The Ryan Hanley Show - 219. The Secret Sales Mindset No One Talks About

Episode Date: January 12, 2024

Became a Master of the Close: https://masteroftheclose.com✅ 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/speakingHave you ever found yourself trapped in a sales pitch that felt more like a scripted monologue than a genuine conversation? Today, we unravel that enigma and reveal how curiosity can be a game-changer in the insurance sales industry. With a treasure trove of personal stories and rich wisdom, I lead you through the untapped potential that lies within the power of inquiry. We talk about how moving past a checklist of questions and truly understanding the nuanced needs of clients builds trust and paves the way for the coveted one-call-close. By embracing curiosity, insurance professionals elevate from transactional encounters to becoming proactive architects of their success, a transformative journey that Finding Peak passionately advocates.As we peel back the layers of this essential skill, you'll be on the edge of your seat, learning why hiring for curiosity is critical and how open-ended questions could be the secret weapon for conversion rates. It's a candid look at the strategies that make a standout insurance agent, where engaging with the complexity of clients’ lives leads to problem-solving that aligns with their genuine concerns. And for those hungry to refine their sales artistry, our Finding Peak coaching program looms on the horizon, promising to arm you with the tools to become a salesperson and a trusted advisor who masters the art of the one-call-close. Join me, and let's transform every sales interaction into an opportunity for trust, rapport, and triumph.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's curiosity. Nobody talks about curiosity. No one highlights curiosity. No one hires for curiosity. Sure, we say, you know, you need to question people and you need to have this dynamic question set. And here's the questions you need to ask. But having a checklist of questions that you have to ask a customer and being curious are two completely different things. Yeah. In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. There's one sales skill that reigns supreme above all others, in my opinion. And having sold now all different kinds of products to all different kinds of customers, mostly in the insurance industry, but selling both to insurance customers as well as to insurance professionals, selling to carriers, selling to insure tech, selling to agencies. Also working in the fields of accounting very early in my career. I was in a sales-oriented

role as a consultant in the accounting, yet nobody talks about it. And if they do, they give it a passing little dusting of attention, just a little tidbit. It's a little contextual offshoot that they may talk about for a brief moment, and then they get back to these seven tried and true practices. And in our industry, to me, considering the nature of the insurance industries, the general sense of confusion that our customers have about our product, the idea that we're selling something ethereal, right? We're selling a promise. Yeah, it comes with a policy and you may get a PDF or even physical paper still. It doesn't mean anything to the customers.

They don't see it, they can't touch it, they can't feel it. To me, it is very difficult to sell if you don't have this characteristic. And in the, whether they be producers, inside sales reps, account executives, et cetera, that I've seen have the most success. They oftentimes embody this without even knowing it, but they all have it. They all have this mindset. They all use this tactic or secret, yet they don't even know that they have it. And when I started teaching this concept to insurance professionals 10 years ago,

it just wasn't adopted. And because no one else talks about it, I think this is a big reason why so few insurance professionals today, so many agencies are doing things like content marketing, creating content, because it all comes back to this idea, this idea that no one in our industry talks about. So what is this? It's curiosity. Nobody talks about curiosity. No one highlights curiosity. No one hires for curiosity. Sure, we say, you know, you need to question people and you need to have this dynamic question set. And here's the questions you need to ask. But having a checklist of questions that you have to ask a customer and being curious are two completely different things.

One is just a set of tactical standards that we go through that you're just checking off a list so that you have the proper information. And one, and the other, in this case, being curious, having a curious nature, actually caring about your customer, what their problem is and how you could potentially solve it, the essence of curiosity. It's the difference between being an order taker or someone who allows, we'll say, fortune to dictate their future and those who take control of fortune and dictate their own success. Because when you're curious, you can sell anybody anything. And this is one of the primary skills that we started to teach at Rogue Risk that we really, when we got to our six producer set, when we were really starting to crank towards the end of the time at Rogue Risk, that was a key to its success, to its rapid growth. And ultimately, and this is something that I haven't talked about over the years, I have coached, consulted, mentored, whatever you want to call it, about a dozen different agencies over the last five years, very quietly, very on the side. And frankly,

I will never tell you who they are because it's not pertinent. And part of my agreement with them is that we've always worked kind of in the dark. And in that regard, I'm not going to tell you exactly who they are. However, what we work on primarily, especially now that I have a name for this process, the one called closed process, and it's something that we teach at Finding Peak. And guys, if you enjoy this content, I highly encourage it, especially if you're listening to this or watching this on YouTube, subscribe. If you're just listening to it, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, whatever, subscribe to this show. We're going to have a lot more of these very detailed conversations, one-on-one conversations coming out around certain topics. But when it comes to curiosity, I think it's a tough concept to teach. And it's one of the concepts that we do have an intrinsically curious nature. So I do think part of the reason why we do not teach curiosity, that we skip over curiosity in the hiring process, is that it's a tough, it feels like you either have it or you don't have it. And if you feel like you're not a curious person or you're not curious

by nature, then there is this idea that you potentially can't learn how to be curious. And that is completely wrong, completely and utterly wrong. You can teach someone how to be curious. Now they have to carry about their job. So first and foremost, we have to cut out the people that are literally just showing up and punching the clock. Those people will very rarely, if ever, adopt a curious nature or behavior. But when we are selling insurance specifically, hiring for curiosity should be at the absolute tippy top of the list. Now, why is that? Because the key to high conversion rates is figuring out what the person's problem actually is, why they are thinking about changing or purchasing insurance in the first place, and getting to the root idea of why they're

going to actually purchase. So this comes through the idea of open-ended questions. Open-ended questions are a key to the one-call-close process. And if you do not have an open-ended question-heavy sales process, then you are losing sales. And the reason for that is when we're not curious or we use close- ended questions, we start shoving prospects down paths that they don't want to go down. So if we think about it, as you know, one of those Plinko boards, right, everyone see if you if you've ever watched the prices, right, or seen a Plinko board, it's where, you know, there's all these pegs in the board. And at the bottom, there's a whole set of outcomes. Usually one of them's like, you win a car.

And then another one's like, we dump a bucket of slime over your head or something. So people will take these little chips and they put them in the board and they drop them down and they hit all these little pegs on the way down and eventually they get an outcome. And if we do not, if we use close-ended questions, then we are trying to shove the prospect into the solution that we want, which is the new car.

Now, the problem is that the prospect in this case has free will. They're not just falling via gravity. So as you try to use different close-ended questions to kind of force that chip into your scenario, more often than not, they fall out of the process and they end up in a solution that they don't actually want. You're trying to sell them general liability, workers' comp, commercial auto in a full package. And they called you because they needed just a commercial auto policy. And their problem, their mindset is that their agent is primarily a personalized agent and they need commercial auto. They may have already got them a BOP and comp because most personalized agents do have a few

commercialized carriers or personal lines heavy agents. But maybe they don't have good commercial auto. So they came to you. They found you. They searched you out. They saw your website or they were referred to you by a friend. And they just need commercial auto. But you're trying to force them into this solution.

Or maybe you don't like the workers comp carrier that they have. And now you're trying to force them into a workers comp policy as well, because you know, because you're the professional that what they have isn't right. And my friends, that's how you lose business. Today, in our current ecosystem, in our current marketplace, we have to be problem solvers. And the only way to solve people's problems is to be curious and to use open-ended questions. So one of the very first stages of the one-call-close process is a simple open-ended question in which we say, thank you for calling, thank you for reaching out, et cetera, however they reached out.

How can we help? Or what's going on? How can we help? Very casual, very inviting, very non-threatening, very non-salesy, but also very curious. And we just listen, right? When you ask a friendly, casual, confident, open-ended question, people start to talk. And in further videos, we'll talk about other aspects of the One Call Close process. And ultimately, if you want to learn this process, you're going to need to work with

Finding Peak. Today, the best way to get on. What's up, guys? Sorry to take you away from the episode. But as you know, we do not run ads on this show. And in 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'd 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. The list when we launch our training program is to go to masterclass.ensure. That's masterclass, M-A-S-T-E-R-C-L-A-S-S dot insure. There'll be a link in the show notes or in the description of this

video or podcast, however you're listening to this, that will allow you to take their, get on the list. We're going to be launching our finding pre-coaching program very soon. And we're going to go through all the details. But when you start with an open-ended question, you're cultivating curiosity. You're opening the door for that prospect to share with you, not just what they actually need, but what's important to them in the buying process, what they may be upset with, or what the obstacle is that they're actually facing, and what you can do, how you can position yourself to be the solution provider for them. But you have to be curious. And curiosity, if you don't naturally have it, comes from learning how to ask open-ended questions.

So my friends, if you find yourself working off a simple Q&A list, if you even have the process of having a set series of questions that you need to ask, that's perfectly fine. There is always information that we must gather and able to do our job in the insurance industry. But before you get to that very regimented, very task-driven, transactional, here's the information I need to be able to provide you with a proposal or quote or however you position it, ask some open-ended questions. And the easiest, most honest, real, inviting, open-ended question that you can ask is, what's going on? How can I help? And I promise you that if you ask that question, if you lead with that question and you're curious about the answer, if someone asks something that doesn't

make sense, ask follow-up questions, listen to what they say. And if you do that, curiosity, cultivating curiosity, using curiosity, and we'll talk about how you hire for curiosity in the future, but using curiosity as a weapon, you can figure out not just what to sell them, but ultimately how they want to be sold and how to overcome whatever obstacles or objections they may have in the future. And frankly, if you do it right, and this is what we teach at Finding Peak, by the time you get to the end of your questioning process, before you even ask for any of the transactional data, that customer's already sold. My friends, there is a way to sell insurance that drastically improves your conversion rate, which allows you to be the solution provider that you actually are, that insurance advisor, that trusted advisor that we insurance professionals all strive to be. But if you don't have curiosity, if you're not using curiosity in your sales

process, whether it's something that comes naturally to you or it's a skill that you have to build over time, I promise you, you're leaving business on the table. All right. I love you guys for watching this. Sign up. Masterclass.ensure. Get on the list. We have so much more.

If you're not subscribed to this channel, subscribe to the YouTube channel. Subscribe to the podcast. I hope these short one-on-one episodes are good for you. I have a whole bunch more coming out. I appreciate you all. Let's get after it. This is the way. Thank you. so Thank you. Close twice as many deals by this time next week. Sound impossible? It's not.

With the one-call-close system, you'll stop chasing leads and start closing deals. In one call. This is the exact method we used to close 1,200 clients in 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-close 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 masteroftheclosed.com. That's masteroftheclosed.com. Do it today.