Finding Peak w/ Ryan Hanley - Chris Greene on Content Marketing as a Competitive Advantage

Episode Date: June 30, 2022

Spartan philosophy, built in the black-ops lab of business: https://www.findingpeak.comFinding Peak podcast: https://linktr.ee/ryan_hanleyIn this episode of The Ryan Hanley Show, Ryan Hanley, intervie...ws Chris Greene, the Flood Insurance Guru. Chris joins the podcast for a master's level conversation on content marketing and how properly using your CRM can create an undeniable competitive advantage in your business. Don’t miss this episode…Episode Highlights:Chris discusses how insurance is not the problem but the risk is, and how he is working on this data to solve the issue. (4:13)Chris explains how their flood risk analysis provides a huge value to their referral partners to grow their business. (8:29)Chris mentions that videos used for education and advice are still considered streamlining. (14:31)Chris shares how he uses automation to follow up with his clients. (22:32)Ryan explains that this is the moment where HubSpot tools, like video cards, give you a true competitive advantage. (25:35)Chris explains that conversations like why they weren't closing more business can be seen at HubSpot as one of its features. (36:34)Ryan shares that the industry needs a company that offers Accord form integration and creation at a price that the industry can afford. (44:09)Chris talks about Hubspot being better than any AMS, and shares how they are currently using it in their interview process. (51:14)Chris shares that what he likes about Ryan's content creation is that it is very neutral and does never put out any misinformation. (55:53)  Chris shares three different books he requires people to read before they come on board. (59:50)Key Quotes:"We just need one company that offers Accord form integration and creation and mapping easily at a price the industry could afford and they would absolutely friggin dominate." - Ryan Hanley"It's not about us. It's about the customers, you know? So, it sticks in my head and everything I do now." - Chris GreeneResources Mentioned:Chris Greene LinkedInFlood Insurance GuruReach out to Ryan Hanley--Recommended Tools for GrowthOpusClip: #1 AI video clipping and editing tool: https://link.ryanhanley.com/opusRiverside: HD Podcast & Video Software | Free Recording & Editing: https://link.ryanhanley.com/riversideWhisperFlow: Never waste time typing on your keyboard again: https://link.ryanhanley.com/whisperflowCaptionsApp: One app for all your social media video creation: https://link.ryanhanley.com/captionsappGoHighLevel: It's time to take your business workflow to the Next Level: https://link.ryanhanley.com/gohighlevelPerspective.co: The #1 funnel builder for lead generation: https://link.ryanhanley.com/perspective--Episodes You Might Enjoy:From $2 Million Loss to World-Class Entrepreneur: https://lnk.to/delkFrom One Man Shop to $200M in Revenue: https://lnk.to/tommymelloIs Psilocybin the Gateway to Self-Mastery? https://lnk.to/80upZ9This show is part of the Unplugged Studios Network — the infrastructure layer for serious creators. 👉 Learn more at https://unpluggedstudios.fm.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 AI agents are everywhere, automating tasks and making decisions at machine speed. But agents make mistakes. Just one rogue agent can do big damage before you even notice. Rubrik Agent Cloud is the only platform that helps you monitor agents, set guardrails, and rewind mistakes, so you can unleash agents, not risk. Accelerate your AI transformation at rubric.com. That's rubr-b-r-k.com. Hello, I'm here during the lunch rush with Janice, who owns her own food truck.
Starting point is 00:00:34 Best cheese sticks and down. Janice traded up to Geico Commercial Auto Insurance for a food truck business. We're here where she needs us most. They sure are. We make it so easy for her to save, with customized coverage that grows with her business. Sorry, I'll just get so emotional talking about saving folks money. Not this onion I'm jabbing? It's just so beautiful.
Starting point is 00:00:54 Oh yeah, no, it's the onion. Get a commercial auto insurance quote today at Geico.com and see how much you could save. Get more with Geico. Happy holidays. Want to give your host a gift? Consider subscribing, rating, and reviewing the show this holiday season. It really helps the show grow. From all of us at Believe, have a Merry Christmas, everyone, and a happy holiday.
Starting point is 00:01:16 Rood Laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello, everyone, welcome back to the show. Today we have an absolutely tremendous episode for you, a dynamic conversation about marketing, the insurance industry, what it means to have a niche with Chris Green, the flood insurance guru. Now, Chris is the things that he's done from a content marketing perspective are nothing other than absolutely outstanding. He leverages HubSpot has fully dived in.
Starting point is 00:02:10 He leverages Marcus Sheridan's concept of they ask, you answer, and fully dived in. And really, that's what I appreciate and respect the most about Chris is that when he makes the decision to take action in his business or in some other aspect of his life, he goes all in. He focuses on it. He attacks it and he sees it through. And there's so many lessons to learn from Chris, not just as a person, but in the way he handles himself in our industry. And this is just a tremendous conversation that I think you're really going to enjoy it. I know I did. Make sure you connect with Chris on LinkedIn, all the socials, all that kind of stuff. because if you're watching what he's doing and taking notes,
Starting point is 00:02:51 you're going to get better at marketing your agency. It's just absolutely positively the case. So with that, I want to give a quick ask to you guys. I put a lot of episodes out. We put an episode out every Thursday. I appreciate you listening. I love you for listening, and I've said that for years. Guys, if you enjoy these shows, just share it with somebody.
Starting point is 00:03:15 That's really my ask today. Just text it to somebody or, or, you know, if you want to share it in social, whatever, email an episode to a friend and just say, hey, I think there's something here. I think this episode is fun, whether it's this episode or another one. Guys, sharing the show, more people find it, more people get into our ecosystem. I get more inbound suggestions for guests. I get more people kind of sending ideas and tips and thoughts in. And I listen to all that stuff.
Starting point is 00:03:45 I read all those DMs. And it helps us get more content, more great guests, more great information in front of you guys. So if you're enjoying the show, if you're loving the show, always love a rating and review on iTunes, that helps more people find the show. But really, sharing the show is the thing that's most important because when a friend tells another friend that something has value, they often take action on it. And if you find value in this show, I'd love you to share with a friend, man. I mean, that's the whole deal. So with that, guys, love you for listening to this.
Starting point is 00:04:18 Let's get on to Chris Green. Yo, what's up, man? Do you hear me okay? Yeah, you're good. What's going on? Not much, man. How are you? I just want to start by apologizing for bailing on you twice, two different times.
Starting point is 00:04:37 I'm glad we finally connected. Dude, I know you got so much going on in the world professionally personally right now. Yeah. I know. Yeah, I appreciate you being good to me about it because, yeah, for everyone listening at home, we've had this schedule. This is the third time now and twice I had to bail because with everything with SIA and whatnot, you know, just different meetings pop up and we're doing so much to like offload services from Rogue to SIA to kind of free us up to do our thing that sometimes they just have to be done. So either way, I'm glad we're finally getting a chance to chat. you know, big news, biggest news in the insurance industry, you had a suit on the other day.
Starting point is 00:05:18 That's like one of the big, big, the earth-shaking, universe-shaking things. That's like I tell my friend Jason Cass. I was expecting unexpected. So what's going on in your world, man? What's up? I'm spending a lot of time on data right now. Yeah? Yeah, like trying to change the flood insurance world right now through data.
Starting point is 00:05:40 It's kind of exciting to this point now where we're getting to a point kind of like with you, where you can take that money, you can actually invest in the business. You can invest in the technology. And so I went and hired a glove box as developer. And we've got about a year long worth of projects. We just tapped into FEMA's database yesterday and basically pooled the entire FEMA database in the HubSpot. And like what is when you say working with data, like what's your, what problem are you trying to solve? Like what are you trying to do?
Starting point is 00:06:09 The problem I'm trying to solve is that like I spoke last week at CFPC. I said insurance is not the problem. I said risk is. The problem is that we don't know, we don't do a good job of knowing the risk, understanding the risk, and reducing the risk. And we don't show the property or the prospect that. So we got to find a way to do that. So that's exactly what we're doing with all these risk analysis companies,
Starting point is 00:06:30 pulling things in and actually showing people the same thing than an underwriter seeing. But how do we change that data? You know, how do we reduce that risk? Now, how do we create long-term rate stability in the market by doing that? Yeah. That's interesting. So how do you do that? What does that look like?
Starting point is 00:06:46 As much as I like technology and marketing and shit, like data is not my specialty. And it's not money. Like I tell people, I'm a visionary. I'm just not good to very implement it. And that's where the developers really help me now. But now I can give a flood score to every property with all these different factors. I can tell you how long it's going to take water to enter your property, where it's going to enter it. Hey, how do we change from that water entering the property?
Starting point is 00:07:09 What can we do? And literally, based on the data, we have all these different videos. there's different steps. We can walk people through part of the video proposal system. Yeah. I, so I was talking to, geez,
Starting point is 00:07:23 I don't know if it was Carruthers or, I was talking to somebody and I was talking through, we were talking about HubSpot. And obviously we have, we use HubSpot and we have big plans for what we want to do. And as we continue to build stuff out. And I think, you know,
Starting point is 00:07:40 I love the system so much. And I don't want to go too nerdy just on HubSpot. But like, I think what a lot of people don't realize about that particular tool is with their operations hub that they've added and the wide open API portal that they've built, you can essentially take any database or data or system that is producing pushing, pulling data and now plug it in. And man, it is, it opens up the world as to what you can actually build. and what it can look like. So yesterday, we finally got version 1 live. And so we got the latitude and longitude. And our API and our developers are like, look,
Starting point is 00:08:21 we got the latitude and longitude. There is nothing we can't do now. Yeah. Google Maps, everything like pulling pictures into these proposals off of the Google API. Like having the longitude and the latitude, when you're talking about this property stuff, that's the golden nugget right there. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:08:37 Yeah. That's really interesting. So, you know, and I guess, I guess what I'm interested in is like a lot of the pushback that I get. I'm interested in where you get this pushback too is people will, what I get is, hey, I think it's cool that you're interested in all this into technology, into systems, into pushing forward into new ways of doing business, blah, blah,
Starting point is 00:09:06 but you can write a lot of insurance just doing it the regular way. Like what is the, what is the improvement percentage? What is the upside potential of going down these paths of leveraging data? Like I guess, you know, what is the opportunity cost versus, you know, I can just keep doing it the way I'm doing it and probably grow a business and probably make money. You know, why do the extra work? Why figure out these ways to put images in proposals and figure out different, you know, why go through all the effort? What does it get you? Well, for me, what it gets me is,
Starting point is 00:09:50 like I tell people, I say, look, we can charge for this because trust me, we're paying a lot of money for it. But think about the value that we can bring our referral partners. Let's just say it, David Carruthers and goes in and meets with a middle market account. He's one of our referral partners. Now they've got this full flood risk analysis report that completely helps separate them from everyone else. You're being able to show that to them on their building. The value that it brings to them now, we've got a referral partner for life now. That's the value of the technology to us is, hey, how can we help our referral partners grow their business? How can we look like rock stars?
Starting point is 00:10:23 Because at the day, like I tell people, say, the technology is not about me writing more insurance. It's about us changing insurance. It's about exchanging risk. That's the difference between us and most insurance agents. The end of day, it's not about us writing a bunch of insurance. It's about, hey, how do we create a more stable insurance market? Yeah. Yeah. And is that how you're getting a lot of your business is referral partners, agents who don't understand flood or need more expertise on flood or is still the inbound content game or is it still, is it a big mix or how's all that working?
Starting point is 00:10:58 You know, a lot of it is coming from the agents. But then, you know, a realtor emails you at 10 o'clock at night. Hey, I got this listing. You know, I need to verify the flood zone. Oh, great. I won't have it back to you in the morning. I'll try to put an offer in. But what if we can solve that point? problem, fairly easy with some technology, which is exactly what we did. As we went to FEMA, we were able to order flood zone to terminations, goes directly back to them. They do it instantly. Next morning, lets us know. It's hard to send in an email to them full risk port. All we're doing is following up with them. We didn't have to do anything. All they did was put an address and the email address in and they got everything they needed. That's pretty cool. So like you call it, it's, you know, it's working as our 24-hour sales rapid. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's really cool. I mean, these are the kind of
Starting point is 00:11:40 that I think, I really believe that we're still in, you know, the first inning or if we're even in the first inning, maybe we're in the top of the first inning when it comes to realigning value with an insurance sale, right? There's the obvious, I shouldn't say obvious. There is the well understood traditional value proposition, which is particularly relevant in, in middle market sales, a lot of the stuff that say Carruthers or Mick Hunt or Charles Speck or these guys talk about, which is, you know, tends to be geared towards comp or something like that. And a lot of it has to do with, you know, just kind of risk management techniques.
Starting point is 00:12:28 Okay. And managing people and injuries and okay. But there are a ton of additional layers of value that can be offered with education, with resources, with real-time return of information, with self-service, automation. Like there's all these different both types of value and layers of value that are possible that we just simply are not even tapping into that in other industries are the bar, like literally the bar barrier for entry. And in ours, we're just starting to tap into them like what you just described,
Starting point is 00:13:06 which is getting a report based on email and address. And that's the other thing, too, is that everybody thinks about insurance first. Like, you know, I'm a carver's teacher. So I was like, like, you know, that's what he taught me love. Insurance shouldn't be the first conversation. Yeah. So that's the problem. That's because when their insurance rate goes up, that's the first thing they're thinking.
Starting point is 00:13:24 Is they're mad at you? Yeah. Because you led with the insurance. And I was like, well, you know, insurance is really all that we do. Well, maybe that's part of the problem is we're not overall risk advisors. Yeah. You know, what is that, the term risk advisor, insurance advisor, is a tough one for me because it's a tougher for everybody.
Starting point is 00:13:49 Yeah, I think that, I think you're right. And I would love to think of myself as an advisor for sure. But then there's a lot of times where I'm just placing policies, right? Someone calls and they need a comp policy and I go, eh, this easy, you know, blast it out, get it back to them. Here's what it is. Off we go. I didn't really advise them.
Starting point is 00:14:11 I kind of just like took an order and placed things. And my point to that is when I think about, I think a lot about the cost of our people's time. That is, that is something that I spend a lot of time thinking about. And it's one of the reasons that I went to HubSpot initially. One of the primary reasons is I wanted to be able to track activity. I wanted to be able to track time. Not in like a, you know, dystopian Joe Biden way where I want to control your every move, but in more of like in order to create areas of value or create area, you know, how do I
Starting point is 00:14:50 automate something that they're doing a lot of or where are we wasting it? Okay. So when you look from a profit standpoint at being an order taker, when an order is put in and you process that order and you sell that order and it works that way, that easy, right? that is the most profitable way to do business. It's why all the insured tax, all the VCs go after these quick DEC place. Because when someone knows exactly what they want, is ready to buy, and all you have to do is execute that order, it is incredibly profitable. So your brain goes, wow, that is easy.
Starting point is 00:15:27 I should do more of that. Except, one, those are relatively rare in our space. And two, those people don't stick around. So I feel like while we all want to be advisors, there's like this false incentive to be order takers because it is actually an easier way to do things. And we get lost in that. Does that make sense what I'm saying? It does.
Starting point is 00:15:51 And so that's why we use video the way we do. They're like, oh, how do you do all that? I said, you can still advise. I said, look, when someone picks the phone up to call us, usually just to give us their credit card information because they've watched 10 of our blogs, they've listened to 10 of our videos, whole journey. But it's the same thing on streamlining it, though. Use the video that educated and advise through that funnel and still streamlining it. Yeah. But most people haven't figured out how to do that yet or are willing to invest the time to do it. So look,
Starting point is 00:16:18 yeah, it's going to take a lot of extra time, but I mean, literally. Dude. Yeah. I mean, it's the same as well when a lead comes in. My license people don't even touch it. It goes straight to the VA. The VA does it. Then when the VA has it ready, then a licensed person reviews it. Yeah. We, you know, it's, it's funny. We're definitely two peas of a pod when it comes to the video stuff. One of the things that, so I, you know, the video content marketing stuff, obviously, like they ask you answer is a set, you know, should be, you should have on your, on your, on your, dresser or whatever, your end table next to your bed, you should have like the Bible. And they ask you answer and life will be, life will be better, the Torah or whatever. I do call it the Bible marketing.
Starting point is 00:17:02 Yeah, whatever you, I always bust Marcus his chops, because, and I know people who've listened for a long time, know that he's a good buddy of mine, and I know Chris, he's become a good buddy of yours. But so when he first came up with that concept, they ask you answer. He was interviewed by the New York Times, and he actually has this article that he shows sometimes, and it's a picture. And it says, answering revolutionary marketing, concept, answering client questions. And it was like a completely dead serious headline. And it's just like so funny that that the concept of just simply answering client questions in video is like
Starting point is 00:17:44 this revolutionary idea that our industry refuses, which I'm glad. I do it. I hope none of you listening ever do what Chris and I do. Please, it's tons of work. Never do it. Don't do it. You're going to be terrible at it. You're all going to be awful. Don't do it. Because then the two of us can reap more benefits for longer. I will tell you this. I'm going to see Marcus in two weeks. I'm on a retreat with him and Donald Miller in Cleveland. Oh, wow.
Starting point is 00:18:11 Yeah. So that's going to be fun. Yeah, geez, that'll be super fun. And I think I'm supposed to be on a retreat with him and David Mirren in October in Massachusetts. Wow. Where are in Massachusetts? I got to look and see. It's a mastermind group he recently started.
Starting point is 00:18:24 A smaller one. It's only like 30 to 40 people. Yeah. We do twice a year. That's cool. That, you know, so what? going to the next level of video, one of the things that I just did was,
Starting point is 00:18:36 I had a buddy of mine refer me over one of his clients that he was struggling with the D&O. And I kind of like the, I'm not as good as Gordon Coyle at this stuff, who will be on the podcast. I think when we're recording it, he'll be on soon. By the time you hear this one,
Starting point is 00:18:54 he'll have already been on. So go back and listen to his episode. But like I liked especially liability stuff too, like D&O and stuff in cyber. And I gave into that. But he referred it over. And what I did was I packaged the account up and put the applications that I knew needed together.
Starting point is 00:19:11 And then when I submitted it, instead of doing a cover letter or just sending in the apps, which if you're just sending in apps, I think that's the most bushy league thing to do today. Like there's just no way to stand out with how busy underwriters are. You at least need a cover letter. So instead of doing a cover letter, what I did was a video cover letter. And I used, so when we do a submission in HubSpot, I add the underwriters as contacts. So in the deal card, I have the client, right, obviously as one of the contacts, their company. And then I'll have the underwriters as contacts as well. So every communication with underwriters from all the companies that I'm submitting to are also
Starting point is 00:19:52 captured in the activity feed for that deal card. Okay. So what I'll do, what I did was because we use video. is um i didn't realize you were using vydyard yeah yep yeah i use vidyard because i wanted the full so we went are you using the paid version the free version paid version yeah yeah it's uh i mean it was it was definitely a heavy expense but the analytics that we get back no that the forms you can put in the videos it's unbelievable like it's just it's unbelievable the r oi you can track and host back to a about us video i tell somebody i got a 10 000 revenue video about us it's a silly video that I put up in November that made $10,000 in 60 days. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:20:32 Because I put a form in it. Yeah, dude, it's crazy. And the other part, too, is like when we went, when we moved, and I'm huge supporter of Chris Landjell and advisory ball and always will be. But when we made them move to HubSpot, I wanted to go fully in. So we moved our website, CMS to HubSpot's CMS so that we could track everything. I wanted to know every visitor, what page, what form, time. I wanted the full.
Starting point is 00:20:58 thing and to get the full thing including video you need to go vidyard so now i have i literally anybody who fills out a form on our site i know everything they've done every video they watched how much of it they watched what buttons they clicked what pages they went to i know everything okay now house spots got the whole video thing but i tell people i'm still a bigger fan of vidyard because first of number of videos but i just don't think hubspots advanced to the field on the video and the forms in it i'll take the analytics all day long now are you doing the website yourself that's been my big a struggle. Yeah. Yeah, I do the website myself. It's hard to find somebody when you get it in the HubSpot who can do it the way you wanted to do, especially what they ask you answer or
Starting point is 00:21:35 something like that other than using, you know, of course, Marcus in them. It's kind of challenging. I'm doing the exact same thing you're doing. I like that stuff. I get into the CMS stuff. I like building out the pages in the form, the page builders and all that. I get into it. But, but, so my point is I did this, I did this submission with it with a vidyard, video submission, cover letter. Well, here's the interesting part. And all my underwriters listening, you're your ear should perk up. I could see. So I sent it, you know, individual emails. I didn't just blast it out to all of them, but I sent it to three different places that I thought would be interested in this account. And I can, the, the, the, um, the, um, the, the, um,
Starting point is 00:22:19 the guy opens it. He then forwards it to his assistant underwriter who watches the full video, they immediately respond with, this just got moved at the top of our pile. We'll have a quote back to you by the end of the week. Boom. So two people in the company watched a video. The video was like three minutes long. And in it, I'm doing what you would do. Hey, look, like, I know this is a first time D&O policy, but, you know, this is a,
Starting point is 00:22:45 you know, blah, blah, blah, I break down the account. Like, here's why I think this is going to be a really good risk for us and why I think you guys should think about placing. Okay. Second company watches 15 seconds of it, never responds. still haven't heard back from them. Third company I sent it to never watches the video, never opens email because I can track that too. So it's like, now I'm like, hmm, who do you think is going to get my next submission? The company that four days later still has not opened the
Starting point is 00:23:11 email or watched the video, the company that opened the email watched 15 seconds of the video and still hasn't responded, or the company that watched the full video twice with two separate people and immediately responded. I now know who my real partners are as underwriters. Because again, carriers are only your partners if they're actually your partners, right? If they act like partners. So what I'm doing is now I have analytics, not just on my customers, but actually on my underwriters and their engagement with us. And, you know, that to me is powerful. So I actually use that with a carrier, and I actually put my carriers in the automation. So when we sit them an app and they don't respond, it's following up them automatically every 24 hours.
Starting point is 00:23:59 It drives them nuts. My office manager thinks it's hilarious because she's like, you're driving, you're driving by nuts. And I said, look, we don't have to do it. But we know that they're opening it and they're not responding. Yeah. But the other thing is I do something called risk storytelling. There's a broker somewhere out in Texas that really hates me right now because we just took a $500,000 account for them. Because I did a risk storytelling video, send it to the underwriter,
Starting point is 00:24:20 full risk. I go through the flood risk score. I'm pulling up all the different types of flooding, how this property was built on another property that had flooded eight times. And they're like, well, somebody else already submitted it,
Starting point is 00:24:30 but we're actually backing them out and we're putting you in as the broker because they didn't give us any of that information. They didn't tell us how it was elevated. They didn't tell us the water resistant materials that were being used. So we just took you to the list and we're giving you the count.
Starting point is 00:24:42 Yeah. Dude, I think you're helping them understand the risk. Yes. Yeah. And this is the thing is, and I've said this, this is why,
Starting point is 00:24:50 I've said this on the podcast before. So we're not doing this anymore, but for a very long time, I took every appointment that I could get because I think that carriers bend the truth. I was speaking with my good buddy, Dave Iodanza from Dyson from Dried Mutual the other day. And I used to say carriers lie.
Starting point is 00:25:09 He said, don't say lie. Lies a bad word, you know, a neat and mean word. We don't lie, but we bend the truth just like agents. And I said, that's true. Okay. So that being said, I think that carriers, over oversell what they're willing to write and what their pricing is going to be and geographic spread and all that. And agents overestimate and bend the truth on how much premium they're going to
Starting point is 00:25:30 put with them. Okay, that's the game. Well, what I'm working towards, and again, I'm training my team and it's not all there yet, but like to what you said, by by doing a better job of presenting an account to an underwriter, I feel like we're being a better partner to them. So we're doing our part. And in exchange by using HubSpot and Vidyard, I'm actually able to see who's a better partner on their side because I can't stand the marketing rep who's like, send us more business, send us more business. Yet they don't realize that they're freaking underwriters bottom file all our submissions. And we don't hear from them for three or four days. And when we do hear from them, it's a one sentence response. And it's like, this isn't a partnership.
Starting point is 00:26:16 this is bullshit. And now I know, like, these guys want our business. When we send them an email, we send them a video cover letter. I like risk storytelling. I may steal that. Like, like when they get that, they open it, they watch it, they appreciate it. That's a partner. And none of that, but now they can say, you know what, broker A, we're blinded. There's risk. Broker B, we've got the full picture. Yeah. That's a broker we feel it's been to a better job of protecting us. Yeah. That's a partnership we want. Like I tell people, look at the end of the day it's our job to make sure we reduce the claims for the customer because we don't want to go through that experience but we're also reducing for the carrier
Starting point is 00:26:52 yeah win win yeah and in tools like you know this is one of those moments where tools like a hub spot tools like a vidyard give you a true competitive advantage i think there's a lot of tools that are you know they're nice and they definitely help but they're not really like a competitive advantage i feel like when i submit business on an account that deserves this. I mean, a $700 bop, you just, you know, you quote it, you write it, whatever. We still will probably do a video proposal to the client, but, you know, you don't necessarily talk to an underwriter. I'm talking about some of a little me or something that needs some explanation or whatever. This allows you, like you said,
Starting point is 00:27:31 to do a screen grab of a report or here's what I'm thinking or here, let's walk through their financials. And yeah, there's a little schmuggy here, but this is why I think this is still a good account. And you actually get to have that interaction with them and they can see the look on your face, they can hear your tone of voice, they can hear you're excited about putting this account on the books and whatever. That to me makes all the difference. And I do agree with you. It's us doing our job. It forces us to do our job better because it's, you can just send a bullshit submission into somebody when it's just an app as an attachment. When you actually have to do a video and pitch it and sell it, you need to believe in what you're
Starting point is 00:28:09 selling. No of that. Like for example, I got a $150 million risk right now in Hawaii that gave me a notice three days before renewal. And I was like, there's no way. Yeah, I sent a video. I got a response back this morning. If I would have sent an app, it would have taken three days. Yes. But from that video, they can see right away what the risk is.
Starting point is 00:28:23 Yes, let's be honest, underwrite, read through the app. It takes time. Yeah, they don't want to do it. They're human. I will say to some video though. We do have a rule too. If someone sends me an email and ask me more than two questions, we actually respond with the Vidyard video.
Starting point is 00:28:36 It's out of conversations. Yeah. First introduction, first person that emails us, we never met him before. Usually something that's going back to them, it's just a simple introduction email for me real quick with Vidyard. Yeah, I like that. I am, I'm definitely going to start responding more, doing more, you know, we, we, we, we started doing this underwriter submission cover letter thing, which has been a big success.
Starting point is 00:29:01 Certainly a success for the underwriters at opening. I just, I can't stress enough how mind blowing it is to me. Because I know the carriers that will give us tons of shit about our submission. And I'm like, wait a minute. I can tell you it's been a week. And he hasn't even open that email yet. Like, don't come at me, man. Like, he hasn't opened the email. The fact that the carriers are willing to almost double your commissions because they see what you're doing with the risks. Yeah. Yeah, we're going to increase your commission because you're doing a better job of protecting the risk. Yeah. You're not sitting there's garbage. Yeah. It's, dude, it is, this is the kind of stuff. That's where I last one. Look, Hussbaum's one of our best employees. It's the most expensive thing. But to tell you, with playbooks now, I don't know if you've gotten into that. We basically built to carry appetite since I playbooks.
Starting point is 00:29:50 Yeah. So we've been with those two weeks or two years, you go and you type the question, you've got to answer for who to go to with it. Yeah. It, um, we're, we're implementing. Actually, right now I'm working on, um,
Starting point is 00:30:01 one of our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, it's a, it's a, it's called needs, N-A-D-S and, and, um,
Starting point is 00:30:10 and it's basically a pre-qualification, sequence of questions. And I built, or I'm in the process, hopefully it'll be done by, I would love to say today, but it probably won't be until next week. Basically, this is going to be the questionnaire for when a lead comes in,
Starting point is 00:30:29 our new business coordinators who are, who's unlicensed person, they call out and say, ask them these five questions and use a playbook and type the answers right into the playbook as they're taking the responses. And then they're trained based on the response as they get to these questions to the playbook, whether they move that person
Starting point is 00:30:47 to from a lead to a suspect or they refer them out to commercial insurance.net, who we refer like lines of business that we don't have, we don't have a good markets for today, or we just, or we just kill the, kill the deal. And that simple process keeps our licensed producers from dealing with accounts that don't really have a shot at closing, right? So the whole point is filtering and things like playbooks, things, you know, things like, you know, dynamic, dynamic forms that, you know, dynamic pages is just something I've gotten into this week with a developer, but also, dude, it's so powerful. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:31:31 Because of the unique customer experience on every different customer. Yeah. I mean, the idea that you can change. the content based on where they're coming from or what pages they've been to or whatever or like like some of the really cool shit what that you can do with with merge fields in dynamic thank you pages where literally the thank you page is being customized that it feels like the page was literally built for that person so now you're using their name and they're in different pieces of their information in how you thank them or how you push them to the next step it it's because
Starting point is 00:32:06 everyone's worried about open range, you know, with Apple and Google's changed. I said, that's why we've generally always stuck to click the links like Vidyard. They click the link. It takes that away. I can still use it based on them clicking that link with a Panda Doc. For example, we build out video proposal with Vidyard and Pandadoc. So when I send it through Panda Doc, they open it. It goes from, well, it basically goes from quote, ready to quote sent automatic when the Pandadok
Starting point is 00:32:28 goes out. Customer reviews it. It goes to quote being reviewed. I don't have to touch it. Yeah. Do you use a lot? Do you do one of the things that I've been working a lot on is like customer life cycles and using them as a way to better understand our funnel and where things are in our funnel.
Starting point is 00:32:50 So we one of the automations, again, I'm way behind just so everyone's clear where Chris is with HubSpot build out and where I am in two different places. So I don't want there to be like, you know, there's no, there's no real comparison. I'm still very early stage. But this is my fourth year too. Yeah. And this is our fourth month. So, you know, that would be the difference.
Starting point is 00:33:12 But one of the things I think is really interesting. So we use a fairly standardized customer lifecycle, which is subscriber, someone who we know of that doesn't know of us, lead, shown interest, suspect meets qualification standards, or what would technically be called marketing qualified in. normal parlance. Prospect is interested in quote and then client evangelist lost. That's customer lifecycle. So you could be a client without being an evangelist, et cetera.
Starting point is 00:33:48 So what's cool is that you can in the pipeline, in different engagements, different pages they hit, you can change where the life cycle is automatically. So like if someone leaves us feedback or uses our referral page and types in a referral to us or, you know, whatever, we can move them from client to evangelist. We can move the automatically. So I don't need to rely on my people to have to think about, are they a suspect? Are they a prospect? Which, not that they're incapable of it, but it's just I don't want them to have to think about that. but as a business owner, I can now look at our customer life cycle report and know exactly
Starting point is 00:34:34 where in the funnel our contacts are, where we may be having obstacles, where there may be issues, you know, our attrition rate and all that kind of stuff. And that's, it's like those simple insights are where you're able to make true improvements in your business. And, you know, you just don't get that a lot of places. So I was able to use it to change our fee schedule. So we could see exactly which deals we're losing and why and what the premium point was like hey it was a big issue 500 dollars and less is we were losing because of fees and I said you know that's not that big of a deal but at least gives us the data to know yeah it's the small stuff for losing which is okay but that's that's why we're losing it well that's like a little bit of it we made a little bit of an
Starting point is 00:35:16 adjustment there and we stopped losing almost all of it yeah that's awesome so that is like putting the learning center on there um was that has been a big thing for us us too. But like my office manager says now, hey, if it didn't happen to HubSpot, it didn't happen. What's up, guys? Sorry to take you away from the episode, but as you know, we do not run ads on this show. In an exchange for that, I need your help. If you're loving this episode, if you enjoy this podcast, whether you're watching on YouTube or you're listening on your favorite podcast platform, I would love for you to subscribe, share, comment if you're on YouTube, leave a rating review, if you're on Spotify or Apple iTunes, et cetera.
Starting point is 00:35:59 This helps the show grow. It helps me bring more guests in. We have a tremendous lineup of people coming in, men and women who've done incredible things, sharing their stories around peak performance, leadership, growth, sales. The things that are going to help you grow as a person and grow your business, but they all check out comments, ratings, reviews,
Starting point is 00:36:23 they check out all this information before they come on. So as I reach out to more and more people and want to bring them in and share their stories with you, I need your help. Share the show. Subscribe if you're not subscribed. And I love for you to leave a comment about the show because I read all the comments. Or if you're on Apple or Spotify, leave a rating review of this show. I love you for listening to this show. And I hope you enjoy it listening as much as I do creating the show for you.
Starting point is 00:36:47 All right. I'm out of here. Peace. Let's get back to the episode. That is our, so our, we're working towards that. We're not there yet. you know, we're moving off of agency Zoom slowly over to HubSpot. That's not necessarily a knock on agency Zoom.
Starting point is 00:37:03 We just are. It's a different level. Yeah. The integration I wanted, you know, especially with, you know, doing the deal with SIA and all that kind of stuff and where we're going and where we're headed. Like agency Zoom was a great tool for us as a seven, eight person agency operating fairly traditionally. great tool. I think today, based on the way things are going, I would probably look at better agency over agency Zoom personally. But, you know, agency Zoom is not a bad tool. But man, if you want to take your game to another level, there's just no comparison between the two and the things that you can see do and the insights you can have. If you are the type of, and this is one of the things that I've always appreciated about the way you look at the business is regardless.
Starting point is 00:37:55 regardless of what system you have, you have some sort of insight into what's happening in your agency. And one of the major beefs that I have with the traditional mentality of our industry is that principles have these thoughts that are really just subjective kind of feelings they get in their brain and they use those to make decisions. And I'm like, you're not actually basing that on anything that's actually legitimately like data driven happening in your business, you're just saying it feels like this happens. So this is what I'm going to do. And when you start to see what's possible from touchpoints, phone calls,
Starting point is 00:38:40 like I'm like, you're supposed to make 20 calls a day, let's say. You could tell me you made 20 calls, but those 20 calls aren't in HubSpot. You made zero calls. Zero. Didn't happen in HubSpot. Didn't happen. And it can track the full life cycle of every touch point. And that is when you get to that level, and it takes work and commitment and you got to keep on your people and, you know, and culturally develop, you know that.
Starting point is 00:39:05 But man, once you start to get some of that insights and we're just getting the very early pieces of it, Jesus, the things you can do are just unbelievable. Yeah, but for example, for me, like I can see why we weren't closing more business because my licensed person was spending time on things that weren't licensed. And I can see that from the conversations at HumpSpot. Yeah. And it easy way to feel me to control that was not assigned in those conversations. assigned to the VA or say, hey, you know what? We need to hire someone else to help you here because I see that you're spending 30% of a day on this.
Starting point is 00:39:32 Now, something else we didn't use it for a while or two is something called MAPSley. So MAPSly actually maps where every one of our referral partners is across the country, our customers. I matched it up with a flood warning system that we use. So it also tells us where to create content where flooding is also happening. And so I can look at the map and say, hey, this month, 40% of our business is Arizona, 30% in California. So it tells us where to kind of spend our time. That's awesome. I just think, dude, that that type of real-time marketing insights of dynamically creating, adjusting,
Starting point is 00:40:10 maneuvering content, whatever to address the market. I mean, one, that's a level that most people are not interested in, like just frankly, they're just not interested in going that deep, which is fine. You don't need to. But for those that are, are the wizard-esque games that you can play are just, I mean, I feel, I honestly feel like a kid in a candy store. Like with when I, when I get into HubSpot, like I've, every meeting that I have in the day that doesn't allow me to like build out new systems, processes or different, different features in, in HubSpot, I feel like it's wasted time because just figuring out this thing that I mentioned to you with the underwriters, right, this submission, video submission process and getting the feedback of,
Starting point is 00:41:05 here's the underwriters that open the emails and watch the videos and here's the underwriters that don't. Just that insight alone allows me to go, guys, don't waste your time submitting your business to X, Y, Z carrier or MGA, send it right to these guys. They appreciate it. They're going to get it back to us. We're going to write the business faster. That safety. If that saves five hours a month total time, right, for the team, if that just that simple insight. And now I can stack those insights up on top of each other, three hours here, an hour here, five hours here, 10 hours here, all that time goes back into selling and helping clients, all of it. And it's like when we think in terms of just,
Starting point is 00:41:47 no, that. Think about employee morale. Yeah. Oh, yeah, 100%. Yeah, 100%. I think about people hate doing mortgage changes they hate doing a lot of the service especially sales people but now what you can see hey here's how i can take it out of your hands yeah or you're doing it and you shouldn't be that's one of the things that i like about is it tells it helps me gauge what are each one of our team members is doing yeah and and ultimately it lets you know where do you need more help where where where do you need another person where do you need a VA hey we can actually we can actually you know go get a VA who crushes COIs or is great at handling email inbound service requests and responding to them and triaging them and you know and you know other things like you know right now are we have a position
Starting point is 00:42:40 new business coordinator that's the person who does the prequalification of leads to suspects and she is training to get licensed well you know I'm able to I am now able to give her and watch how and listen, one, listen to phone calls to ring central. I'm able to call log every call she makes. So I'm getting a feel before she ever becomes a licensed producer for Rogue Risk. I am able to see how does she do on the phone? Is she willing to pick up the phone? How does she do with answering questions?
Starting point is 00:43:08 How is she a documentation? So I'm literally getting, she's building her resume for us as a select producer before she ever becomes a select producer. And I can see it all right there. Now, she's doing an awesome job. I can't wait for her to become a producer. I think she's going to crush. but like but but maybe she's maybe she wasn't good right and i would get to see that and either train her
Starting point is 00:43:28 or say maybe this isn't the right thing for you or whatever that's what like conversation AI yeah to detect customer behavior based on tone yeah helps us teach our team how to use the right tone to the conversation to control the conversation yeah you know it's it's it's it just this level of insight i think a lot of people will go ah you know i'd rather just go golfing with person and and I think that's wonderful. I think I think what's happening in our space is that there's developing a clear delineation between those individuals who whose thought process is singular individual household income, right? Which through nonprofit events and golf games and asking for referrals, can you build a book of business that provides you with personal income that that's
Starting point is 00:44:21 Abso-freakin-lutely. You don't have to do any of this shit. None of it. You can use a spreadsheet and have two carriers and make more than enough money to take care of your family and everything's fine. It's going to take time and a lot of work, but you can get there and that's fine. If you're looking to scale your business, to like grow your business beyond you, beyond the kind of egocentric kingdom version of your business.
Starting point is 00:44:54 You cannot do it today, in my opinion, without starting to dip your toe into the shit that we're talking about right now. You just can't. It doesn't mean you can't be successful. You can. It doesn't mean you can't make money. You can. But if you're looking for if scale, if legacy, if you're ambitious and you want to,
Starting point is 00:45:17 Want it to be bigger than just you, you have to start to think about this stuff. You just can't compete if you're not. That's the same thing we're doing with payments right now. We're getting ready to finally finish the integration with the ePay. We go straight through deals in the HubSpot. We don't have to do anything. Instead of having to go to ePay, fill it the pre-fay payment page. Send it.
Starting point is 00:45:33 None of that. Yeah. Same thing with the accord forms with the developer. We're going to finish out pre-filling accord forms. How are you getting to that? You're using, you got an accord templates and you've built it yourself? I built it myself years ago. I just didn't like the way it looked.
Starting point is 00:45:50 But now with API data, it can be up-to-day and really accurate. It can change instantly if we needed to. Yeah. The accord form thing is such a shame. It's such a shame that in court, a cord like can't get out of their own way. You know, what a bureaucratic nightmare court is. It just, you know, the, the, what they have at their fingertips and how much value they've actually extracted is it's sad because I know some, you know, accord would say. oh look how much money we make and look how big we are and it's like yes except you've probably
Starting point is 00:46:21 done 5% of what you would have been capable of if you had ever actually pushed so that said that being said you know we use wonder right for to produce a lot of our chords today um and they just opened up a zapier beta which is cool um we're going to help test that a little bit I'm hoping that that works um I do like peter and what they're doing at wonder right but um you're on the or remote brain share Yeah, it's hard. You know, I'm very hopeful for them, so I don't want this to be negative in any way. But, you know, with third party, the hard part is you have to assume inevitably they're going to continue to expand services and, you know, want to become an AMS or want to become something else.
Starting point is 00:47:06 And it's just like, it's like we just need one company that offers a cord form integration and creation and creation and mapping. easily at a price the industry could afford, and they would absolutely friggin' dominate. But I feel like everybody goes, no, we need to build an ecosystem. We need to build this and we need to build that. And it's like, if I have to duplicate entry, it's not going to work. Oh, you need to offer this type of insurance and this type of insurance. Look, it can be nice.
Starting point is 00:47:38 Maybe we should offer that. Maybe we should go over there. And you get distracted so easy. Then what happens, you forget why you got in business to do what you do in the first point. Yeah. Yeah, chasing shiny objects is difficult. You know, I know I'm, if there was like a chasing shiny objects, anonymous 12 step program, I probably would have or should have been in it a long time ago because I'm definitely guilty of that. But, you know, I think that there's two sides of that coin. You know, there's part of me always says like, oh, Ryan, just stay focused on what you're doing. And, keep pushing and blah, which, which, you know, in general is what we do. Or I guess I hire people to do that because I struggle with it. But the other side of it is.
Starting point is 00:48:25 Naturally, things are going to develop off what you're doing. Like when we originally started with just flood insurance, you know, we have a flood city company now. We have a flood mitigation company, a flood consulting company. But it still goes back to our educational vision of it's all still circled around that. Yeah. I mean, it's not going outside of that. But these things, you know, like people, oh, you know, you start a side business or whatever.
Starting point is 00:48:44 it just naturally happens when you get in a certain field and you're dealing with it. You know, the thing, the thing too, yeah, and I think that's a great point. I think the other thing with chasing some shiny objects or always kind of researching or looking into new technology is that if you don't, if you don't spend some time in that space, right, then you do become stale, like over time. I'm not saying immediately, but you do start to, like if you're not, there is absolutely, absolutely something to keeping some small portion of your brain looking out into the future at what's coming, at what's going on. It doesn't mean you always take action. But like,
Starting point is 00:49:27 I'm going to, in two weeks, I'll be at in SureTech, Boston, which I don't know when this is going to come out, but may or may not, this may not come out that week or may come out the week after, so it may already happen. But I can't wait to go there. It's a great event. they do a great job. I'm glad it's back after COVID. But like you get a chance to just bump into people that have crazy ideas, kind of like you do. And it gives you it gives your brain a little taste of like, here's what's possible. It doesn't mean you need to do it, nor do you need to do it today. But like this is possible or like, you know, you talking about some of the shit that you do. I may look at that and go, gee, I'd love to be able to do that. I can't do it today. But man, that's on my list. And I'd like a year from now to be. be able to do that thing that he's doing. And if you don't let your brain go to that space, I feel like you're doing your business. You could also bring it back and say, you know what? I can tweak it just a little bit to improve what I'm currently doing. Yeah. And that's usually what my goal is of, hey, no, I don't want to go do what they're doing, but maybe something they say
Starting point is 00:50:30 triggers in my brain to help me improve our process. Yeah. Because I got to tell you, look, as fancy as these systems are, at the end of the day, it's all about process. Yeah. Yep. One of the things that I want to do that I'm going to build out eventually is I want to track every company that we quote on an account. I want to track who we quoted, what their response was, quote or decline, and then what the actual quote number was. Because I want there to become a day when I can pull a report that says, say Amtros, Hanover, Chub, Liberty, and Hartford, right? Let's take those five companies. So we quoted those five companies 20 times. Hartford came back with a quote 90% of the time.
Starting point is 00:51:22 Chubb was 82% of the time, you know, down to Liberty that only came back 52% time. It's not a lack on liberty. I'm just an example. Right. And then what that, and here's the quoting, who was the best price, who declined, you know, whatever. And be able to take those analytics and come back and go, okay, in the future, when this type of account comes in, don't even quote the other four, just quote, Chub, because they're quoting this type of risk, 97% of the time. And another 90% of those times, they are the best price. So I'd rather just go right to them, write the business, then quote the other four as well
Starting point is 00:52:00 and have to deal with a decline or the rate not being as good or whatever. And then you can obviously tweak it too with like they have the right coverage package and that kind of stuff, obviously. So but being able to get that, being able to get that insight back allows you to shave so much time because I know you're dealing with a singular line of business. I know you have multiple markets. But like for us, one of our biggest headaches and biggest time lost is where does the business go? Where does it go? That is an enormous time waste. I'm wasting 80% of my time.
Starting point is 00:52:34 sitting into 20% of the carriers, you know what I mean? Like, hey, how do we do a better job of an appetite? We're instantly we know right off the back. When we put something in, even training this system, you know, machine technology to tell us, hey, go to company A, company B, based on what you're putting in. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, in this, to the underwriter not opening the email and watching the video, that underwriter is going to get less submissions from us from now on. And in, and in the next quarterly review with their marketing rep, when they call and go, hey, submissions are down. I'm going to go, look, I sent you guys 25 emails and this son of a bitch only opened 16 of them. What happened to the other nine? What is it too good to open those?
Starting point is 00:53:12 Like you're not doing us any favors. Don't, you know what I mean? Like that kind of stuff to me, not to screw the carriers. I, you know, that's not the point. I wish the person would open the emails. That's, that's the point is from from a people time efficiency standpoint and to your point, a quality of work standpoint, my people are not ever, are feeling. less and less like they're just spinning their wheels, which is just a soul killer. I mean, let's be honest, too, you deal with a mark grip. They've always had the power of, hey, you didn't do this, you didn't do that. Now, something like a house spot.
Starting point is 00:53:42 No, wait, we did. And here it is. Yeah. We get just an opportunity to defend what we did. Yes. Yep. That, that to me, there is. Just like E&O.
Starting point is 00:53:52 That's how people, HubSpot is better than I think any AMS out there. I'll destroy it. I will put, I walked through, so I walked through for my team, how I do. did this submission the other day. This here added this contact, added the underwriter, made a note, attached these quote forms. It automatically pulls in all the emails. It tracked the call that I made to the person. And here's the video. I showed them all that. And I was like, what's not in the system? What activity that I do that someone could go back and say, hey, you know, blah, blah, blah, here, here. What did I not do? What did I miss? And they were like,
Starting point is 00:54:29 you got everything. And that, it was easy. It's different, right? HubSpot is different. If you're trained on a traditional AMS, it's definitely a different mental with the objects and stuff. But like, man, once you start to pick it up, it is insane.
Starting point is 00:54:45 It's just all there right at your fingertips. And that's what's up. That's what it wins is ease of use because even when I interview a candidate, HubSpot is part of our interview process. And yeah, it usually blows them away about how easy the system is to use. But I say, look, it's not that it's, necessarily easy to use. It's that I'm only showing you 1% and it's the 1% you're going to use every day. Yeah. Yeah. Dude, it's awesome. So, so, you know, we're, wow, we just blew through 52 minutes
Starting point is 00:55:12 and no time. That was crazy. So, you know, kind of using the last 10 minutes or so of our conversation here, talk to me a little bit about what you got the most excited about your business. It doesn't have to be technology. It could be whatever. Like, what do you, when you, when you show up in the morning, like what right now are you the most excited? excited about? When I show, it still goes back to this massive risk that comes on my desk and nobody says they can do anything with. And I'm able to instantly pull the first data we have, go in, put a full report together, send it to a carrier and get a risk model and a rating model that no one else can get. Yeah. Because of our educational background. It's at the end of the day,
Starting point is 00:55:49 it still comes back to that for me. Yeah. That's the part I enjoy it. Yeah. So you love the challenge of the tough account that you get to, you really dig your teeth into and do the problem solving. I get that. I like, you know, as much as I don't really love selling insurance, I love the, I love the risk management, you know, I love walking through. I'm with you.
Starting point is 00:56:16 I love the educational side of walking a client through the coverages, why they're important, how they can mitigate them. Like that problem solving piece is, it is a lot of fun. There's, there's, there's, there's a lot to that. Then I also like how my team
Starting point is 00:56:30 will email me and say, hey, here's what happened this morning that we need videos on. Yeah. And then you go crank them out. Like this afternoon, I'll crank out about eight more. I usually do eight to ten videos on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Starting point is 00:56:42 Yeah. I, I, so you guys know this is a Friday. So he's off his schedule. Just, just to be clear on that. But I,
Starting point is 00:56:49 I will, I am also this afternoon going to be doing my, I did a bunch of stuff this morning. I got a few more calls. And then this afternoon before I get my kids off the bus, I will go crank out. I got about six. I have six head. So I think in headlines, you know, in terms of what I want to attack.
Starting point is 00:57:08 So I have six headlines. I may, depending on time, I may just add two more and bang out a quick eight. But, but dude, you know, I know you're right there. We did, we just got monetization status. You know, I'm not going to actually put ads on our videos for Roe Gris. but the monetization status gives you some extra tracking and whatever. But you have 1,000 plus subscribers. And we did 4,000 total hours of view time in the last 12 months.
Starting point is 00:57:36 Last month we did last 28 days, we did almost 11,000 views. Which, dude, for insurance YouTube channel, that's why like I watch the shit you do. I've done it twice now, once with the Murray Group with Rogue, you know, a few other agents. Crowley's doing some good stuff. like I just don't see how other agents can see the things that we're doing and not be like, this is a thing we're going to do. Like, we're going to do this. Like of all the things we should be doing, this is like, look at the success these guys are having.
Starting point is 00:58:07 Like the leads just keep, it never ends. It's just every day. We generate two to 300 leads a month from between referral partners and content. Like we're not out there spending money in ads. Everything's strictly organic. Yeah. And we have an 80 to 90% close ratio. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:58:23 It's, dude, it is insane the possibilities. Yeah. It's just insane. And it boggles my mind. But not of that, the content, like I had a meeting with a large carrier yesterday that's leaving a private flood market. And they came to us and we're going to put a blog out with some other carriers. We're kind of putting misinformation out there. And I say, you know, we like your content.
Starting point is 00:58:46 It's neutral. And it's always fact based. Will you put this piece of information out for us? So I shot a video on it. And I got a blog I released last night on. They said, we know that you won't spit it negatively, but you also won't spin it positively. You're going to be completely neutral about it. And that's what we like, watch your content.
Starting point is 00:59:02 Yeah. Yeah, that's good. That's good, man. I know, in general, I'd say carrier reviews do really well for us from a content perspective. I got a call from four CEOs, my did a best up on private, residential and commercial. Yeah. It's what's funny is that a lot of agents are like, oh, well, you know, my carrier is going to get mad at me.
Starting point is 00:59:25 I'm like mad at you. Like, I mean, maybe if you're saying a bunch of untrue things about them or you're purposefully like trashing them. But like if you're giving an honest review, like I did an honest review of maybe Hanover or somebody where, you know, like I just, I said like, hey, like they are a little old school in some of the things they do. But the paper's amazing. The claims handling is amazing.
Starting point is 00:59:49 You know, so so it was, it felt to me. it felt very real. And I know if I were going to sue you for saying something good about them. Yeah. What do you? Why would they be pissed? I'm doing the video to write more business with their carrier. Like I want people to watch the video and go, hey, you know, hey, I saw your video on
Starting point is 01:00:07 Hanover. They seem like a great company. Let's do, you know, I like do business. Like that's why you're doing it. So to me, it's just there's just, it's like what read. They ask you answer. Do exactly what I see. No.
Starting point is 01:00:19 I can't discuss pricing on my website. look, customers don't want to know how much your insurance is going to cost. They want to know what's determining the price of insurance. That's all they want to know. Dude, that Marguess has made an entire career just in our space with that point is, yes, you cannot say a bop for a bakery is going to be $1,300. No, you can't say that because you don't know. But what you can say is here's the four main factors that based, you know,
Starting point is 01:00:47 based on these four factors, your rate is going to go up or down. and here's what they are. And that's what people want to know. And I promise you that will be the number one page of people visit on your website. Yes. Yeah. It's, dude,
Starting point is 01:01:01 it's wild. Unfortunately, he's trained me really badly. I got to send him an email on this. I made my wife and Mother's Day present. And she's like, you know, no,
Starting point is 01:01:08 you're not any of the pictures. I said, you got to blame that market shared him. There's that whole thing he trained me. You know, it's not, you know, it's not about us.
Starting point is 01:01:15 It's about the customers. You know, so he sticks it in my head on everything I do now. Yeah. I know. lot of, I've had a lot of people, you know, a lot of people have questioned the fact that all our videos on rogue risk YouTube channel have me in them. And I'm on the cover image. And it's like, look, as soon as I get someone who is willing to be, who can speak to insurance in a way that I
Starting point is 01:01:40 believe is authentic and real and, and, and get, you know, in a caring way. Like I'd like to believe that the way I deliver it is I actually want people to learn. Like as soon as I get someone who can do that and do it consistently, I will have them do it. Like I don't want to be the face. It's the reason it's not the Hanley agency. Like I didn't name it Hanley insured and services. I named it rogue risk because I don't want it to be about me.
Starting point is 01:02:04 But I think to a certain extent, the human factor, there's something to it. There's something to it that like you run your agency and people get to hear your viewpoints. You're the, you're the cultural leader and driver of the business. And if you're out there every day teaching and educating, then it becomes very clear that that is a core principle of your business. Do I love answering the phones every now and then it completely throws people off late. This is the person from the video. Yeah. They're just like shocked. Yeah. I will tell you this. There's three books I require people to read before they come
Starting point is 01:02:39 on board now. They ask you answer. The visual cell by Marcus and Tyler. And And then Anne Hanley, everybody writes. Yeah, Ann Hanley's great. And I said, because you know, you're going to write a blog. You're going to do a video. You're going to share it with a customer. And they're going to build this instant trust because it's actually done by you. Not someone else on your team.
Starting point is 01:03:01 I had Anne Hanley on the podcast. She is. Gosh, I was what, what, two or three years ago now? It's probably about two years ago now. She's awesome. Yeah, I've had so much going on. I haven't been able to do too much outreach to people outside of the industry. race to love like bringing people outside the industry and every once in a while.
Starting point is 01:03:19 But yeah, she's, she's awesome. And just as quality of person off camera as on camera, just think very highly of her, very, very good person. But I've sent out probably 20 copies at the visual selling. Everybody, I had one candidate reached out back on to me. Didn't end up coming to work for us. She's like, I closed a $10,000 account today because of that book. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:03:42 Dude, I'm with you. Hey, man, I want to be respectful of your time. we just blew through an hour long conversation. We'll have to have you back on the show again. This is great. People want to see what you're up to. They just want to connect with you. Where are the best places to do that?
Starting point is 01:03:58 LinkedIn. Find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, our website, flood insurance guru. com. I have a lot of people right now that are reaching out to us about the learning center. Not necessarily learning about flood in the learning center, but they're like, hey, how do I build a learning center like that? visit my website flood insurancecuber.com ford slash learning center reach out to me
Starting point is 01:04:18 market shared and actually built it for me but it's been very beneficial for us I'd be happy to sit down with anybody and just kind of show them how we built it the process, all that stuff that really helped you out. Yeah, dude, I appreciate you the work you do the way you think about your business.
Starting point is 01:04:34 You're definitely someone who's leading to charge on a lot of this stuff and I'm glad that you were willing to stick with me and finally get this interview done because I always love our conversations and I'm always just trying to keep up with you from a content and marketing standpoint. So I will tell you this, though, what you did to me, I've actually been doing the Jamie Pierce. I owe him an interview. Well, dude, thank you so much. We should have none but the best.
Starting point is 01:05:01 Thanks, man. Close twice as many deals by this time next week. Sound impossible, it's not. With the one call closed system, you'll stop chasing leads and start. closing deals in one call. This is the exact method we use to close 1,200 clients under three years during the pandemic. No fluff, no endless follow-ups, just results fast. Based in behavioral psychology and battle tested, the one-call closed system eliminates
Starting point is 01:05:40 excuses and gets the prospect saying yes, more than you ever thought possible. If you're ready to stop losing opportunities and start winning, visit masteroftheclose.com. That's masterof-theclose.com. Do it today. You've finally broken loose from work. Three friends, one tea time, and then the text. Honey, there's water in the basement. Not exactly how you pictured your Saturday.
Starting point is 01:06:08 That's when you call us, Cincinnati Insurance. We always answer the call, because real protection means showing up, even when things are in the rough. Cincinnati Insurance, let us make your bad day better. Find an agent at CINFIN.com. If you're an HVAC technician and a call comes in, Granger knows that you need a partner that helps you find the right product, fast and hassle-free.
Starting point is 01:06:36 And you know that when the first problem of the day is a clanking blower motor, there's no need to break a sweat. With Granger's easy-to-use website and product details, you're confident you'll soon have everything humming right along. Call 1-800-Grangeer. Clickgranger.com or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done. Happy holidays.
Starting point is 01:06:59 Want to give your host a gift? Consider subscribing, rating, and reviewing the show this holiday season. It really helps the show grow. From all of us at Believe, have a Merry Christmas, everyone, and a happy holiday. If you like the show, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe. It really does help the show to grow. Thank you for listening.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.