Finding Peak w/ Ryan Hanley - Stop Selling Inbound Insurance Leads

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

Spartan philosophy, built in the black-ops lab of business: https://www.findingpeak.comFinding Peak podcast: https://linktr.ee/ryan_hanleyEver had a lightbulb moment that shifted how you approach your business? That's what we're unpacking today, the seismic shift inbound marketing can create for insurance agencies.✅ Join the Insurance Growth Masterclass: https://masterclass.insure✅ For daily insights and ideas on peak performance: https://www.instagram.com/ryan_hanley/✅ Hire me to speak at your next event: https://ryanhanley.com/speaking** More about this episode **I bring my journey to the table, sharing my days at the Murray Group to my current insights as Chief Marketing Officer at TrustandChoice.com and Agency Nation.We dissect the rise of 'closers', the unsung heroes in converting inbound leads, and why their existence marks a pivotal turn from aggressive selling to strategic closing. Embrace the nuances of this transformative role and discover how answering client questions can lead to a trust so deep that it practically sells your policies for you.Real-life stories are the heart of this session, like the one about Virginia from Clifton Park, whose inquiry became an eye-opening testament to the power of content marketing. And let's not forget the contractor whose life was changed by a workers' compensation video.These narratives cement that addressing specific needs can spark organic growth and solidify lasting client relationships. As we wrap up, I sincerely thank our community and urge you all to lean into the Inbound methodologies.For those who dare to adapt, the next decade promises many opportunities. So, tune in, join the conversation, and let's chart the course to a thriving future in the insurance space.--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/80upZ9Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.This 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

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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show. Today we have a topic that is near and dear to my heart. Inbound leads in the insurance industry. which so many people talk about, but so few have had the experience that I've had with dealing with these literally thousands, tens of thousands of leads in multiple different formats. And just to give you a feel for what I mean, I was generating back in the good old days with the Murray Group for more than eight years. We were doing close to, we average somewhere between like 85 to 100 leads a month. And I was doing that on a $100 budget, making every mistake, wasting time, energy content all over the place. and really cutting my teeth on what it meant to be to do inbound,

what inbound marketing was, what content marketing was. These are terms that aren't used as much today. It's more like digital marketing or, you know, brand building, etc. But the core principles were really built back in from like 2010 to 2018-ish around these ideas of inbound and content marketing. And when I was doing this for the Murray Group, what I learned very clearly was that by answering at its base, answering simple questions that you consistently receive from your target market, putting them online and written in my preferred format video as well as others,

generates inbound opportunities. People find you. They see that you know what you're talking about. They understand that you have an expertise. They may appreciate the way you look, you talk, your feel, your authenticity, whatever vibe you're giving off, whether it be hyper professional, very casual, etc. It could be some sort of connection to a particular niche market, et cetera. Whatever it is, they connect with it.

They build trust with you in the digital environment. And then when they have a problem, they reach out to you. Okay. So that is primary lessons I took away from the Murray Group. Transitioning into the second phase of my career, which was as the chief marketing officer for trusted choice.com and agency nation, I got to teach a lot of these principles and see the results in real agencies across the country. and did a lot of that through agency nation.

And then through the lead delivery system that trusted choice.com has, we were able to watch the result of agencies across the country, of every shape, size, and every geographical region, how they handled inbound leads, leads that were delivered via like a warm call transfer and leads that were delivered via email or what are commonly known as data leads. And what were the opposite?

they were consistently having to hurdle. Where were the spots? Where did things come up that they didn't see? We'll call those blind spots. And what were the problems that seemed to be easily solved, et cetera? Pushing through that and a couple other businesses and just continuing to apply the results and the entire time working my own personal brand using a lot of these techniques, whether you're listening to this in the podcast or seeing in social or on the YouTube

channel, eventually coming to the agency that I founded, sold and ultimately exited, rogue risk, where in less than four years, we applied these principles and saw massive growth. Not to mention over this time, I have consulted with just under two dozen clients on the side for a period of a few years in which I didn't talk about these very much and we'll never tell you who they are specifically. That's just out of respect for them. But I've been able to see this work over and over and over again. I believe that inbound marketing, generating opportunities, which reach out to us, our agency, so inbound, meaning they come to us. We're not, we're not have to call them, we're not warming them up, we're not wedging our way in, et cetera.

They're raising their hand and contacting us. I believe that this is one of the most important aspects of scaling and growing an agency. Cold calling is amazing. I have absolutely no problem of cold calling. I did cold calling. I think that some amount of outbound prospecting, whether it's cold calling, cold emailing, using tools like Lume to do very targeted, very personalized outreach can be highly effective.

And on a one-to-one basis, like producer by producer, these methods can generate real revenue and real wealth for us over time. However, if you're trying to scale an agency, if you're trying to scale a business. From my perspective and my experience, the best way to do that is not to just hire, hire, higher, higher, higher, higher, higher cold callers and then spend tons of time training in them, hoping some percentages of them hit and work and actually can produce results. It's build a team of closers that are absolutely tremendous at closing inbound leads. Now, the title of this video is stop selling inbound insurance leads,

and I firmly believe that. So what do I mean? What is the difference between closing and selling? Selling is where we feel the need to inject our selves into the process. If we're doing inbound right, we're not part of the process. And this is why I believe, and we're going to do future videos on this here at Finding Peak. And if you're part of our training programs or one of our coaching clients, we dive deep into this topic, talk about how to recruit, how to hire closers versus producers or account executives. But just the high level here of what a closer is, is a closer is a different personality, a different psychological profile, which sits in between our outbound hunters, our chest thumpers, those people who want to write a piece of business

and post it on LinkedIn and get all the likes and hand clap emojis and love that stuff. people are important, amazing, but they have a very specific disposition. And then you have your account executives who are more about nurturing and carrying and solving, you know, kind of service-related issues and retaining business, right? Those are AEs. And what happens in so many agencies is that we try to take someone from either one of those buckets and turn them into an inside sales rep. And neither one of those profiles exactly matches, in my opinion, an inbound sales rep. I call this third production position of closer. Like I said, we'll do deeper dives on this in future videos.

But that position has to be able to operate from a different mindset than you would want a producer to operate or an A to operate. And the difference is you are closing business. You are not selling insurance. I'm going to say that one more time. A closer closes business. They do not sell insurance. So what are the difference between selling and closing?

I learned this from the very first inbound lead that I ever got. So the very first inbound lead that I ever received was in 2011. I had been writing blog posts on my ex-father-in-law's agency's website for a while, about six months. and a woman called me and her name was Virginia. And Virginia, I got a, you know, beep, Ryan, there's someone on the phone for you. Her name's Virginia. Okay, great. So I pick up the phone and this woman responds and she says, hi, Ryan, you don't know me.

My name is Virginia. I'm from a town called Clifton Park. That's about 20 minutes from where our agency was located. You don't need to know where that is. But she wasn't calling from like, she didn't like driven by our agency. She was from a different town. She didn't even necessarily know where we were located. She said, I'm from Clifton Park.

We've never met. But I've been reading your blog posts for a few months now. And I want you to quote my insurance. Or she said, I want you to handle my insurance. I'm sorry. I want you to handle my insurance is what she said. And I said, oh, so you're looking for a quote. And she said, no, no, I'm not looking for a quote.

I'm going to send you everything I have. I want you to look through it. Make sure I have the right stuff. If there's anything I need that's not there, let me know. I want you to give me the best price you have. Send it back to me and I want to do business with you. See, Virginia was already sold. Virginia wanted to work with me, with our agency, with the mindset that I had.

She was already sold. I just had to close the business, meaning do the job, do the job that we do. Make sure she had all the right coverages. Make sure she was with the right carrier. Make sure she had competitive pricing, et cetera. right that's the job but if i tried to sell virginia on things she would have she would have balked she would have jumped she didn't want to be sold she didn't want to have things pushed down her push down her throat she didn't want to know all the options she certainly didn't want to have me

you know deny doing business with her because i couldn't completely round out her account in some way shape or form virginia had a problem and her problem was she didn't particularly have a good relationship with her agent she had read my content and thought that i would be a good fit and was already sold when she reached out. Okay. Another example of this is the very first inbound lead that I ever got at the agency that I started back in 2020, Rogue Risk. And this was a contractor who was about two hours south of our location.

He had found one of my videos on YouTube about workers' compensation for painters. And he was, had been a lifelong, you. you know, solo shop, just him painting, never needed workers' comp because most jobs being an individual, he was a sub. And he had recently, this was 2020, he had recently before COVID, unfortunately, gone out on his own and it formed his own shop and hired a couple guys to come work for him. And he had never had workers' comp before. But he already had general liability. So he had general liability through his current agent. But he didn't know, you know, and again, And some of this is the power of inbound marketing.

He and how unfortunately, how poorly we as agents often explain to our customers all the potential services and policies that we can provide. So he was unaware that his agent could actually write workers comp, found us online, saw the video on workers compensation insurance for painters that we had done, reached out, said, hey, I just hired two guys. I know any workers comp to get on these job sites. I've absolutely no idea how to do it. uh, can you help me? And, uh, this is like June, uh, or no, late May of 2020. So, you know, the zombie apocalypse has happened and we're starting to open things up a little bit. Certain people were able to go back to business. In this case, he was. And, uh, they still had to wear like masks and stuff at that time. But I, you know, so just so you know, I launched in March and

didn't write a policy for two and a half months, which was scary. But once, once the COVID stuff started to go away, everything changed. But he reaches out and, and, and he reaches out. And, and, he, he's, you know, he had a problem. His problem was, I have no idea how to do workers' compensation. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do. I don't know what it requires. I think to some businesses, workers, even though to most insurance agents, workers' compensation, once you understand the mechanics, is fairly straightforward. To many business owners, workers' comp is scary, right? They know that they need it. They know they have to have a cert for it. They know they can get in trouble if they don't do it properly. So he reached out. If I had pushed this gentleman for all his insurance,

you know, his commercial auto, his general liability, he would not have done business with me. He had a problem. His problem was workers' comp. And I was able to write that policy for him and get him squared away so that the next day he could get on a job that he needed to pay his bills. I then went back around about two months later and did end up writing the general liability and a couple months, maybe like a year after that, I think we ended up writing the commercial auto as well because he moved the truck from his personal name into his business name.

We didn't do personal lines or I tried to stay away from personal lines at that time. So the idea was if we sell, right, the common sales process is, well, you need this and you have to have your general liability. And, you know, if you're driving that truck around, it should be in commercial, you know, that should be a commercial auto policy, et cetera. No, not on inbound stuff, not on the first contact, not in that initial call, not in the initial sale. Now, if someone comes in and says, hey, I have all this stuff.

If you want it, you can have it. 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. 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, 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.

All right, I'm out of here. Peace. Let's get back to the episode. Awesome. But we need to stop thinking on inbound leads. This is just right. If you're doing outbound stuff, cold calling, you want to get the whole account. That makes a lot of sense to me.

But on inbound leads, what that person is saying is they're raising their hand and saying, I have a problem. My problem is, insert whatever it is. In this case, it was, had never purchased a workers' comp policy before needed help. It could be, I just got my first commercial vehicle. It could be I'm starting a business. It could be, I can't get a hold of my agent. It could be, I've been auto renewed for five years and I'm sick of it.

It could be, you know, we're starting a subcompany. We're starting a spinoff where there are 10 million potential reasons that someone does not 10 million. There's probably about a dozen or so really. But in five to seven are most common of reasons that someone reaches out for you when they're doing, when, and they say, I have this issue. And your job is to solve that problem. A closer's job is to solve the problem, not to sell them a bunch of insurance. Now, you might be saying, Ryan,

monoline accounts, accounts that are split with other agents tend to not renew at as high as a rate. It opens us up to having our work stolen or BOR. And that's 100% true. That is why on the back end, you need to have an onboarding process, which maximizes the lifetime value of that customer by, one, setting expectations that you are going to reach back out and, you know, look into their other stuff. And, you know, you need to have reminders set up in your systems. You need to have some automation, some touchpoint automations, some introductions set up. We need to have trainings with our AEs so that any touchpoints we're asking for the rest of the account.

We need to be asking for reviews and referrals, et cetera. And those are all things that we set up during our onboarding process for that lead. So the idea is get as many leads in the top of the funnel as you can and solve their problems. Be a solution provider. Get that huge blast of positivity and trust that you get when you solve someone's problems. When they reach out to you on inbound, they are saying I have an issue that I need help with. and whatever's in my physical right in front of me world is not getting it done. That's why I'm coming to you.

So solve their problem. They now see you as a solution provider. You have incredible value in their mind. And you have all the momentum to then during the onboarding process in the following two, three, six months to come back around upsell, cross-sell, ask for Google reviews, ask for referrals, and maximize the lifetime value of that customer. But if you try to do all that work up front, if you try to ask for referrals, ask for Google reviews, round out the account, try to sell them more than what they really need or what they're asking for, in that initial interaction, you will lose that account. They will absolutely ghost you.

They will go away. They will find someone else because they don't understand what you understand. They don't understand your business model. Frankly, they don't care about your business mile. They don't care that, you know, we go from, you know, a 30% retention rate with one podcast. policy to 70% with 2 to 91 with 3, right? They don't care about those numbers. Those numbers mean nothing to your inbound prospects.

All they know is they have a problem and they want you to solve that problem. And if you can change that mindset, if you can start to change that mindset, there's all kinds of things you can do. This is what we do with Finding Peak is we help agencies fix this mindset, build this mindset if they don't have it in the beginning, help you recruit closers if you don't currently have them. changing this mindset, changing this idea to be just pure problem solvers and then allowing our CRM automation, technology, et cetera, our AE team and however you want to set it up,

there's all different methods. You can have the producer reach back out, et cetera. You know, that's more philosophical to the agency and how they want to compensate people, et cetera. Solve that problem. Do not try to tell them that they're wrong, right? Unless they're truly wrong. But I've seen people lose accounts because someone, wanted a one million umbrella and you're like, well, really, they should have three and I don't want to write one. It's like, if they need a $1 million umbrella to get on the job, you know, you should be recording phone calls, et cetera, anyways. You say, look, I want you to know my recommendation is a $3 million umbrella, but I understand you only need to want to get on the job. I'm going to write you the $1 million

umbrella, but I just want you to know, I'm going to notate my system that I offer to three. Here's the price. And if you ever change your mind, let me know. And if it's okay with you, I'd like to follow up with you in six months and just make sure that $1 million umbrella is still okay. That's all you got to do. Simple stuff like that, right? You've solved their problem. You've got them the commercial umbrella that gets them on the job. That's what they're worried about.

You've gotten them the commercial umbrella that gets them a contract that gets them paid. That's what they need it. You solve that problem. And then by handling the process correctly, by not trying to sell them by just closing the business, you can then come back around now that you're seen as a value provider and get the rest of the account and do what you do best and make sure they're properly. protected and all that kind of good stuff. So my friends, I highly, highly recommend that this is a mindset you address inside your agency for inbound accounts, imbound accounts, that you are solving problems,

that you are closing business, that you are not trying to sell people insurance. I promise you, if you're looking at low conversion rates, if you get ghosted, if people tend to push back or give you a hard time, it is most likely because you are trying to sell them when really they just want you to solve their problem. If you enjoy this content, if this is something you're interested, guys, I love you for being part of Finding Peak and part of this community. If you're watching on YouTube, love for you to subscribe. Leave me a comment. If you have any questions about this process, thoughts, whatever, leave them inside of YouTube. If you're listening on the podcast, share this with friends, guys, I love you. I believe the next 10 years in particular are wide open for those who

want to adopt the technology systems, processes, and cultural mindsets of inbound and conjunction with everything they're currently doing, those are going to be the agencies that stand out and grow. And at finding peak, that is what we're helping agencies do. I love if you're listening to this, I'm out of here. Peace. I'm going to Shaboo! 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 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 masterof-theclose.com. That's masterof-theclose.com. Do it today. Happy holidays.

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