RHS 149 - Chris Greene on Content Marketing as a Competitive Advantage

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Speaker 6 In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home.

Speaker 6 Hello everyone and welcome back to the show.

Speaker 2 Today we have an absolutely tremendous episode for you, a dynamic conversation about marketing, the insurance industry, what it means to have a niche with Chris Green, the flood insurance guru.

Speaker 2 Now, Chris is

Speaker 2 the things that he's done from a content marketing perspective are nothing other than absolutely outstanding. He leverages, HubSpot has fully dived in.

Speaker 2 He leverages Marcus Sheridan's concept of they ask, you answer, and fully dived in.

Speaker 2 And really, that's what I appreciate and respect the most about Chris is that when he makes a decision to take action in his business or in some other aspect of his life, he goes all in.

Speaker 2 He focuses on it. He attacks it and he sees it through.

Speaker 2 There's so many lessons to learn from Chris, not just as a person,

Speaker 2 but in the way he handles himself in our industry.

Speaker 2 And this this is just a tremendous conversation that i think you're really going to enjoy i know i did um make sure you connect with chris on linkedin all the socials all that kind of stuff because if you're watching what he's doing and and and taking notes you're going to get better at marketing your agency it's just absolutely positively the case so uh with that i want to give uh a quick ask to you guys you know I put a lot of episodes out.

Speaker 2 We put an episode out every Thursday. I appreciate you listening.
I love you for listening. And I've said that for years.

Speaker 2 Guys, if you enjoy these shows, you know,

Speaker 2 just share it with somebody, right?

Speaker 2 That's really my ask today.

Speaker 2 Just get, you know, text it to somebody or, or, or, you know, if you want to share it in social, whatever, email an episode to a friend and just say, hey, I think there's something here.

Speaker 2 I think this episode is fun, whether it's this episode or another one, guys. Sharing the show,

Speaker 2 more people find it. More people get into our ecosystem.
I get more inbound suggestions for guests. I get more people kind of sending ideas and tips and thoughts in.
And I listen to all that stuff.

Speaker 2 I read all those DMs. And it helps us get more content, more great guests, more great information in front of you guys.

Speaker 2 So if you're enjoying the show, if you're loving the show, always love a rating and review on iTunes. That helps more people find the show.

Speaker 2 But really, sharing the show is the thing that's most important because when a friend tells another friend that something has value, they often take action on it.

Speaker 2 And if you find value in this show i'd love to share you to share with a friend man i mean that's the whole that's the whole deal so uh with that guys love you for listening to this let's get on to chris green yo what's up man

Speaker 7 can you hear me okay yeah you're good what's going on not much man how are you i am uh i i just want to start by apologizing for

Speaker 6 bailing on you twice two different times i'm glad we finally connected i'd like to dude i know you got so much going on in the world, professionally, personally, right now that

Speaker 6 I know.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I appreciate. I just, I appreciate you being good to me about it.
Cause,

Speaker 7 yeah, I, for everyone listening at home, we've, we've had this scheduled.

Speaker 7 This is the third time now, and twice I had to bail because with everything with SIA and whatnot, you know, just different meetings pop up and we're doing so much to like offload services from Rogue to SIA to kind of free us up to do our thing that sometimes they just just have to be done.

Speaker 7 So either way, I'm glad we're finally getting a chance to chat.

Speaker 7 You know, big news, the biggest news in the insurance industry, you had a suit on the other day. That's like one of the big, big earth-shaking, universe-shaking things.

Speaker 6 It's like I tell my friend Jason Katz, I always expect the unexpected.

Speaker 7 So

Speaker 7 what's going on in your world, man? What's up?

Speaker 6 I'm spending a lot of time on data right now. Yeah.

Speaker 6 Yeah, like trying to change the flood insurance world right now through data.

Speaker 6 You know, it's kind of exciting to this point now where we're getting to a point, kind of like with you, where you can take that money, you can actually invest in the business.

Speaker 6 You can invest in the technology. And so I went and hired a Glovebox's developer.
And we've got about a year long worth of projects.

Speaker 6 We just tapped into FEMA's database yesterday and basically pulled the entire FEMA database in the HubSpot.

Speaker 7 And like, what is...

Speaker 7 When you say working with data, like what's your, what problem are you trying to solve? Like, what are you trying to do?

Speaker 6 The problem I'm trying to solve is that, like I spoke last week at CIPC, I said insurance is not the problem. I said risk is.

Speaker 6 The problem is that we don't know, we don't do a good job of knowing the risk, understanding the risk, and reducing the risk. And we don't show the property owner or the prospect that.

Speaker 6 So we got to find a way to do that.

Speaker 6 So that's exactly what we're doing with all these risk analysis companies, pulling things in and actually showing people the same thing that an underwriter is seeing. But how do we change that data?

Speaker 6 You know, how do we reduce that risk? Now, how do we create long-term rate stability in the market by doing that?

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 7 That's interesting. So how do you do that? Like, what does that look like? Well, I mean, for as much as I like technology and marketing and shit, like data is not my specialty.

Speaker 6 And it's not money. Like I tell people, I'm a visionary.
I'm just not going to very implement it. And that's where the developers really helped me now.

Speaker 6 But now I can give a flood score to every property. with all these different factors.
I can tell you how long it's going to take water to enter your property, where it's going to enter it.

Speaker 6 Hey, how do we change from that water entering the property? You know, what can we do?

Speaker 6 And literally, we can, based on the data, we have all these different videos, these different steps we can walk people through part of the video proposal system.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 7 I,

Speaker 7 so I was talking to,

Speaker 7 geez, I don't know if it was Carruthers or I was talking to somebody and I was talking through, we were talking about HubSpot.

Speaker 7 And obviously we have, we use HubSpot and we have big plans for what we want to do and as we continue to build stuff out. And I think,

Speaker 7 you know, it, I love the system so much. And I don't want to go too nerdy just on HubSpot, but like,

Speaker 7 I think what a lot of people don't realize about that particular tool is with their operations hub that they've added and the wide open

Speaker 7 API portal that they've built, you can essentially take any database or data

Speaker 7 or system that is producing, pushing, pulling data, and now plug it in. And

Speaker 7 man, it is, it opens up the world as to what you can actually build and what it can look like.

Speaker 6 So, yesterday, we finally got version one live, and so we got the latitude and longitude in our API. And our developers, like, look, we got the latitude and longitude.
There's nothing we can't do now.

Speaker 6 Like, Google Maps, everything like pulling pictures into these proposals off of the Google API.

Speaker 6 Like, having the longitude and the latitude, when you're talking about this property stuff, that's the golden nugget right there. Yeah,

Speaker 7 yeah, that's really interesting. So, you know, and

Speaker 7 I guess,

Speaker 7 I guess what I'm interested in is like

Speaker 7 a lot of the pushback that I get, and I'm interested in, and where you get this pushback to is

Speaker 7 people will a lot. What I get is, hey, I think it's cool that you're interested in all this.
into technology, into systems, into pushing forward, into new ways of doing business, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 7 But you can write a lot of insurance just doing it the regular way. Like,

Speaker 7 what is the improvement percentage? What is the upside potential of going down these paths, of leveraging data? Like, I guess, you know,

Speaker 7 what is the opportunity cost versus,

Speaker 7 you know, I could just keep doing it the way I'm doing it and probably grow a business and probably make money.

Speaker 7 You know, why do the extra work? Why figure out these ways to put images in proposals and figure out different, you know, why go through all the effort?

Speaker 7 What does it get you?

Speaker 6 Well, for me, what it gets me is, like I tell people, I said, look, we could charge for this because trust me, we're paying a lot of money for it.

Speaker 6 But think about the value that we can bring to our referral partners. Let's just say a David Carruthers goes in and meets with a middle market account.
He's one of our referral partners.

Speaker 6 Now they've got this full flood risk analysis report that completely helps separate them from everyone else.

Speaker 6 You know, being able to show that to them on their building, the value that it brings to them now, we've got a referral partner for life now. Yeah.

Speaker 6 So that's the value of the technology to us: hey, how can we help our referral partners grow their business? How can we make them look like rock stars?

Speaker 6 Because at the end of the day, like I tell people, so the technology is not about me writing more insurance. It's about us changing insurance.
It's about us changing risk.

Speaker 6 That's the difference between us and most insurance agents. At the end of the day, it's not about us writing a bunch of insurance.
It's about, hey, how do we create a more stable insurance market?

Speaker 6 yeah and

Speaker 7 is that how you're getting a lot of your business is referral partners agents who don't understand flood or or or need more expertise on flood or um is still the the inbound content game or is it still just is it a big mix or how's all that working well it's you know a lot of it is coming from the agents but then you know a realtor emails you at 10 o'clock at night hey i got this listing You know, I need to verify the flood zone.

Speaker 6 Oh, great. I won't have it back to you in the morning.
I'll try to put an offer in. But what if we can solve that problem fairly easy with some technology, which is exactly what we did?

Speaker 6 Is we went to FEMA, we were able to order flood zone determinations, goes directly back to them. They do it instantly.
Next morning, lets us know.

Speaker 6 It's already sent in an email out to them, full-risk port. All we're doing is following up with them.
We didn't have to do anything.

Speaker 6 Literally, all they did was put an address and email address in, and they got everything they needed.

Speaker 7 That's pretty cool.

Speaker 6 So, like you call it, it's you know, it's working as our 24-hour sales rep.

Speaker 6 Yeah,

Speaker 7 yeah, that that's that's really cool. I mean, these are the kind of things that I think

Speaker 7 I really believe that that we're still in, you know, the first inning, or if we're even in the first inning, maybe we're in the top of the first inning when it comes to

Speaker 7 realigning value with an insurance sale, right? There's the obvious old, I shouldn't say obvious. There is the

Speaker 7 well-understood traditional value proposition, which is particularly relevant in

Speaker 7 middle market sales, a lot of the stuff that say Carruthers or Mick Hunt or Charles Speck or these guys talk about, which is, you know, tends to be geared towards comp or something like that.

Speaker 7 And a lot of it has to do with, you know, just kind of risk management techniques, okay, and

Speaker 7 managing people and injuries and okay.

Speaker 6 But

Speaker 7 there are

Speaker 7 a ton of additional layers of value that can be offered with education, with resources, with real-time return of information, with self-service, automation.

Speaker 7 Like there's all these different both types of value and layers of value that are possible that we just simply are not even tapping into that in other industries are the bar, like literally the bar, barrier for entry.

Speaker 7 And in ours,

Speaker 7 we're just starting to tap into them like what you just described, which is getting a report based on email and address.

Speaker 6 And that's the other thing, too, is that everybody thinks about insurance first. Like, you know, our car's teacher, so I was like, you know, that's what he taught me.

Speaker 6 Insurance shouldn't be the first conversation. Yeah.
I said, that's the problem. I said, because when their insurance rate goes up, that's the first thing they're thinking: they're mad at you.

Speaker 6 Yeah. Because you, you led with the insurance.
And I was like, well, you know, insurance is really all that we do. Well, maybe that's part of the problem is we're not overall risk advisors.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 You know, what is that

Speaker 7 the term risk advisor, insurance advisor

Speaker 7 is a tough one for me because

Speaker 6 it's a tough one for everybody.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I think that I think you're right. I, and I, and, and I would love to think of myself as an advisor for sure.

Speaker 7 But then there's a lot of times where I'm just placing policies, right? Someone calls and they need a comp policy and I go, eh, this is easy, you know, blast it out, get it back to them.

Speaker 7 Here's what it is. Off we go.
I didn't really advise them. I kind of just like took an order and placed it.
And

Speaker 7 when, and, and, and my point to that is when I think about, I think a lot about

Speaker 7 the cost of our people's time. That is, that is something that I spend a lot of time thinking about.
And it's one of the reasons that I went to HubSpot initially.

Speaker 7 One of the primary reasons is I wanted to be able to track activity.

Speaker 7 I wanted to be able to track time, not in like a, you know, dystopian Joe Biden way where, where I want to control your every move, but in more of like

Speaker 7 in order to create

Speaker 7 areas of value or create area, you know, how do I automate something that they're doing a lot of or where are we wasting? Okay.

Speaker 7 So

Speaker 7 when you look from a, from a profit standpoint at being an order taker,

Speaker 7 when an order is put in, and you process that order and you sell that order and it works that way, that easy, right? That is the most profitable way to do business.

Speaker 7 It's why all the insure techs, all the VCs go after these quick DC plays, because when someone knows exactly what they want, is ready to buy, and all you have to do is execute that order, it is incredibly profitable.

Speaker 7 So your brain goes, wow, that is easy. I should do more of that.
Except, one, those are relatively rare in our space. And two, those people don't stick around.

Speaker 7 So I feel like while we all want to be advisors, there's like this false incentive to be order takers because it is actually an easier way to do things.

Speaker 7 And we get lost in that. Does that make sense what I'm saying?

Speaker 6 It does. And so that's why it's helpful, you know, that's why we use video the way we do.
They're like, well, you know, how do you do all that? I said, you can still advise.

Speaker 6 So I said, look, when someone picks the phone up to call us, usually just to give us their credit card information because they've watched 10 of our blogs, they've listened to 10 of our videos through the whole journey.

Speaker 6 But it's the same thing on streamlining it, though.

Speaker 6 Use the video to educate and advise through that funnel and still streamlining it yeah but most people haven't figured out how to do that yet or aren't willing to invest the time to do it so look yeah it's going to take a little extra time but i mean literally

Speaker 6 dude yeah i mean it's the same reason why when a lead comes in my my licensed people don't even touch it it goes straight to the va the va does it then when the va has it ready then a licensed person reviews it yeah we um

Speaker 7 you know it's it's funny we're definitely two p's of a pod when it comes comes to the video stuff.

Speaker 7 One of the things that, so I, you know, the video content marketing stuff, obviously, like they ask you answer is a set should, you know, should be, you should have on your, on your, on your dresser or whatever, your end table next to your bed, you should have like the Bible and they ask you answer and life will be, life will be better, the Torah or whatever.

Speaker 6 I do call it the Bible marketing.

Speaker 7 Yeah, whatever you, uh,

Speaker 7 I always bust Marcus's chops because uh, and I know people who've listened for a long time know that he's a good buddy of mine and I know Chrissy's become a good buddy of yours but um

Speaker 7 uh

Speaker 7 so when when he first came up with that concept they ask you answer um he was interviewed by the New York Times and he actually has this article that he shows sometimes and it's a picture and it says answering uh um

Speaker 7 revolutionary marketing concept answering client questions. And it was like a completely dead serious headline.

Speaker 7 And it's just like so funny that that the concept of just simply answering client questions in video is like this revolutionary idea that our industry refuses, which I'm glad.

Speaker 7 I, dude, I hope none of you listening ever do what Chris and I do. Please, it's tons of work.

Speaker 6 Never do it.

Speaker 7 Don't do it.

Speaker 7 You're going to be terrible at it. You're all going to be awful.
Don't do it because then the two of us can reap more benefits from conquer.

Speaker 6 I will tell you this. I'm going to see Marcus in two weeks.
I'm on a retreat with him and Donald Miller in Cleveland. Oh, wow.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 That's going to be fun.

Speaker 7 Yeah, geez. That'll be super fun.

Speaker 6 And I think I'm supposed to be on a retreat with him and David Meirman in October in Massachusetts. Wow.

Speaker 7 We're in Massachusetts.

Speaker 6 I got to look and see. It's a mastermind group you recently started, a smaller one.
It's only like 30 to 40 people. Yeah.
We do twice a year.

Speaker 7 That's cool. That,

Speaker 7 you know, so what going to the next level of video, one of the things that I just did was I had a buddy of mine refer me over

Speaker 7 one of his clients that he was struggling with the DNO.

Speaker 7 And I like, I kind of like the, I'm not as good as Gordon Coyle at this stuff, who will be on the podcast. I think when we're recording it, he'll be on soon.

Speaker 7 By the time you hear this one, he'll have already been on. So go back and listen to his episode.
But like, I liked especially liability stuff too, like DNO and stuff and cyber. And I gave into that.

Speaker 7 But he, you know, he referred it over. And what I did was I packaged the account up and,

Speaker 7 you know, put the applications that I knew needed together.

Speaker 7 And then when I submitted it, instead of doing a cover letter or just sending in the apps, which if you're just sending in apps, I think that's the most bush league thing to do today.

Speaker 7 Like there's just no way to stand out and with how busy underwriters are. You at least need a cover letter.
So instead of doing a cover letter, what I did was a video cover letter.

Speaker 7 And I used, so when we do a submission in HubSpot, I add the underwriters as contacts. So in the deal card, I have the client, right, obviously as one of the contacts, their company.

Speaker 7 And then I'll have the underwriters as contacts as well.

Speaker 7 So every communication with underwriters from all the companies that I'm submitting to are also captured in the activity feed for that deal card.

Speaker 6 Yep. Okay.

Speaker 7 So what I'll do, what I did was, because we use Vidyard is.

Speaker 6 I didn't realize you were using Vidyard. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Yep. Yeah.
I used Vidyard because I wanted the full.

Speaker 6 So we went. You're using the paid version, the free version?

Speaker 7 Paid version. Yeah.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 7 It's, I mean, it was, it was definitely a heavy expense, but the analytics that we get back.

Speaker 6 No, the forms you can put in the videos. It's unbelievable.
Like, it's just unbelievable. The ROI you can track in HubSpot back to about us video.

Speaker 6 I tell somebody, I got a $10,000 revenue video about us. It's a silly video that I put up in November that made $10,000 in 60 days.
Yeah. Because I put a form in it.

Speaker 7 Yeah, dude, it's crazy.

Speaker 7 And the other part too is like when we went, when we moved, and I'm huge supporter of Chris Langell and Advisory Evolved and always will be, but when we made the move to HubSpot, I wanted to go fully in.

Speaker 7 So we moved our website CMS to HubSpots CMS so that we could track everything. I wanted to know every visitor, what page, what form, time.
I wanted the full thing.

Speaker 7 And to get the full thing, including video, you need to go Vidyard. So now I have.

Speaker 7 I literally anybody who fills out a form on our site, I know everything they've done, every video they've watched, how much of it they watched what buttons they clicked what pages they went to i know everything okay now hubspot's got the whole video thing but i tell people i'm still a bigger fan of vidyard because first of a number of videos but i just don't think hubspot's advanced enough yet on the video and the forms in it i'll take the analytics all day long now did you are you doing the website yourself that's been my biggest struggle yeah yeah i do the website myself it's hard to find somebody when you get it into hubspot who can do it the way you wanted to do especially with the ask you answer or something like that other than using you know course marketing them it's kind of challenging i i'm doing the exact same thing you're doing i like that stuff i i get into the cms stuff i like building out the pages and the form the page builders and all that i i i get into it but but so my point is i did this um i did this submission with a vidyard video submission uh cover letter well here's the interesting part and all my underwriters listening your ears should perk up.

Speaker 7 I could see, so I sent it, you know, individual emails. I didn't just blast it out to all of them, but I sent it to three different places that I thought would be interested in this account.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 I could, the, the, the, um, the first place, uh, guy opens it. He then forwards it to his assistant underwriter who watches the full video.

Speaker 7 They immediately respond with, this just got moved to the top of our pile. We'll have a quote back to you by the end of the week.

Speaker 6 Boom.

Speaker 7 So two people in the company watched the video. The video was like three minutes long.
And in it, I'm doing what you would do.

Speaker 7 Hey, look, like, I know this is a first-time DNO policy, but you know, this is a, you know, blah, blah, blah. I break down the account.

Speaker 7 Like, here's why I think this is going to be a really good risk for us and why I think you guys should think about placing. Okay.

Speaker 7 Second company watches 15 seconds of it, never responds, still haven't heard back from them. Third company I send it to never watches the video, never opens email because I can track that too.

Speaker 7 So it's like, now I'm like, hmm, who do you think is going to get my next submission? The company that four days later still has not opened the email or watched the video?

Speaker 7 The company that opened the email, watched 15 seconds of the video and still hasn't responded, or the company that watched the full video twice with two separate people and immediately responded.

Speaker 7 I now know who my real partners are as underwriters, because again,

Speaker 7 Carriers are only your partners if they're actually your partners, right? If they act like partners. So

Speaker 7 what I'm doing is now I have analytics, not just on my customers, but actually on my underwriters and their engagement with us. And,

Speaker 7 you know, that to me is powerful.

Speaker 6 So I actually use that with a carrier and I actually put my carriers into automation. So when we see them an app and they don't respond, it's following up them automatically every 24 hours.

Speaker 6 It drives them nuts. My office manager thinks it's hilarious because she's like, you're driving, you're driving by nuts.

Speaker 6 And I said, look, we don't have to do it, but we know that they're opening it and they're not responding. Yeah.

Speaker 6 But the other thing is i do something called risk storytelling there's a broker somewhere out in texas that really hates me right now because we just took a 500 000 account from them because i did a risk storytelling video sent it to the underwriter full risk i go through the flood risk score i'm pulling up all the different types of flooding how this property was built on another property that had flooded eight times and they're like well somebody else already submitted it but we're actually backing them out and we're putting you in as the broker because they didn't give us any of that information they didn't tell us how it was elevated they didn't tell us the water resistant materials that were being used so we just took you to the list and we're giving you the count.

Speaker 6 Yeah. Dude, I think.
Because you're helping them understand the risk. Yes.

Speaker 7 Yeah. And this is the thing is, and I've said this, this is why I've said this on the podcast before.

Speaker 7 So we're not doing this anymore, but for a very long time, I took every appointment that I could get because

Speaker 7 I think that carriers bend the truth.

Speaker 7 I was speaking with my good buddy Dave Ayadanza from

Speaker 7 Dryden Mutual the other day, and I used to say carriers lie. He said, don't say lie.

Speaker 7 lie lies a meet a bad word you know a meat mean word we don't lie but we bend the truth just like agents and i said that's true okay so so that being said

Speaker 7 um i think that carriers over oversell what they're willing to write and what their pricing is going to be and geographic spread and all that and and agents overestimate and bend the truth on how much premium they're going to put with them okay that's the game well what i what i'm working towards and again i'm training my team and it's not all there yet but like to what you said by by doing a better job of presenting an account to an underwriter, I feel like we're being a better partner to them.

Speaker 7 So we're doing our part. And in exchange, by using HubSpot and Vidyard, I'm actually able to see who's a better partner on their side because

Speaker 7 I can't stand the marketing rep who's like, send us more business, send us more business. Yet.

Speaker 7 the they don't realize that they're freaking underwriters bottom file all our submissions and we don't hear from for three or four days. And when we do hear from them, it's a one sentence response.

Speaker 7 And it's like, this isn't a partnership. Like this is bullshit.
And

Speaker 7 now I know, like, these guys want our business. When we send them an email, we send them a video, a video cover letter.
I like risk storytelling. I may steal that.
Like,

Speaker 7 like

Speaker 7 when they get that, they open it, they watch it, they appreciate it. That's a partner.

Speaker 6 And not only that, but now they can say, you know what, broker A, we're blind to there's risk. Broker B, we've got the full picture.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 That's a broker we feel is going to do a better job of protecting us. Yeah.
That's a partnership we want.

Speaker 6 Like I tell people, I say, look, at the end of the day, it's our job to make sure we reduce the claims for the customer because we don't want to go through that experience, but we're also reducing it for the carrier.

Speaker 6 Yeah. It's a win-win.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 7 tools like, you know, this is one of those moments where tools like a HubSpot, tools like a Vidyard give you a true competitive advantage.

Speaker 7 I think there's a lot of tools that are, you know, they're nice and they definitely help, but they're not really like a competitive advantage.

Speaker 7 I feel like when I submit business on an account that deserves this, I mean, a $700 bop, you're just, you know, you quote it, you write it, whatever.

Speaker 7 We still will probably do a video proposal to the client, but, you know, you don't necessarily talk to an underwriter.

Speaker 7 I'm talking about some of a little me or something that needs some explanation or whatever.

Speaker 7 This allows you, like you said, to do a screen grab of a report or here's, here's what I'm thinking, or here, let's walk through their financials.

Speaker 7 And yeah, there's a little schmoogie here, but this is why I think we're, this is still a good account.

Speaker 7 Or, and you actually get to have that interaction with them and they can see the look on your face. They can hear your tone of voice.

Speaker 7 They can hear you're excited about putting this account on the books and whatever. That to me makes all the difference.
And I do agree with you. It's us doing our job.

Speaker 7 It forces us to do our job better because it's. You can just send a bullshit submission into somebody when it's just an app as an attachment.

Speaker 7 When you actually have to do a video and pitch it and sell it, you need to believe in what you're selling.

Speaker 6 None of that like for example i got a 150 million dollar risk right now in hawaii they gave me a notice three days before renewal and i was like there's no way yeah i sent a video i got a response back this morning if i would have sent an app it would have taken three days yes but from that video they can see right away what the risk is because let's be honest underwriting reading through the app it takes time yeah they don't want to do it they're human i'll tell you this on video though we do have a rule too if someone sends me an email and asks me more than two questions we actually respond with a vidyard video and so have conversations yeah first uh introduction first person that emails us, we never met them before, usually something that's going back to them.

Speaker 6 It's just a simple introduction email from me real quick with Vidyard.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I like that.

Speaker 7 I'm definitely going to start responding more, doing more.

Speaker 7 You know,

Speaker 7 we started doing this underwriter submission cover letter thing, which has been a big success.

Speaker 7 Certainly a success for the underwriters at Open. I just, I can't stress enough how mind-blowing it is to me because I know the carriers that will give us tons of shit about our submissions.

Speaker 7 And I'm like, wait a minute. I can tell you it's been a week and he hasn't even opened that email yet.
Like, don't come at me, man.

Speaker 6 Like, he hasn't opened the email. The fact that the carriers are willing to almost double your commissions because they see what you're doing with the risks.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 Yeah, we're going to increase your commission because you're doing a better job of protecting the risk. Yeah.

Speaker 6 You're not sending us garbage. Yeah.

Speaker 7 It's, dude, it is.

Speaker 6 This is the kind of stuff that that's where i laughs and i'm like look huskbot's one of our best employees it's the most expensive thing but i'll tell you with playbooks now i don't know if you've gotten into that we've basically built that carrier appetites inside playbooks yeah because we've been spending this two weeks or two years you go and you type the question you've got the answer of who to go to with it yeah it um

Speaker 7 we're we're implementing actually right now i'm working on um one of our our our head of sales he put together this uh

Speaker 7 it's a it's called needs n-e-a-d-s and um

Speaker 7 And it's basically a pre-qualification sequence of questions. And I built, or I'm in the process.
Hopefully it'll be done by,

Speaker 7 I would love to say today, but it probably won't be until next week.

Speaker 7 Basically, this is going to be the questionnaire for when a lead comes in, our new business coordinators

Speaker 7 who's unlicensed person, they call out. and say, ask them these five questions and use a playbook and type the answers right into the playbook as they're taking taking the responses.

Speaker 7 And then they're trained based on the responses they get to these questions through the playbook, whether they move that person

Speaker 7 from a lead to a suspect or

Speaker 7 they refer them out to commercialinsurance.net, who we refer like lines of business that

Speaker 7 we don't have a good markets for today, or we just, or we just kill the, kill the deal. And

Speaker 7 that simple process keeps our licensed producers from dealing with accounts that don't really have a shot at closing, right?

Speaker 7 So the whole, the whole point is, is filtering and things like playbooks, things, you know, things like,

Speaker 7 you know, dynamic, dynamic forms that, you know,

Speaker 6 dynamic pages is just something I've gotten into this week with our developer, but also, dude, it's so powerful. Yeah.
Because of the unique customer experience on every different customer. Yeah.

Speaker 7 I mean, the idea that you can change the content based on where they're coming from or what pages they've been to or whatever, or like

Speaker 7 some of the really cool shit with that you can do with merge fields and dynamic thank you pages where literally you're the thank you page is being customized that it feels like the page was literally built for that person.

Speaker 7 So now you're using their name and their and different pieces of their information. in how you thank them or how you push them to the next step.

Speaker 7 It's

Speaker 6 because everyone's worried about open rates, you know, with Apple and Google's changed. I said that's why we've generally always stuck to click the links like Vidyard.

Speaker 6 They click the link, it takes that away. I can still use it based on them clicking that link with a Panda doc.
For example, we build a video proposal with Vidyard and Panda Doc.

Speaker 6 So when I send it through Panda Doc, they open it, it goes from well, it basically goes from quote ready to quote sent automatically when the Panda doc goes out.

Speaker 6 Customer views it, it goes to quote being reviewed. I don't have to touch it.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 Do you use a lot? Do you do

Speaker 7 one of the things that I've been working a lot lot on is like customer life cycles and using them as a way to better understand our funnel and where things are in our funnel?

Speaker 7 So we, one of the automations, and again, I'm way behind, just so everyone's clear, where Chris is with HubSpot Buildout and where I am, two different places.

Speaker 7 So I don't want there to be like, you know, there's no, there's no real comparison. I'm still very early stage, but.

Speaker 6 But this is my fourth year too.

Speaker 7 Yeah. And we're, this is our fourth month.
So, you know, that would be the difference.

Speaker 7 But one of the things I think is really interesting. So we use a fairly standardized customer life cycle, which is subscriber, someone

Speaker 7 who we know of that doesn't know of us, lead, shown interest, suspect meets qualification standards, or what would technically be called marketing qualified in normal parlance.

Speaker 7 Prospect is interested in quote, and then

Speaker 7 client, evangelist lost that's that's customer life cycle so um you could be a client without being an evangelist etc um

Speaker 7 so

Speaker 7 what's cool is that you can in in in the pipeline in different engagements different pages they hit you can change um the where the life cycle is automatically so like

Speaker 7 If someone leaves us feedback or uses our

Speaker 7 referral page and types in a referral to us or you know whatever we can move them from client to evangelist we can move the automatically move them to suspect so i don't need to rely on my people to have to think about oh are they a suspect are they a prospect which not that they're incapable of it but it's just i don't want them to have to think about that but as a business owner i can now look at our customer life cycle report and know exactly where in the funnel our contacts are where we may be having obstacles where there may be issues, you know, our attrition rate, and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 7 And that's it's like those simple insights are where you're able to make true improvements in your business. And

Speaker 7 you know, you just don't get that a lot of places.

Speaker 6 So, I was able to use it to change our fee schedule so we could see exactly which deals we were losing and why, and what the premium point was.

Speaker 6 Like, hey, it was a big issue: $500 and less is where we're losing because of fees. And I said, you know, that's not that big of a deal, but at least gives us the data to know.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 Hey, it's the the small stuff we're losing, which is okay.

Speaker 6 But that's why we're losing it. Well, that's like a little bit of an, we made a little bit of an adjustment there and we stopped losing almost all of it.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 That's awesome. So that is like putting the learning center on there

Speaker 6 has been a big thing for us too.

Speaker 6 But like my office manager says now, hey, if it didn't happen to HubSpot, it didn't happen.

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Speaker 7 That is our, so our, we're working towards that. We're not there yet.

Speaker 7 You know, we're moving off of agency Zoom slowly over to HubSpot. That's not necessarily a knock on agency Zoom.
We just are

Speaker 6 different level.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 7 The integration I wanted,

Speaker 7 you know, especially with, you know, doing the deal with SIA and all that kind of stuff and where we're going and where we're headed, like agency Zoom was a great tool for us as a seven, eight person agency operating fairly traditionally.

Speaker 7 Great tool.

Speaker 7 I think today, based on the way things are going, I would probably look at better agency over agency zoom

Speaker 7 personally.

Speaker 7 But, you know, Agency Zoom is not a bad tool.

Speaker 7 But man, if you want to take your game to to another level, there's just no comparison between the two. And the things that you can see, do, and the insights you can have.

Speaker 7 If you are the type of, and this is, this is one of the things that I've always appreciated about the way you look at the business is,

Speaker 7 regardless of what system you have, you have some sort of insight into what's happening in your agency. And one of the major beefs that I have with the traditional mentality of our industry is that

Speaker 7 principals have these thoughts that are really just subjective kind of feelings they get in their brain and they use those to make decisions and i'm like

Speaker 7 you're not actually basing that on anything that's actually legitimately like data driven happening in your business you're just saying it feels like this happens so this is what i'm going to do and when you start to see what's possible from touch points phone calls, like I'm like, you're supposed to make 20 calls a day, let's say.

Speaker 7 You could tell me you made 20 calls, but those 20 calls aren't in HubSpot. You made zero calls, zero.
Didn't happen in HubSpot, didn't happen.

Speaker 7 And it can track the full life cycle of every touch point.

Speaker 7 And that is when, when you, when you get to that level, and it takes work and commitment and you got to keep on your people and, you know, and culturally develop, you know, that.

Speaker 6 But man, once you start to get some of that insights and we're just getting the very early pieces of it, geez the things you can do are just unbelievable yeah but for example for me like i could see why we weren't closing more business because my licensed person was spending time on things that weren't licensed and i could see that from the conversations at hump spot yeah and an easy way for me to control that was not assigned them those conversations assigned to the va or say hey you know what we need to hire someone else to help you here because i see that you're spending 30% of your day on this.

Speaker 6 Now, something else we've been using for a while too is something called Mapsly.

Speaker 6 So Mapsly actually maps where every one of our referral partners is across the country, our customers. I matched it up with a flood warning system that we use.

Speaker 6 So it also tells us where to create content where flooding is also happening. And so I can look at the map and say, hey, this month, 40% of our business is at Arizona, 30% is in California.

Speaker 6 So it tells us where to kind of spend our time.

Speaker 6 It's awesome.

Speaker 7 I just think, dude, that type of real-time marketing insights of dynamically creating, adjusting, maneuvering content, whatever, to

Speaker 7 address the market.

Speaker 7 I mean, one, that's a level that most people are not interested in. Like, just frankly, they're just not interested in going that deep, which is fine.
You don't, you don't need to.

Speaker 7 But for those that are,

Speaker 7 the, the wizard-esque

Speaker 7 games that you can play are just,

Speaker 7 I mean, I feel, I honestly feel like a kid in a candy store. Like with when I, when I get into HubSpot, like I've,

Speaker 7 every meeting that I have in the day that doesn't allow me to like build out new systems, processes, or different, different features in, in HubSpot, I feel like is wasted time because just figuring out this thing that I mentioned to you with the underwriters, right?

Speaker 7 This, this submission, video submission process and getting the feedback of, here's the underwriters that open the emails and watch the videos and here's the underwriters that don't.

Speaker 7 Just that insight alone allows me to go, guys, don't waste your time submitting your business to XYZ carrier or MGA. Send it right to these guys.
They appreciate it.

Speaker 7 They're going to get it back to us. We're going to write the business faster.
That saved, if that saves

Speaker 7 five hours a month total time, right, for the team, if that just that simple insight. And now I can stack.
those insights up on top of each other.

Speaker 7 Three hours here, an hour here, five hours here, 10 hours here. All that time goes back into selling and helping clients.
All of it. And it's like

Speaker 7 when we think in terms of just

Speaker 6 not only that, think about employee morale.

Speaker 7 Yeah, oh, yeah, 100%. Yeah, 100%.

Speaker 6 Think about, you know, people hate doing mortgage changes. They hate doing a lot of the service, especially salespeople.
But now, what if you can see, hey, here's how I can take it out of your hands?

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 6 Or you're doing it and you shouldn't be.

Speaker 6 That's one of the things that I like about it:

Speaker 6 It helps me gauge what each one of our team members is doing. Yeah.

Speaker 7 And ultimately, it lets you know, where do you need more help?

Speaker 7 Where do you need another person? Where do you need a VA? Hey,

Speaker 7 we can actually go get a VA who crushes COIs or is great at handling

Speaker 7 email inbound service requests and responding to them and triaging them and

Speaker 7 other things like

Speaker 7 right now we have the position new business coordinator that's the person who does the pre-qualification of leads to suspects and she is is training to get licensed well you know i'm able to i am now able to give her and watch how and listen one listen to phone calls through ring central i'm able to call log every call she makes so i'm i'm getting a feel before she ever becomes a licensed producer for rogue risk i am able to see how does she do on the phone is she willing to pick up the phone how does she do with answering questions how is she at documentation so I'm literally getting, she's building her resume for us as a select producer before she ever becomes a select producer.

Speaker 7 And I can see it all right there. Now she's doing an awesome job.
I can't wait for her to become a producer. I think she's going to crush, but like, but, but maybe she's, maybe she wasn't good, right?

Speaker 7 And I would get to see that and either train her or say, maybe this isn't the right thing for you or whatever.

Speaker 6 That's why I like conversation AI. You can detect customer behavior based on tone.
So it helps us teach our team how to use the right tone through the conversation to control the conversation. Yeah,

Speaker 7 you know, it's it's it just this level of insight. I think a lot of people will go, ah, you know, I'd rather just go golfing with the person.
And I think that's wonderful.

Speaker 7 I think, I think what's happening in our space is that there's a there's developing a clear delineation between those individuals whose thought process is singular individual household income, right?

Speaker 6 Which through

Speaker 7 nonprofit events and golf games and asking for referrals, can you build a book of business that provides you with personal income that's sufficient? Absolutely freaking lootly.

Speaker 7 You don't have to do any of this shit, none of it. You can use a spreadsheet and have two carriers and make more than enough money to take care of your family and everything's fine.

Speaker 7 It's going to take time and a lot of work, but you can get there and that's fine.

Speaker 7 If you're looking to scale your business, to like grow your business beyond you, beyond the kind of egocentric kingdom version of

Speaker 7 your business, you cannot do it today, in my opinion, without starting to dip your toe into the shit that we're talking about right now. You just can't.
It doesn't mean you can't be successful.

Speaker 7 You can. It doesn't mean you can't make money.
You can. But if you're looking for if scale, if legacy, if

Speaker 7 you're ambitious and you want it to be bigger than just you, you have to start to think about this stuff. You just can't compete if you're not.

Speaker 6 I mean, that's the same thing we're doing with payments right now. We're getting ready to finally finish the integration with ePay.
We go straight through Dills and HubSpot.

Speaker 6 We don't have to do anything instead of having to go to ePay, fill out the pre-payment page, send it. No, none of that.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 Same thing with an accord forms with a developer. We're getting ready to finish out

Speaker 6 pre-filling accord forms.

Speaker 7 How are you getting to that? Just you're using, you got an accord templates and you've built it yourself?

Speaker 6 I built it myself years ago. I just didn't like the way it looked.
But now with API data, it can be up to date and really accurate. It can change instantly if we need it to.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 The accord form thing is such a shame. It's such a shame that in court, a cord like can't get out of their own way.
You know, what a bureaucratic nightmare a cord is. It just, you know, the, the,

Speaker 7 what they have at their fingertips and how much value they've actually extracted is it's sad because i know some you know a cord would say oh look how much money we make and look how big we are and it's like yes except you've probably done five percent of what you would have been capable of if you had ever actually pushed so that's sad that being said you know we use wonder right for to produce a lot of our accords today um

Speaker 7 And they just opened up a Zapier beta, which is cool. We're going to help test that a little bit.
I'm hoping that that works. I do like Peter and what they're doing at Wonder Write, but

Speaker 6 I know it's hard about a brain share.

Speaker 7 Yeah,

Speaker 7 it's hard. You know,

Speaker 7 I'm very hopeful for them. So I don't want this to be negative in any way.
But, you know, with third party, the hard part is

Speaker 7 you have to assume inevitably they're going to continue to expand services and, you know, want to become an AMS or want to become something else. And it's just like,

Speaker 7 it's like, we just need one company that offers a cord form integration and creation and mapping easily at a price the industry could afford. And they would absolutely friggin dominate.

Speaker 7 But I feel like everybody goes, no, we need to build an ecosystem. We need to build this and we need to build that.
And it's like, if I have to duplicate entry, it's not going to work.

Speaker 6 Oh, you need to offer this type of insurance and this type of insurance.

Speaker 6 Look, it can be

Speaker 6 nice. Oh, yeah, maybe we should offer that.
Maybe we should go there. And you get distracted so easy, then what happens? You forget why you got in business to do what you do in the first place.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 Yeah. Chasing, chasing shiny objects is difficult.
You know, I know I,

Speaker 7 you know, I, I'm, if there was like a chasing shiny objects anonymous 12-step program, I probably would have or should have been in it a long time ago because I'm definitely guilty of that.

Speaker 7 But, you know, I think that

Speaker 7 there's two sides to that coin, you know, there's part of me always says, like, oh, Ryan, just stay focused on what you're doing and keep pushing and blah, blah, blah, which, which, you know, in general is what we do.

Speaker 7 Or I guess I hire people to do that because I struggle with it.

Speaker 6 But the other side.

Speaker 6 Naturally, things are going to develop off what you're doing. Like when we originally started with just flood insurance, you know, we have a flood CE company now.

Speaker 6 We have a flood mitigation company, a flood consulting company, but it still goes back to our educational vision of it's all still circled around that. Yeah.

Speaker 6 I mean, mean, it's not going outside of that. But these things, you know, like people, oh, you know, you start a side business or whatever.

Speaker 6 It just naturally happens when you get in a certain field and you're dealing with it.

Speaker 7 You know, the thing, the thing too, yeah, and I think that's a great point.

Speaker 7 I think, I think the other thing with chasing some shiny objects or always kind of researching or looking into new technology is that

Speaker 7 if you don't, if you don't spend some time in that space, right,

Speaker 7 then you do become stale, like over time. I'm not saying immediately, but you do start to like, if you're not, there is absolutely something to

Speaker 7 keeping some small portion of your brain looking out into the future at what's coming, at what's going on. It doesn't mean you always take action, but like,

Speaker 7 I'm going to,

Speaker 7 in two weeks, I'll be at InsurTech Boston,

Speaker 7 which

Speaker 7 I don't know when this is going to come out, but

Speaker 7 may or may not. This may not come out that week or may come out the week after.

Speaker 7 So it may already happen but um i can't wait to go there it's a it's a great event um they do a great job i'm glad it's back after covid but like you get a chance to just bump into people that have crazy ideas kind of like you do and and it gives you it uh it gives your brain a little taste of like here's what's possible it doesn't mean you need to do it nor do you need to do it today but like this is possible or like you know, you talking about some of the, some of the shit that you do.

Speaker 7 I may look at that and go, gee, I'd love to be able to do that. I can't do it today, but man, that's on my list.
And I'd like a year from now to be able to do that thing that he's doing.

Speaker 7 And if you don't let your brain go to that space, I feel like you're doing your best.

Speaker 6 You could also bring it back and say, you know what? I could tweak it just a little bit to improve what I'm currently doing. Yeah.

Speaker 6 And that's usually what my goal is: of, hey, no, I don't want to go do what they're doing, but maybe something they say triggers in my brain to help me improve our process. Yeah.

Speaker 6 Because I got to tell people, look, as fancy as these systems are, at the end of the day, it's all about process. Yeah.

Speaker 6 Yep.

Speaker 7 One of the things that that i want to do um

Speaker 7 that i'm going to build out eventually is i want to track um

Speaker 7 every company that we quote on an account i want to track

Speaker 7 who we quoted

Speaker 7 what their response was

Speaker 7 uh uh quote or decline and then what the actual quote number was Because I want there to become a day when I can pull a report that says, say, say you have Amtrus, Hanover, Chubb, Liberty, and Hartford, right?

Speaker 7 Let's take those five companies. So we quoted those five companies 20 times.

Speaker 7 Hartford came back with a quote 90% of the time. Chubb was 82% of the time, you know, down to Liberty that only came back 52% of the time.
It's not a lack on Liberty. I'm just as an example, right?

Speaker 7 And then what that, and here's the quoting, who was the best priced, who declined, you know, whatever.

Speaker 7 And to be able to take those analytics and come back and go, okay, in the future, when this type of account comes in, don't even quote the other four, just quote Chubb, because they're quoting this type of risk 97% of the time.

Speaker 7 And another 90% of those times, they are

Speaker 7 the best priced. So I'd rather just go right to them, write the business, then quote the other four as well and have to deal with.
a decline or the rate not being as good or whatever.

Speaker 7 And then you can obviously tweak it too with like, they have the right coverage package and that kind of stuff, obviously. So, but but being able to get that,

Speaker 7 being able to get that insight back allows you to shave so much time because I know you're dealing with a singular line of business. I know you have multiple markets, but like for us,

Speaker 7 one of our biggest headaches and biggest time lost is where does the business go? Where does it go? That is an enormous time waste.

Speaker 6 I'm wasting 80% of my time sending it to 20% of the carriers. You know what I mean? Like, hey, how do we do a better job of understanding appetite? We're instantly, we know, right off the bat.

Speaker 6 But we put something in, even training the system, you know, machine technology to tell us, hey, go to company A, company B, based on what you're putting in.

Speaker 7 Yep. Yeah.
I mean, and this to the underwriter not opening the email and watching the video. That underwriter is going to get less submissions from us from now on.

Speaker 7 And, and then, and in the next quarterly review with their marketing rep, when they call and go, hey, submissions are down, I'm going to go, look, I sent you guys 25 emails and this son of a bitch only opened 16 of them.

Speaker 7 What happened to the other nine? What is it too good to open those? Like, you're not doing us any favors. Don't, you know what I mean? Like, like that kind of stuff to me,

Speaker 7 not to screw the carriers. I, you know, that's not the point.

Speaker 7 I wish the person would open the emails. That's, that's the point is from, from a people, time, efficiency standpoint, and to your point, a quality of work standpoint, my people are not ever.

Speaker 7 are feeling less and less like they're just spinning their wheels, which is just a soul killer.

Speaker 6 I mean, let's be honest too, you've been with a market rep, they've always had the power of, hey, you you didn't do this, you didn't do that. Now, something like a HubSpot.
No, wait, we did.

Speaker 6 And here it is. Yeah.

Speaker 6 It gives us an opportunity to defend what we did. Yes.
Yep.

Speaker 7 That to me, there is.

Speaker 6 Just like ENL. That's how people HubSpot's better than I think any AMS out there.

Speaker 7 I will put,

Speaker 7 I walked through. So I walked through for my team how I did this submission the other day.
This here added this contact, added the underwriter, made a note, attached these quote forms.

Speaker 7 It automatically pulls in all the emails. It tracked the call that I made to the person.

Speaker 7 Here's the video.

Speaker 7 I showed them all that. And I was like, what's not in the system?

Speaker 7 What activity did I do that someone could come back and say, hey, you know, but

Speaker 7 here, here, what did I not do? What did I miss? And they were like, you got everything. And that.

Speaker 7 It was easy. It's different, right? The HubSpot is different.
If you're trained on a traditional AMS, it's definitely different mental with the objects and stuff.

Speaker 7 But, like, man, once you start to pick it up, it is insane. It's just all there right at your fingertips.

Speaker 6 And that's what I tell you. And that's what it wins is ease of use because even when I interview a candidate, HubSpot is part of our interview process.

Speaker 6 And yeah, it usually blows them away about how easy the system is to use. But I say, look, it's not that it's necessarily easy to use.
It's that I'm only showing you 1%.

Speaker 6 And it's the 1% you're going to use every day. Yeah.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Dude, it's awesome.

Speaker 7 So, so, you you know we're wow we just blew through 52 minutes and no time that was crazy um so you know kind of that using the last 10 minutes or so of our conversation here talk to me a little bit about what's good you got the most excited about your business it doesn't have to be technology it could be whatever like what do you when you when you show up in the morning like what right now are you the most excited about

Speaker 6 When I show, it still goes back to this massive risk that comes on my desk that nobody says they can do anything with.

Speaker 6 And I'm able to instantly pull the data we have, go in, put a full report together, send it to a carrier, and get a risk model and a rating model that no one else can get.

Speaker 6 Yeah, uh, because of our educational background

Speaker 6 at the end of the day, it still comes back to that for me. Yeah, that's the part I enjoyed.

Speaker 7 Yeah, so so you love the challenge of the tough account that you get to you really dig your teeth into and do the problem solving. I get that.
I like,

Speaker 7 you know, as much as I don't really love selling insurance, I love the,

Speaker 7 I love the risk management. You know, I love walking through.
I'm with you. I love the educational side of walking a client through the coverages, why they're important, how they can mitigate them.

Speaker 7 Like that, that problem solving piece is, it is a lot of fun. There's, there's, there's a lot to that.

Speaker 6 Then I also like how my team will email me and say, hey, here's what happened this morning that we need videos on.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 7 And then you go crank them out.

Speaker 6 Like this afternoon, I'll crank out about eight more. I I usually do eight to 10 videos on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Yeah. I

Speaker 7 so you guys know this is a Friday. So he's off his schedule, just to be clear on that.
But

Speaker 7 I will,

Speaker 7 I am also this afternoon going to be doing my, I did a bunch of stuff this morning. I got a few more calls.
And then this afternoon, before I get my kids off the bus, I will go crank out.

Speaker 7 I got about six. I have six head.
So I think in headlines, you know, in terms of what I want to attack. So I have six headlines.

Speaker 7 I may, depending on time, I may just add two more and bang out a quick eight. But dude, you know, I know you're right there.
We did,

Speaker 7 we just got monetization status. You know, I'm not going to actually put ads on our videos for Rogue Risk, but the monetization status gives you some extra tracking and whatever.
But.

Speaker 7 yeah thousand plus subscribers and we did 4 000 total hours of view time in the last 12 months last month we did last 28 days we did almost 11,000 views, which, dude, for insurance YouTube channel, it's that's why like I watch the shit you do.

Speaker 7 I've done it twice now, once with the Murray Group with Rogue, you know, a few other agents. Crowley's doing some good stuff.
Like,

Speaker 7 I just don't see how other agents can see the things that we're doing and not be like, this is a thing we're going to do. Like, we're going to do this.

Speaker 7 Like, of all the things we should be doing, this is like, look at the success these guys are having. Like, the leads just keep,

Speaker 7 it never ends. It's just,

Speaker 6 we generate two to 300 leads a month from between referral partners and content. Like we're not out there spending money on ads.
Everything's strictly organic. Yeah.

Speaker 6 And we have an 80 to 90% close ratio. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's,

Speaker 7 dude, it is insane, the possibilities. Yeah.
It's just insane. And it boggles my mind.

Speaker 6 But not only that, the content.

Speaker 6 Like I had a meeting with a large carrier yesterday that's leaving a private flood market. And they came to us and we were going to put a blog out with some other carriers.

Speaker 6 We're kind of putting misinformation out there and they say, you know, we like your content. It's neutral and it's always fact-based.
Will you put this piece of information out for us?

Speaker 6 So I shot a video on it and I got a blog I released last night on it.

Speaker 6 They said, we know that you won't spit it negatively, but you also won't spin it positively. You're going to be completely neutral about it.
And that's what we like about your content. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Yeah, that's good. That's good, man.
I know

Speaker 7 in general, I'd say carrier reviews do really well for us from a content perspective.

Speaker 6 I got a call from four CEOs mine did a best of on private, residential, and commercial. Yeah.

Speaker 7 It's what's what's what's funny is that a lot of agents are like, oh,

Speaker 7 well, you know, my carrier is going to get mad at me. I'm like, mad at you.

Speaker 7 Like, I mean, maybe if you're saying a bunch of untrue things about them or you're purposefully like trashing them, but like, if you're giving an honest review, like, I did an honest review of

Speaker 7 maybe Hanover or or somebody where, you know, like I, I just, I said, like, hey, like, they are a little old school in some of the things they do, but the paper is amazing.

Speaker 7 The claims handling is amazing. You know, so, so it was, it felt to me, it felt very real.

Speaker 6 My marketing is a little bit more. And why am I going to sue you for saying something good about them? Yeah.

Speaker 7 What do you, what, why would they be pissed? I'm doing the video to write more business with their carrier.

Speaker 7 Like, I want people to watch the video and go, hey, you know, hey, I saw your video on Hanover. They seem like a great company.
Let's do, you know, I like to do business.

Speaker 7 Like, that's why you're doing it. So to me, it's just, there's just, it's like, what, read, they ask that you answer.

Speaker 6 Do exactly what's going on.

Speaker 6 I can't discuss pricing on my website. Look, customers don't want to know how much your insurance is going to cost.
They want to know what's determining the price of insurance.

Speaker 6 That's all they want to know.

Speaker 7 Dude, that Marcus has made an entire career just in our space with that point. Is yes, you cannot say a bop for a bakery is going to be $1,300.
No, you can't say that because you don't know.

Speaker 7 But what you can say is, here's the four main factors that based, you know, based on these four factors, your rate is going to go up or down. And here's what they are.

Speaker 7 And that's what people want to know.

Speaker 6 And I promise you, that'll be the number one page that people visit on your website. Yes.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 It's,

Speaker 7 dude, it's wild.

Speaker 6 It's unfortunately, he's trained me really badly. I got to send him an email on this.
I made my wife a Mother's Day present. And she's like, you know, now that you're not in any of the pictures.

Speaker 6 I said, You got to blame that Market Sheridan. There's that whole thing you trained me.
You know, it's not, you know, it's not about us, it's about the customers.

Speaker 6 You know, so he sticks it in my head on everything I do now.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I know. A lot of, I've had a lot of people, um,

Speaker 7 you know, a lot of people have questioned the fact that all our videos on Rogue Risk's YouTube channel have me in them. Uh, and I'm on the cover image.

Speaker 7 And it's like, look, as soon as I get someone who is willing to be, who can speak to insurance in a way that I believe is authentic and real and

Speaker 7 get, you know, in a caring way, like I, I'd like to believe that the way I deliver it is I actually want people to learn.

Speaker 7 Like, as soon as I get someone who can do that and do it consistently, I will have them do it. Like, I don't want to be the face.
It's the reason it's not the Hanley agency.

Speaker 7 Like, I didn't name it Hanley Insurance Services. I named it.
Rogue Risk because I don't want it to be about me. But I think to a certain extent, the human factor, there's something to it.

Speaker 7 There's something to it that like you run your agency and people get to hear your viewpoints.

Speaker 7 You're the cultural leader and driver of the business. And if you're out there every day teaching and educating, then it becomes very clear that that is a core principle of your business.

Speaker 6 Dude, I love answering the phones every now and then. It completely throws people off.
Wait, this is the person from the video? Yeah.

Speaker 6 They're just like shocked. Yeah.
I will tell you this. There's three books I require people to read before they come on board now they ask you answer the visual sale by marcus and uh

Speaker 6 uh tyler and then ann hanley everybody writes yeah and hanley is great and i said because you know you're going to write a blog you're going to do a video you're going to share it with a customer and they're going to build this instant trust because it's actually done by you not someone else on your team

Speaker 7 um i had ann hanley on the podcast she is Gosh, that was what, what, two or three years ago now? It's probably about two years ago now.

Speaker 7 She's awesome.

Speaker 7 i've she is yeah i've had so much going on i haven't been able to do too much outreach to people outside of the industry i used to love like bringing people outside the industry in every once in a while but um

Speaker 7 yeah she's she's awesome and just as quality a person

Speaker 6 off camera as on camera i just think very highly of her very very good person so but i've i've sent out probably 20 copies of the visual sell and everybody i had one candidate reach out back up to me didn't end up coming to workforce she's like i closed a ten thousand dollar account today because that book yeah

Speaker 6 dude i'm with you hey man i want to be respectful of your time we just blew through an hour long conversation um we'll have to have you back on the show again this is great um people want to see what you're up to they just want to connect with you where are the best places to do that linkedin cursoring uh find me on facebook twitter uh instagram or website floodinsuranceguru.com i have a lot of people right now that are reaching out to us about the learning center not necessarily learning about flood in the learning center, but they're like, hey, how do I build a learning center like that?

Speaker 6 Visit my website, floodinsurancecury.com forward slash learning center. Reach out to me.
Marcus Sheridan actually built it for me, but it's been very beneficial for us.

Speaker 6 I'd be happy to sit down with anybody and just kind of show them how we built it, the process, all that stuff to really help you out.

Speaker 7 Yeah, dude, I appreciate you, the work you do, the way you think about your business.

Speaker 7 You're definitely someone who's leading the charge on a lot of this stuff.

Speaker 7 And I'm glad that you were willing to stick with me and finally get this interview done because I always love our conversations.

Speaker 7 And I'm always just trying to keep up with you from a content and marketing standpoint.

Speaker 6 So I will tell you this, though, what you did to me, I've actually been doing to Jamie Pierce. I owe him an interview.

Speaker 7 Well, dude, thank you so much.

Speaker 7 Wish you nothing but the best.

Speaker 6 Thanks, man.

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