RHS 072 - 7 Ways to Prospect and Close More Commercial Accounts

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Speaker 2 In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home.

Speaker 2 Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Show.

Speaker 5 Today we have a different kind of episode in so much as this was actually a webinar that I did for Zywave. So Zywave puts on webinars for, I think, the general public, maybe just Zywave clients.

Speaker 5 But either way, we had about 200 people on the webinar, which was very cool. It was lots of great questions, as you'll hear during the webinar.

Speaker 5 But I thought the topic was super relevant and it breaks down a lot of the things that I am doing right now to grow Rogue Risk.

Speaker 5 Now, not all all of the processes that I described are completely baked out and completely running in fifth gear, but I will tell you that these are the directions that I am taking Rogue.

Speaker 5 They're the channels that I'm working to drive business into Rogue Risk.

Speaker 5 And it was just a lot of fun to share them with the audience. And then obviously they were asking questions and I was answering them on the webinar.
And it's just highly informational.

Speaker 5 And Zywave was nice enough to allow me to take the audio from it and push it out to you guys. And I think you're going to get a lot from it.
So, I want to give a shout out to Zywave.

Speaker 5 I want to give a shout out to

Speaker 5 April Larson from their team who kind of put this together for me. And just say thank you to them.
And hopefully, you guys enjoy what was a very, very tactical,

Speaker 5 very fast-paced webinar that I think you're going to get a lot out of.

Speaker 5 So, I'd get a pen and pencil ready, or you may have to listen to this one a couple of times, which is okay because that drives my podcast numbers up.

Speaker 5 So then I can take those podcast numbers and shove them in Bradley Flowers, Scott Howell, and Jason Cass's face as we all compete for who has the top podcast, though.

Speaker 5 I think I'm losing handily to the two of them. But either way, you're going to enjoy this podcast.
Get ready. Here we go.

Speaker 6 Speaking today, we have Ryan Hanley, the founder of Rogue Risk and host of the Ryan Hanley Show podcast series. And with that, I will hand it over to Ryan.

Speaker 7 Well, thank you.

Speaker 7 It's a pleasure to be here with everybody. And we're going to run through

Speaker 7 a bunch of different methodologies that I use both in my agency as well as some of the agents that I network with from around the country.

Speaker 7 So we'll be talking about some things both that I'm doing, but also some case studies and ideas from other agencies.

Speaker 7 So it's not just my agency, agencies of all different sizes, some new to commercial, some that have been

Speaker 7 prospecting commercial lines, pretty much everything from middle market down to, you know, the 500 bop range. And you can pick any of these topics.

Speaker 7 It looks like someone is saying that they can't hear anything. Can everyone put into the chat whether you can hear or not?

Speaker 7 Because someone just posted that they couldn't hear. And I want to make sure that everyone can.
Okay.

Speaker 7 So

Speaker 7 we got a, I can hear fine. Okay, good.
So thank you, David. Thank you, Ryan.

Speaker 7 So whoever cannot hear, that's a technical difficulty. So, okay, so getting back on track.
Guys, so here's basically the deal.

Speaker 7 The things that we're going to be talking about now, Ken, glad you're back in business, my man.

Speaker 7 So the things we're going to be talking about pretty much work from middle market down to the $500 bops that are going to come in.

Speaker 7 It's not, I'm not going to say, well, this only works in small commercial or this only works in middle market. These are tactics and techniques and kind of methodologies that span that range.

Speaker 7 If you're going beyond that, to kind of enterprise-level stuff,

Speaker 7 that's not a world that I play in or really my network.

Speaker 7 So, we're thinking middle market and middle market, from my perspective, just to kind of give you some ideas, say, is 150 to 300-ish thousand in premium.

Speaker 7 So, that would be middle market, and then anything below that would be more of the small market stuff.

Speaker 7 So,

Speaker 7 let's get into these

Speaker 7 tactics. And hopefully, I can figure out how to, there we go.
All right, so this is what we're going to talk about.

Speaker 7 So, first, we're going to just briefly talk about my background, give you a little feel for who I am. Um, if you've listened to the podcast, then that part will probably be boring for you.

Speaker 7 If you don't listen to my podcast, then uh, hopefully, this will just give you some context on where I'm coming from and why I've chosen these particular items is what I feel can drastically increase the both volume of prospects, the quality of prospects that we're bringing into our agencies, and ultimately deliver more closed business on a consistent basis.

Speaker 7 Because that's really the key. I mean, my agency, RoBrisk,

Speaker 7 was born on March 9th of 2020. So my actual agency ownership is relatively young, though I've been in the business for about 15 years.

Speaker 7 And what I've learned over those 15 years, not just in the last seven months, but over those 15 years, is that the key to our business is consistency.

Speaker 7 It's those drastic upswings and downswings that start to cause problems.

Speaker 7 Gaps form in our business. We develop bad habits.

Speaker 7 We make poor decisions because maybe we get overwhelmed with a huge upswing of business because we're focused on prospecting for a little while. We get overwhelmed.
We stop prospecting.

Speaker 7 Then we get that valley. Maybe we make some bad decisions in that valley.
We spend some money in places that

Speaker 7 do not actually produce results. And, you know, and then this cycle just perpetuates.

Speaker 7 So what I am trying to do with Rogue and what I've seen work both over my previous producer career and with the tens of thousands of agencies that I've spent time with now

Speaker 7 is consistency is the key. Can you find out of this list the one or two items that you are going to be consistent with?

Speaker 7 And that's all I'm going to ask is that between cold calls, cold emails, postcards, LinkedIn, automations, video content, and thank you letters and gifting, we could say thank yous and gifting.

Speaker 7 If you can pick one or two of those items and focus in on them over the next six months, I promise you you will start to see consistent results. I absolutely promise you that you will.

Speaker 7 So don't think, oh,

Speaker 7 I can never do all these things. I don't expect you to.

Speaker 7 I don't do all these things um i i do most of them though you know i've kind of built my business around this and i'm also in the prospecting phase of my business right it's not a whole lot of service requests in your first year so so i have a little more time but um

Speaker 7 you know if you if you aren't doing any of these and you can just pick one or two and really dial in on them really focus in on them um you're gonna see uh you're gonna start to see real results and then what happens from that is and and and uh

Speaker 7 then you can start to add in the other ones where it makes sense. And we'll talk about how they all fit together and what a kind of a unified strategy or combined strategy might look like.

Speaker 7 But these are the items, cold calls, cold emails, postcards LinkedIn, automation, video content, and thank yous and gifting.

Speaker 7 And then we're going to close by talking about video proposals because I think it's an important topic for us to discuss today.

Speaker 7 Not just in a COVID world, but in a post-COVID world.

Speaker 7 I think video proposals are a tremendous tool for a bunch of different reasons.

Speaker 7 Even if you prefer face-to-face, even if that's still where your customers want to close the deal, I think video proposals can play an important role. And if you are

Speaker 7 have personal lines as a portion of your business, as a significant portion of your business or a portion of your business that you want to grow, I think video proposals are almost

Speaker 7 an absolute must. They're part of the personal lines

Speaker 7 process today.

Speaker 7 That's my, I know there's a lot of agencies that still don't use them, but I do think the agencies that are growing the fastest, that are building fences around their clients in personal lines are using video proposals.

Speaker 7 So we are going to talk commercial the rest of the way out.

Speaker 7 And to that effect, I'll tell you a little bit about who I am and what I do.

Speaker 7 Those weird

Speaker 7 white lines, I guess, are L's that didn't translate very well when I turned this into a PDF.

Speaker 7 And also, so you guys know, I'll be sending the folks at Zywave this PDF. And I don't care if

Speaker 7 they send it to you and you can have it. So don't feel like you need to chicken scratch this down real fast.

Speaker 7 This is happy to share this and anyone can have it. It's fine.
So this kind of outline is just the about page for Rogue Risk. My career started 15 years ago.

Speaker 8 I

Speaker 7 found a young lady who I cared about very much and wanted to marry. And in asking for her hand in marriage,

Speaker 7 the price that I had to pay in exchange was my father-in-law kind of sat me down in high leather back chairs during a Christmas Eve party of all things. So

Speaker 7 kind of this,

Speaker 7 even though they're not Italian, like mafioso style scene, and kind of made me, you know, said, hey, you know, if you're going to be part of this family, we really want you to come and sell insurance for our agency, which was called the Gildalin Agency at the time.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 as much as I said yes for no other reason other than I wanted to marry, she's still my wife today, you know, all these years later, even though I

Speaker 7 wanted,

Speaker 7 I said yes because I wanted to marry her.

Speaker 7 You know, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

Speaker 7 What ended up being the case was I was absolutely blessed. My father-in-law is a tremendous agency owner, tremendous salesman.

Speaker 7 And even though our styles are different at a macro level, at a micro level, his focus on value and consistency and quality and caring for clients and always doing the right thing, regardless of

Speaker 7 what that might mean

Speaker 7 on a short-term basis,

Speaker 7 set the bedrock for my own career. I did that for eight years.

Speaker 7 At the end of those eight years, unfortunately, for a bunch of different reasons, that single location, family-owned business, me being the son-in-law, there was never really going to be a place beyond being a producer,

Speaker 7 which was fine,

Speaker 7 which was fine. I was offered the opportunity to become the chief marketing officer of trustedchoice.com.

Speaker 7 I went on to build the agency nation platform, put on Elevate 2017, 2018, built a tremendous community there, lots of great relationships.

Speaker 7 Went on from there to become the chief marketing officer of Bold Penguin, which is an insure tech company that does a lot of different things.

Speaker 7 And at that point, unfortunately, my brother-in-law, who had been a big part of the family agency, he came down with a form of terminal cancer, which forced me to move home. I was traveling a lot.

Speaker 7 Bold Penguin is based in Columbus. I live in Albany, New York.
And so I left the insurance industry in 2017 and joined 2018, something like that.

Speaker 7 I joined,

Speaker 7 I left there to move home because I had to be home for the family, which was fine,

Speaker 7 which was fine. That's what you do.
But

Speaker 7 I became the CEO. I took the next best thing that I could find.
And in the Albany area, there's not a tremendous amount of insurance opportunity.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 I took the next best thing I could find, which was become the CEO of a fitness franchise of all things.

Speaker 7 So I ran a 15-person team, $3 million business. We had six locations.

Speaker 7 We grew the membership from 2,000 members to 3,000 members, which was absolutely awesome. It was a great experience, even though I did miss insurance quite a bit, which is an odd thing to say.
And

Speaker 7 unfortunately, at that point, the founder of that business who had hired me because he didn't like being the business guy,

Speaker 7 he saw what was going on and all the growth and decided that he wanted to be the business guy again. And when that happened, there really wasn't a place for me.
And

Speaker 7 I was fired on the spot at 8.36 a.m. on a Monday in October.

Speaker 7 Actually, October 6th marked the one-year anniversary of that very interesting day in my life. But it was from the walk

Speaker 7 from being canned to my truck that I decided it was time to start this agency that I'd been mapping out for years. And that's where Rogue Risk came from.

Speaker 7 The idea behind Rogue Risk, and I promise I'll finish this up so we can get the tactics, but I do think some of this context helps set the stage for the advice that I'm going to lay out for you.

Speaker 7 The context or

Speaker 7 the core value of Rogue Risk is marrying the

Speaker 7 traditional

Speaker 7 deep relational and caring aspects of the agency life that I learned from my father-in-law with the digital tools and technology and experience that I learned was possible and helped implement in agencies through trusted choice and my experience at Bold Penguin and really even the digital experience that we were delivering for the fitness franchise.

Speaker 7 So

Speaker 7 I call it a human optimized agency.

Speaker 7 I'm efforting. We're nowhere near there.
We're seven months in and I self-fund rogue. It's not like I got some...
somebody handing me millions of bucks.

Speaker 7 So we're, it's an effort. Every day we're getting better.

Speaker 7 So I don't want you to think that any of the things that we're going to talk about today, I have fully figured out and implemented and that it's perfect. That's not the case.

Speaker 7 So, you know, there is an aspirational aspect to all of this.

Speaker 7 And I'll be completely transparent in the places that we're doing well and it's working in the places where we personally are failing, but I'm seeing success in other agencies.

Speaker 7 So the context here, the concept is this human-optimized agency, that there are aspects of our business which do not drive value

Speaker 7 to our customers, right? They're transactional things. They're the bar.
They're expected. Car changes.
A car change is an expected service. If you mess a car change up, you did something wrong.

Speaker 7 If you get a car change right and everything happens, they do not care. That is,

Speaker 7 it is a reality of our business. And for that reason, when our people,

Speaker 7 the humans in our office are spending their time on car changes, at least our most valuable people,

Speaker 7 the hourly, and I don't want to say value, like that probably sounds bad, but the people who we are paying the most to, the people who have the highest hourly wage, they should not be spending time on low-value transactional areas of the business.

Speaker 7 So, what we're trying to do at Rogue every day,

Speaker 7 and

Speaker 7 what I advocate for is

Speaker 7 automating the aspects of our business business that our customers don't see as valuable so that the humans can spend time on the things in which our customers do see valuable.

Speaker 7 I'm not talking about removing humans altogether. That's bananas.
The humans are the most important part of our business.

Speaker 7 All I'm saying is we have allowed ourselves to be dragged down by simple transactional items that should not be handled by

Speaker 7 our in-office staff. There are VAs,

Speaker 7 there are literally systems that can do these things for us.

Speaker 7 And these are some of the things that we're going to talk about today, or some of the things that I'm trying to do in my agency.

Speaker 7 Today we're talking specifically about prospecting, but that's the idea, human-optimized agency, allowing our humans to deliver the most value possible.

Speaker 7 If one of my customer service people is not doing a car change, that frees them up to have five more minutes on the phone with that person when they call to ask about their family, to find other lines of business that we could potentially write, to maybe get a referral out of them or ask for a rating and review or just develop more rapport and build higher fences around those clients.

Speaker 7 But if they're shuttling them off the phone as quickly as they possibly can go, because they know that a stack of tasks in the agency management system they have to get to, then

Speaker 7 you're not optimizing their value. So that's the core concept behind Rogue.
I'm not going to say we're there yet, but we are on the way.

Speaker 7 I have a VA and I have a personal lines producer today, and we are optimizing a lot of those processes as best we can.

Speaker 7 So, with that, again, guys, if you have any questions about any of this stuff, even if it's not prospecting and closing-related, put them in the chat. We're going to get to them at the end.

Speaker 7 I promise I'll answer all your questions.

Speaker 7 But that's what I'm trying to do, and who I am. And I guess the other piece of it is the podcast.
I do the podcast

Speaker 7 because I think it's important that we have these conversations And I bring people in and we talk about what they're doing to figure this stuff out because

Speaker 7 I am rarely,

Speaker 7 probably more like never, the smartest person in the room. I just listen and I learn and I take it in.
And

Speaker 7 if I can share with others, that's what this is all about. That's why I'm here today.
So, okay, with all that, let's get on to...

Speaker 7 to some tactics, some strategies, some tools that we can use to prospect and close more Commercial Lines business. All right.
So why commercial lines? I think it's pretty obvious.

Speaker 7 Commercial lines, it's confusing, it's time consuming, it's costly, right? We, you know, we want to solve that problem.

Speaker 7 That's our tagline at Rogue. Insurance is confusing, time-consuming, and costly.
We solve this problem.

Speaker 7 Probably should be, I'll go back and forth whether that should be we solve these problems or we solve this problem. I'm kind of batching all those things into one problem.

Speaker 7 Let me know in the chat whether you think it should be these problems or this problem.

Speaker 7 That would be interesting to find out. But on my website, it's this problem.
I think ultimately, in commercial lines, this is the undiscovered country. This is where the opportunity lies.

Speaker 7 Is that your prospects that are sitting out there, and most likely some of your customers too,

Speaker 7 they either believe that their insurance is confusing and they don't understand it. They believe it takes way too much time, or they think it costs too much.

Speaker 7 And I think we spend a lot of time on the cost part, not enough on the time-consuming or confusing part, but ultimately,

Speaker 7 those three levers make up

Speaker 7 where the opportunity lies in commercial lines. In personal lines,

Speaker 7 I think there's an equal set here, but personal lines is being deluged by direct writers, by highly automated, independent agents,

Speaker 7 by some of our carrier partners who are offering direct services.

Speaker 7 There is a lot of competition there. In commercial, there is still

Speaker 7 blue ocean. And And for that reason, being able to solve these problems in the commercial line space between all the way from small market to middle market, there's blue ocean opportunities out there.

Speaker 7 And that's why specifically I think dialing in on commercial lines for this presentation was important to me. So

Speaker 7 prospecting and lead lists.

Speaker 7 It's very important to understand who are we prospecting? Like, who are we going after? Why did you choose the individuals?

Speaker 7 Are you just like driving down the road looking at signs and writing them down? I mean,

Speaker 7 I don't know plenty of agencies that do that. When I started back in 2006 or whatever it was, 2005,

Speaker 7 I was doing the same thing. I was literally driving to strip plazas with a pocket full of business cards and just walking in and dropping business cards on desks and asking who the owner was.

Speaker 7 That's one way to build a lead list. I don't think it's the most optimized way today, but it's certainly one way.

Speaker 7 There are so many tools to find not just a list of customers, but

Speaker 7 a list of qualified customers, of the customers that you actually want. And the way to get there is

Speaker 7 just what you see in front of you. So first, Zywave, just to plug them in their tool, MyEdge is a great resource.

Speaker 7 Obviously, the information is specific to the state.

Speaker 7 All the states give different information at different times, but I'll tell you that MyEdge is a tremendous tool for New York and the Northeast and the states that I prospect in, which are basically Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and all points north and east, with my primary state being New York.

Speaker 7 MyEdge has been a great tool. It helps me specifically find opportunities and property because they have a lot of property.

Speaker 7 A lot of the property information is on there that you're not going to get in other databases, as well as who the owners are.

Speaker 7 Sometimes it's very obvious who the owners are if you go to their website or whatever.

Speaker 7 And other times, depending on the size of the business and how the owner is set it up and if it's a corporation or not, sometimes it's tough to figure out exactly who the decision maker is in that business.

Speaker 7 And I have found MyEdge to be a very good resource for that.

Speaker 7 I also use,

Speaker 7 because

Speaker 7 New York State is tough with X states, I use insurance X dates to get the workers' comp X date for customers. So insurance X dates for my, insurance X dates also doesn't have X dates for every state.

Speaker 7 So again, you have to kind of, like my buddy Adam Sheridan, insurance X states doesn't work for him in Kentucky. It doesn't have the information he needs.
So he actually uses LexisNexis. But

Speaker 7 you have to kind of, I would look at all these tools and figure out the ones that have the crosscut of information for your state, for your line of business that work and dial it in.

Speaker 7 There is a little bit of,

Speaker 7 yeah, so very good question. Are my edge and X states redundant?

Speaker 7 Completely depends on um what you're going after and what states you're in so in some states 100 redundant in other states they're not redundant it just depends like in new york my edge doesn't have x dates yet when it does then then insurance x dates will become redundant because i i my edge has more of the other data um

Speaker 7 so it all just depends it all just depends on where you are but i would certainly i would literally go through this list in this order to get to your lead list so reference usa which is free if if you have a library card, is a great place to get lists.

Speaker 7 Again, it's not going to have X dates.

Speaker 7 The information sometimes can be outdated, but it's a great place to verify. And it does have some additional stuff.

Speaker 7 Trade Association websites, again, now you're, you know, even reducing the amount of information you're getting.

Speaker 7 But if you go to the, you know, a lot of trade associations will list out their members. That's another place to get a good lead list.
And then you can always just use the Almighty Google

Speaker 7 as well. So

Speaker 7 if you have VAs, this is a great task to stick them on.

Speaker 7 So what I have my VA do is pull workers' comp X dates for the classes that I like to prospect, put them into a Google Doc, then go into MyEdge, pull all the information that Insurance X Dates doesn't have.

Speaker 7 And then we actually use a tool called hunter.io to find email addresses if there's no, if there's not a good email in InsuranceX Dates or MyEdge. So that's hunter.io.
It's a Chrome extension.

Speaker 7 It's also a website. And basically you put a URL in and it pulls all the emails associated with that URL that it can find on the interweb.
It's actually a really, it's a super valuable tool.

Speaker 7 And the free version, I've never had to pay. I've never done enough searches that I've had to pay.

Speaker 7 But you, you know, you can buy as many searches as you need. I think you get 50 or 100 a month.
So those are some really good ways to build. uh lead lists

Speaker 7 if you have any more questions about that again just pop them in the q a i got the q a up here so i'm kind of watching as the questions come in and we'll we'll try to answer in real time unless i feel like it's not particularly irrelevant um it's okay so let's get on to some of these things cold calling everybody hates cold calling i hate cold calling i have to be honest with you um i got i got a a buddy who helps me he's kind of a coach and a mentor um his name's nick hunt He owns a company called Premier Strategy Box.

Speaker 7 They do producer training and sales training. He was actually on the podcast recently.
If you want to learn about him, and he'll text me every day, how many cold calls did you make today?

Speaker 7 And if my answer is zero, he will then question my manhood for the next 10 or 15 minutes until I start making cold calls.

Speaker 7 And the reason that I appreciate that he does that is because I'm not one of those guys or people, I guess, who just loves the cold call or can just take down that wall.

Speaker 7 Like I, it bopped, like it really. It just bugs me.
I don't like making cold calls. But at the same time, logically, I know how important they are to our success.

Speaker 7 They absolutely, positively work, especially in a COVID and I think in a post-COVID world, picking up the phone and introducing yourself, not being

Speaker 7 a nudge, not being, you know, you have to be, you have to come in confidently. You have to have a plan of attack.

Speaker 7 But if you have those,

Speaker 7 you can start some good relationships. And again, one of the things, so, so here, here's kind of my best practices, you you know, create a script, short, short script, super, super short.

Speaker 7 A block time to do it.

Speaker 7 So John Hunter, Hunter, like H-U-N-T-E-R dot I-O. The letters I-O is the website.

Speaker 7 So create a script, block the time on your calendar, because otherwise you will absolutely positively let that time get eaten up.

Speaker 7 Make the calls, right? Actually, when the time hits your calendar and it's time to cold call as much as you don't want to, make the calls. Now, some of you are sitting there going,

Speaker 7 some of you are sitting there going, Well, I just make the calls, it's all good. God bless you, absolutely, positively, God bless you for being able to make those calls.

Speaker 7 I struggle with it every single day. I'm getting better,

Speaker 7 but I still struggle with it. I find that tracking works.
I use a kind of bullet journal-esque style of tracking tracking

Speaker 7 where I track, I actually track five prospecting activities every single day. I'm holding up my hand for five.
I don't know if you can see me or not, but

Speaker 7 those are cold calls, cold emails, postcards sent, thank you letters sent, and LinkedIn DMs sent. Those are my five prospecting activities.

Speaker 7 I don't do all of them every day, but I track them on a day-to-day basis. And then I actually have a spreadsheet that I put them in to track over time my prospecting activity.

Speaker 7 And then ultimately, I want to track that prospecting activity against my sales activity to see, to try to come up with some correlations.

Speaker 7 I mean, obviously there's a fairly simple assumption that if you prospect more, you're going to write more business, which is great. But if I can attach

Speaker 7 a type of prospecting to an outcome, that will help me. And then ultimately, what I want to get to is I teach someone else how to do all this.

Speaker 7 And then I can run my agency and someone else has to make the cold calls because I don't want to have to make the cold calls forever. I hate making the cold calls.
So,

Speaker 8 um,

Speaker 7 so track results. And the last thing, and this is like, so I learned this from a guy by the name of Josh Braun.
J-O-S-H-B-R-A-U-N.

Speaker 7 Go to joshbraun.com. He's a sales trainer guy.
He has nothing to do with insurance.

Speaker 7 I found him on LinkedIn. He's a great follow on LinkedIn.
J-O-S-H, Josh Braun, B-R-A-U-N.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 he has a course that I paid like $175 for forever. And it has

Speaker 7 cold call scripts, cold call examples, cold emails, LinkedIn, tons of stuff around prospecting.

Speaker 7 But it's very tactful. It's very real world.
It's very like a real business person talking to a real business person, not this crazy salesy stuff with all this.

Speaker 7 gimmicky nonsense that some of these people say to like grab someone's attention that like i wouldn't want to do business with someone who says some wacky thing on the phone just to get my attention like i don't know that this is not who i am so i really like him i've used it put his a lot of a lot of his stuff into practice and i know a couple people are asking about um the script i'll share with you i'll just read you my script i'm happy to send you this google doc it's literally like two sentences long just just the opener but i got all of my material for this for the most part uh mick has helped me a little bit um helped me refine some of it to insurance, but the high-level ideas and the stuff that I talk about even with my personal lines producer,

Speaker 7 and that I will probably use to train the first commercial lines producer that I bring into this place is from Josh Braun. I just think his stuff is the best and it's so practical.

Speaker 7 And for like, like I said, it's like $175 for the year

Speaker 7 to have access to all this material. And it's so much material.

Speaker 7 I think it's a no-brainer. So that would be my thing.
So my script goes something like this. Person picks up the phone.
Let's see, who's over here asking questions? Kevin Duffy. Okay, Kevin.

Speaker 7 So I would say, hi, Kevin. You and I haven't spoken before.
Can I have 45 seconds to tell you why I called? Kevin says, no, no problem, man. I'll try it another time.
That's it.

Speaker 7 You're not trying to harass the person. This isn't wedge your foot in the door kind of stuff.
You're trying to do business with this person for a long time.

Speaker 7 Like really the cold call, you're just trying to use the cold call as a way to

Speaker 7 use the cold call as a way to start a conversation. That's it.
I'm not trying to close a deal on this call. I'm literally just trying to get to the next call.
That's it. That's the whole goal of this.

Speaker 7 That's why it's so short. I'm literally just trying to get to the next call.
I'm not trying to close the business. I'm not trying to get policy docs.

Speaker 7 This is call one of, who knows, maybe 15 calls to get this guy as a client or person as a client. Okay.
But in this case, this guy is Kevin. All right.
Hi, Kevin. You and I haven't spoken before.

Speaker 7 Can I have 45 seconds to tell you why I called? You can also say, hi, Kevin. This is a cold call.
I hope you're okay with that. It's only going to take 45 seconds.
Can I explain why I called?

Speaker 7 You know, the idea is let them know that you're not trying to fool them into thinking that you're calling for any other reason than

Speaker 7 to introduce yourself. Like, that's the, you know, break down those barriers.
Okay. So the pitch, let's assume they say, yes, I have the 45 seconds or whatever.
Thank you.

Speaker 7 The reason for my call is that my business, Rogue Risk, is showing business owners and decision makers a lesser known approach to their workers' compensation insurance that reduces injuries, saves time, and puts cash back into your bottom line.

Speaker 7 Would you be opposed to learning more sometime in the next week about this program? That's it. If they say no, they wouldn't be opposed, right? Then, boom, I just say, great.
How does Monday at 2 p.m.

Speaker 7 sound? Awesome, right? And

Speaker 7 actually, now,

Speaker 7 I guess some people still are super freaked out by COVID for a good reason. That's not a political statement.
I am not freaked out by COVID.

Speaker 7 So I do try to say, if you're comfortable, I would love to come in and sit with you. And if they say, hey, no,

Speaker 7 I'm freaked out by COVID, no problem at all. We can do it by Zoom or phone call, whatever, no big deal.
So

Speaker 7 that's it. That's the whole call.
That's the whole deal. That's it.
And if they say, if they want some more information, well, hey, can I get some more information? Well, then I have more information.

Speaker 7 You know, then it's, you know, we're, I have a whole thing. I call it Rogue Risk 365.
And that's a whole nother thing. We're spending a lot of time on cold calling, but

Speaker 7 this works. This absolutely works.
If I could have an army of

Speaker 7 killers, men and women who just want to make calls, and, you know,

Speaker 7 cold calling, good prospecting list, and then

Speaker 7 a solid service team behind them, you make them freaking rich. I mean, how many of you guys have gotten there this way? I mean, this is the deal.
It's just cold calling is the worst.

Speaker 7 It's just the worst. It's just the way it is.
So, and if you can remove yourself from the outcome, that's been the biggest change for me.

Speaker 7 And this is the last thing I'll say, maybe from all this stuff, from everything else we're going to talk about.

Speaker 7 This is one of the most important parts of prospecting for me when I was prospecting carriers to sell them

Speaker 7 subscriptions or advertising to trusted choice. When I was prospecting back at my old agency, when I was prospecting for

Speaker 7 new vendor clients or putting together pitches for group plans for the fitness place

Speaker 7 or pitching carriers to become part of Bold Penguin or pitching new workers' comp client. Workers' comp is one of the focuses here.
It's one of my specialties. Or workers' comp clients for Rogue Risk.

Speaker 7 Detach yourself from the outcome.

Speaker 7 So much easier said than done.

Speaker 7 I had major cold call hesitation today, and I only did five calls this morning, which means I have 15 more to do after this webinar because I couldn't detach myself from the the outcome.

Speaker 7 I got five, like, kind of not good calls in a row, just people weren't interested. And it's really hard not to be like,

Speaker 7 man, I'm a loser. Um, but if you can detach yourself from that and be like, ah, those people weren't a good fit today.

Speaker 7 Let's do the next 15. And in the days when I can get my mind to that place, that's when I'm going to crush.
And in days like today, I don't crush. And that's okay.

Speaker 7 I try not to hold myself accountable. So, so take that under consideration for all the things that we're going to talk about moving forward.
All right. So we feel good about cold calling.

Speaker 7 Hopefully, we do. Josh Braun, he's the dude that I look to, and

Speaker 7 I think it's money well spent in his program. Okay, and I don't, obviously, don't have any financial interest in that.
Just kind of full disclosure. So, all right, let's keep let's keep cruising here.

Speaker 7 Um, let me get back in here. Cold email.
Similar thought process, similar thought process to cold calls.

Speaker 7 You're going to get an even, you're going to get a lower hit rate, but it's a really good way to warm people up.

Speaker 7 Or if you make a call and say you leave someone a voicemail and then you get a cold email behind it, automations work great for this. I use better agency as my automation tool.

Speaker 7 I like it.

Speaker 7 It's not perfect for commercial yet, but it's getting there.

Speaker 7 I do think it's the best CRM that exists for personal lines. So if you have a personal lines book of business, there's literally nothing better.
For commercial lines,

Speaker 7 it's still, you know, they're still working on commercial lines. But any CRM automation tool will work.
This is tool agnostic. It doesn't matter.
The key to cold email is do your research.

Speaker 7 These are maybe a little out of order. Do your research.

Speaker 7 Don't just blast 5,000 people.

Speaker 7 That's a silly strategy. That is,

Speaker 7 it's not going to work. It's just not going to work.
I promise you, I've done it. I wanted it to work.
I've said, no, if I just write the perfect email, then...

Speaker 7 a thousand of these 5,000 people are going to contact me and all my wildest dreams will come true.

Speaker 7 And that just doesn't happen. So the best way to do this is do your research, know a little bit about the person so you can tailor the cold email just a little bit.

Speaker 7 Now, you can do this with merge tags, which means like you can have an automated email and then have like two or three different fields that you can fill in about the client so that, or the prospect, so that the email does feel very personalized, but do that work.

Speaker 7 Make it slightly more personalized than just their first name and their business, because then it looks like you did the research. You're trying to differentiate differentiate yourself.

Speaker 7 So short messages, short messages. This isn't an essay contest.
It could be the perfect cold email is the one that the person responds to.

Speaker 7 So you got to test, but I'm telling you, shorter, better, shorter, better.

Speaker 7 Be targeted just like everything else for your research. Add value.
The first cold email could be a PDF that you put together. I'll tell you a great strategy.
Go

Speaker 7 if you're not subscribed to Broker Briefcase, subscribe to Broker Briefcase, pull together a list of their resources. They even have some PDFs and stuff.

Speaker 7 Brand them to yourself, make them your own, and then give that away as a free touch point in, you know what I mean, to get the person's interest. Say, hey, I have this resource.
It's three pages on

Speaker 7 how to, I don't know,

Speaker 7 better

Speaker 7 add a safety functionality to your commercial auto program to decrease the number of accents you have. That's absolutely horrible example, but something to that effect.
It could be EPLI.

Speaker 7 It could be whatever. A cyber is a good one.
Give them something for free. Here, here's some value.
Here's how you do it yourself. Boom.
They're going to,

Speaker 7 the simple fact that you're giving it away is going to differentiate you in people's minds. And then the next phase is going to be just,

Speaker 7 you know, then you can see, you know, most CRMs are going to let you know who clicked on it, who downloaded it, whatever. And then you can do another reach out to those people.

Speaker 7 Hey, I saw you downloaded our cyber email, our cyber thing. What questions did you have? Why did you do it?

Speaker 7 What's going on that you would download our cyber PDF? And

Speaker 7 that's a great way. Now, again, that's how you start to batch these things together, cold email.
Now maybe you don't do a follow-up email, you do a follow-up call.

Speaker 7 So you have your sales team watching and you send out these targeted emails, drip, drip, drip. And

Speaker 7 then when someone clicks on one of the links and downloads the PDF, the next day or an hour later, hour later is a little creepy. Maybe the next day is a good one.
You'll have to test that too.

Speaker 7 But then you just have someone from your team reach out and say, hey, saw you, you know, you opened our email, you downloaded that cyber PDF. What made you do that? Like, what's going on?

Speaker 7 Did you have an incident?

Speaker 7 Do you have an employee that's doing something weird? Do you have, did you start adding a new data set to your company that makes you a little nervous, or just you read an article?

Speaker 7 Like, how can we help? So that's a great way. Zywave, if you

Speaker 7 wave has the ability to do some cold emailing.

Speaker 7 email if you if you if you want a tool that's specifically designed for cold email mail shake m-a-i-l shake like uh

Speaker 7 like shaking something um

Speaker 7 mail shake is a great cold email tool it's specific it's what it's specifically designed to do and the good thing about mail shake that i like is it um

Speaker 7 uh it protects your domain. It really, it makes sure that you don't get put on a spam list or it works.

Speaker 7 The system is specifically designed to make sure you don't get put on a spam list when you're cold emailing. So Mailshake is a great tool for that.
Okay. Cold email.
Awesome. Postcards.

Speaker 7 Hard mail works. I use a tool called thanks.io.

Speaker 7 I build postcards in Canva. I upload those designs to thanks.io.
And then I have a Zapier Zap.

Speaker 7 If you don't know what Zapier is,

Speaker 7 it basically connects different tools. I'm not going to go deeper than that on this thing.
You can ask the question if you're particularly interested or it doesn't make any sense to you.

Speaker 7 But the idea is when I add a prospect and better agency, I will add a tag,

Speaker 7 like month one of my workers comp prospecting campaign. And that tag sends a message to Zappy or to thanks.io that says, send postcard one to this client.
And boom, a postcard goes out.

Speaker 7 It warms the calls up. So then, you know, a couple of days later, I get a task in my task list that says, Call this account.

Speaker 7 Now, the postcard's already gone out, I've given it enough time to be delivered. Now, I can call and say, Hey, I sent you a postcard about your premium audit.

Speaker 7 I know you just renewed, but most of the time, agents do not follow up on premium audits.

Speaker 7 They're not going and getting the auditor's worksheet and matching it to the audit bill, making sure that there's no discrepancies or errors.

Speaker 7 Even though you're not currently my client, I'd be happy to do it for you. It's what I do.
Boom.

Speaker 7 Yes, April. Although the word dongle has oddly sexual connotations, which make me feel uncomfortable, I do think that that is a great way to describe it.

Speaker 8 All right.

Speaker 7 So hard mail works. Again, there is an expense to it.
A way, if you're looking to kind of blanket the market on thanks.io, it does have a cost, obviously.

Speaker 7 If you want to go the most cost-efficient way to blanket the market with a message, every door direct mail through the u.s postal service is the best way to do it you basically target specific routes and um and then you can say i want just the residential or just the business addresses on this route and and that's a way to go about it so um there's more to

Speaker 7 direct mail but postcards and mail letters absolutely work if you want to be super gangster handwritten letters that takes time um but there's all kinds of different ways but mail works again it's you never know which touch point is going to turn on on the customer.

Speaker 7 You just don't. So if you're only doing something one way, you know, this isn't, you know, Bruce Lee said, you know, I'm not scared of the ninja that knows how to do every kick.

Speaker 7 I'm scared of the ninja who does the same kick 5,000 times a day or whatever.

Speaker 7 That's not true when it comes to prospecting because there are clients, if you cold call me, you have very low probability of me saying yes to you.

Speaker 7 If you send me a really good email that catches me at the right time, you got a chance. If you slide into my, into my LinkedIn DMs, I'm going to bang, you know, no thank you.

Speaker 7 But then I have other people who are like, yeah, I look at DMs and stuff. So you're just never going to know.

Speaker 7 That's why you got to do, you know, you got to hit people in different ways as best you can. Okay.
LinkedIn, moving on.

Speaker 7 So LinkedIn, in my mind, is about being top of mind in your in your customers. And I'll give you a really good example of how this happened.

Speaker 9 So

Speaker 7 I work a lot of, have been working on building relationships with mortgage brokers.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 42 minutes in for my first sip of water. I think that's pretty good.

Speaker 7 So I've been working on building a relationship with mortgage brokers, which has been a really solid stream of personal lines or a growing solid stream of personal lines, which is why I ended up hiring the personal lines producer that I did.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 I just had a new mortgage broker reach out to me because of the content that I was putting on LinkedIn. And in particular, I put out a post that basically said, loan officers, dot dot dot dot,

Speaker 7 this, this piece of advice will make you look like a rock star in front of your first-time homebuyer clients or something like that. You can go check out my LinkedIn if you want.

Speaker 7 But basically, it was a quick video talking about,

Speaker 7 you know, that loan officers should tell their homebuyers about

Speaker 7 water backup coverage. I said, you know, it's tens of dollars, not hundreds of dollars.
It's a simple little coverage, but it's not a standard coverage on a homeowner's policy.

Speaker 7 And by you telling them that they should have this, that, you know, you look like, like a pros pro, like you're giving them some inside baseball that, you know, no one else is going to tell them.

Speaker 7 And they're buying something cheap, which does have a lot of value. I mean, we all know that when that happens, if they, the coverage is so cheap.

Speaker 7 And if they, if it wasn't on the policy, the client's pissed, you're pissed you didn't put it on there. So, you know, it is valuable information.

Speaker 7 It is a valuable coverage, but it's an easy ask and it makes them look great. So, so he reached out to me and he's like, you know, dude, I love what you're doing, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 7 And he sent me his first referral two days later.

Speaker 7 So I know that's a personalized example, but LinkedIn, you know, consistency, add value, share content, share your customers and clients, prospects content.

Speaker 7 Native video is tremendous opportunity on LinkedIn. And by native video, I mean hold up your cell phone camera, talk into it, and then post it on LinkedIn, right?

Speaker 7 The video that I just told you about was one one minute and one minute and 16 seconds. I did it from inside my garage while it was raining.

Speaker 7 And I literally said, hey, it's the rainy season in the northeast. You know, here's, you know, da, da, da, da.
And I said basically the stuff I just told you. And

Speaker 7 just uploaded it and just look, put a little, put a little caption on the text, off it went. And then later in the day, I think I reposted it to Facebook, but

Speaker 9 that's great.

Speaker 7 Here's the double secret sneaky trick for LinkedIn that you can use to get some awareness.

Speaker 7 So everybody knows that the LinkedIn messages or the DMs or whatever you want to call them are just awful, right? Like you just,

Speaker 7 you go into any of the Facebook groups, insurance Facebook groups, and you just see people bitching about LinkedIn messages all the time. And I get it, a lot of them are terrible.

Speaker 7 So if you want to stand out in that environment, because it is a good way to get in front of people, like I do have a lot of positive conversations there too, even though there are a lot of annoying conversations.

Speaker 7 A way to stand out is to use LinkedIn voicemail drops. So if you don't have any idea what I'm talking about, I'm about to blow your insurance mind.

Speaker 7 So on LinkedIn mobile, the mobile app, now you need to have a cell phone that has LinkedIn app on it. If you,

Speaker 7 sorry, most likely you all have that.

Speaker 7 So you go into LinkedIn. and you go to Mind Network or whatever and find one of your connections and click on their name like you're going to send them a message.

Speaker 7 And what you'll see is, I'm not sure if I can share my camera.

Speaker 7 April, can I share my camera? Is that possible?

Speaker 7 So people can see me. I just want to show them this thing that I should have taken a picture of.

Speaker 7 Let's see.

Speaker 7 Try that. Your screen is a little bit bigger, so go to us a try.
So if you can see this, you may not be able to because

Speaker 7 of the contrast or whatever, but where the message, where write a message is, and this is only in mobile, this isn't going to, you're not going to see this on your

Speaker 7 on your

Speaker 7 on your desktop. Next to that is a microphone.
Okay, next to that is a microphone. If you press that microphone down and you hold it, you can actually talk a voice message.

Speaker 7 And this is pretty common in Facebook now. Facebook Messenger has this.
Some of the texting apps have it. But you can hold the microphone down, talk in, and what it does is it leaves this blue line.

Speaker 7 You have up to a minute. It leaves this blue line and people can touch it.
And then it's a voice message. Well, nobody does this because all the spammers can't do it with the spamming software.

Speaker 7 So you immediately stand out by having this blue line in the message section. So like today, literally 15 minutes before we came on this show,

Speaker 7 I was hitting up

Speaker 7 loan officers in my area, and I say the same thing to every single one of them. I say,

Speaker 7 this woman's name is Mary.

Speaker 7 Hi, Mary. My name is Ryan.
We've never met in person, but we're connected here on LinkedIn. I just want to introduce myself.
I'm the founder and

Speaker 7 president of Rogue Risk, which is an independent insurance agency here in the area. And we specialize in real estate, homes, second homes, vacation homes.

Speaker 7 We do a lot of two families, multifamilies, even some apartment buildings, rental properties, stuff like that.

Speaker 7 But the reason I'm reaching out is because we specifically have a program for loan officers. And what this program does is it helps you capture refinances from your current clients.

Speaker 7 So let's say you write a loan and then that person six months, a year, 18 months later decides to go to rock and mortgage. God forbid.
We notify you that that's happening.

Speaker 7 And then you can jump in and save that load and build fences around your clients. It takes me like 10 minutes to show you this program.
It's super easy, but it's super powerful.

Speaker 7 And if you're interested, just let me know. Either way, I hope you're crushing Q4.
Have a great day. Boom.
That's about 57 seconds. It takes me about 57 seconds to say that.

Speaker 7 I do it over and over and over again. And what's the crazy part is three people have actually already responded to me from the messages that I've sent just the last two days.

Speaker 7 So you can do that for your prospects, for any line of business. If it's comp,

Speaker 7 if it's cyber, whatever you're going after, you just introduce yourself. Hey, we've never met in person, but we're connected here.
I just want to introduce myself.

Speaker 7 All you're trying to do is get to the next call, get to the next call, get to the next call. And eventually, one of those calls turns into, hey, man, take my check.
And

Speaker 7 that's what we're trying to do with all this stuff. I think LinkedIn is an incredible place to do it.
Okay, if you have questions about LinkedIn, drop them in the QA and we'll hit those up at the end.

Speaker 7 Automation.

Speaker 7 I'm not going to spend a ton of time here because this is like an

Speaker 7 entire episode or whatever of whatever this thing is called webinar that we could do just on automations. Here's what I'm going to tell you.
There is plenty of automation software.

Speaker 7 There's all kinds of automation software. Like I said, there's better agency.
There's agency revolution. There's whatever.
If you want to automate your

Speaker 7 Google reviews, there's rocket referrals. There's, you know, there's all these different tools.
Salesforce, HubSpot, Active Campaign, Infusionsoft. The tool you choose does not matter.

Speaker 7 The point of automation is to reduce the need to be typing out things that you can just automate, to hit people with multiple touch points in timeframes that you control.

Speaker 7 It also allows you as the agency owner, if you're an agency owner or the producer, to control the message. It means not every message is going out differently.

Speaker 7 You can also make sure things like typos don't exist because every message is standardized. And

Speaker 7 you can make them sound conversational and be standardized at the same time. You can help remove some of these valueless activities like retyping emails.

Speaker 7 You can ultimately get to more people through automation than you could if you were to do kind of hand-to-hand combat. And like I said, there's tons of different tools.

Speaker 7 Just so you guys know, I have no financial interest in better agency. It's just what I use.
That's why I talk to it. So

Speaker 7 Agency Zoom is another one. So

Speaker 7 yeah,

Speaker 7 automation is your friend. It can be nerve.
It can be not nerve-wracking. It can be frustrating.
It can be time consuming at first. If you have the resources, pay someone to help you.

Speaker 7 There are plenty of people that can do that.

Speaker 7 If you're super into it, spend the time, learn it, design it, match it to your value structure. It doesn't have to be some crazy thing that is completely different from the way that you operate today.

Speaker 7 You're digitizing the soul of your business. That's what automation is.
It's taking who you are as an agency and it's just digitizing it. Don't think about it any more than that.

Speaker 7 But it is incredibly important. It is absolutely part of the future.
And if you're in small commercial, like

Speaker 7 let's say, let's say $2,500 bops and below and in the corresponding coverages, you have to have automation to be profitable. Like that stuff is just not profitable unless you're using automation.
So

Speaker 7 automation. There we go.
We could go down a hole, grab a hole. Let's see.
Would love to have more details on the refi LinkedIn strategy market rocket mortgage fence post.

Speaker 7 That's my favorite comment so far.

Speaker 7 Buy more information.

Speaker 7 Just let me know what that looks like. Happy to help however I can.

Speaker 7 Video content. So, video content is a long play.
I'm going to give you some basics on video content, but you should be producing video content. And I know that sounds like very shallow advice.

Speaker 7 My reason for it it being shallow is I've been talking about producing video content since 2011.

Speaker 7 In 2020, if you're not doing video content, it is quite literally your own fault. Like you, you have not not heard this before.

Speaker 7 There's no, oh, I don't like the camera. Oh, I don't look good on video.
Those are those are excuses,

Speaker 7 not reasons.

Speaker 7 I just, I literally have no remorse for people who don't have an online presence but refuse to do video video content today because it's so easy.

Speaker 7 Your cell phone camera has a probably somewhere between an 11 and 15 megapixel camera on it. Like it's all right here.
It doesn't have to be great. I'm wearing a hoodie right now.

Speaker 7 I could crush some video content for commercial clients with this thing. I got a nice little backdrop here.
I got my lighting set up.

Speaker 7 You know, if I were doing this right, I'd have my light over here on. Bang.
Hey, how's it going, guys?

Speaker 7 You know, whatever you're going to say. I told you I just signed up.

Speaker 7 I just got a brand new mortgage referral partner who's going to probably send me somewhere between one and six referrals a month simply by doing a sideways video from my garage during a rainstorm and posting it on LinkedIn.

Speaker 7 This stuff works.

Speaker 8 Um,

Speaker 7 template the content, have the have it have a template. Don't recreate the wheel every time.
Time my name is this. Here's what we're talking about.

Speaker 7 You can, you, you know, I like to use uh a template where it's called a beginning hook. So, what's the issue?

Speaker 7 Loan officers, I'm going to give you a simple piece of advice that will make you look like a rock star in front of your new loan clients. Boom, that's the beginning hook.

Speaker 7 What's the middle build is I'm giving them the information, giving them the information.

Speaker 7 The ending payoff is, and whack, I'm going to make it so every one of those clients who does business with you never does business with anyone ever again. That's my refinance program.
Okay. So

Speaker 7 that's what I use. Templatize your content, Be consistent.
Track your results. Listen to your audience.
Now, I'm not talking about an audience like Joe Rogan has an audience.

Speaker 7 I'm saying listen to your audience, like any type of feedback that you get from clients, customers, people commenting, you know, how many views is something getting. Just watch those things.

Speaker 7 It doesn't have to be terribly strategic, but watch it and adjust courses you see necessary. And always, always, always, always, always have a call to action.

Speaker 7 That call to action doesn't always have to be buy insurance from me. It could be visit our website.
It could be check out our partner over here. It could be have a great day.

Speaker 7 It could be smash that like button. Always have a call to action.
Get people who watch your content used to

Speaker 7 doing something at the end of your video so that when your call to action is giving me a call to save you, you know, 15% and 15 minutes on your auto insurance, that I'm probably going to get sued for.

Speaker 7 plagiarism. Sorry, April.

Speaker 7 You, you, you know, they do it. That's the whole point.
Get them used to the call to action.

Speaker 8 Um, okay, let's keep rolling.

Speaker 7 Thank you letters and gifts. Say thank you, people.
Please say thank you to people. If the world needs anything today, it needs more people saying thank you to each other.
Say thank you.

Speaker 7 If someone does something nice, say thank you. Right here off my right, again, you're not watching me, but right off my right shoulder is...

Speaker 7 Thank you cards, a pen, stamps, business cards, and note cards. So I can pop open, pop open a note.
Hey, thanks for this. It means the world to me that you would do this.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 7 Throw my business card in there, close it up, throw the throw it in an envelope.

Speaker 7 Put a business card in. Sometimes I don't put a business card in because I don't want it to seem like

Speaker 7 I don't know, there's like an implicit, there's something implied by popping my business card in. So I don't really like to do that.
Sometimes I just don't put it in. It's just a straight thank you.

Speaker 7 And then I have one right here. Boom, thank you card.
And I try to do at least one thank you card a day.

Speaker 7 gifts are also awesome um i just sent a one of my referral partners on the mortgage side um a pretty nice gift it cost me about 75 bucks um

Speaker 7 and i did that because he didn't it wasn't just because he sent me referrals there's no like holiday i didn't tell him i was doing it um i just really appreciate him like when i call him we have real conversations most of the time we don't even talk about what's going on between our two businesses it's like oh did you see this you Do you see that?

Speaker 7 Or, oh, this local politician is trying to raise our taxes again.

Speaker 9 You know, whatever.

Speaker 7 And, and, and it's just, I just appreciate him. I just appreciate the relationship that I have with him.
So I sent him something nice that I think he'll like.

Speaker 7 I don't care if he likes it.

Speaker 7 You know, the point isn't, like, is this the most mind-blowing thing that he's ever seen before? The point was, it doesn't have my logo on it.

Speaker 7 It's not some, hey, wear my shirt around town so people see that, some nonsensical thing like that.

Speaker 7 It's giftology, which is another book that you should absolutely read, giftology. It's the idea that I am literally giving him this for no other reason than I have appreciation for our relationship.

Speaker 7 And it's not self-serving in any way. I just want him to have something nice.

Speaker 7 It actually has his name on it. So gifts, thank you.
If you can do one a day, one thank you card a day, just one thank you card a day.

Speaker 7 Google reviews, shout outs on social, stop by their office and just say hi, bring them something. It depends on where you are in the country, whether that's even legal or not.
But

Speaker 7 do what you can. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Be appreciative, right? Because don't you love when people say thank you to you? I do.

Speaker 7 So

Speaker 7 that's another great one. That's another great one.
Because what happens is then people talk about you. Ah, you know,

Speaker 7 this dude down here, he's not such a bad guy. You know, most insurance agents are kind of weird, but he seems like he's all right.
And that's all I'm really looking for. So

Speaker 7 last but not least in this presentation before we get to Q ⁇ A, and I hope you guys have some good questions because I love Q ⁇ A,

Speaker 7 is video proposals. Use video proposals.

Speaker 7 Just do it.

Speaker 7 They work.

Speaker 7 They work. They just work.
I use Neoteric Agent, Grant Botma's tool.

Speaker 7 If you looked at Neoteric Agent before, it used to be terrible. It's awesome now.
He completely tore the platform down and rebuilt it.

Speaker 7 Again, I have no financial interest in any way other than I use the tool. I think Neoteric Agent, other than having, I don't, the name is not my favorite.
It's awesome. It allows me to create these

Speaker 7 little web pages that people can log into with just their email, which makes it super easy. They're like basically good, better, best proposals.

Speaker 7 I can show them savings versus their old program. I can upload so that they can download the like company proposals.
And then I always do like a video, like a Loom video that gets embedded.

Speaker 7 So it's like Loom video on top, really nice looking good, better, best scenario, if that's what you're looking for, proposal with downloadable company, um, company proposals at the bottom, which I always like to include because I think it adds a level of authenticity.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 then you just email it to them. And what happens is I will watch people go back to them because every time they open it, I see it.
I'll watch people go back to them two, three, four, five times.

Speaker 7 If someone's checking out your proposal five times, you are going to write that business. Like they're interested.

Speaker 8 And

Speaker 7 then it doesn't mean you shouldn't follow up with a call.

Speaker 7 Neoteric, N-E-O-T-E-R-I-C, Neoteric.

Speaker 7 Neoteric agent. I don't actually know how to spell it.
I have it in my thing here.

Speaker 7 Hold on. I can find it for you.
N-E-O-T-E-R-I-C, neoteric agent.com.

Speaker 7 There's others. There's form stack.
It's not the only one. There's plenty.
I'm just telling you what I use.

Speaker 7 And they all kind of do the same thing, but I like, plus it's cheap. It's 350 bucks a month.

Speaker 7 But I will tell you, if you use video proposals, you follow up with a phone call, you follow up with an email, you follow up with a text, whatever your preferred method is, people love this stuff.

Speaker 7 They love it in commercial. I haven't done, of all this talk and all these talking heads, zoom this, zoom that, zoom this, zoom calls that, zoom sales this.
I haven't sold one policy on Zoom.

Speaker 7 I haven't sold one. You know why?

Speaker 7 Because I I use video proposals you know what I hate doing selling on zoom you know what I love doing selling in person you know what the what a much better option for me is than selling on zoom video proposals followed by a phone call or video proposal followed by an in-person meeting

Speaker 7 killing the game that that's that's that's that's how i do it i get all the information now if it's a huge account and there's there you know it's going to take me more than three to five minutes to break down the macro level of the coverage then you know again what I'm trying to do with a video proposal is give them the macro perspective, then get them on the phone or in person to break down the micro perspective and sell the business.

Speaker 7 That's my goal. With personal lines, it's different.
With personal lines, I want that video proposal to sell. With commercial lines, it's more like, here's the high level.

Speaker 7 Look how amazing this thing is.

Speaker 7 I'm trying to wet their appetite, show them how different I am, how much I care, personalize a little bit, and then get them on the phone or in person to close the deal.

Speaker 7 That's what I'm trying to do with a video proposal. So

Speaker 7 pick your tool, use it. I promise you, video proposals are gangster.
You will, you

Speaker 7 work it into your flow. If your people bucket it, just, you know,

Speaker 7 start using decaf coffee for a while and just mess with them.

Speaker 7 Okay, let's see what kind of questions we have here. All right.

Speaker 7 Screw it. I think I hit a lot of these already.
That's it. Video proposal name, John.
Great question. Thanks.
So if you guys have any questions, pop them in the Q ⁇ A right now.

Speaker 7 I think we're bucking up against the time. We may even be a little over.
If we are, I apologize for that.

Speaker 7 But I just want to say thank you for coming on. I think Commercial Lines is greenfield.

Speaker 7 You know, one amazing tool.

Speaker 7 So

Speaker 7 Zywave just came out with their CPQX or CPX or whatever comparative rating software,

Speaker 7 which is making small commercial profitable. Tarmica is another incredible tool for the same thing.

Speaker 7 You know, obviously, you got to pick your ecosystems, right? So there's a million tools. You pick the one that works for you.

Speaker 7 Comparative rating, small commercial tools

Speaker 7 are how small commercial is going to become profitable. You cannot be profitable in small, small commercial going into Liberty and then Travelers and then Harvard and then you just can't do that.

Speaker 7 It's absolutely impossible. We all know that.
That's why we all take so much time to get back to people. But these comparative rating, these commercial comparative rating softwares

Speaker 7 are super dynamic and they are changing the game. And

Speaker 7 like I said,

Speaker 7 I've looked at Zywaves.

Speaker 7 I think that's going to be a great tool. I use Tarmica just because I was into it beforehand and have gotten used to it.
So I think you can't go wrong with either one of those.

Speaker 7 I think that, but there's a bunch out there. I think you need to be a little careful because some of them are kind of janky, but

Speaker 7 yeah. So guys, thank you.
Thank you, Zywave. Thank you, April, for having me on.
I appreciate all of you. Check out the podcast, ryanhanley.com.
You'll find the podcast there.

Speaker 7 Really appreciate you listening. The last,

Speaker 7 you know, basically every episode will blow your mind, but the last few have have have seeming have seemed to be very well received. They're about prospecting and stuff.
And

Speaker 7 just wish you guys nothing but the best in Crush Q4. Thank you.

Speaker 6 Great. Thank you, Ryan.
We do have two quick questions for you that came in through the chat, actually.

Speaker 6 One of them is related to cold calls. So what can someone do if most of their cold calls either end up in voicemails and don't have any returns or end up with someone who's very irritated?

Speaker 6 How do you get past that?

Speaker 7 Yeah, so if the person's, so there's a couple ways that you can handle that. And again, I don't want to pretend that I am the cold call master, but I do leave voicemails.
Super short.

Speaker 7 Hey, my name is Ryan.

Speaker 7 I'm with Rogue Risk. I have a workers' comp program.
I want to introduce you to it. That's why I'm calling.
I'm going to call back in the next couple of days, just so they know.

Speaker 7 If they keep ducking you, which they probably will, that's okay. But again, every prospect is not a perfect prospect.

Speaker 7 You have to refine that voicemail. There's a bunch of ways that you can do it.
You can be right on the nose. You can try to leave cliffhangers,

Speaker 7 but that you just have to test.

Speaker 7 I don't like the not leaving a voicemail because when has someone called, when have you gotten a call on your cell phone from a number that you didn't recognize that didn't leave a voicemail that you

Speaker 7 called back or did anything with? And the next time you see it, you just think it's spam, right? At least if you leave a voicemail, the person knows why you're calling. And,

Speaker 7 you know, I think there's different opinions on whether that's good or not. If someone's upset or gives you crap, you have two options.
One is you could apologize.

Speaker 7 I don't like to apologize because

Speaker 7 one, according to my wife, I have a large ego.

Speaker 7 Two,

Speaker 7 she's probably right. But two, I also don't think we're doing anything wrong by reaching out to somebody, especially if you believe yourself to be a value provider.

Speaker 7 So I think it's okay to say, I regret that you're upset. I didn't mean to upset you because that is regrettable.
That would be the language that I would use.

Speaker 7 I would also say to them, and I have tried this to varying degrees of success. So use this at your own discretion.
I have said before,

Speaker 7 if, if, you know, one person, you know, said to me, like, what, you know, why are you calling me or whatever?

Speaker 7 You know, you know, they were giving me, they said, they were giving me a hard time or a little upset. And I just said, I can't remember what the guy's name is.
So I'll just call him John.

Speaker 7 I said, John, if you were me and you believed that

Speaker 7 you could help a business, how would you reach out?

Speaker 7 Like, I'm reaching out to you. And I didn't say this second part, but that's what I, that was the question I asked.
How, How, how would you reach out?

Speaker 7 I was trying to put it on him to say, if you thought you could help my business, wouldn't you call me? And, and,

Speaker 7 and he thought about that for a second. And I think he knew that I boxed him in.
And he just kind of said, well, I don't have time for this now. And I just said, that's fine.
Have a nice day.

Speaker 7 And I let him go. But, but that's kind of, I kind of put it back on him to say,

Speaker 7 and I guess what I was hoping for was constructive advice to a certain extent. Like, I wanted to put him in a position of power because

Speaker 7 I think sometimes people feel powerless. You're calling them.
You're interrupting their day. They feel powerless.
They didn't ask for the cold call. And we can all understand that.

Speaker 7 So I was trying to give him the power back by saying,

Speaker 7 if you were me and you felt like you could add value

Speaker 7 to my business, the roles were reversed. How would you get in touch with me? How would you make that connection?

Speaker 7 And what I was hoping for was he would say, oh, well i see i see where you're coming from that that's not what happened but um that would be one approach uh the other approach would be you could just curse at him over the phone and hang up real loud i don't know i think you just have to test a bunch of varieties and see what works

Speaker 6 Great, thank you. Looks like we've got one last question that came in through the chat.

Speaker 6 So where do you mainly post your video content on social media or do you also include that in any emails that are direct to clients?

Speaker 7 So it all depends on the purpose of the video.

Speaker 7 I post

Speaker 7 most of the videos ultimately get posted on LinkedIn. Depending on the nature of it, I'll post it.
Some I'll post just a YouTube video on social. I'll share that.
Some of them I will post natively.

Speaker 7 So I will just directly, so it'll live on YouTube. But then in addition to that, like on LinkedIn, I'll just upload it directly.
So the LinkedIn, you can watch right there without going to YouTube.

Speaker 7 And then other video I will embed into my website. And if you go to Rogue Risk,

Speaker 7 go to commercial, and then go down to like, say,

Speaker 7 insurance by coverage, landlord, you'll see I have a bunch of stuff. I've been building out the real estate and property side.
But basically, what I have is this templated style for these posts.

Speaker 7 headline, subhead, little bit of text, embedded video, QA, call to action, then supporting, da-da-da. You'll just see, I've just templated it.
I literally just do the same thing every time.

Speaker 7 Because what very few people are going to do is go to your site and thumb through it like an encyclopedia.

Speaker 7 What they're going to do is go to the page that answers the question that they have, and then hopefully they're going to call you or not.

Speaker 7 So it doesn't matter that all the pages look the same. And in truth,

Speaker 7 there are a lot of studies that showed that a consistent design is actually helps the user experience so you don't like every page doesn't have to be different or unique

Speaker 7 the text does if you're trying to rank for SEO but the setup can should be very similar you want people to be able to easily scroll your site so so that all being said it all depends on what you're doing for the For the mortgage, hey, I'm going to give you this thing that helps you.

Speaker 7 That I just directly uploaded to social.

Speaker 7 I have a video I did. I mean, I have like almost 100 videos on YouTube.
I answer questions a lot. So, what is this? How does this work? What's the best way to do this?

Speaker 7 What are the five best workers' comp companies in New York or whatever?

Speaker 7 Those videos I post to YouTube. I'll share those.
So, it really just depends on what your goal is for the video.

Speaker 7 Ashley, yes, you can email me directly.

Speaker 7 You can email me at ryan at ryanhanley.com. Uh, you see it right there.
If you email me, Ryan, first name at ryanhanley.com, email me any questions you have and happy to happy to chat with anybody.

Speaker 7 I think on the last slide, I actually put, yeah, here's my contact information. I actually put my rogue risk email in here.

Speaker 7 If you email the rogue risk email, which you can absolutely do, I just may take longer to get back to you because that's like my work email and I tend to filter it for work-related stuff.

Speaker 7 If you email me at ryanhanley.com, then at night or on the weekends or whatever, when I'm looking at that, I'll absolutely get back to you.

Speaker 7 I put my cell phone on here. Please don't call me, but you can absolutely text me.

Speaker 7 And then we can set up a call.

Speaker 7 But

Speaker 7 I mean that in good nature, but please don't call me. But absolutely text me and then we can set up a call.
Happy to do that if you prefer text. And then the podcast is at ryanhanley.com.
Let's see.

Speaker 7 Do you know something outside of Zoom seamless AI reference unit to get cell phone numbers?

Speaker 7 Cell phone numbers are really tough.

Speaker 7 Cell phone numbers are tough. It depends if someone, like LinkedIn, sometimes people will put their cell phone number into LinkedIn.

Speaker 7 You can go out into the shady part of the web and buy cell phone numbers. You can sometimes get cell phone numbers from Fiverr, but that's also going to be super shady.

Speaker 7 You just have to, it all depends on how far you want to step into that really shady gray zone with cell phones because of the do not call and do not text and TPT PCA and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 7 So I would be careful with that.

Speaker 7 If you don't care so much about that, I would go into the dark web or Fiverr or whatever and just buy as many cell phone numbers you can and blast the heck out of them and hopefully someone responds.

Speaker 7 That's how I would do that.

Speaker 6 And if you're interested to see any more webinar content, you can visit us at zywave.com forward slash webinar to view any upcoming and on-demand ZyWave webinars.

Speaker 6 Thank you and have a good rest of your day, everyone.

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