RHS 080 - Peep Laja - Your Brand is Your Value

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In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello and welcome back to the show.
Today we have a dynamic episode for you in which I bring someone from outside the industry in, Pep Leja, who is the founder of ConversionXL or CXL, one of the top, like top in the world, conversion optimization organizations that exist. They have all kinds of courses.
They have consulting work. They put on a tremendous, used to be in-person conference, I think virtual conference, but Pep has been around the marketing space on a very, very high level for a long time.
And he recently started a new business called winter.io spelled W-Y-N-T-E-R.io. And it is copy testing.
And we'll get to that. But the reason that I actually reached out to Pep was because of a tweet.
A tweet that I had to do about branding. Essentially what he said is all services in the end are commodities and what differentiate our businesses are our brand.
What define us, what build value and growth into our business are our brand. And I'll be honest with you, the deeper that I get into running Rogue Risk, the more I believe that his tweet was true.
And I brought him on to talk about it, to explain it, to talk about brand and branding. You're going to get so much out of this episode.
It was absolutely a pleasure to have him on. Before we get there, I want to give a big shout out to AgencyVA.
AgencyVA is one of the sponsors of this show and they power Rogue Risk. I actually have three different individuals that work through AgencyVA.
Each works on a part-time basis doing different functions inside my agency. And to be honest with you, I don't know that I would have made it from the summer to today without their help.
Helping me get things done, helping me move data between systems, helping solve customer problems, doing customer service

work, pulling statements from different carriers. It just, the amount of communications and touches that it takes to run an agency, as many of you know, is absolutely bananas.
And without the help of agency VA, I don't know that I could have got there. I think they're world-class.
Nat is a tremendous worker, tremendous part of my team, and I'm looking forward to growing my relationship with Agency VA as there's many things that I want to do with Rogue. And I'm going to be sourcing talent from Agency VA first in all cases and only backfilling where I think they, or maybe they believe that they don't have a good fit.
And

that's a different way of looking at it. I think backfilling into local people rather than

virtual assistants. And we'll see how that goes.
But I could not have a better partner than agency

VA both to sponsor the show and to help me run rogue risk. So go to agency VA today.
If you're

looking for VAs, go to agencyva.com today. All right, let's get on to Pep.
So the crux of, and just so you know, like super casual conversation, you know, we can just roll. So, you know, the crux of what got me to reach out was your tweet around brand and the importance of brand.
And being that this podcast specifically speaks to, so the people listening right now are insurance professionals. This is a 95 plus percent of the audience are insurance people from up and down the space.
So everything from carrier, staff and executives to independent agency owners to vendors in the space of all different shapes and sizes. And one of the things that I think continues to specifically retail insurance agents.
So, you know, Williams Insurance of Main Street America, wherever you live, zero, zero emphasis or thought put into brand, zero. Outside of my last name is Williams and my agency's name is Williams.
So we have a brand. And, and, and I guess I just wanted to dive into that topic.
And you can kind of take it wherever you want to go to start. But I really want to talk through why this is something that we should even consider when there's all these things happening, you know, you're running a business, you're trying to manage a business, trying to, why do we have to think about brand? Because I wholly agree with you.
Um, but yeah. Well, ultimately I think that brand is the only way you can, is your only sustainable competitive advantage because anything else your competitors can copy can mimic and you know if you think about objective differences between you and everybody else out there it's like if in insurance like what what's the object what's like the actual practical differentiation there probably a minimal to no difference between insurance agents.
There might be some differences to category connoisseurs. So if I'm an insurance agent, I can read and understand the minor minutiae that's different.
But if I'm just a regular dude wanting insurance, and you say, oh, you sell auto insurance, so does everybody else. And I think that's what caught my eye.
So I want to read the tweet exactly for everyone. So this was the tweet that caught my eye, November 29th.
I'll have it linked up in the show notes for everyone. And then you can go and follow Pep on Twitter, all the other socials as well.
We'll have them all linked up. But so it says, your business is a commodity, commodity in the sense that it's fungible, quite easily replaced by another competing business.
You can't really win on better. It is your brand that is your best defense against commoditization.
And this is, I think in a very succinct way, you summed up my complete feelings on what is missing in our space is that, you know, there's hundreds, hundreds of carriers. Well, I think technically, there's 1300 kind of independent carriers that exist.
That's, you know, in the in the United States, there's 38,000 agencies. And, and, and my point is always to these guys, um, out of those 1300 carriers, do you care if it says Hanover or Safeco or State Farm, like, so you can drive your car, right? Like you want to go from your home to your office, does it, does it enter your mind even a little

what the, what the brand stamp of that carrier is on? Like, do you think there's, you know, is there any differentiated difference to a consumer? And the answer is no, they don't care because all they want to know is if some dude runs into me or I run into some dude, you know, I'm not going to have to come out of pocket for the full thing. That's what they're worried about so to to me, it feels like it's this, it's the human and the brand the human has is the only thing that separates who I buy insurance from.
Is that what you were trying to say? Or, you know, or what were you trying to say in there, you know, beyond that? Well, there's, there's endless amount of choice for the consumer, right? And so there are two aspects. How do you even stand out from all these other possible providers out there? Even if they stumble upon you somehow, how would they even notice you? So that's the differentiation.
How will you stand out if you say the exact same things like everybody else? You just, they won't even find you. Or if they find you to just, you know, walk right past you, right? There's nothing about you.
And two is that even if they find you and pause you and you are trying to compete them better like let's be honest can you really be objectively better than anybody else you know like and even outside of insurance like any category like can you tell me a product that is objectively better than competing products, like software or agency services or like cars, you know? So the only example I could come up with was that Tesla makes better batteries, long range batteries for now. All these other car manufacturers are making, you know, electric cars and trying to catch up.
And so I think that current competitive objective advantage will erode, will go away. So then they also need to compete on brand.
I mean, Tesla is already competing on brand because they are spending zero dollars on advertising, zero compared to what like gazillions that everybody else is spending plus, they have the biggest mind share biggest brand value etc so so think about so you can't really compete on better you can't win on better um it's like banks and checking accounts i mean this is all the same stuff all right so if you can can't be objectively better, stop trying to compete on better. You have to compete on other intangible things, which is your brand.
And so, you know, and then how do you compete on brand? I mean, obviously there are many, many, many different ways. There's, you know, your personal brand can be a reason to choose you and even big companies play that game you know microsoft and and apple you know used milk steve jobs and bill gates you know until eternity right even though they were huge you know elon musk is still pimping tesla who's the who's the representative of ford motor company I have no idea.
But personal brand can be a massive asset. And so if I like you, I buy from you, right? The classic Zig Ziglar sales thing.
People do business with people they like. So also then you need to have a personal brand.
But that's just one one way to compete with brand. I mean, we can go into all the different ways here.
So I think the issue that a lot of my peers in the space run into has to do with, they have a brand that they haven't put much work into. It's always a personal brand, right? Because it's, I see you at the country club, or at the kids PTA meeting, or we, you know, we play in the same softball league, or you drink beers, the same bar, and I bump into you.
And, you know, one of the one of the one universal consistencies of any independent insurance agent is that if they bump into you more than twice, they're going to ask you who does their insurance. And that's basically the marketing plan.
Some people cold call to start relationships. Some people, you know, do snail mail still or whatever, but it's all based on I bump into you.

We both smile at each other.

We seem to have something in common and I pitch you on why you should try.

And since you don't give a shit because it means nothing to you, because to you insurance is a commodity and you like me.

So you decided to business. So that's it.
That's as far as it goes.

So if you're starting there,

if that's the baseline for what we're most likely working with,

with most of the people that are listening, and I don't mean that to be offensive because a lot of them are very successful, but that's as far as it goes. What has happened, and if I'm giving you too much context, I just want to kind of set the stage why I think this is such an important topic.
I'm doing a bad job of interviewing since I'm talking more than you are, but what's happened is since in 2016, there was a technology revolution in our industry. It's called the InsurTech revolution, whether it was a revolution or not, isn't important.
A lot of direct consumer facing brands built more in the Silicon Valley marketing methodology than in the old traditional methodology have made their way into our space. So now we have public companies like Lemonade.
You know, we have big consumer brands that have started just three, four years ago, like Hippo, like Clear Cover. I mean, all these branded agencies who are primarily digital have started to leak in.
And now you have the Williams, Stevens and Thompson agency of main street,

you know, wherever trying to compete against these,

these clearly defined well-marketed brands. So, you know,

if you had to give someone in that space, some advice,

what are some steps that they could start to do to start to establish who they

are, how they talk to the market, how they start to build that brand, if they start to do to start to establish who they are, how they talk to the

market, how they start to build that brand, if they wanted to do that? Yeah. Well, first of all, let's acknowledge that real differentiation, it's hard, but it is not enough to be just a little bit different you, differentiation needs to be big enough to tell the decision in your favor.
So you just, you know, adding a line in your website copy here and there, just like having those small cosmetic differences is just not enough. So basically, You need to give somebody a reason to choose you over others.
And, you know, competing on price, like I'm the cheapest, is not sustainable. Probably also not possible.
But, like, you need a structural advantage. Don't even go there, right? So small, subtle differences are not really enough.
And as I mentioned, like, you know, where category connoisseur sees differences, a novice can see, novice likely will see similarities. Because a connoisseur would know how to look for the differences, and novice likes the, you know the necessary experience filters to find or assess those minor differences.
But it's also scary to be different, you know, because there's a temptation to be a safe and boring company, you know, especially in insurance, I think. A safe and boring company boring company you know like you say safe and boring stuff because it's inoffensive and does beyond criticism and like nobody will call you out nobody will nobody will criticize you nobody will say weird things bad things about you so you won't hit.
But also the problem obviously is that nobody will care either. Right? If you're an old established company with deep pockets, like you are like, I don't know, State Farm, right? You can get away with it.
But like if you're looking to grow, you're looking to build awareness around you, won't serve you you know and yes some people prefer to buy from boring companies but people who like to buy from boring companies they already have one you know so they're not looking for you they're not looking to switch so so so i i think most people get the the fact that you need to be uh different that's not hard but like that that radically different part that's hard it's it's it's uh most deem it too risky and it's hard to predict how it will play out um yeah so well yeah i think there's so much in there I I really wanna so I think I think you've really touched on it I think what you've touched on is um the idea that if you were to bump into any one of the individuals listening to this show right now and and talk about differentiation logically I think this, they would completely either agree and possibly even understand and be able to come up with some of what you just said logically, but emotionally, emotionally, to get past the emotions of doing something like this, I think would be beyond most people. I mean, if you were to scroll through, if you were to, if you search the hashtag insurance Twitter, there's a lot of amazing people, right? But if you were to, you would find a lot of really common themes.
There's not a lot of people going that far out of bounds one way or the other in terms of their look, their feel relatively safe, muted colors for the most part, usually, you know, kind of standardized website theme, standardized copy, you know, you'll probably see save money a million times. And so how do you or how do you start to make that move? Like, how do you start to crack that? Because I can, I, again, this, this is what I believe.
I mean, the, the, my agency, I own an independent insurance agency, um, and, and the name of it is Rogue Risk. So the very first thing I tried to do was hopefully easily to, easy to remember, you know, Rogue Risk, two-syll, uh, the alliteration, you know, rogue risk with the two Rs you don't hear rogue with insurance.
It feels like a pattern breaker. So I tried to be very deliberate with that.
Um, what's interesting is, and this is the part that I find very interesting is that I get two, I get two responses. Oh,, man.
Rogue. That's awesome.
I want some rogue insurance or yeah. What, what, what's that all about? That's the reaction you want to get.
Cause the worst mistake is like, you try to appeal to everyone, you know, which obviously means that nobody will care about you is like you've you've you've turned up the vanilla and nobody cares you will not stand out you just like so ideally a strong brand is polarizing it is repelling a certain part of the population and And it is therefore also more magnetic to another segment of people. That's what you want.
Winning everyone over is impossible. It's just not going to happen.
So you do want to figure out what is the type of person who will find this appealing. And you're going to go all in.

And in fact, you want to turn up the repel factor.

You want to drive away a certain type of people.

So in your case, probably these are maybe,

and I apologize for generalizing,

but maybe like more risk-taking, younger, less conservative people. I tend to get a lot of motorcycle.
People who like motorcycles tend to be – I get a lot of motorcycle people. They'll be like, hey, I want you to do my workers' comp, and down the line I'll find out they own a motorcycle.
That has been something that I've found for whatever reason. That is a segment.
I've never ridden a motorcycle motorcycle in my life I don't know a Harley from a Indian from a Triumph but it's just interesting how that works so so let's let's talk about some some of the ways how you know with brand and your communication how you can set yourself apart so this does not involve you know radically changing what you do as a company, but you might need to change the DNA of your company, meaning like what do you stand for, right? So in the insurance case, you know, so one classical move is, this is not about insurance, but like in general, it's attribute leadership. You are better in some one very particular aspect, an aspect that buyers might care about.
So, you know, it might be customer service, but if you just say we provide good service, that's, you know, nobody cares, right? So it needs to be very specific. So like, I don't even, I don't know enough about the insurance to give you an example.
Yeah, that's fine. That might be, but like, for instance, like in website hosting, if you know that there's this company called WP Engine, WordPress hosting company, when they came out and there was already a 7 billion hosting companies, they said, we are the fastest WordPress hosting company.
You know, like they doubled down on that speed attribute. And of course, they did optimize their business also to be fast, right? So attribute leadership.
So you're better in one specific aspect. And then you can be the preferred provider.
You know, this is the classic, more doctor smoke camelos type of thing, or, you know, like more dentists recommend this toothpaste. But also, so in your case, I don't know, do you do local insurance, or, yeah, it might be a market segment, like, um, more bikers use rogue.
Yeah. Local motorcycle gang association is recommending you nine out of 10 Hells Angels riders prefer rogue risk over the competition.
Exactly. Right.
Right. So that becomes, that becomes a reason to, to choose you.
You know, there might be a heritage thing. So like, Oh, already my grandfather was serving these areas, you know, and then you like to make it about the history and the tradition.
And, you know, my father was hanging out with your father, you know, if you have that. That's a big one.
That's a big one. Cause a lot of of a lot of independent agencies tend to be legacy businesses and their strength is they have they have generational knowledge which is really a strength 50 60 70 years into a community and um and it and it is a real value proposition yeah and then you can double down on that messaging like like make your design and, you know, your web design and everything about you reflect that.
Yeah. The history of the safe, you know, all that stuff.
Use black and white old photos on your website. I don't know, like go all in.
Yeah. Yeah.
I love that. Then there's the leadership aspect.
So you are the leader in some category. And so like, I don't know.
So this is similar to attribute leadership, but you're saying like most companies or humans in this segment are using you. Like it needs to be true, obviously.
Like most small restaurants in Southern Nebraska are my customers, you know? Like if you're a restaurant, you should also join.

Something like this.

Yeah.

And specialization, always good.

So you go after a very specific niche,

you know, like I am insurance agent for people who are into heavy metal and orgies.

You know, like super.

That's a great category.

You would dominate that category, you know.

Yes.

That is, that's a wide open category. Pun intended.
That's a good one. So that one is used a lot too.
So I think what's interesting here is, um, and I'm, cause I'm cycling it through, what do I hear? So, so the legacy one locally, so geographic, geographic preferred provider and specialization, I see a lot. Leader in a category, I see less.
And attribute leadership, I don't see much of at all. Just out of the ones you've named so far, I don't see a lot of agencies using those to brand their business.
Another one is everybody can do is you differentiate on customer experience. There's this great book that I do recommend everybody pick up.
It's called Never Lose a Customer Again. It's basically how to compete in customer experience.
So this is exactly when you're in commodity business. You're a dentist, right? You fix teeth like everybody else.

So the moment somebody calls you or makes an appointment or something,

like you do something ridiculously crazy

that they do not expect.

Yeah.

You know?

So if you think that the best type of experience

is a five-star experience, just as an exercise thing, what would a 10-star experience look like? You know, it's like, if I get insurance with you, then tomorrow, you know, you have, you know, Elon Musk pick me up in his Tesla, drive me to, you know, Disneyland and, you know, take me on a ride. That's part of your service.
You know, of your service. That would be epic.
I'll sign up just to hang out with Elon. Of course, you can't do Elon, he's a busy guy.
But what are some of those things that are over the top value-add experience that you can add on top? Obviously, if you have a customer database and receptionist, you can maybe have a database of all their family thing. You call on little Jimmy's fifth birthday and send a cake and a clown.
You differentiate. Use your imagination here.
No, I think that's wonderful. I really liked that one.
And shout out to Joey Coleman, Joey Coleman, keynote speaker at Elevate 2018. That's a tremendous book.
Never lose a customer again. Okay, customer experience.
I think, you know, that one, I think one of the things, so here's my question on customer experience for you. So customer experience is a term that gets thrown around a lot.
Right. And what I feel like a lot of people do is give lip service to the term, or they do like this little thing, like a, like a, not, not anything that actually is interesting or engaging, just, just they do something very small like a like a not not anything that actually is interesting or engaging just just they do something very small like a you know just like a a birthday card that's auto printed from thanks.io or something which is better than nothing but wholly forgettable so i mean car birthday cards i mean don't do anything right like if you postcard, like my insurance agent, I don't even know what they are.
They change every year because I'm part of Allstate. So I get a birthday card that I throw in something in the trash.
It's like so impersonal. Or like I get a Christmas card from somebody I've never met.
No, that's not – i think that's more like a waste of money so also it's very predictable yeah so that was my next question not it's not something i'm gonna tell my you know neighbor about you know so is so okay so i'm so predictability you don't you want it to be something they don't

see coming is exactly right.

How do you figure out what that bar is?

Because, because I know it doesn't have to be something expensive.

And it doesn't have to be something overly time consuming doesn't have to be, you know.

So what are the characteristics that that might trigger?

Wow, that was thoughtful.

That was something I didn't see coming. What are some of the things that people could be thinking about? Hmm.
Well, this is a, you know, uh, it's a creative exercise, right? It's, it's, it's, uh, it's a, it's a classic Seth Godin's book, you know, purple cow, you know, you you see a remark, he defines remarkable experience as something that is just worth making a remark about. You just pause and say, oh, that's cool.
So what I would do is brainstorm 10 or more ideas on a paper and just go read them out to your friend, to your, to, you know, somebody you trust. It's like, Hey, which of these things would be, would make you go, Hey, that's cool.
Yeah. You know what I think is fun? This is off topic slightly, but what I think is really interesting that I feel like so few people do is just call a customer and go, Hey, also make you happy.
Like what, what part of this relationship that we have? Like what have you woke up in the morning? You know what, man, I really wish they did that thing. Like, is there anything, is it zero? Or is it, is it five things? Like what, because I had an opportunity.
I don't know what was going on in my brain. Cause I don't normally ask this question.
So this is kind of me talking to myself, but I had a customer on the phone and just something popped in my brain. I was like, Hey man, like, how's it going so far? Like we've been doing business together for eight months.
How's it going? He's like, it's going great. I said, well, was there anything I haven't done? He said, well, you never followed up on this thing.
I need you to follow up on. I said, and what he did by asking that question, what he did was he found a gap in my follow-up system that I didn't know even existed.
And I wouldn't have known it was there if I hadn't asked him. And I made a note and am now starting to build reminders to do this because I was like, holy shit.
I just asked randomly for whatever reason, just popped in my head. How you doing? How's it going so far? You know, I don't even know if that's the right question to ask.
And it helped me plug a gap in my business that wasn't there before. And he then gave me all his personal insurance as well.
So I ended up upselling him just by answering this stupid question. Yeah, totally.
I mean, calling people, I'm part of a gym or used to be before corona hit and so they got a new trainer and the trainer called me and i had a really nice experience and i was more motivated to go back into the gym you know uh so definitely personal touch just to see how you were doing the trainer was just calling to see like how you were how you were getting by uh basically yeah yeah that's nice yeah how i'm doing you know what uh what are my needs and and it was also like i i hadn't been in for a while yeah it was more like hey what's going on in your life, man? And I had the shoulder injuries. Oh, man, we have this, you know, whatever, rehab class and blah, blah, blah.
So, you know, the old saying, like, people remember how you made them feel. Yes.
So that made me feel real good. Like, oh, take care.
Yes, it's a capitalistic organization. But I felt like somebody showed interest in me.
Yeah, definitely. I believe that it is possible to be both ambitious and capitalistic and also do the right thing at the same time.
I know that that's maybe not the norm or the perception by some, but I do believe that that's very possible. I think it is.
I think it often gets, I think, I think a lot of people, I think sometimes we get lost in believing that you either have to be high growth, high ambitious, kind of leave, you know, your, your customers are users or whatever. And we don't really think of them as, as anything more than a number in a database, or we're hyper hands-on.
We know everything about them that ever existed. We know their entire life story, but we can only grow this fast.
And I think you can be both. I don't know that that's, I don't think it's easy or everyone would do it, but I do think that it's very possible.
And I think what you're talking about, and again, this is why I wanted to have you on to have this conversation, was I think brand is the method to do that. I think by focusing on brand and making it a core part of what you think about day-to-day interaction by interaction, you can be both of those things.
You can be both a scaling business and a business that cares about its people at the same time. I think it's that to me, I guess you, I saw your tweet at like the perfect times this has been going on in my head.
And I was like, I feel like brand is the keystone to this concept that connects these two pillars is brand done. Right.
Does that seem crazy to you? Yeah. I mean, what is a brand, you know? So also we need to like be on the same page about the definition here.
Brand is not what you say you are. It's what they say you are.
Yeah. But brand management is helping to control that perception.
So it's not 100% in your control, but you can influence it. You can influence the perception of you through you know visuals the communication the words you use all those things yeah and obviously it's a sum of all the experiences uh somebody has had with you like if you're you've been a dick to somebody you know for for years and now you're suddenly i care about you like doesn't work right Yes, I do.
I do know. And it's.
I do know. It's a weird feeling, I think.
It's a weird feeling that you get when you see messaging that does not match your perception of the brand. It's a weird – you get a very – it's almost like it's a uh uh we have some sort of sense or instinct to you know when you see like you'll see it you'll see a message a brand message that does not match what's actually being delivered or what your experience isn't delivered there's a clear disc i guess what i'm trying to say is you can't lie about it like you can't actually you know if you're if you're saying that your customer service is world-class and it's not it's just run-of-the-mill at best when you put we have world-class customer experience on your Facebook post everyone just goes if anything it creates a counter negative reaction to it it almost has the exact opposite effect of what you want it to have because of

how disconnected it is from what reality is.

Yeah. You're absolutely right here.
Yeah.

So, um, so I want to, I want to, uh,

adjust course a little bit and I want to talk about, uh, your company. Um,

and when I first came across your work and I, and I've been following your work for a long time, I'm not going to fanboy or anything, but obviously from conversion Excel days and stuff. And a lot of the chops that I use on my own website, I, I guess, learned reading, you know, some of the tremendous content you have.
And, you know, actually became friends to a certain extent with some, with a lot of people that used to contribute. Cause I, it was a, you had a very high quality contributor network that was producing content on conversion Excel's website.
And, uh, now, you know, tell me, you know, so, so I was looking through the site and getting kind of reacclimated to what you were doing. And this idea of, you know, and I kind of found it right on your about page was, you know, achieving message market fit.
That is something that feels really difficult, I think, for a lot of people. So tell us a little bit about the business, what it is, what you're doing.
And then that's kind of the concept. I want to try to get into that concept and how we help maybe the takeaway from this podcast, the very end is, here's what you're helping people do.
And if they can't do it on their own, they know where to go. Yeah.
So the company is called Winter, winter.io. And it's a messaging research service, if you will.
So what it does, it helps you achieve message

marketing. And it's a messaging research service, if you will.

So what it does, it helps you achieve message market fit, as you alluded. What is a message market fit? So message market fit is that you're sending out some messages on your website or landing pages, you know, whatever web properties.
and does that message that you're sending out does that resonate with your target audience do they find it appealing do they find it yes i want that you know like there's a it helps create buying buying intent so how do you how do you know what do what are the target people in the target audience? What do they think of your pitch, your sales pitch, your copy on your website? That's what what it's about. You cannot achieve product market fit where people just want to buy your stuff without message market fit first.
So your messaging needs to land on them. So it's kind of like, excuse me, the way I think about it is in a one-to-one sales situation, like if I'm trying to sell you insurance, there are certain arguments that I'm going to be making that are more powerful than others.
So over a period of time, I'm testing and twe tweaking i'm selling a bunch of people and then i'm like finding like all these three key arguments are really that's you know driving it home these are the main arguments that work so that's when you achieve you know message customer fit basically like i know that this when this, when I say this, they go, ah, yes.

Yeah.

And you find that either through experimentation in a one-to-one sales situation,

but also, you know, you don't scale.

So you can't sell to every customer on a one-to-one basis.

So you need your website.

And marketing is sales at scale, right? It's scaling you. Now, if your messaging is boring, if it's like me, if it's like me too, if it's like, you know, you say you sell car insurance.
Well, I mean, I already have one. So like, if you sell, say these boring things, it's just not going to resonate.
So you don't have message market fit, they're not going to buy. So winter helps you, lets you know what people think about your messaging, what about it resonates and what actually turns them off.
Yeah, I love that. So here's what I found so much in our space.
What's funny is the example that you just gave is a great one. You said, hey, hey, can I quote your insurance? And you said, I already have one.
Now to an insurance agent, they're going, well, of course you do. What I'm asking is, can I provide you with a quote for my insurance, you know, my whatever I I'm providing to you.
And it, but your mind, you're like, bro, I don't need your thing. I already got mine.
And that is a complete disconnect that happens a lot. A lot of times with struggling salespeople in our space, struggling marketers in our space.
This is one of the concepts that they, that, that is a huge disconnect in terms of what they're saying and what the customer actually wants. However, I feel like one-to-one, it's easy to overcome.
So how would someone in our space take what they know and can do unconsciously one-on-one and move that to their website. Because that to me is an enormous disconnect in our space.
When I look at insurance websites, I'm like, God, this person doesn't know what they're talking about. When I meet them at a conference, I'm like, wow, this person is brilliant and is a killer.
Completely disconnected. I just feel like for some reason, there's a huge gap from getting it from them being on the ground to them being digital.
Right. So, I mean, buyers are different, right? So some are more price sensitive than others.
For me, I'm not particularly a price sensitive buyer myself. Obviously, I have insurance.
But if somebody would tell me that they, you you know get a quote maybe it's cheaper

it's a hassle for me like i don't wanna i mean happy it's a you know i've been with the same company for many years i don't want to rock the boat because i don't have a problem to solve yes and so if you're gonna pitch me and say you have this problem this problem i might even get defensive right so the way around that is that instead of you um selling telling me you know like i either get a quote or that uh something's wrong with me open my eyes to to look at the situation open yeah to look at the situation with new eyes, essentially. So I would see that there's a problem without you telling me.
And the way you, I mean, there are multiple ways to do it, but like one good way to do it is you talk about a change that is happening in the world. So me becoming aware of the problem is me adapting to this change.
So for instance, I've been an Allstate customer since, I don't know, like many years. But you can say, hey, Allstate is an old school insurance company.
You know, like things have been changing and you're locked. Oh, I don't even know what the argument is.
You can say that there's things have changed dramatically since. And like, you know, you can say that something has changed.
And now I'm like, Oh, really? I've never considered this aspect. And then it's like, Oh, so what has changed? Oh, so what should I be aware of? And then now I start asking questions and now you might feed me with some information that might make me reconsider my choices, you know? Yeah.
Yeah. I think that I love that.
I think that's really, really interesting because this is a major obstacle for new business growth for a lot of agencies. So what we find is referred agencies that grow oftentimes have just fallen into, many times because of their generational nature, referral sources.
You own a mortgage company. I'm an insurance agent.
We've become buddies over playing little league together and going to college together. You send me all your business.
It's teed up. It's in a moment of change.
There's not really a heavy pitch. I don't actually have to sell you.
I just have to provide you with a product because you're coming in on a tee and I grow my business. For the agencies that don't have those relationships who need to go out and actually engage with customers and get them to and create that emotional differentiation, this becomes a major pain point because get a quote, if it ever did have power, is losing power every single day, almost at a logarithmic scale.
Me coming to you and saying, hey man, can I quote your stuff? You, it's going to be the answer you just gave, which is that sounds like a hassle to me. And the last thing in a post COVID world that I need is another hassle.
And, uh, and this is a major problem that we're, that the industry is facing right now, um, is, is people just don't want to, they don't need another thing to spend brain cycles on,

even if it could help them.

So it's, yeah, I love that.

That's really, really interesting.

So there's this classic copywriting technique

when it comes to like writing headlines

is a question that makes you go, how do you do that? So let me give you an example. So the other day I landed on this website called, I think it's FastSpring, FastSpring.com.
And on their homepage, they say, hey, you are missing out on 30% of sales.

Basically, it's a merchant account service.

So I'm using Stripe.

I'm happy with Stripe.

I don't want to rock the boat.

I don't have a problem.

But now when I read that headline, they didn't say, oh, merchant service,

accept credit cards.

I'm already accepting credit cards.

They say, you're losing out on 30% of and that makes me go oh really how's that and now they cut my interest and i'm going to read and i'm actually dive into their pitch and then that particular website fails to deliver on the promise like they never actually answer how I'm losing out.

So it's a dud.

But, like, you can do better.

So, like, you know, I don't know what the equivalent is,

but, like, you could be paying 30% less for your insurance.

Yeah.

Although, if you're just about the cost, I think it's hard.

Yeah.

Because then there's a demographic that, for sure, that every year is switching year is switching insurance you know like who is cheaper this year for sure uh and you know this better than i do uh but so i think ultimately competing on price is uh is uh everybody wants everybody's competing a price you know so you need something else yeah um can i hit you with the headline on my website and you tell me how it grabs you as a little example?

So I say, insurance is confusing, time consuming and costly.

We fix these problems.

I feel like it's close, but it's not there.

If I had to give you my thing, I think it's close, but it's not there.

So my first reaction is, you might be right, but i have it solved already i'm good with old state yeah right like i don't have those problems you don't find it confusing time consuming or costly because you feel good about where you're at i've already dealt with it i like i don't know how i even chose all state but i have them for whatever reason yeah so they're just you know

and I've had a couple of you know uh incidents where they they were good to me so I got like

some minimal brand loyalty um so it's not a not a not a problem that I so you say it's complicated

maybe if I was in the market to choose one I would agree but I'm not on the market so obviously I don't know I'm different in that case like you have you know different personas you're selling to somebody might be actively looking for one and maybe maybe maybe you aren't the consumer or it's the right time because maybe it does become time consuming for you I guess how would you I don't want to pitch you on why i think it's right i i'm i'm tweaking it but i i felt like it had some of the elements of actionable differentiated and but but i it also doesn't feel all the way there to me for some reason i guess that's why i'm asking you and i know i'm putting you on the spot here, but you know. Yeah.
So obviously, you know, there are multiple reasons why somebody might buy anything and I'm just not actively in the market for insurance. Yeah.
So that headline, I think, is not speaking to my kind of passive person. Gotcha.
I will say though, and cause I've, because I I've I asked another friend and he he said something a little different but we were talking through different scenarios you would never come to my site if you didn't have an insurance problem that is true yeah right like you're not gonna go hey you know what I'm gonna do for the next hour? I'm going to go take a stroll through rogue risk.com for some, some light insurance reading. Totally.
Totally. So, so even, even if I would see your ads, I would not click because I'm not in the market for one, but those who would come to your site, you're absolutely right.
There's some sort of a, you know, lead qualification, you know, what, however you want to do the lead scoring there, but it will be a signal signaling some, some level of interest. For sure.
There are some people who randomly somehow happened there, but like most majority would, would be, would have some level of interest. You're right.
Yeah. Interesting.
So, okay. So I want to ask you a question about winter.
Um, cause I want to be respectful of your time. So I'm, I, I, this, I mean, I think this looks super cool.
I'm probably going to do one of these tests. Um, so basically I'm looking at, uh, you know, you can either get business to business or consumer, which I'm assuming if you're going like B2C.
So you'd have actually- Exactly, if you're selling to individuals, that's a consumer panel. Cool.
And then you can target them by different psychographics. Gotcha.
And then you guys go out, send some consumers through and they give you feedback on, this headline doesn't make sense. I never saw this button.
Talk me through what so it's not about usability it's it's not like usertesting.com where you got usability it's it's all about the messaging the copy on your website yep and so it's asking the consumers if if that's your audience research questions so it's not what do you think? It's more like,

what about this is unclear? What about this is off-putting? What about this is, do you find compelling? And also like you can do Likert scales on a scale of one to five, you know,

so after reading your headline, on a scale of one to five how how much do you want to keep on reading because you know like the classical thing is like your goal of the headline is to make them want to read the next line and so on so you can measure that by asking and you'll get a score the reading of the headline it's 3.5 or whatever right and then you can change the headline and test it again and see if the willingness to read more goes up. And so people will rate you on clarity.
They will rate you on... So the possible Likert scale is how badly they want to keep on reading, how clear it is, because clarity is most important in copy.
If it's like vague or uses, you know, complicated,

big words, jargons, doesn't resonate for sure. Also, do they care about the arguments you're making? Like, we call it care score.
So on a scale of one to five, how much do you care about this? So you maybe came up with this idea for a differentiation where, I don't know, maybe you're eco-conscious.

You know, like for every dollar you invest,

you know, spend with us,

we give five cents to homeless dogs or you know and then does that gesture actually resonate with people and maybe yes but maybe they don't give a you know rat's ass and so so you get all the feedback you get is answers to research questions and you can choose and you can ask different questions about different sections of your website. So maybe you have different, one set of questions for a headline, one set for your, you know, the service description, things like that.
Guys, if you're listening at home, go go-Y-N-T-E-R, winter.io. And if you're selling personal insurance and your website is important to you at all, I mean, 99 bucks to have vetted consumers walk through and be able to give you feedback on your messaging, to me, is a fucking Like, and I mean that in a good way.
I mean, a good way. Like that is absolutely something you should do.
Like you are going to get immense value out of this. Like, you know, I'm absolutely going to do that.
I mean, I obviously I checked it out before you came on and everything. And but I mean, it to me, you know, this is the difference.
And I've even, I do a lot of testing on my site and, um, I'm bad because, uh, I don't

use all the, all the tools I probably should use, but, but, uh, I do, I do do a lot of

testing and, um, you know, right now I'm testing a video and in a very small headline, um,

versus real text.

And it's interesting, the feedback that I'm getting, But this to me, as a way to start to craft a message, it's actually going to get people to grab onto your brand, your agency brand. I think this is a no brainer.
This is absolutely no brainer. To add some context, so another company I run is called CXL that you mentioned that we have, we do online courses on all these things.
And we have like 50 plus products, like courses. And then we have PPC landing pages and webinar pages.
So we have like hundreds of pages that are very copy heavy, a lot of words. So in order for me to increase the conversion rate on those pages, get more people to buy, sign up, et cetera, I need to improve the words.
I need to make the copy better. Because copy is the number one thing that gets people to take action.
Now, how do I improve the copy on all these pages? You can't improve the copy if you don't know what's wrong with it. I can just have an opinion and you can have an opinion.
But we are not the buyers. We know our product so well, we have forgotten what it's like to not be the expert at our thing.
right yeah so it's it's it's rather it's like impossible for us to see our product the way our customers see and we should not underestimate how little we might actually know what customers think about our pitch yeah and that's that's the power of this data so now you know oh this stuff that i'm writing here is completely not resonating. And maybe it's unclear.
Maybe it doesn't communicate value. And I want to take everyone back to your reaction to your own.
You were kind of talking to yourself in this scenario, but your honest reaction to the question of, can I quote your insurance was,'m, I already have insurance. Like, and I don't think that that is the reaction that most insurance professionals would necessarily think.
And that's not a knock guys that I just think this is a blind spot for anybody in any industry, particularly for us is you would not, your, your reaction. I don't think people would expect your first reaction if we were to rank them.
If we were to put seven reactions on a list and say,

which one do you think would be first?

I do not think I already have insurance as it would be even close to the top

because the insurance professor is like, yeah, no, I know you already have it.

I'm trying to show you something different.

That disconnect I think is powerful as much as I might not be articulating it in the best way.

That might be an interesting headline to lead with. You it in quotes but I already have insurance and people like oh yeah yeah you're now connecting with the conversation in the head of the customer like oh yeah so why should I you know but now you're you're addressing the elephant in the room right up front and you might actually get me me.
Obviously, I don't know, but. I'm going to start running ads with, but I already have insurance in Austin, Texas, and we'll see what happens.
Yeah. No, I'm in upstate New York, so you won't have to, you won't be Facebook stalked by me.
But no, dude, I want to be respectful of your time. This has been absolutely tremendous.
I really appreciate you coming on. I know like the insurance industry is not your primary niche, obviously, but I do think that the work you've done both at CXL, which, you know, I kind of came in contact with this conversion XL and all that.
And now with winter and particularly these are, this is a very, you know, guys, I think a lot of times tools like what we were talking about, they tend, you know, they feel outside our reach, right? They're 500, $700 a month. I mean, we're talking about very manageable, reasonable prices for, for, for a service that could drastically improve.
I mean, just, just your headline being more, uh, grabbing someone can improve what's going on, you know, can, can get them going down further. And then, you know, maybe they catch a video or another set of copy or whatever that really pulls them in.
But if they're not getting past that headline, just that alone, just being able to dial in your headline alone is worth what you'd spend. And so I just want to push everyone there.
And I want to say thank you for your time, man. Where can everyone get at you besides these websites? Any of the socials?

What's your favorite social? Twitter and LinkedIn. Those are the two where I'm active posting daily.

Gotcha. Well, hey, man, this has been great.
Thank you. Appreciate you.
You have a great day.

Thank you, Ryan, baby.

Take it.

Yeah, baby.

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Oh, yeah, baby.

You go fuck yourself with your fat fucking ass! Thank you. Thank you.
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Do you want to have a few drinks and smoke a joint bubbles?

Yes.

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