]
You recommend that the agent understands how Facebook works. How just the basics work so they can speak that language and ask good questions so that when they do hire someone that they’re able to be on the same page with what’s going on in their ad accounts. But unless the agents is all-in on learning how to be a online marketer, I would, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t manage all the ads, yourself.

I would delegate it to someone who is all in. So let’s say you have a team member. Who is a willing to learn and you give them a training course, or they do their own training. And that that person goes all in and learning how to run ads. And they’re stayed up at night, sitting through Facebook groups, reading chats of what’s working.

What’s not working. If you can find someone like that, delegate it to that individual. Because as you know, Todd. Things change all the time with, with Facebook advertising, like we’re experiencing a huge change right now, as we’re doing this, podcasts. Where Apple is, changing the rules on what data Facebook has access to when it comes to apps and, and Facebook is freaking out, they are modifying all the advertisers from every different angle or sending out emails. they’re posting notification saying this is a big change that’s coming. It’s going to affect you. So people who are not rolling with the punches and learning how to adapt, just. Won’t have a successful campaign longterm. And if you’re going to do any marketing, if you’re going to spend any more money on marketing, don’t just dabble it for a few months, do it for an extended period of time.

And I, I truly believe that Facebook is an amazing way to generate leads for your agency, but it should never be the only way that you generate leads or you should have multiple different lead sources. But, so to answer your question just directly. Yeah. Is that agents should understand how Facebook advertising works, but don’t manage the ads yourself, unless you’re going to go all over.

Todd: [00:13:05]
And that’s something that I’ve, I’ve seen happen too often. especially in our last podcast, when we talked about internet leads. Where, if you’re going to try any marketing tactic, you have to be all in. Right. and if you can’t physically manage the time to maintain it or continue to strengthen the campaigns, then you have to hire somebody to delegate that you just have to where you’re running a business.

Right. So there’s no other excuse. There’s not, I can’t do it. It’s you’re running a business. You have to do it. Right. So I love that answer now. How advanced, do you think agents should get into leads? Should they use things like pixel right off the bat, it start conversion ads. you know, is it necessary to get really deep up front to start seeing success?

Vlad: [00:13:55]
100%, yes. To building the foundations correctly right off the bat. Because if you spend a couple thousand dollars on Facebook ads without having a pixel installed in your website, your landing pages, well, that’s a few thousand dollars that you wasted essentially where Facebook didn’t collect any data.

On the people who visited your website. So you have to set up the, you have to install the pixel into the Laney page of the website so that it’s captured in the data. Even if you’re not using the pixel to its maximum potential, at least have the installed in the website have installed in the landing page.

You’re not going to get all the foundational things set up correctly, but installing the pixel right off the bat is important. Setting up your conversions is important. Setting up your audience groups is important. And that’s where hiring someone to that knows what they’re doing, to help you set up the foundational things is really helpful.

Todd: [00:14:54]
Dating was that when you were getting through the year long journey of learning about Facebook advertising? When you started actually learning about the topics, did you feel like it was really overwhelming at first and then realized it’s a ABC kind of a campaign event? Like people that feel really intimidated, maybe they’re not tech savvy?

Like what, what advice would you give them? Diving into Facebook advertising.

Vlad: [00:15:21]
Yeah, I will admit. And this is embarrassing to say maybe I’m low, but

Todd: [00:15:28]
hear.

Vlad: [00:15:30]
I, I probably asked the same question of like, wait, so what’s a pixel. And like, what’s the difference between a pixel and a conversion because they seem to be. Doing the same thing. Like, so explain to me the difference between that. And, I remember asking the same person, like three different times and three different ways and I still didn’t get it.

And then I asked another person, it was like one of those things that I just couldn’t comprehend, kind of like the only other time that I remember it being that difficult for me to understand something was. Also has to do with insurance on when someone cancels or homeowners, insurance, or switches, their homeowners insurance with what to do with that check and setting it to escrow.

When I just started selling insurance, I wasn’t a homeowner. I didn’t know how escrow works, how mortgages work, none of that.

Todd: [00:16:23]
I mean, you buy GameStop, right? That’s what everybody’s

Vlad: [00:16:25]
All in on that. Yeah. So, that was a hard concept for you to understand. And then the pixel conversion was also difficult to understand, but anyways, it, once I got that past, that initial phase of just understanding the basics of how it works, things started clicking and just jumping in and doing the work is where. it all kind of made sense to me. I, when you just talk about advertising, it’s one thing, but when you start setting up the campaigns, a whole new set of questions comes up and after you do it a few times, it’s like anything else? It just becomes second nature. Like, think about the first time I probably was probably years ago when you were preparing the homeowners or auto quote, it was a difficult, right.

There’s so many questions that you had, but after you did a few hundred of them, you can. You can do it in your sleep. Now the same thing with Facebook advertising. So it’s intimidating at first, for sure, because there’s no like one way that works all the time. You there’s great, processes that you could follow and systems that you can follow, but, you always have to yeah.

Experiments and see what’s working at that exact moment.

Todd: [00:17:40]
That brings us to, you know, let’s talk about the different ways that people use. Social media. In the past and the kind of the pros and cons, you know, I’ve seen, I’ve seen groups out there that sell. I think the latest price was $6,000 for a, how to add, to generate leads for mortgage brokers. And it kind of drives me nuts only because agents, especially new agents, they think that.

You know, that might be the Holy grail type of method because we love mortgage brokers. We love building referrals. We’re think we’re giving them something of great value. But if we generate leads for mortgage brokers and you’re a brand new agent, who’s generating leads for the agency, you’re, you’re hoping that this Facebook long ad form is going to be worked by a good person at the brokerage.

And the first couple of leads. If they get them, if they’re crappy leads, you just ruined a rapport building relationship instead of building out ads for yourself. So, I mean, there’s all different types of ways that you can generate leads. Mortgage brokers were one like giveaway ads, right? Niche marketing.

So, I mean, what are the, to you, if you had to rank what a new agent should be doing day one, when they get into social media ads, where would you guide them? What would be your, your recommendation on where they should start?

Vlad: [00:18:58]
Yeah. In terms of generating leads for mortgage lenders. I know that works because, it, like, I I personally know of agents that do that successfully, but it’s not something that, will work with every lender and every, in every situation. In other words, if the, if you’re giving. Great leads. Let’s call them great leads to the lender, but the lender is not working.

Those leads properly. They’re not going to see results. So there’s that one extra layer of complexity where you as a insurance agency owner, have to coach and guide the lender on how to work those leads. And if you’re willing to do that, then by all means, learn how to do that. However, my preference is to generate leads for the, for the insurance agency, because those are leads that I’m buying for myself that I can control from start to finish. I can see the quality bait based on the way how the conversations are going with the team. so. I’m not going to go out and say that one is significantly better than the other, both have their own pros and cons. You just have to decide how much time you want to spend on, on, either route So I guess if, if you’re thinking that you can just generate leads for lenders and they’ll bring you a lot of business, then that’s a naive way to look at it.

There’s a few more layers of complexity there. So. That’s that’s what I would say to that.

Todd: [00:20:32]
Yeah, well, and it’s, it’s, it’s really a matter of controlling what you can control because you can’t control somebody referring you business. And, and I might be sounding like I don’t agree with the method, which I know the method can work. But what I want agents to understand is that, just like I teach knowing your numbers, like if you know, percentages your ROI, your cost per customer, if you know your numbers, you can make anything work.

What you can’t control is if a lender has a good employee is going to work your leads, you can’t control. If they’re going to refer three other agents, if you’re a captive agent, not competitive in the area. You’re going to get spanked every time. You know, there’s, there’s a lot of other variables layers.

Like you put it, where I feel like the agent, if you’re generating leads for yourself, you can really dial in to any complexity or issue that might come up. Like your employee is not working them properly. Getting better sales tactics, generating leads online for yourself, getting better, lower cost per click, right?

So it’s something that you can control and a skill set that’s needed. In the agency first and foremost, before you build outside of that environment and working on like brokers. So what about niche marketing? cause I know we’re going to get into the show. How to, what kind of niche marketing would you say you’ve had the most success with recently?

Vlad: [00:21:59]
Yeah. And so go deep on or deeper on the niche marketing concept. The most insurance, the most expensive keyword. in Google to bid for is insurance. So there’s no other word that’s more expensive than, than, the word insurance. In other words, if you go online and search in Google, the word insurance, there are companies that are paying like 40, $50 in some cases more to have their ad come up first.

Geico the Progressive the state Farm the farmers, all these big companies, they have. Billion dollar budgets. So they’re trying to constantly outbid each other. And what is their message? Todd, like what is the message that they have when it comes to insurance,

Todd: [00:22:47]
Save money on auto insurance.

Vlad: [00:22:49]
Save money on auto insurance, only pay for what you need for, right. and you see that in Google. You see that on Facebook, you see that on TV, everywhere, sports arenas, there’s no industry. That’s bombarded with more ads. Then, who bombards people with more ads than the insurance industry it’s everywhere. So if you’re going to take that same approach and you’re going to go on Facebook and say, Hey, get a quote on your car insurance.

Here’s a link to put in your information. You’re not going to get much traction, but if you can call people out by name and use unique strategies, to, to niche down, as you say, then you can get more traction. Here’s what I mean by that. There are carriers that we both know of that have affinity programs where they’re, if you’re a first responder, an educator, a, police officer, a nurse, you get special discounts, right?

So what if you called out that niche and said, Hey, if you are an educator, then you could be saving a lot of money on your car insurance or homeowner’s insurance. So if I’m, if I’m a teacher and I’m scrolling through Facebook, And I see an ad like that, calls me out, saying Hey, if you’re an educator in Salt Lake City, Utah, well, that’s me.

I’m in Salt Lake City, Utah. I’m an educator, I’m a teacher. You could save money on your insurance. All right. Well, and then the ad says, if, if you feel like you’re paying way too much for your insurance, then click this link, fill out this form. We’ll call you, and give you a quote. Well, now you just spoke directly to me.

Or if I’m a 45 year old dad who has. Two kids that are starting to drive a 17 and a 16 year old. and I’m like, dang, my insurance is just too expensive, but I know that. so if I’m a dad who has kids and I go on Facebook and the ad says, Hey, if you are a parents with kids that are starting to drive and they’re on your insurance and you feel like you’re paying way too much for your insurance, then we could help you.

We can save you a lot of one year insurance. Well, that’s exactly what I’m experiencing right now. So I would click on that. Right. And the cool thing about Facebook is that Facebook knows who those people are. And when you create an ad as an advertiser, you can say only show this to people who are in this geographic location, who have kids that are between these ages.

It’s crazy how much data Facebook has, or, if you. No, that someone went to a certain school, right? They went to university of Oregon. You can say, Hey, if you want to university, if you graduated from, or if you’re an alumni of university of Oregon, well, if they’re an alumni from university of Oregon, what do we know?

They have a degree and some companies give you a discount. If you have a degree, right. About two years master’s degree. So you can say, Hey, if you’re an alumni, we could save you a lot of money on your insurance. So if I’m a U of O alumni, I see that ad I’m clicking on that. Right? So that’s what we mean by niching down.

And there’s more ways that we can niche down and create a perfect customer avatar, but that’s just like a basic way to start niching down.

Todd: [00:26:00]
And I’ve heard people say that, you know, they’ve tried using certain niches. And when I asked them, you know, what niche they use? They said it worked for a little bit, and then it stopped working. And so I think that’s something that’s really important that we, it goes back to the beginning of our conversation, that if you’re going to get into Facebook advertising then you’ve got to understand, it’s not something you just dabble in and try out and burnout is real, right?

If tomorrow, a thousand people try to target educators because of this podcast, you might have success. But it’s, you’re going to need to keep trying different niches that are really important around you. Wouldn’t you agree?

Vlad: [00:26:39]
100%. And it also depends on the size of that market. So if you’re going to target people in to salt Lake city who are educators, and you’re willing to go out 50 miles out of your, your primary zip code. How many educators are you gonna target? Maybe 10,000. So once you’ve shown that add 10 times to that group of people, well, you’ve already.

Got the low-hanging fruit of the people who are interested in that particular offer. and you’re going to have this, you’re going to have diminishing returns over a period of time where you’re not going to get the same cost per lead over period of time. So that’s where, to your point, you have to be a student of the game and always experiment with different things in, in, Markets where you have millions of people, where your audience is, is huge.

Like one I’m thinking about is I worked with a, with a, with an accountant who was targeting people who sell products online. I remember setting up an ad for him one time, like a year and a half ago. And he’s still running the same ad today. He hasn’t changed anything. It’s been almost 18 months. It’s the same exact ad.

And it’s performing the same exact way now as it did, then it’s, he’s getting like $3 leads and really good quality leads. But because his audience is just so huge, it’s. People who are selling products online and because Facebook learned who those people are over a period of a time it’s showing ads to the right people, but he’s targeting, a niche market by is calling them e-commerce sellers.

But that market is huge. That’s why he’s been able to run the same ad for 18 months. On the insurance side, if you’re going to pick a niche and it’s not a huge niche, don’t expect your ads to perform the same way over a period of 18 months. Sometimes they’ll perform a wealth for, for a month and then stop Sometimes they’ll perform well for 90 days or six months. You just have to maintain them week in, week out.

Todd: [00:28:36]
And I would think that a, I mean, if an agent’s going to get into this, they should probably start writing down the different niches niches that they should get into. And then as they start rolling through them over time, you’re going to build kind of like a library of things that worked, that didn’t work.

And you can go back to that niche, you know, in 12 months. And so agents need to be really cognizant of not just what’s working today. Right. But come back to it later and try it again, you know, depending on what Facebook does or, you know, any changes that happen to the technology. but really keeping track of, and trying to plan out kind of like a plan of attack.

And how would you, how long would you say. A certain campaign on a niche would work for like what’s the average timeframe. So people can maybe plan for three of them. the next quarter,

Vlad: [00:29:30]
Yeah. So I’ll give a response in like three different ways. One is never just start with one niche, always start with, with, or never just do one campaign. Always do at least three campaigns. So for instance, if we’re going to target alumni, of university of Oregon, And I want to build out a campaign for people who went to that school.

Don’t just run an ad for people who would see U of O also create an ad for people who went to Oregon state university and also create an ad for people who went to a PSU. So those are like the three big schools in Oregon, because what you’ll find is that when you launch those three campaigns, one of them will do exceptionally well.

One of them is going to stink. And then one it’s like, it might do well or might not do well. So if, if you do that and after a week, you look at the performance, you like, okay, this one is clearly not doing well. I’m not, I’m turning it off. And this one’s crushing. It’s, I’m going to spend even more money on it.

And the, and the, the, the one in between, while it’s doodle, Kayla, just keep the budget the same. Whereas if you just started with one campaign and it. Just happened to be the one that wasn’t going to turn out anyways, then you might be, He might feel like, okay, Facebook advertising doesn’t work, and he was stopped running out.

So first thing is I like to set up three different campaigns, upfront. Secondly, I would never turn off the ad or make any changes to the ad, until I’ve let it run for at least four days. So when he turns something on, when you turn an ad on, do not touch it, do not touch the budget. Do not touch anything for four days, because Facebook has to go through a learning phase of what what’s working, like who to target the ads to and what I have found.

And this happens so often where you churn it out on, you’re super excited, but then you check in in a day and there are no leads. You check in the following day. And there are no leads and you’ve already spent a bunch of money. You’re seeing a lot of clicks come through, but people are not opting in. And then day three, you start seeing some leads come in and then day four, boom.

You get a ton of leads. So it kind of averages. Yeah. Yeah. So, four days is like the minimum to give Facebook to optimize itself. and. After four days, you can, you can make changes. So that’s, that’s the other part of the response. And then, I would say the last part when it comes to niches, and this is kind of like the part where you just will only get this over time is you can right.

Kind of, you can target multiple niches. Let me give you an example. You can target people who are parents with youthful drivers who are married, as the main audience, but then you can call them out two different ways. One ad you can say, Hey, if you’re married, That’s your niche. And then from a different ad, you say, Hey, if you have kids that are starting to drive, you’re, you’re targeting the same group of people, but with two different messages, does that make sense?

So they might respond to one ad the one that says, Hey, if you’re married, but not respond to the one that has to do with, if you have kids who are starting to drive or vice versa, so you can

Todd: [00:32:53]
all the action triggered them.

Vlad: [00:32:55]
Yeah. Yeah…

Todd: [00:32:57]
Ended the response to call it and to opt-in.

Vlad: [00:32:59]
Yeah, yeah. So it should. Yeah, you shouldn’t always target the same niche with the same message. You should switch up the messages.

Todd: [00:33:09]
Yeah. And that, I think that brings up a topic. When you said tried three different schools. a lot of people bring their own bias into marketing, right. just because your college team lost to the other college doesn’t mean you shouldn’t run an ad for them. Right. Like get rid of your bias just because, you know, you think something calling something out in an ad copy is going to work.

You still need to try something else because ABC testing is critical. you know, I might run an ad for an Aggie. I don’t know, like I’d have to get Ooh, but, yeah, you gotta get rid of your biases and you’ve got to try. Different tactics in order to finding out what actually triggers people into opting in.

So you’re going to, so for everybody who’s listening on the podcast, you can still listen in, but we’re going to share your screen and you’re going to actually take us through how to build your own niche campaign. so let’s, let’s see what you got.

Vlad: [00:34:11]
Okay. So first I’ll show an ad that is working today. This is a screenshot of a, an ad that’s running right now as we speak, I just did a screenshot. So I’ll first kind of walk you through the ad structure and then I’ll show you a few other examples. So at the very top, we’re asking a question, we’re calling out the audience.

We’re saying, are you an OSU, Oklahoma state university alumni If they read, go ahead.

Todd: [00:34:47]
Well, very specific. Right,

Vlad: [00:34:48]
Soup. Yeah, it’s a yes or no question. And if you read that and you’re like, Yep that’s me. You’re probably going to continue reading. So it says, starting today, you may be eligible. Notice we’re not saying, you are eligible. You may be eligible to receive a significant discount on your car and home insurance.

If you meet the following criteria. So now I’m wondering, do I meet the following criteria or not? One is you have to live in Oklahoma check. Have an active car insurance policy check have less than three acts car accidents in the last three years? Yep. I don’t have three car accidents in the last three years. So I meet this criteria and I’m an alumni Okay. So what else? So if you meet that criteria and you want to save money on your car insurance, which I do simply click the, get quote button below to get a free quote, and then we have some urgency in here. This offer will expire soon. It will expire soon because this ad is not going to run indefinitely.

We’re going to turn it off. So this particular offer will be taken off and we have a little emoji that points down. Click the, get quote button below, and we’ll get in touch with you. with a free no-obligation quote it looks like there might be a grammar error. so w you can go about this a couple of different ways.

You can either place a link right in here. And people can just click on it and be taken to a page, a landing page, or you can just set it up where they, where you don’t have a link in there. And even if they just click on the picture or this get quote button, they’ll be redirected to the landing page.

And one thing I, I should have addressed sooner. Is that when people think of running ads on Facebook oftentimes they think about posting something on their page and then boosting it. You know what I mean? Oh yeah. There’s that blue boost button where Facebook tempts, you and says, Hey, for $20 you can reach 10,000 people.

And then once you put your credit card in there, it’ll say, who do you want to target? And you’re like, Oh man, there’s so many advanced options. I can. Play around with the audience, but that’s like a really small, like it’s, it’s not the best way to market when you run ads on, on, on, on the page, you are so limited with what you can do and I’ll show in a couple of minutes on how to set up an ad through the ads manager.

That’s where you want to set up your campaigns. So we got that. And then what do you notice about this picture? Todd? What stands out about this picture to you?

Todd: [00:37:17]
If you went to OSU. You’re like feeling happy when you see the mascot, right? It’s like, yeah, you’re, you’re throwing your sign up for your school. Right. But I definitely agree with the photo. It just catches your attention. And then even, even before that, when you were going through the ad itself, I really like how you’re filtering out underwriting reasons.

Why you wouldn’t want somebody to click on, get quote, waste your team members time. have Facebook help you identify people that should, you know, that might qualify, but yeah, this is, this is a perfect set up.

Vlad: [00:37:54]
Yeah, and we don’t want more leads, Todd, we want higher quality leads, right? I’d rather pay a little more but work with fewer leads. Okay. So you’re spot on this picture, resonates with people who went there. and then we have a headline here. That’s the same as what we have up there. Are you an OSU, Oklahoma state university, alumni, and look at the engagement.

How many likes comments and shares do you see here?

Todd: [00:38:22]
Absolutely 223 likes and loves. They love their mascot they love their school. They’re going to show that pride and give and give some love when they see it, Even if they don’t click on the ad, they’re probably still going to give it love.

Vlad: [00:38:35]
Yeah. Yeah. So the real leads, Todd are people who click on this page, go to, or click on the ad, go to a page and fill out a form, which I’ll show in just a second. But the other people to consider are the people who are in the comment section. I took a screenshot, put it here. This is from this particular ad.

What are people saying here when they’re commenting?

Todd: [00:38:57]
Class of, I mean, everybody’s just opting in with the class of where they graduated. And, you know, again, showing their pride of, Oh, too, that’s my pride. right. It’s they’re, they’re engaging with you, because they saw the mascot. So this is awesome.

Vlad: [00:39:16]
And if you see right here, the agent who’s running this ad, he likes or loves each one of these comments. So he’s engaging with them. And every time, your comments get engagement. If someone likes it or replies to it, you get a notification. So we’re with Christiansen, right? Lots of 2000. The moment this agent liked that comment she gets a notification. So she’s probably going to go back to the ad. Now, if, if you really want to get good results, what you want to do is click on this message button and send that person a direct message. Hey Ruth, thanks so much for your comments. if If you haven’t already click this link to get a quote from our insurance agency and

Todd: [00:40:02]
So I’ve never thought about. Somebody just responding to the ad with class of 2000 and sending them an actual message of the get quote with the call to action to me, that’s it. I mean, they interacted with the ad, so it makes sense. I’ve just never tried it. So, I mean, that’s a really good tip right there.

Everybody should be sending a message with the call to action. Not just letting people send a message on your ad.

Vlad: [00:40:28]
Yeah. And the more personalized it is, Todd, the better.

So let’s look at the landing page. this right in your Tod is where people go to now, what do you notice between the ad and the landing page?

Todd: [00:40:40]
It’s like, I feel at home still…

Vlad: [00:40:43]
Yeah.

Todd: [00:40:45]
This is a safe space.

Vlad: [00:40:46]
Yep. So same picture. and so there’s congruency, and then it says attention, Oklahoma state university, alumni, stop overpaying for your car insurance. It can say just insurance at the very top. And again, I’m calling out the niche, reinforcing the message. It says, enter your information below to get a free quote from our local insurance agency.

So. Notice that we’re not putting in any testimonials here, any, additional links, it’s just a landing page. So I’m not taking people to a website where there’s so much going on. I’m just taking them to a simple page where they have to really what decision to make opt-in or leave. Right. So there’s not much research to do here.

They opt in and that’s it. So there’s a picture of the agent at the bottom rights, right? and the name of the agency to give it more credibility, but notice how much information we’re asking for here. We’re asking for the first name, last name, email, phone number, date of birth street, address, zip code, and then get a quote for auto home or out of renters or home only auto only.

So there’s a dropdown where people could pick what it is that they want and the moment someone ops that, or puts that information in. Guess what? That lead goes into their CRM, go straight into agency of VP. And once it hits the CRM, a texts and email goes out to that person saying, Hey, Vlade thanks so much for requesting a insurance quote from our agency.

Someone from our team will get a we’ll call you shortly. If you’d like to get ahold of us sooner, click this number and call us right now. And then we put in a trackable phone number so they can call in. Some people call in, usually it’s within working hours, but if they opt in after five or six, then they know that no one’s at the agency.

So they don’t call in. there are a few ways you can go about this. Some people like to ask one question at a time I’ve experimented with both, both have their pros and cons. For me, I like to, like, this is my, where my personal bias comes in and I know do I need to keep it out? I like to see all the fields that I will need to fill out first.

I’m like, okay. I’m willing to give out this information. So I’m going to put the book, put it in submit and I’m done.

Todd: [00:42:58]
Well, and if you’re on a phone, you know, when you click first name, it will, you can select on your iPhone or your phone to pre-fill all of it immediately with your contact info. So this play is just so easy for somebody to click a couple buttons and you’re done versus having to type all of that in. So I agree.

I love this method versus like a survey method that takes you screen by screen. And so why I got a question though, why so much information? I I’ve heard people say, I don’t want them to have to feel like they’re giving away their life in order to get a quote from me. I just want maybe a piece, either their name and a contact method, email, or a phone.

Why things like their date of birth.

Vlad: [00:43:43]
Yeah. Great question. So If if all I ask is first name, email, and phone number. I’m going to get a ton of leads. but if I’m asking for more information, I’m going to get less leads, but I’m only going to get leads of people who are actually interested in getting a quote. So the reason I’m asking for these particular, fields right here, date of birth.

If I have that and I have their street address and I have their name, I can, I can put that into the system. And a lot of times the system will tell me who they’re insured with, right. Where you’re just doing it differently. So I’m asking enough information just to be able to get this process started. So when we get on the phone, we’re already past the initial phase of collecting information.

So, I don’t ask for city or state, did you notice that here it’s just the street address and zip code? Because if I have the zip code, then I have the city and state. so I’m not looking for more leads. I’m looking for higher quality leads. So how much do you think we’re spending on this kit? Or how much do you think we’re paying per lead for someone to fill out this entire form?

Todd: [00:44:57]
I’d say the average exclusively lead. Is going to, with that much information is going to be somewhere between 15 $20.

Vlad: [00:45:06]
Pretty close. Yeah. So, For this particular campaign. So w w this agents, I can pull up their campaigns, so actually show you, but to keep it moving, the three campaigns that this agent ran, one of them stunk. It was like 30, some dollars per liter. So we turned it off. The other one was about 20, $22 a lead.

And then this one is like $8 a lead. So yeah, $8 to opt in. So when you, so he turned off the poor performing one and between the two that he’s running right now, his average cost per lead, this is something I, I, I checked just recently. He was, I want to say less than 15 bucks a lead is what he’s paying.

So, which is great. I mean, if you are the owner yeah. If you’re the only agent calling the leads. That’s awesome. So let’s just say you’re paying, let’s just say 20 bucks a lead to keep them out simple. You get five leads that come through. So you spend a hundred bucks, you get five leads cause you’re spending 20 bucks a lead.

If you’re, if you have a good sales process, and this is key Todd, you have to have a good sales process. You can give a really good lead to a sales person and they won’t close the lead because they don’t know how to sell. And then you can give a crappy lead to a good sales person. and They’ll close that lead.

It’s not the lead that matters. It’s the sales conversation.

Todd: [00:46:31]
I tell everybody that like with even direct mail, like if you must have good people working good leads, like, or make your bad people good.

Vlad: [00:46:41]
yeah, through teaching them how to sell, if you are not willing to replace your team members and go through that process, then train the people that you have. Agents spend thousands of dollars a month on marketing getting leads, but they don’t train their team on how to call those leads. I often ask. How, when was the last time you did a sales training with your team?

Where, when was the last time that you put them through a workshop or a training? Well, we, we, we do that once a year. You do that once a year, when your people are calling leads every single day, you should be training every day anyways, besides the point. So if we get five leads at 20 a pop, if you’re following a a proven sales processes then you should, at the very least close, one of those leads at the very least.

Right. So that would give you a 20% close rate. And if you’re, if you’re closing one out of five leads, in one call, then your client acquisition costs, new client acquisition costs is $100 So if you’re making 200 in commission, when you close a sale, well use, you spent $100 you grossed 200, you netted 100, right?

Plus renewals. So a lot of agents are going to be willing to S to at least break even when they close a sale, on, on the marketing. But if you’re able to make a profit, then that’s even better, you can continue to scale up. So that’s the, that’s the page. Any questions on the ad or the page here?

Todd: [00:48:13]
Now let’s show them like the overview of how to set it up and what you would recommend setting it up.

Vlad: [00:48:20]
Okay.

Todd: [00:48:21]
there’s more.

Vlad: [00:48:22]
there’s more, what do you say with the three different ads here? What’s the big difference between these three ads?

Todd: [00:48:28]
You’re calling me out in different ways with your images.

Vlad: [00:48:31]
Yes. So the copy is exactly the same. Everything’s identical, everything above the picture and below the picture is exactly the same. The only thing that’s different is the three pictures. So one quick pro tip here is never rely on one picture just because you love this particular picture with this mascot doesn’t mean that it will perform the best.

So I always like to run. Three different ads to that same, market. Now, one last thing I’ll show you is that we talked a lot about alumni ads, but here are a few other options. One is, there’s a, there’s a Spanish added. I can share this video. This is a front of a mine, Maryland who lives here in my town.

She, w I ran her as she’s a real estate agents. I ran her ads and I, I called her one day. I said, Hey, I need a video where. You hold a gift card and you say, Hey, if, if you feel like you’re paying too much for your car insurance, then fill out the form below and we’ll call you, give you a quote. And as a bonus, we’ll give you this $10 gift card.

And I need that video so I could share it with other agents. So they don’t have to record their team members or record themselves because they may not be comfortable with videos. So she gave me this video, or I recorded this video. So if anybody wants me to send it to them, I can do that. And I’ll give that contact information at the very end so that you can use this video in your ad.

Does that make sense? Okay, so we wrote it in Spanish, and then it’s translated here, basically paid too much of your car insurance to see how much you can save in your car insurance. It says four. Thanks. This is the translation by Facebook. I hope that this is the proper way to write it in Hispanics, but anyways, Yeah.

Yeah. This out of crushes. It’s every time we bring this and it’s performed really well, this one has to do with, parents who have youthful drivers. with kids who are on your car insurance policy. So you may be eligible to receive a significant discount. And then, Yeah, have two or more vehicles have less than two car accidents.

I’ve had insurance for more than six months. And this one is a giveaway ad where you basically give away tickets to an events. One thing I will just warn you with the giveaway ads. you have to make it clear that the person has to get a quote from your agency before they’re the answer, the raffle. and the other thing to also know is that your team.

Shouldn’t just focus on the raffle. They call the lead, but focus are closing the sale. So with these giveaway ads, they can’t work. But again, if you have a good sales team, that’s trained on how to go through a good conversation, a closing conversation. So that’s it. As far as different ad variations that I wanted to show, you’re ready to have me show you the full setup from beginning to end.

Todd: [00:51:19]
I think I’ll add on this. you know, just as a disclosure, cause we’re a podcast, so we’ll be on live for a while. You definitely want to make sure that has rules and regulations change. is, is a giveaway or is anything like that legal in your state? gift cards and whatnot. So just so we cover our butts, right? yeah. Let’s check out. How do you, how do you start create the ad? Kind of take us through the step-by-step.

Vlad: [00:51:45]
Step number one, make sure you have a. Ads and ad manager account. So if you don’t have an ad account, our Facebook ad account, I should say, then Google, how to create a Facebook ad accounts. Once you have that, you’ll have some that looks like this without all of these demo ads, but you’ll be able to click this button that says, create with the little plus right here. click on that. And I’ll, I’m not going to explain every detail here, Todd, by all means, stop me and ask questions if you have some, but I’ll just give you like the general gist of every part of that equation. So the first thing Facebook ads asks you is what do you want the outcome of this campaign to be?

Do you want people to watch your video? You want people to click on a link or do you want people to. Click on a link and actually opt in. So, or do you want people to download an app right here is where you tell Facebook what you want. What we would select is conversions right here. Conversion is where people click on a link and opt in and provide their information.

So we’re going to select that. And then what I like to do is just, name my campaign, outset, an ad right off the bat. So I don’t have to do that. And this is going to change when people watch the video, because it always changes. You have a question.

Todd: [00:53:05]
Keeping it consistent through all the campaign. The ad said, what’s the difference between a campaign and ad set and an ad.

Vlad: [00:53:11]
Yep. Great question. So right here, if you see my screen that’s how far is the campaign? this is the outset and this is the ad. So the ad right here is the last thing you do. That’s where you. Create the actual image in that boards that people see, that’s the ad level. The ad sets is where you tell Facebook, who to show the ad to.

And then where do you want the ad place? There’s a Facebook. Is it Instagram? Is it. desktop only, or is it mobile only or desktop and mobile? You want it Spanish? Do you want it in English? Do you want to put it, in articles? Do you like, where do you want to place your ads? and then the campaign objective that’s where you tell Facebook what you want the outcome to be.

So a lot of times people think about advertising as just the ad level, but there’s so much more to it. okay.

Todd: [00:53:59]
To the onion, because when I first got into Facebook advertising that confused the hell out of me. I thought a campaign was the same thing as an ad. Like, so you, if you just break down, like you just did, if you didn’t catch it rewind. but it’s really simple. The campaign, the ad set we’re replacing it.

And then the ad is that copy.

Vlad: [00:54:18]
Yeah. And you know, if you notice here, where w where is Facebook prioritizing the actual, like ad itself last. Yeah. First, they ask you, what do you want the objective to be? Then they ask you, what, who do you want to show it to? Where do you want to place it? Once that’s all down, like the foundational things, then they say, okay, now be creative with the creative part.

You know what I mean? Because these two things can be constant. At all times, but then with the creatives, you can test with pictures, different pictures of videos, different headlines, that’s where you do all of the experimenting. So that’s why they prioritize that. Or they set at the very end, okay.

Campaign, budget optimization. I always like to do on. So I control the budget at this level. Well, at the campaign level, I never want to campaign less than 15 bucks. For a campaign you’re just not going to give Facebook enough money to work with and experiments. So that’s not like a hard rule, but 15 bucks is a good start.

Todd: [00:55:16]
Now what I want to do 150 bucks?

Vlad: [00:55:19]
Not too hard. Now at the start, you can do multiple ads at 15 bucks, which will end up being $150. That’s one way to do it. And, When it comes to scaling, let’s say for four days you run ads and you’re getting leads for 10 bucks a lead you’re like, Oh man, this is awesome. Let me make that $15 budget, $150 on day five.

You know, what’s going to happen to your campaign. Your, your cost per lead is may go up from $10 to. 20 $30 per lead because you just rushed to scale. So it, sometimes it it’s, you can increase the budget and it still keeps the same cost per lead, there, but you want, if you are going to scale, the general rule that I follow is every three days increased by 20%.

So if after four days you’re like, okay, we’re running at 15 bucks a day. It’s going, well, let’s go up by 20%. And then run it for three days if it’s still working well up by 20%. So that’s how you’d want to scale it. Okay. Ad set name. We got that conversion. Just do website Facebook pixel by now, you should have, we skipped this part, but you have to install a pixel in a landing page. just Google our go on YouTube type in how to solve a pixel. And there’s a bunch of the soils and how to do that. And then conversion events that you have to create a conversion. I’m not going to do that here. because it’s something that you want to set up before you start doing this.

Todd: [00:56:50]
Right. And we’re gonna, we’re going to have, you know, how to set up landing pages. How to have a conversion of that, like creating a lead. So there’ll be other tutorials. And by all means everybody should join the thing. Agents think tank group, and ask these questions live. We will not like the other groups will ban you.

If you try to talk about Facebook ads, because they sell the Facebook programs and our place, you know, ask as many questions as you can. We’ve got tons of experts that will help you out.

Vlad: [00:57:20]
Podcasts in the future with Q and a if, if we, if there’s enough interest on that. Okay. So, but budget and schedule, this is where you tell Facebook to, to run the ad indefinitely or put an end date to it. I just like to run it definitely. And then if I see that it’s not going well, I just turn it off manually. okay. So this is where the real magic happens. Todd, this is the audience section. So the audience section is, is super, super critical. the first thing we do is we, narrow down our audience geographically. How what’s your potential reach that you see here on my screen, 230 million people in the us over the age of 18 that we can target.

Now, that’s not what we want for this campaign. So what we’re going to do here is we’ll change that to just do do Oregon You’re not from Oregon. You’ll call it Oregon. so now we’re down to 3 million people and I don’t want to target 18 year olds for this campaign. I want to target people who are, say 27 and older because in a school, by the way, we’re setting up an alumni ad.

I don’t think I made a 27 year old and what’s. Go up to 59 years of age. So that’s my target. And now we’re down to 1.8 million people, gender I’m going to keep it all genders, detailed targeting. So this right here is where you can get super granular. what you can do here in your own time is just click this browse button and then look through the crazy targeting options that Facebook has here.

Education level, financial level, life events. Like it knows if you have. if, if someone’s birthday’s coming up, if someone’s anniversary’s coming up if someone just got married, all that information is in here. What we want to do is just type in, University of Oregon. And if you look here, the first three results are exactly the same university of Oregon, university of Oregon, university of Oregon.

What, what separates them is if you look right here on the right hand side, there’s interests, employers and schools, you have to select schools because that’s where, when you target people who actually went to that school employers are people who work at that school interests is people like me, who like the ducks.

Todd: [00:59:45]
Yeah. Yeah, that threw me off. when I was building out ads, as at the beginning is people would tell me to use interests as part of the ad campaign. And so I could see if there’s a, almost a four-and-a-half time, multiple on that. How, how I could waste so much time and energy and money focused on the wrong people.

Vlad: [01:00:05]
Yeah, because if I, if, if you select this by accident, the university of Oregon and the interest, then you’ll target someone like me. Who’s a huge duck fan. But when I see the ad, it says, are you a university of Oregon alumni? And I’m not, I’m going to skip the ad. So you just wasted money on me. It was a cool ad, but I’m not going to opt in because I don’t think it speaks to me.

So, the size here is 415,000 people, right. That went to U of vote. But when we click on that, it drops down SU. and we have to uncheck this or here at detailed targeting expansion, it’s down to 49,000 people. The reason it went down from 419,000 to 49,000, it’s because we’re targeting people who are in Oregon between the ages of 27 59.

So now one quick note on that if you’re targeting audiences that are less than 10,000 people. It will be difficult to run ads. If it’s cold campaigns, like people who have never seen your ads, if it’s a retargeting campaign, different story, but for cool ads, 10,000 or more, okay. This is another big mistake people make.

And that has to do with placements. Facebook by default wants you to show you the ad everywhere. and that’s not what you want when you’re starting off. You want to select manual placements, even though it says recommended right there. Basically what this is, is, you know how sometimes you’re on Facebook and you’re in, you’re reading an article and they have the little ads that are in there.

So those ads, the in article ads, you don’t see the full ad. You just usually see the picture, maybe a headline. So you miss out on a lot of the, you don’t get to see the full, ad. What I like to do is I just turn all of these off with my cold ads, all of these options. And the only one I keep on is.

Facebook feed and Instagram feed. And when I’m running a retargeting ad, then I can activate some of these other ones. But for starters, Facebook feed, and guess what? We’re not just running a Facebook ad anymore. We’re also running an Instagram ad. Okay. So we got that. for now you can skip this part and then click next.

Now we get to the juicy part of creating the ad. So we got the campaign outset, and now we’re doing the ad here. Facebook will want you to identify the page. I would say Oregon insurance, if I don’t have an Instagram account created for this particular purpose, I’m just going to select use page selected.

So I don’t need to have an Instagram account. So now we have that, that Facebook says, how do you want to create an ad? Do you want to create an ad, use an existing post from your page or use their creative hub? Mock-up I’m going to say, create an ad from scratch. It’ll ask if you want, an image video ad, you want a carousel, where has two or more scrollable images, or do you want a collection for this purpose?

I’m just going to say single image ad. And then I scroll down and then Facebook says, all right, let’s start uploading pictures here. Or my media, I’m going to select add video or ad image in this case, I’m going to do image. and since I already have some of the pictures in here, I’ll just use them. If you don’t, you just upload new ones.

Or you can always, uh, Facebook gives you the option to, use stock images and they’re free. Well, not free. They charge you through the ad, but you don’t pay for them separately. So if you don’t have pictures, that’s where you can get them. Okay. So what we have so far is the picture, right? if I’m like, ah, that’s not the picture I wanted to pick, then I’ll just select.

The other one, go back and change it. And this is something I want to point out, notice how this is a square, but then my picture is horizontal. What I’m going to do, select the square one by one option. Now I’m zoomed in on this and it makes a bigger ad and I click done. Okay. We got our picture down. Now we have to pick the text that goes above the picture. so what I’ll do here is I’ll just type in, are you. A

Todd: [01:04:02]
And you’re using basically the same context when you were looking at doing that Oklahoma university.

Vlad: [01:04:09]
100%.

Todd: [01:04:11]
And all that

Vlad: [01:04:12]
Yep. So I’m going to use, I’m gonna use this exact post, but for the sake of time, I’m not going to type it all out. but that’s where that sex would go. And then I would put a headline. The headline goes right here at the bottom and then description that goes underneath the headline. So pretty straightforward and right here where it says website, we would give it the website URL.

Where do you want to send your traffic to. Yep. Exactly right. You would put that website here and then if you want to change the call to action button, which I highly recommend that you do, instead of learn more, tell them exactly what they’re going to do. They need to get a quote. So it gives you an option.

Apply. Now book. Now, contact us donate. Now in this case, get quote. So if you S if you look here, you can see the preview of this ad right here. That’s the Facebook feed, and this is the Instagram feed. So you know exactly what it looks like. okay. So we have all that. And then, it’s telling us that we don’t have the pixel installed.

This is a demo account. So it’ll remind you of that before you could publish, once you click publish. You’re done with the setup, but Facebook needs to review the campaign before they approve it. That could take anywhere between a couple of minutes to I’ll usually a full day. and if it’s a newer ad accounts, they may take a bit longer in this case.

I know for certain that they’re going to deny this ad because the test URL, here’s a pro tip and I’m not going to ensue spend too much time on this, but I’ll just say out loud. once I click publish, the ad will, will come up over here. What I can do is then is select the ad click duplicates, and then just change the picture and then click a duplicate one more time and change third ad.

So I’ll have precisely, so we’re using the same campaign. We don’t change anything there. Same outset. We’re only changing the ad and we have three different ads. And now I have found Todd this to be something that. I was reluctant and trying, and I’ve heard people, using that strategy, but I never did it. And so a while back I was a very, let me experiments.

And my cost per per impression went down like crazy where it was costing me. Like I was running video ads. It was costing me about 30, 40 cents to run a video ad. And it went down to like 7 cents to run a video ad, to have someone watch 15 seconds of it. So that’s by just giving Facebook options.

Facebook likes to have a variety of ads to, to run, or to pick from. So it was that helpful.

Todd: [01:06:53]
Absolutely. and you know, like you said, we’re going to have some Q and a, later on, you know, I think, I think what really. That at least gets people started. Right. So if you’re intimidated by Facebook advertising, if you’re intimidated on what tactic you should use, I think this was a perfect podcast for somebody to listen to her YouTube video and follow through and, and, definitely we’re here to help if they need any help.

So I really appreciate, you know, you’re walking through the Facebook advertising. but I know that’s not actually what you do, right? So people shouldn’t use you as just the Facebook resource guy. can you kind of dive into how people can find what you actually do with the insurance?

Vlad: [01:07:36]
Yeah. so yes, and thanks for giving me this opportunity. And I just created a quick slide to make it easier on anyone. So if you’re watching this on YouTube, you can see this. So. My main thing that I do is I work with insurance agents and their staff and teach them how to close sales in the first call.

Even if your price is more expensive. So I created a script, called a six step script to the one call close. So very simple to follow, and I recorded a free webinar, just like this Todd, where I break down the script. It’s not a sales page. It’s, there’s no theory. It’s kind of like this, podcast where it was very practical where we showed real.

Substantive things that people can just apply. This webinar is exactly the same way where I’ll show you the script and how it works. People are always blown away, how much free stuff they get in this webinar. So it’s about 90 minutes long and you get to see the, how the script works from beginning to end.

And to see that webinar just simply visit InsuranceTrainingWebinar.com. And you can link it if you’d like, post this video. And if someone wants to send me an email, bottom right-hand side, you’ll see my email. It that’s the general inbox for the company, but I read every email. It says info@insurancesaleslab.com that’s info@insurancesaleslab.com.

If you liked this podcast and you have followup questions on, any tactical things posted in the think tank group, but if you want me to send you, like that video of Maryland with a Spanish ad, or if you want me to share the landing page that I use, I’d be happy to share those items for free. so you can just import it into your click funnels accounts.

All you gotta do is just send me an email and give me feedback on how you thought this podcast wins. But the main message is that if you want your team members to close more sales and teach them how to sell, then make sure you watch the free training webinar. It’ll be absolutely transformational for your agency.

Todd: [01:09:40]
Beautiful. Well, Hey, thank you, Vlad. Thank you to everybody that’s listening, hope you have an amazing day.

View Details

Watch the video version of this show on YouTube »

On the first episode of the Insurance Agents Think Tank podcast, we’re talking to Jeremy Olson and Kristin Isaacson, who run Role Play at the Olson Agency; the first and only live sales training program for insurance agencies.

This episode is all about making money from online leads, a critical source of income for insurance agents during the pandemic, when we can’t do roadshow events or meet prospective clients in person!

In this value-packed podcast, you’ll learn:

• Jeremy & Kristin’s top tips for increasing sales.
• How they keep their customer retention rate over 90%.
• How to make sure you’re spending your budget for online leads effectively.
• And so much more!

Links & Resources

• EverQuote for Agents

Jeremy Olson & Kristin Isaacson’s Links

• Website: Role Play at the Olson Agency

Episode Transcript

Jeremy: [00:00:00]
On the first part of the call, we all know what’s coming. We all know people are going to say, Oh, I was just looking online. I just thought I’d get an online quote. Can’t you just tell me or send that to me in an email or I got to talk to my spouse or, Oh man. You’re the fifth agent to call me. We all know what’s coming.

It’s being the best at that and making the most of your at-bats, that’s going to really change your close rate and how many you sell from these.

Todd: [00:00:30]
Welcome everybody. I’m really happy here for a dish to kick off our episode number one for the Insurance Agents Think Tank podcast we have two amazing guests for the show today, Jeremy and Kristin, they, Jeremy is one of the largest Allstate agents in the country also has Role Play at the Olson Agency. And then of course, Kristin, who does all the work, right, the right hand, right hand for Jeremy. I’m so I’m so glad for you guys to be on episode number one. And, you know, this episode is really all about the trick to making money off of insurance leads, right? Aggregated online leads, especially with the pandemic. You know, a lot of people were relationship driven.

You should still be relationship driven. Right. but now with the pandemic, we gotta, you can’t really do road show events or, you know, there’s a lot of sources in, in person sources that got cut off. And so we have a lot of people just jumping into internet leads. And so I really wanted to create a podcast about how do you make money off of those?

Right. Cause everybody tries them out. I hear so many times that insurance leads don’t work. Right. I’m sure you guys hear that all the time, but you guys have really found a way to make that successful. And so I’d love to, I mean, Jeremy, I’d love to hear your story about how, how you came to be and how you, how you made them work.

Jeremy: [00:01:53]
Yeah, no. And, first of all, I really appreciate, and am honored to be your first guest. And I really do find it kind of ironic that the topic is internet leads because I, so I’ve been an Allstate agent. This is my 24th year now. And for my first 22 did not buy a lead. I heard all those same stories. You know, these, these types of things they don’t retain well, they just shop price.

They’re closed rates, terrible. They’re just not good. And so, ever bought leads my first 22 years. two years ago, I was given some pretty high goals by, by my company and I knew we had to change things. And so that’s when we developed this whole arm of the business. In fact, we have 11 people now on our outbound team that just work internet leads.

So we did, we went from zero leads to a significant amount of leads, and we’ve learned a lot of things along the way, things not to do things to do. And that’s what, that’s what we’ll share with you today. Perfect. Yeah.

Todd: [00:02:51]
I think, I think what people want to know most is what not to do. Right. It’s how do I, how do I save myself from making these mistakes?

I’m not paying for these mistakes. What’s the quickest way to that, you know, the, the end goal of making money off of leads. So I actually want to ask you first, you know, which, how do you know which lead provider to find, because there’s so many different lead providers, where do you even start? What would you say about that?

Jeremy: [00:03:19]
Yeah, I w I would say, first of all, that’s changing every day. and you know, that would be the first thing first tip that I would give anybody getting into the lead game. Is, you’ve gotta be consistent. This isn’t something that, you know, I hear a lot of agency owners say, Oh, there was a special came out with this vendor.

I’ll buy a couple hundred dollars worth and we’ll just try it. And from our experience that isn’t the best tactic. If you’re going to be into leads and working them. You’ve got to commit to making that a part of your business. So we, you know, now two years later we have probably three people on the backend that are constantly tweaking our vendors.

The type of lead the filters. We’re looking at our close rate, our cost per sale, where it’s a, it is a full-time job. So that would be the first thing is you’ve gotta be consistent and make this a regular part of your business. What would you say in terms of. Picking vendors. What are some of the things that we’ve done?

Kristin: [00:04:13]
Well, I mean, what noticed is that you’ve got to like your vendors. And so there are people that represent, you know, certain lead companies and it’s just like any other business relationship that you have. You’ve got to like them, you’ve got to feel like they’re in your corner because you call them a lot.

And so, because you’re going to be tweaking filters. Sometimes you hear things from the team like where there’s some trends that you see that, you know, the prospects are saying things that we didn’t know that they were being led down. That road. So we just want to make sure that you have open communication and really look at that account manager as someone that’s truly helping you if they aren’t.

I would say either ask for someone else to be your rep or, you know, maybe it’s not the right company for you, but each company has like a different way of doing business. And so I think it’s really important to, to love, love doing business with them. And then, beyond that, I think that just, if the leads, like if the team loves the leads and if they believe they love the leads and the leads are good, the leads are going to be good.

If the team thinks the leads are bad, the leads are going to be bad. so it is funny to hear like what people say, and we, we. Bought a lot of leads. There was one time where we really truly thought the leads probably weren’t the best leads for us. Other than that, all leads have really been good. It’s just how the team views them.

Jeremy: [00:05:30]
Well, it seems like that is a common go-to. If, if somebody is having a poor month, I’ll always go right to that vendor. And I, I think we would probably disagree with that. We, you currently use two or three different vendors, and there’s some people that love vendor, a, some people that think they’re the worst ever.

So it’s all in their perception and their mindset of how they think about leads. to me, the vendors don’t make or break your success. There’s certainly a part of it, but it’s more your mindset going into working the leads and then being prepared. To work them once you are talking to a live person.

Todd: [00:06:06]
Absolutely. I’ve found, you know, some, some of the advice that I like to give out is if you try it now, let’s say your budget’s a thousand bucks. I tell agents if you’re going to try internet leads and maybe you dabbled in it in the past, you shouldn’t spend a thousand dollars at one company when you’re trying it out.

Because in the, in the backend, what these internet lead aggregators are doing, they even buy and sell leads between one another. you know, if they don’t, if they don’t have somebody to buy the lead instantly, they’ll sell it off to a, another lead aggregator. So what that means is, is you want to, like you said, track your numbers.

You want to know your cost per sale. You want to know your contact rate, your lead, the quote rates, you know, so you can really engage in, in your numbers and find out, all right, if I’m trying three internet lead companies in my area, you know, I’m going to spend $300 a piece, not a thousand dollars on one because.

Again, you want to learn about the relationship that you brought up Kristin and knowing are they easy to work with? Are they good to work with? And then as you start to learn about them, you can really dial and fine tune your, your filters and the type of leads that you’re buying and really dive into it.

So that’s that, I guess that would be my first tip too, is, is don’t. Don’t just spend it all in one place. Grab top three, like I love ever quote unquote wizard, you know, grab those top three lead providers that are out there and then. You know, dive into it. So what, what happens? can you talk us through the workflow that you guys have when an internet lead comes in?

Can you kind of go through how do you work it?

Jeremy: [00:07:45]
Yeah. You want to take that one?

Kristin: [00:07:46]
Sure. Well, I mean, the lead comes in, so I mean, we’re, they’re, real-time leads. So the first thing with leads is that you’ve got to really like as fast as you can get to them the better, because they’re not only going to just.

You so say that an Evercoat lead comes in, there’s probably five other people or five other companies that are going to be contacting that. So, the speed to contact is the most important thing. Everybody wants to talk to them first. but so if the call comes in and it gets answered great, then we have a sales process that we use.

If it doesn’t get answered, then within five minutes, the system will call them back. And then, after 60 minutes it will dial again. So the first day we have three connections that we try to make if we don’t get ahold of the lead the first time. And then after that, it goes into a dialer campaign. So for five days it will be every five hours.

The lead will be contacted. And so that’s really like the cadence that we use or the workflow that we use, when we start with elites. Awesome.

Jeremy: [00:08:51]
A lot of contact.

Todd: [00:08:54]
Absolutely. so like when an internet lead comes into our system, we like instantly fire off a text message trying to just get them engaged with us, you know, really easy scripting something to the effect of, Hey, I’m working on your quote, how would you prefer to receive this by text or email?

Right. We’re just trying to get them instantly engaged, knowing that we’re working for them. What about scripting on your end? Let’s say, you know, you immediately make that phone call. Can you kind of walk us through your, you know, how do you get their engagement? Because correct me if I’m wrong, you guys were saying that that’s, that’s the most important part that first, I think you said first 90 seconds earlier.
can you kind of walk me through that first 90 seconds? Look like.

Jeremy: [00:09:37]
Yeah, no. And to me that is, you know, really the biggest thing between somebody being successful at leads and somebody not, you, you’ve got to start with having a company like MVP. That’s just the best at what they do. And, you know, having the data under control, that’s a given you’re going to get into the internet lead and not do that.

I would say don’t even try it. You’ve got to start there for sure. But after that, it’s really working on what to say to these prospects. and really being the best at it. I see a lot of agency owners that get into leads. They just say, here you go, try to call some leads. And they don’t really provide that training and that support.

And I was just, I was telling you earlier, we were looking at our numbers for last year, this morning, and our close rate on inner. Yeah. The leads that we spoke to with is 16%, which is probably three times higher. I know, to be willing to kind of think in your head. but it’s, that’s the reality in our agency because we spend so much time.

On the first part of the call, we all know what’s coming. We all know people are going to say, Oh, I was just looking online. I just thought I’d get an online quote. Can’t you just tell me or I’ll send that to me in an email or I got to talk to my spouse or, Oh man. You’re the fifth agent to call me. We all know what’s coming.

It’s being the best at that and making the most of your at-bats, that’s going to really change your close rate. And how many, how many of you sell from these? Yeah,

Kristin: [00:11:00]
I would, I don’t even know what the percentages of people that, that initial reaction is. I would at least say at least half is going to be some sort of objection.

I already talked to somebody I’m not interested. You’re the fifth person. And so we really, really work on keeping the conversation very open at the front end. So asking open-ended questions, keeping them on. I think it’s really hard because you’ve got to change your mindset around, bothering people. I hear that a lot at first, the people who aren’t good at keeping them on in the first 90 seconds, well, they sounded really rushed.

I didn’t want to bother them, but even if they say I don’t have time, then your responses. Oh, absolutely. No problem really quick. Let me just see if I can confirm a few details so that when I do call you back, I can make sure that, you know, you’re the right fit and I don’t waste any of your time. And so then you’re straight into asking them a few details.

They might end up having time. You don’t, you don’t know, but we practice that kind of stuff all the time. We even practice just active listening. So we’ll, re-enact calls where we, we have our team, like literally just practice, active listening because at the front end of the call, they’re not just saying I’m not interested.

They’re saying other things and all we’re hearing. Is, I’m not interested and you’re thinking, Oh great. Here’s another one. That’s not going to work out. So asking open-ended questions at the beginning of the call, starting out with confirming details, like right away. So if I called you or, you know, if I called you, I would say, you know, Hey Todd, it looks like you’re researching your insurance online.

What has you looking for insurance today? And you might say, Oh yeah, no, I just called, you know, I’ve been called by five other people. And then I might say something like, you know, I’ll absolutely man. That’s, that’s no fun having to talk to five people. You’ve been talking to you and just open up. Like, if you keep on asking the questions and you’re super friendly, that first 90 seconds is going to turn into, you know, there’s going to turn into five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes.

And you’re actually into having a good conversation about their insurance.

Todd: [00:12:58]
I like that. Just keeping them engaged instead of just shutting it off. Is there some

Jeremy: [00:13:04]
pieces here, practice that stuff every day. So we have, we have a team meeting every Tuesday morning. We call it the one that got away where they’re literally talking about difficult situations on leads that they’ve been coming up against.

And as a team, we talk about how we might work our way through that. So a Thursday, we do an evening meeting where we’re going through their stats or data for them for the week individually in a group setting of how did they. You know, their tasks or follow up their notes. How did they do on that? it’s this is an everyday thing where you’ve got to stay in front of your team and really coach them to success.

It’s not something you can just turn over to them and say, Hey, we have this awesome lead manager. Now, you guys don’t need to do anything. There’s also the human element to it, which is the difference between that three to 5% and 16.

Todd: [00:13:56]
So you’re, can you give me an example of, let’s say your best opening script on internet leads?

Was that it was that, is there any other things that you can give to, the listeners?

Kristin: [00:14:08]
Yeah, I mean, we, well, we have so many scripts, but the opening script typically with, let’s just say like some accompany, like Evercoat quote, where they filled out a form. Usually we will, we open up the conversation by not saying the word quote.
it looks like you were, you know, looking for a quote on your insurance, anything that sets us apart, so, and changes their mindset about what they’re actually doing. So the reason why we say it looks like you were researching your insurance and you filled out, you know, you filled out a form online.

That’s awesome. It looks like you’d be a great fit for our company. So we’re giving them something positive. We’re, we’re assuming that they’re researching their inserts and that they’re going to have a conversation about their insurance. And we’re kind of seeing how they feel about that. And then the second part is you start immediately confirming details.

It looks like you have a 2017 Honda accord. Yes. You know? Awesome. I just need to confirm a few more details and then we’ll, we’ll talk a little bit more about what that looks like with our company. And so you’re just straight into the quote, but you’ve got to ask those open-ended questions upfront, but really it is as simple as it looks like you’re researching your insurance.

And you filled out a form online. You did a great job of that. So we’re giving them something really positive and it looks like you’d be a great fit for our company. and you’re driving a 2017 Honda accord, and then we have some other confirming details that we’ll ask, like, you know, really quick. I’ll just confirm a few details.

Do you have any accidents or tickets on your records within the last five years? We say five years, because then that covers the three years. And, and then we might ask, you know, do they own or rent their home? Is there anybody else listed on the policy? I have this big thing about saying, I really have a thing about not saying, are you single, married or divorced?

I think that can cause somebody to be really offensive. or, you know, like I know if someone said that to me, I would just feel like, Oh, it’s none of your business. That’s kind of personal the way you’re asking that. And so we really work on just positioning things in a really positive way upfront.

There’s 1,000,006 thing. It’s like just within that first 90 seconds that you can work on. It’s super fun.

Todd: [00:16:14]
Well, that’s, I mean, that’s what this is. It’s in sales. It’s always practicing your craft, right. It’s always active listening. And even a lot of us, especially salespeople who think they know it. All right.
we, we’ve got a practice on active listening and knowing, That there’s other ways to do things, especially like you mentioned not asking about if they’re married or not. I mean, I think that’s something that I need to actually implement in our office and just saying, is there anyone else listed?

Cause I agree. You never know if you’re going to offend or, you know, if there’s an, if you cause any kind of feelings that will get in the way, right. Get in the way of what you’re trying to accomplish, which is building a relationship. So I think it’s

Kristin: [00:16:58]
awesome. And the other thing too, super duper important is the other than price conversation that most people will just leave that and they’ll get straight into the quote, but you want it, you really do want to flesh out what other than price is important to them.
Jeremy has a great way of doing that. Always love it when he just says, if you were to just like, you know, like, we’re just gonna assume that price is super important to you. So we’re going to put that kind of on a shelf for right now. And let’s assume that all insurance was free. what would you want, what price would you want?

And so you kind of get them to visualize that, and we’ll give you like a number at the end if we need to go back and, you know, take a look at tweaking, some things, you know, but keeping coverage is the most important thing. we can do that, but let’s just assume that all insurance was free right now so that we can get you the right coverage for you and your family.

Jeremy: [00:17:44]
Well, I, I think, you know, you said the word relationship a few minutes ago. I think that’s really. The key driver in our agency that, that has made us be successful with internet leads is we’ve all heard that stereotype of what internet leads are they just by the state minimum, they just find the cheapest covered.

We, we talk people into great coverage every day. My people are putting in the chat. Just sold somebody that had 25,000, they now have an umbrella policy because we are not going into these converse bins, in that mindset that this is an internet lead and an internet lead is a person. They’re all people that need to have the right insurance.

And that’s what I think really differentiates us is that we’re looking at them as people, not as a lead.

Todd: [00:18:32]
Let’s talk about what type of employee you need to be working internet leads. would you say makes, I mean, what type of employee what’s the right person to work? Internet leads?

Jeremy: [00:18:42]
Yeah, no, that’s a great question. So when we decided to get into leads a couple of years ago, one of the ideas we had and I think it was actually, Kristin’s idea was to separate our sales team.

To us. It’s really a different person, a different mindset, working leads versus working current customers. So we have half of our team working, the everyday inbound service transactions, cross selling our customers. We have the other half of the sales team, just working internet leads every single day, all day long, they’re working leads.
for me, the number that I want to be able to provide, provide for each team member is between 10 and 15 new leads every single day. But, how we arrived at who was going to be on the team. We just interviewed them. We just told them, Hey, we’re going to be separating the team. here’s what person a would do.

Here’s what person B would do. And, people just kind of fell into the right spots. You know, it’s just their personality. They’re totally different jobs. If you’re working internet leads, you’ve got to be somebody that loves. Fast paced. You gotta be dialing a lot of times a day. So number one, fast paced.

You gotta be okay with rejection. A lot of my people that work my book, they wouldn’t love to be hung up on or told no 15 times a day. So they wouldn’t want to be on that team. Now, when we interview employees to hire them for our sales team, we mentioned both roles and we just kind of ask them, which one do you think would be a better fit for your personality?

But they’re just very different personalities.

Kristin: [00:20:17]
Yeah, I think that they’re, and they’re kind of like, if you see that two teams, it’s really fun to see the personality of the teams, but the outbound team and then ones that are doing the leads. You got to have a sense of humor. you’ve got to really, you know, be someone that is self-driven and, and we’ll do the consistent dialing and, and you’ve got to have a sense of humor.

Jeremy: [00:20:38]
Yeah. You’ve got to, you’ve got to know that, burnout can be a real thing that are going to be some days you just get in there and you D you don’t feel like making 200 calls that day. Cause he did it yesterday and you didn’t get any, you just have to know. That’s a part of the job and we spend a ton of time working on that mental side.

That’d be another, another tip for owners. you know, what these guys do on our outbound team is very hard work and they love it, but it’s very hard work calling this many people and talking to this many people who are shopping multiple carriers and multiple agencies. So you’ve got to spend a lot of time focusing on their mental.

I have a saying happy people sell more. So we want to make our people happy as, as often as we can. So we do little things like. We break up their days of the week. One day there’ll be working traditional internet leads the next day they might there’ll be working live transfers. We have them rotate every single day.

So they’re in a different role. They’re still working leads, but the types of leads is different just for that mental break. One day they’re dialing one day they’re they’re fielding phone calls, but both days are working leads. So,

Todd: [00:21:50]
what about the smaller agents who maybe just have themselves and maybe one other producer in the office?

Is there, is there any advice you would give to that person? you know, who has to wear the, all the hats, any kind of advice you’d, you’d give on that.

Kristin: [00:22:05]
I think you still have to hire the right person. So someone that’s got the, the high energy, but someone who’s able to multitask, I would make, I would make sure that the right they’re the right fit and probably blocking time too.

So knowing when the best time of the day is to actually call those leads, know when the leads are coming in, what type of leads you have, is super important. I was going to say too, just a sidebar, a tip on for the team members with the types of leads, every company, it’s a different type of lead. You should know how many questions they filled out on the form.

You know, you should really know what that user experience is on the other side, so that you can speak to that lead in a really educated way where you know what they’ve been through. but we’re the agent, you know, we’ve, I’ve talked to agents and we used to have our team, where we didn’t buy like real time leads, but we did have like real quotes in the system.

And we had some old leads that we bought. So if they did have time at the end of the day, because every team member was doing service and sales, there was more time. They would at the end of the day, start going in the system and just calling some of those requotes and some of the old leads. But the, the team member that’s, you know, doing it all, they just have to sign on to, yes, I’m committed to doing this role and you may have to motivate them differently, but communication between you and your team member is just key to everything.

Todd: [00:23:23]
Absolutely.

Jeremy: [00:23:24]
Yeah. Yeah. One thing I, I don’t want to forget to touch on is the importance of activity. So, you know, a lot of agencies will measure number of dials. We certainly do track that as well. But one thing that we’ve found is super important, especially for these people working internet leads is how much they’re on the phone.

So we look at their talk time over anything else. And the minimum to be on my team is three hours per day. right now we’re having a promo because we always are trying to incentivize these guys to be on the phone as much as I can. And every single day, this month we’ve had multiple people over five hours.

We’ve had a couple of day over six hours and people look at us like. Yeah, that’s impossible, but it actually is possible. If you’re focusing on that first 90 seconds of the call and extending the conversation a lot with them, it is there’s very few and far between days that somebody would be under three hours on my team.

Todd: [00:24:23]
Wow. That’s a lot of talk time.

Jeremy: [00:24:25]
It’s a lot of talk time and you figure how many people are not answering those dials. Cause their leads that aren’t there. How many, you know, how many hang ups are you going to get quite a few. So that just shows you by extending the conversation, what, what you can get out of those conversations.

It’s, it’s kind of an art. We listened to these guys talk on the phone every day and they just truly have fun with it. Turning that person. out of being that internet lead that just wanted the three second phone call with a number, that’s all, they wanted just a number. They, they make a game out of it.

How can I turn this person into really getting the importance of having an insurance agency relationship of having better coverage? That’s what drives my sales people. And that’s, I think that goes back to the hiring. That’s what we hire for people that have a, a passion. Before that, and yes. you know, the first to admit an internet lead probably is a little bit different than a cross sell.

They are initially, but how do we turn them into the other one? That’s our whole goal in all of this is turning a person away from being a lead, just a traditional internet lead. In fact, we have, Oh, did you have a question, Todd? Yeah.

Todd: [00:25:41]
So, one of the process that I get asked about a lot. Is what do you do with all the leads that don’t answer the phone?

Because, I mean, just in our own experience, I would say only maybe 10% for lucky answer the phone. so what do you do if they don’t answer the phone? I know you said five minutes later, you make another phone call and then I think you said 60 minutes later, but you know what, if you don’t get them on the phone, the first quoting them.

Kristin: [00:26:06]
No, we don’t. And we don’t have the ability to text just with our company. we’re not texting out, to customers, so they just, they get an acute where they’re called every five hours for the first up to five days until they get contacted. And then we’re watching, like in the system, you can actually see how many have been contacted in the first day.

How many have been contacted within that first five days? It goes, you know, all the way up to the first six months. So costs they’re in the system and then we’re scrubbing them to make sure that they’re still compliant and all of those things, you know, along the way, but, it’s just, people are continuing to call them until they pick up.

Todd: [00:26:43]
Yeah. So there’s, I mean, just some tips. I’ve seen some success with agents on internet leads, who, and, and this might not be for, you know, specifically Allstate cause texting issues, but I’ve seen some agents have a lot of success around doing home home leads. and it doing teasers right. Using, if you don’t get them on the phone within the first 24 hours, then you know, there’s a good chance.

A couple of already people already talked to them. Right. And they’ve already gotten a few quotes. So how do you stand out ahead of that person that they’ve already sent them a quote. So would you say in your business, you have so many marketers generating those quotes via phone. But you don’t feel like taking the time to sending them somewhat of a teaser quote that kind of dilutes your relationship.

It almost sounds like that you’re trying to build with them on the phone. Have you tried it for us?

Jeremy: [00:27:38]
We don’t do that because we want to be talking, you know, if we’re talking four or five, six hours a day, we’re busy doing that. I would rather put my people in a position where they’re always talking to people rather than just.

Blanket mailing people. Now that’s a whole separate activity. You own a mailing company. We love mailers. That’s a whole separate thing, but my sales people, I want to be on the phone, talking to people all day long.

Kristin: [00:28:02]
And then there is, you know, there’s yeah. I was just going to say there’s a piece in it where I have heard a different school of thought where there’s, you know, companies or agencies out there where they require their team to talk less on the phone.

Like they want. the quote to be done within a certain, let’s say like 15 minutes, which would be a really short call for us. If you’re going to get through the whole quote, we celebrate something we call first call closes. And so we have this competition going on all month long, where we’re looking for, you know, as many first call closes as possible.

And then the person, you know, wins an award at the end of the month. So that’s someone that’s actually going to keep them on the phone, talk about all their insurance review, what their current coverage is not quote apples to apples. That’s kind of, I think what sets us apart is the fact that we don’t do that and we kind of fight for that.

And, a lot of times I think our talk paths qualify the, prospect, whether they’re a good fit for agency or not. because if they’re really resistant and they start to get, you know, really up in arms about having a conversation about their liability or having a conversation about the coverage that they picked, you, you can just tell whether they’re the right fit or not.

And so sometimes, you know, we do, we’ll shorten up the conversation, still send them a quote, but probably in some cases they’re not the best prospect. And I always say, you know, if you’re talking to someone who’s really combative, if they’re, you know, there’s a lot of different variables, but. A lot of times, their interaction with you initially is going to be their interaction with you as, you know, as a customer and as you continue, and that can take up way more time than quoting the right person for your agency.

Todd: [00:29:45]
Absolutely. So w what would you say, Oh, keep going. You had, you had some more. No, no,

Jeremy: [00:29:51]
I was just going to mention one thing too, before I forget, you know, we S we started this call by talking about the stereotypes of, of leads that they don’t retain. Well, they buy bad coverage and, I, I somewhat agree with some of that, but we also have a lot of processes in place.

After the fact that I think are super important. So we’ve been able to maintain a 90% and above retention on, on my business, despite doing a lot of internet sales over the past two years, we’re over 90. And a lot of that is because, I implemented, we have what we call a cleanup artist on our team.

That’s her title, just having fun with it, but it truly, it, her full-time job I lean is to call all of the business at the end of the month. That, we sold as a result of an internet lead and her whole goal is to really clean it up, get them out of that mindset. Take a second pass at things. So she’ll say things like Todd, you know, I know you purchase this by your initial way of getting into contact with us was through an internet lead.

You went online and said, Hey, I want the best rate. we wanted to talk to you a little bit about today and I’m sure Jeff already did this, but just the importance of having that local relationship, that agency relationship. And then she’ll take a second pass at their coverages to try to try to change things and just clean them up a little bit more.

I think that is super important if you’re really looking to keep this business rather than just burn it, you know, churn through it.

Todd: [00:31:20]
Oh, absolutely. I’ve even heard tricks of people. I think this is kind of funny. but I sent out postcards a while back. there was a, a big news story talking about identity fraud.

And so we send out once a year, we send out all of our customers, a postcard that shows them how to put themselves on the do not call list. And you can imagine how that helps my business, sending all of those people, postcards. And we’ve had actually a lot of people say, thank you for sending that to us.

We didn’t realize our number wasn’t on there. And, you know, that’s a good way to protect your business at the same time from marketers or, you know, people that are trying to solicit my customers at the same time, but so correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel like the best way to make money off internet leads is first, you got to know your data.

You got to track it. You got to have the right people in place using really good open-ended scripting, getting people engaged to talk, right? You want to relearn, you want to be different. And how you’re different is through your engagement and what you’re saying to people. I almost feel like I always use the term assembly line, because you have your marketer, you have your cadence that you, you call on, you have your open-ended scripting, and then you have a clean-up artist once you close it, or you’re calling them.

Consistently, which is I think the key, right? if, if you’re not talking to somebody you’re not closing something. So we, we, we know the process. What would you say the failures you’ve made on internet leads have been like, can you take us through some of the things that you think you’ve you quickly learned?

Like, Oh, that was a mistake. I shouldn’t do that again. Anything that comes to mind? I

Kristin: [00:33:01]
think that, You know, we want, you always want to monetize the leads and make sure that like his spend on the leads is monetizing in the business. there was a time where we had just some leads that, you know, our team kept on saying, you know, these prospects are saying this and it was when we first got the lead game.

And, we just, we were just like, Oh, they’re just complaining. And we just kept on telling them that they were, we just kind of didn’t address it. I think fast enough. And it ended up that our sales went down that month and it was due to, those were actually just not the right leads for our business. just the way that they came in and what was being said on the other end, they were just, they just weren’t the right leads.

And so we ended up getting rid of them, but I think we took maybe a little bit too long. So it, did you have a S you know, a little bit of decrease in sales for, a month or two, you know, as we kind of got those out of the system, And then, so I would say listen to your people, but listen to your people.
not in a way where they’re just complaining, like if they’re giving constructive feedback and it’s like, everybody is saying the same thing, there’s probably something to it. You’re always going to have, I mean, if you have multiple team members, you’re usually going to have someone who’s Debbie downer about, everything, or it gets, you know, frustrated if they’re not selling.

And so they’re going to complain. But it’s always the lead. I would throw that one out because that one doesn’t, you know, that one doesn’t count, but if it’s constructive feedback, listen to your people. And I think the other thing is, is ramp up. it’s really important when you have new team members that they have to like start building their pipeline and ramping up.

And so helping them really know how to manage their tasks and their notes and know what that means. That is their lifeline. So helping them really understand how to manage their pipeline and manage them, managing their pipeline. I think at first we took a lot of that stuff for granted and we started noticing that things weren’t status.

Right. And that the system is only as good as the data you put in it. And so we started getting pretty strict, about, well, very strict about how they it’s a third grader could do it. You, then you Mark it as what kind of lead it is. And then you put, you know, you talk to the person, you put notes in the system and you schedule the followup task.

Right. And so it’s a very simple thing, but a lot of salespeople don’t like to do it consistently every single time because they think they need to make another phone call really fast. But we got to the point where if people don’t do that, and if we see a trend of them just being careless with the data they’re putting in the system, then we’ll, we’ll actually take them away from that.

We actually have old leads that they can call if they don’t want to manage the good leads that we’re giving them and respect that. So I think that’s super duper important.

Jeremy: [00:35:47]
Yeah, no. And for me as the owner, I think one of the mistakes I I’ve made and that just kind of goes with my personality. I’m somebody that if there’s something broken, just go fix it.

And so I would just buy unlimited leads if I was spending. $20,000 a month. And, I wanted more sales, I thought, Oh, just go to 50. And that automatically, you know, the close rate would stay the same and it doesn’t always work that way. You’ve got to figure out the balance. I would rather close 16% of a thousand leads than 5% of 10,000 leads.
because it would be more, it’s more cost-effective for me as the agency owner. There’s, there’s just that balance between knowing what number you’ve got to produce and being, being efficient with, with everything. So don’t automatically assume just by unlimited leads and that’s on an individual basis to what Kristin is referring to, that we implemented learning and tweaking every day.

But. One thing that we implemented was my sales team now has to earn unlimited leads, unlimited new leads. So like I said earlier, I like people to get between 10 and 15 fresh leads. We call them new leads per day, but if they write less than 35 policies, the month before they don’t get them the next month, because if you can’t sell 35, plus with that many leads, there’s something else that needs to be fixed.

Fixed. So we put them back on older leads and make them work, improve themselves and get back to that 35 before I’ll be spending money on them again.

Todd: [00:37:18]
I can’t thank you enough for bringing that up because you know, as I coach, as you guys coach tons of agents, I think, one of the things, you know, if I’m going to crack a whip on some agents listening to this podcast right now, it’s, you’ve got to know your numbers.

And when I say know your numbers, I’m not saying, you know, every last penny that you’ve spent, but you’ve got to know what your staff are doing. You’ve got to know if they’re converting or not. You got to know what. You know, how many are converting to a quote, how many are converting to a cell? Because you’ve got to identify the problem.

You got to know what the problem is. Are they not gonna listen to their phone calls if they’re not converting well? Right. So there’s a lot of insight as an agency owner. And if you can’t do it yourself, you gotta hire, you know, a manager to manage that process about, are they entering the data in properly?
you know, w as, as my agency has used and built off of internet leads, what we’ve also found. is that a lot of our internet leads convert, not within the first 30 days, but they’re converting 12 to 24 to even 36 months out. A lot of these internet leads correct me if I’m wrong, in your area. But what I’ve seen is that almost even if you use a filter where they say they have no claims, we still get like half of our internet leads that have a claim in the last three years, especially auto claims.

And so if you can’t convert it today, because you’re, you’re too high on a surcharge, something like tracking a claim falling off and stealing that person, midterm is where I would say we close almost 60 to 70% of all of our internet leads. So not within that first 30 days, but as those leads fall off and as you’re accumulating your, your data set, there’s a lot of potential in the future.

Have you guys noticed that?

Jeremy: [00:39:00]
Yeah, no, we, we work on that stuff all day long. We call them triggers. You know, if the, if they don’t close something today, are there any triggers that could help you close it tomorrow? So an example would be somebody has a birth date. You know, they’re going to turn 25, they’re going to 50 in six months.

You weren’t quite competitive enough today to win them over. You put that in your calendar to follow up. When they do turn that age, that’s going to give them a better rate. Or maybe they have only nine months with a prior carrier and your rate isn’t the best until one year or three years, you put that in your system to fall follow up the people that are successful, do that.

Others just say moving onto the next one. And so, yeah, we work on that stuff all day

Kristin: [00:39:43]
long. It is funny because you’ll hear a team, they’ll say, Oh, I closed that one that so-and-so talked to, you know, a few months ago. And they didn’t think it was a good enough lead to follow up on. And I followed up. You know, and closed it.

So it is, you know, a lot of times people will get, cause you can put leads back in the system, if you don’t want to put them in your task list and have them in your pipeline. And, it is funny what people, what people do to themselves. I can’t emphasize enough to just following up in the, in the CRM. Like I think a lot of times I remember back when I was in sales and we had Salesforce, which was our CRM and I just remember.

Not really being trained efficiently on that and thinking, what does that do? What does that do? And, you know, not knowing exactly how to use it because the company that I worked for, they just said, here’s something that you’re going to put all of your customers in. Just make sure that you have all their addresses up to date and you have all their information in there, but there’s so many ways that you can track yourself in your CRM if you really know how to use it.

And so we do spend a lot of time teaching them really. How do you use it? to, I mean, the investment in the CRM is such a huge investment to the company that is our lifeline. It’s like, it is the phone. It is our connection out to, to everyone. So you have to have, a CRM that you rely on, in a really solid way.

And I think that’s why, what you do is so important, Todd is because, Without that, you know, we can’t even be in the

Jeremy: [00:41:13]
lead game. It goes back to, you know, we’ve talked a lot about the importance of listening and the relationship, but you know, you get a customer or a lead that right now he’s single one car you’re not competitive, but because you care about that relationship and being different during the course of your half an hour conversation, you found out that he’s getting married next summer.

So a lot of people would just put that off. They lost it, no deal. They didn’t make a sale versus. You have a potential to car in the summer because they’re going to get married. They’re going to have a better rate. They’ll have additional cars. And I mean, it’s just a win-win. If you put that in your system, it’s a future sale for you versus just letting it go by the wayside cause you couldn’t close it today.

Todd: [00:41:53]
Absolutely. And I think a lot of, especially the captive agents, listening in, might have a little bit of a different mentality. You can tell me if I’m wrong or not, but. A lot of agents feel like, you know, we’re selling our customers that we’re selling policies too. Like we own those customers. You don’t, your carrier owns the customer.

Right. And we’re on a contract service contract getting renewal commissions. And what I always try to preach to agents is you gotta think of your business as a different model. You’re you’re in the business of building relationships with people around you. Like the more, you know, about consumers in your area, or if you do multiple States, wherever, wherever you’re spending marketing dollars, the more that you learn about that consumer and then in consumers and aggregate around you.

Now you have a system as long as you’re using that data properly entering in that information, using those notes, tracking your followup, you’re growing a data set, which you own. That’s your business. And then if anything comes out in the future and you know, a good example of people say, how do you make money on internet leads?

They suck. It’s not just selling them. You know, if you’re buying auto leads, auto insurance, it’s, you’re selling them that home. You’re selling them the umbrella, you got their specialty property or secondary rental. Like as you build that relationship, you start to convert more money, more premium revenue from those consumers as you’re growing your business, which is.

Data, like that’s, that’s what I preach. So I don’t know. I feel like too many agents get caught in the rat race of buying internet leads, calling them three to five times, and then they get lost in some leads list somewhere. And it’s never followed up with properly ever again. I mean, what do you hear from agents?

Jeremy: [00:43:35]
No, they, they do. They just think it’s all about that new lead and there’s so much to be found in our old leads. That’s one of the reasons why we started making people earn new leads is so that. If they don’t, then they’re going to work all that, those old leads that we’ve, you know, for two years now, we’ve bought just, I don’t know how many thousands of leads, but yeah, that was money I spent yesterday, but it can start, it can still pay off today.

Kristin: [00:44:01]
Yeah. That, that is everything. And I always go crazy when agents will say I bought internet. You know, and it’s, and I think that that’s that consistency piece on the, you know, on the front end, it’s the consistency piece on the managing, you know, your notes and all of your tasks and the followup and the system.

And then it’s the, it’s the continued follow up. Like you, you can’t emphasize that enough. There’s statistics out there on how many follow-ups it actually takes to close a sale. And, have you ever seen that Todd? It’s always posted all on her. I don’t have, I I’ll send you the stuff.

Todd: [00:44:32]
We actually run those stats in MVP for all of our users.

And so we found that after, after 12 contact attempts, Represents 60% of all closing rates. So, you know, at least 12 attempts to sell more than half of, of average user sales, then you start getting really crazy numbers, like 30 contacts to do like 20%. So, I mean, when you talk about leaving money on the table, I don’t know anybody who doesn’t want to convert an extra 20% of their sales, even if you have to call 30 times.

Right. So, yeah, we, we definitely track all those statistics. Have you. Have you looked at, geo-targeting at all on your internet leads. Is there a specific way that you use your data to geotarget

Jeremy: [00:45:20]
you’re speaking a different language.

Todd: [00:45:23]
Okay.

Kristin: [00:45:26]
Yeah, I was just going to say, we have a person that actually, what is, is that like a type of car? No, we, so we’re doing the people side and managing the people and, you know, knowing obviously Jeremy is very concerned about the lead spend, but then we also have someone that’s, you know, Just working in the system and it’s really good.

Like, you know, with the data, I always say that like, if someone’s really good, like just working all the data and knowing the backend and the systems and you know, how to, how to actually program the systems, they’re probably their sweet spot. Probably isn’t coaching the people and getting like the ma you know, like getting them to their talk, passing their skills to success.

So we have two different facets where we have somebody doing the operations in the background, and then we’re doing the. Managing the soft skills on the phone calls and the people and making sure that the data that we’re seeing is making sense for, the amount of policies that they’re selling.

Jeremy: [00:46:24]
And I, I think, you know, your typical agency with one, two, three producers, they’re going to have to get into that themselves.
I have the luxury just because of the size of my team. You know, I have Kristin and I manage the, how we talk to people. That’s what we focus on. But then I have two people completely dedicated to leads one on the vendor side. They’re constantly tweaking that. And then I have one person full-time looking at their statuses, their tasks and their notes.

So that’s not going to be the case in every agency, of course, but that’s why, I don’t know some of that, those data questions that you share with us. Well,

Todd: [00:46:58]
and a lot of systems aren’t in place, right. The track that data and make it easy so you can tie it all together. So, I mean, that’s, that’s what I try to preach a lot to my agents is that, you know, especially if you don’t have a budget, like a Jeremy Olson, right.

You’re a new newer agent. Who’s maybe only have 500 bucks that they can spend a month. you know, it’s not only tracking your, your cost per sale or your, your lead to quote ratio. Right? How many of are they sending you? Good leads? And like you said, Kristin learning about, are they actually filling out a form or are they, is that company using teasers?

Like, Oh, they said I would win something on Facebook as you learn about those companies. And you, you know, as an agent, if you’re really competitive in home, You should lead with home leads. If you’re really competitive and auto, you should leave with auto leads. So it’s just, and then if you, what’s really interesting and data on my end that I see every single day is that carriers how they rate per zip code.

Are there’s actually some, I don’t know if there are mistakes. I would say an actuary would laugh me out of the room with their MIT degree. If, you know, if I told them they made a mistake, but I’ve seen zip codes where, especially in Heather, weather related areas, where if a tornado runs through a County in Dallas, they might penalize, you know, state farm might penalize the entire County and give some huge surcharges.

Whereas another carrier, maybe farmers only picks specific zip codes that it ran through. And so if you, if you track those kinds of zip codes, statistics, I can see where we have an unfair advantage based on actuary rate increases. so it’s just, it’s interesting to watch if people are geo-targeting or not, or if they are really doubling down in the, in a radius around their office.

So I guess it just depends on, on your marketplace too. so let’s talk about. role-play with Olson agency. Cause I think like you said, you guys are really good at opening up the scripting, the conversations, training people on how to get engagement in that first 90 seconds. Can you tell us a little bit about what role-play does and how our listeners might benefit from it?

Jeremy: [00:49:13]
Yeah, why don’t I take the, how it was born part, and then you take the product. Cause I’ll talk for two hours. I get so passionate, Kristin. I hired her five, six years ago from a company called Dale Carnegie world renown training company. She’s a certified instructor, just amazing at coaching people. And that’s what I wanted on my team.
just how to talk better to people and pro prospects to convert them at a higher rate than we do without talking to them the right way. So, Kristin, one of the first things she said was Jeremy, we’ve got to implement this thing called role-play and I was 18 years into my career then had never role-played one single time in my life.

My team would never do it. They would all say that was, they would be scared to do it nervous to do it. They just wouldn’t do it. She kept fighting for it. We implemented it. And five years later, I can’t imagine a day. I can’t believe I ever led my team without role-playing. That is the same thing as being on a sports team and only showing up for the game.

You just can’t imagine ever not practicing. And so role-play is just a fancy way. A word for practicing. We do it every single day in my agency. And it was so impactful with them, you know, for my own agency and the results that we decided to create a company to share that with other agents around the country.

Kristin: [00:50:34]
Yeah. And so, the way that it works is we just, we do a live webinar. every Tuesday at 3:00 PM Eastern. And I think the thing that makes it super exciting is that we have sales producers. In fact, we had, somebody from your team on our show early on, where they will come on and they will be willing to be coached to the talk path that we’re talking about.

So this week we’re going to be doing what I call power phrases, which is just those little things. Even like what we were talking about at the beginning of our conversation. That give us lift in our conversation, help build trust and eventually help close sales. And we’ve got so many, any of them phrases to really like stick with that will really help you.

And then we’ve got some that aren’t so great, but we’re going to take that topic and we’ll talk about it probably for about 15 minutes and then we’ll give some scenarios, to these, we call them willing victims. And, we’ll just see what they do and then I’ll coach them to help them get better. So my goal is always to help them have some sort of aha moment where they see that they can do something different that will get a better result.

And as a result of that, everybody watching is identifying with that and they’re going to go and they’re going to try it too. And I think it’s really engaging and it’s fun. Obviously we never had a loss for words, or, you know, saying some sort of weird jokes. So yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy: [00:51:59]
It’s 52 weeks, a year, 30 minute show with a script and a specific talk path that our members vote on each week.

It then goes into the library, which you have access to. So. We use that to onboard our team members every day, we have tons of episodes in there on objections, closing techniques, all this stuff we talked about today, we have it there. So when we hire a new person, they spend a few days just watching the prior episodes and man, they come out like they’ve been doing this for a couple years.

Todd: [00:52:29]
Yeah. Well, it’s nice. When I had my staff member, go through your role-play. What’s what’s really nice about that is he’s actually come to me about scenarios and how he should have done something differently. So not only is it good to listen and learn, but it also keeps them engaged in that process.

Right. And hopefully the agent keeps engaged in that process and is working with the staff. So I’m sure you guys want the agents engaged in that platform as well.

Kristin: [00:52:56]
Oh, definitely. Yeah. And we do have a ton of agents engaged. we actually do a Q and a with agents in their, team managers or sales managers, an hour after the show, every Tuesday, just so that if they have any questions for us on how to keep their team engaged, we’ll be there for them.

So we talked to them for an hour and it’s really just, you know, no, we don’t have any agenda. It’s just, they come to us with questions. So we’re forming a nice little community of people that are just. having a great ongoing conversation on how to manage their team and coach their team. Yeah.

Jeremy: [00:53:27]
And then the last piece, and then we can wrap that up.

But, we also do once a quarter, we do a full four week workshop. We call it how to run your agency. It just really is the journey of, you know, I started scratch 24 years ago and now about 40,000,040 team members and seven locations just. How did we get there? We talk about everything. We love sharing and watching people get be successful.

So we, we, offer that as well, every quarter for four weeks.

Todd: [00:53:58]
Awesome. That is so awesome. I love that. And that’s exactly what we’re, we’re also trying to do with, we’re building a group agents think tank.com where you can listen to these podcasts and we’ll be working with, you know, other amazing guests like yourself and really helping build a community of.

You know, content help, how do we help agents grow? And so I really want to say, thank you, both of you for being on our first podcast. Is there anything like maybe that one secret sauce thing that we’re missing that you would say to make money off of internet leads?

Kristin: [00:54:33]
Yeah, I mean, I would say for me, just as the team manager and team coach, I can’t emphasize enough how to really pay attention to.

How your people are responding to these leads and really take, he has, you know, happy people sell more. I say, take care of the people and the, you know, the items will come. So we’ve got to take care of our team members and stay in communication with them. Like you just said, the coaching it’s ongoing. You just got to constantly be talking to them.

It’s. It’s a hard role. and I don’t think that we as managers can take that lightly because they need, they need the coaching and the constant communication. So that would be my secret sauce.

Jeremy: [00:55:10]
Yeah. Mine would be the first 90 seconds. You, you have to be a good, you know, I still, despite we have a training platform and all that, we still send our.

Our team members to Dale Carnegie, so they can learn how to communicate and be better speakers. We’re always working on just making them better on the phone. So that first 90 seconds is the difference between a 10 policy producer and a hundred policy producer.

Todd: [00:55:37]
Well, and I hope so. I hope all of our listeners understand, especially if you want to compare yourself against somebody like a Jeremy Olson agency, there’s a reason why he’s making money off of internet leads.

Like I hope you heard that. Like, unless you’re just buying leads and calling them three or four times, and then they just die. Like, obviously there’s a method to the madness. There’s training. There’s role-playing there’s followup processes. There’s learning about your data. There’s, there’s so many things that if you want to get into the internet lead game you’ve got to do, or it won’t work.

Agreed. Agreed. Yeah. Well, Hey, thanks so much. what, where, where can they find you guys at?

Jeremy: [00:56:17]
Oh, our website is just a, we made a very simple: www.insuranceroleplay.com.

Todd: [00:56:23]
Awesome. Hey, thanks guys. Appreciate it.