Noob School - Breaking Into the Sales World with Ed Williams

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

Today on Noob School, we're joined by Ed Williams - a Citadel grad working with AssuredPartners, an insurance brokerage. We discuss the importance of networking early on, as well as the impact a good tutor can have on the trajectory of your career. Tune in to learn more about Noob School, and how it helped Ed on his path to success, as well as more about Ed and what AssuredPartners can do for you. Check out what the Noob School website has to offer: https://SchoolForNoobs.com I'm going to be sharing my secrets on all my social channels, but if you want them all at your fingertips, start with my book, Sales for Noobs: https://amzn.to/3tiaxsL Subscribe to our newsletter today: https://bit.ly/3Ned5kL #SalesTraining #B2BSales #SalesExcellence #SalesStrategy #BusinessGrowth #SalesLeadership #SalesSuccess #SalesCoaching #SalesSkills #SalesInnovation #SalesTips #SalesPerformance #SalesTransformation #SalesTeamDevelopment #SalesMotivation #SalesEnablement #SalesGoals #SalesExpertise #SalesInsights #SalesTrends

New School. All right, welcome back to Noob School. John Sterling here. Today I've got a relatively new friend, young Ed Williams. Welcome, Ed. Thanks for having me, John. I appreciate it. Of course.

I met Ed. Ed is a Citadel grad, and he was networking with another Citadel grad about where he might work in Green Bull and how he might become successful in business and somehow got my name and he made an appointment. And we met and he eventually, you know, read the book and has been coming to my sales class and kind of been, I guess, a mentor to some degree on your selling. That's right. For how long now? It's probably been right out of year. A year.

I was looking back, it's been right out of year now. Cool. So I'll give you a lot of credit for a lot of things. But, you know, one of them is you went to the Citadel on purpose because I think you wanted to prepare yourself to be a successful business person, right? That's right. Okay. Did you have a second choice?

I think my second choice was Furman, but it was definitely like a, if I don't get accepted at the Citadel. I knew from the start of my like college search, I wanted to go to the Citadel. Cool, cool. And what company were you in there? I was in Bravo Company.

Bravo. First Battalion. There you go. That's where you want to be. I was down there too. And so when you were networking with John Harris, Harrison, did you already have a job? I did, yes.

I've been with the same company for coming up on four years now. Okay, so you were already working there. What were you asking him? What was your net, what was the purpose of your networking? It was just a casual lunch catch-up. I hadn't talked to him in a while. I was friends with his son, Evans from the Citadel, and knew that John Harrison was highly successful in like what he has done over the past several years.

and wanted to get with him, pick his brain on, you know, just ideas. Yeah, ideas and kind of who he knew or any advice he would give me. Okay. And I think that's the biggest takeaway was when he said, you got to meet John Sterling. He's the guy. Yeah, well, there's more than just me out there who can be helpful, but he was one of, he was someone who I remember when he was about your age.

You know, I remember recruiting him from the Citadel. He was outstanding baseball player and cadet. And I think he had taken a job, I think, like I said, maybe a basketball coach or something at one of those local high schools. So we got him, pulled him out of academia to come be a salesperson, and he crushed it. He did. He did. He's still crushing it. What kind of training have you had in sales so far?

So the training through my company, we have a training or sales process. that we go by and then really just new school as well as internal sales talking to my sales manager and upper leadership but and your company's assured partners that's right we're a commercial insurance brokerage okay so tell us what give us the elevator pitch on what that means so our job is to find business owners CFOs CEOs and meet with them about their insurance and see who wants to wants to have a higher performing risk management and insurance program. You know, a lot of insurance out there is, let's get a quote. And we just think if you peel back the onion a little bit, there's several more factors

than to just get in a quote, whether that be coverage, service, loss control recommendations, claims advocacy. So we just feel like that there's more value add that most people don't see. And our job is to get them to see that. Yeah, and your first job, I guess, is to have the discussion, right, to find a way in the door. That's right. So tell us about how you do that. My first, I'd say two and a half to three years was a lot of cold calling.

I would use Zoom Info and my edge to, like, softwares that we have as a company, and I would make a list of CFOs and just start calling on them and manufacturing and transportation and construction, whoever I could get in the door with, really, and just reach out to them and say, I know you're probably. you know, happy or in a good spot because most people are. Every salesperson knows that they're going to say they're happy or not interested. But they do have insurance already. That's right. Of some sort. That's right. Yeah. So I think just saying that definitely makes them, it lowers their guard. Like this guy I'm going to try to come kicking the door in day one. It's like, I just want to meet you, get to know you a little bit, see if we can add value and just be number two, a back pocket option for you, should you evaluate, you know, your insurance program down the road. We just hope that we're the first person that you think of.

What general area do you work? So I'm all over South Carolina and I call in on North Carolina and Georgia as well. That doesn't necessarily limit me to three states but as much or as many calls as I'm making it's a you got to have a pretty

broad territory. Yeah. How many calls do you have to make to a new prospect to get one CFO to say yes I'll take a meeting? I think that average number and it varies but I think the average number that we as a company and what I've seen on my numbers as well is probably that that seventh to tenth touch so it's not it takes several attempts

and I think I've heard recently one that had as many as like 40 or 45 so touches to get in the door okay as you're saying on average is taking seven attempts before the person says okay let's set up a meeting let's set up a 30 minute team's call and then go from there so you're starting what the teams call not a meeting. Right. Okay. I think that's really helped sales, because I think back to before when Teams was, in those Zoom and that stuff was popular,

the first meeting was a bigger deal. Because we're all coming together, we're all gonna be in the conference room, we're gonna fly to whatever, drive, you know. It's just like, hey, 30 minutes, look at your computer. It's more so to qualify the prospect too, because you can get on there and know if it's, if it's potentially gonna go somewhere

in the first five minutes or if it's not gonna go anywhere at all. And you'd hate to drive four hours or get on a plane, and it'd be a complete waste of time. Ed, listen, you missed all that because we used to do that all the time. All the time. I can remember once there was like a manager and a rep we're going to fly to Canada to try to close this deal, this big, important deal. And it was like we had an ice storm or something, and they couldn't fly. And so they called the prospect and said, hey, we've got to put off the meeting.

We can't get up there. The prospect says, well, what was it where we're going to do? And he goes, we really were trying to get you to sign the contract this quarter because it's really important to us. He was, well, I'll sign the contract. You know, I'll fax it right. He signed the contract. He faxed it to him. But that was back when, I think, mentally, everyone thought you just had to go.

Right. And you've learned in your young career, you know, you really shouldn't go. You should even burden the prospect with your visit until you both know. don't make sense. And I really learned that because I started in July of 20. So I didn't have an, and that was in the middle of COVID when it started. So I didn't have an in-person meeting for at least the first six months, if not, probably close to a year.

I mean, they were all teams calls because nobody was, you know, letting you in the office or, oh, we have COVID restrictions. Yeah. So it was definitely a difficult time to get started. Well, how much, I know how much training we do at News. school with you. We do about an hour a week, plus if you have any questions, you call me. Right. How much do you do with Assured? How much do they do for you? It depends. We meet every Wednesday morning for, it used to be two. I think it's like an hour and a half now. And just

any kind of prospects that we want to run by our sales manager, she's phenomenal. She's been doing it for several years. And just any questions or like, what's working on the phones, how? How How is everybody getting meetings? I think it's more of a, maybe it's a training, but it's more of like just a collaboration. What's working? What's not? Why is this deal not closing?

What can we do to get this one moved along? So you're learning from each other. Right. So I would call it a couple hours a week. We do that a lot at new school too. Absolutely. What's holding you back? What's the obstacle?

I kind of find I like that kind of training better because it's dealing with like, real today's real problems versus here's lesson plan four right you know on this or that yeah i'm not the best learner when it's watched these four videos and answer these 10 questions about it i just i like more in person or over a virtual call yeah um interactive how have your sales been going since we started you started the new school yeah they've been great i mean i hit my sales goal and exceeded it, qualified for our national sales contest. So it really has been most beneficial.

Good. So you think it's just accelerated your learning a little bit? Absolutely. Good. Well, we're so darn happy for you. That's awesome. In terms of the prospecting you're doing and getting new business, what's your number one thing that's helped you score a new business?

I would say it's just following our sales. process. Okay. And sticking to it, we're not going to come in and just quote your insurance and see if we can save you 25 percent because it's not the best way to buy your insurance, but also with the market the way it is now, I just think that those days are over. Yeah. And it's best just to pick a broker based on the tools and capabilities that that that insurance broker can provide. So you stick with the process, you tell the prospect that we have to follow this process. That's right. To do a good job for you. That's good. That's good. They must have a good process.

Yeah, and if they don't, if they have their way, once they go through ours, if they have to do a formal RFP or you have it, like some bigger companies, especially require it every three or five years. And we're happy to participate, but we want to make sure that we set a discovery and understand where they are with their current program and where their pains are. Because without us knowing their pains, we're not going to be able to deliver any solutions, right? Yeah. Well, how did you pick insurance in the first place? So I was in a class at the Citadel, one of my big wrestling friends, Martin Duane.

He told me, I got this internship with Assured Partners. I'm going to decline it because I want to do equipment sales. And he got a job with equipment sales like a week or two later or an internship. And I called the assured partners contact at the time. we set up an initial call, had a great conversation, got lunch a couple weeks later, and I think a week or two after that they offered me the internship in Charleston as the sales executive. So my job was to build leads list for the more experienced producers and, you know, listen in on their sales calls and just ask a bunch of questions and participate in a couple

projects that the person over our internship department had us do. And that opened up the door to a time opportunity after graduation. Did you have much of a finance background? I did not. I was a business administration major general. I had an idea of what I wanted to do. It was either going to be insurance with assured partners or there's a pacemaker school here in Greenville that coaches, or it's a nine-month class.

So I had those two options and decided ultimately on assured partners. Yeah. Well, it's a great business, but I think it requires a lot of your, the talents that you have, you know, determination and thick skin. You probably, I guess, you probably have more understanding of numbers than you think because you have to be pretty good with that. Right. To make all that work, all the numbers work for everybody. Is the AI stuff influenced your business at all? It's starting to from maybe like a manufacturing, from like the manufacturing. world, but I have not seen it as of yet, but I do think that it's going in that direction.

Okay. It'll be interesting. And then how about social media? Do you use that at all in your business? I use LinkedIn all the time. We promote our events. If there's a manufacturing webinar that we're putting on, I posted on LinkedIn, any co-worker trips, like our national sales contest or like if we have a producer retreat, we're

always posting and just, you know, sharing the good news of assured partners. So as you're prospecting your three-state region, are you trying to get those CFOs to link in with you? Absolutely. Yeah. And so hopefully, even if they won't take a meeting yet, they're starting to see your stuff pop up. That's right. Just drip.

We call it drip on them, just at any touch point. And them seeing a LinkedIn post or like all good people on the same, or sharing the same goal and on the same path is very, you know, it's very helpful, and it definitely is another touch point. It really is. Yeah, that's good. So what's your favorite book? I was thinking about that on the way here, and I had like four or five that I have down on my phone. But I think if I had to pick, it would be Can't Hurt Me, David Guggins. Just the, and I went to the Citadel. I don't have a military background, but I'm able to relate that. book to my life just the persistence and determination that it took for him I think he was in seal training class or bud's training for I think twice and he finally was able to achieve it and and get through on the third time and like that's just unheard of yeah just the guy had he was

determined and nothing was going to get in his way and I just I always relate that to myself and what I'm doing that's good that's a good way to be and I would say you picked a good industry in a good area and as long as you just keep this pace up you know there's just no question in my mind when you're 40 years old they're going to say man I wish I could be like be like him right it's just going to be 20 years of work you know you're going to have you're going to have things set up real nice so that's cool that's a good book did you read the other one uh like 30 days with the seal or something I think that's on my, I have a list of probably 100 on my notes on my phone that I need to.

That's an easy one. It's a very quick read, but it's about, I can't remember the guy's name, but he hired Goggins to come live at his house for 30 days to get him tough and in shape. And the stories of him like showing up in the middle of the night and making him get out of bed and go run outside in the cold. It's pretty cool. I need to, I don't think I have that one on my life. list now that I think about it.

Yeah, did get that one. It's a real quick easy read. It's really funny. Favorite band or singer? I'm a big Kenny Chesney guy. I just love getting on the boat in the summer and playing a little Kenny Chesney. And on a sunny afternoon, it's one of my favorites for sure. Good.

And favorite word? Persistence. Persistence. What would you like to promote today to our audience? Just think the good word of assured partners. We're up-and-coming insurance brokerage. We started in 2011, a private equity backed, and we recently reached the mark of $2.5 billion in annualized revenue.

Billion? Billion. Wow. So we're growing, and a lot of the competition out there has had, you know, they've been around for a lot longer than 12 or 13 years, but we're definitely here to stay, and we're enjoying the upstate South Carolina and really all over the country.

Good. And how could they reach you if some business owner wanted to talk insurance with you? Connect with me on LinkedIn or, I mean, my cell phone is always available. Okay. All right.

Well, thank you very much for being here. Thanks for being a student. I wanted people to kind of hear the perspective of a young person who was using Noob School and how it was helping them as they grew. So thanks for being here and for working with us.

Thanks for having me, John. I appreciate it. Thank you. All right.