The Ryan Hanley Show - 234. Are Independent Agents Over Indexing on Middle Market Accounts

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

Became a Master of the Close: https://masteroftheclose.comListen in as I share my candid thoughts on the often-neglected potential of small business accounts in the insurance world.✅ Free step-by-step video series for generating inbound leads from YouTube: https://go.ryanhanley.com/youtube✅ For daily insights and ideas on peak performance: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanhanley✅ Subscribe to the audio podcast here: https://ryanhanley.com/podcast** More about this episode **While the allure of middle market accounts is undeniable, I discuss the overlooked opportunities within the small business sector.Despite popular belief, these accounts can be just as profitable, if not more, when properly nurtured and managed. I challenge the common misconception that small business insurance is unprofitable and highlight the intense effort and resources required to service larger accounts.With insights from my experience and discussions with industry peers, this episode is an eye-opener for insurance agencies who might be undervaluing the smaller players in the market.Dive into our conversation about the strategic advantages of cultivating a diversified portfolio of small business accounts, especially in light of unpredictable events like the COVID-19 pandemic.I outline actionable strategies to attract and retain small business clients, emphasizing the importance of specialized sales processes and client onboarding to ensure a seamless experience.Whether you're an industry veteran or a budding producer, this episode offers valuable perspectives on balancing your agency's focus and capitalizing on the stability that small businesses can provide. Tune in to discover why treating small business as a vital niche could be the game-changer your agency needs.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's the reality? The reality is that if you believe personal lines can be profitable, then small business can be profitable. It's a very similar process. It needs to be packaged a little differently and there's some nuances to it. But ultimately, we need to think about how we package the flow, both the lead flow, the sales flow, and the service flow. We need to think about them similar to personal lines. And I do believe that we can be highly differentiated. I do believe that we can be value creators. We can be seen as partners in their business. But we have to set those expectations.

We have to build that into our marketing, into our messaging, and how we handle customers. If you treat a small business customer like you're not making crap on their account and that you don't care they're not going to be loyal to you in a crude laboratory in the basement of Are independent insurance agencies over-indexing on middle market accounts? On this, the 234th episode of the show, we are going to address a topic that I am sure is going to get some gurus' blood boiling. But before we get there, guys, I just want to say I love you for watching this show. If you're not subscribed and you're watching on YouTube, please hit that subscribe button. If you're listening to the audio version, whatever network or service you're using, make sure you subscribe so you get all the new episodes. All right, guys. So here's the deal. I, in full candidness, have never been a true middle market producer. I have written accounts in my career as a producer that would be qualified as middle market, but in all honesty, I have never done hardcore, consistent, long-term middle market account production.

That being said, for more than four years, I ran an agency that had an entire segment that did middle market production, and some of my best friends in this entire industry teach middle market production. And I believe that middle market production is an incredibly important aspect of every agency. I honestly believe that regardless of your agency size, scope, geographic location, et cetera, there should be some portion, some segment or division of your agency that is prospecting larger accounts, either larger, small or middle market accounts, accounts that have some meat to them, accounts that are going to bring in real revenue, let's say somewhere between 10 and $50,000 in revenue, right? Just to take a segment, you can push that up, push it down, et cetera. But like taking that market and saying, you know, unless you're one of the large mega

shops or super regional shop, et cetera, which may be looking at accounts even larger than that and have the services and value add staff to manage a true upper middle market or enterprise level account, you know, let's take that $10,000 in revenue to $50,000 in revenue per account segment. And I do believe that there should be someone or a group inside your agency that is prospecting those accounts. There are reasons for that. We can get into those. But what I want to address is what I believe is a completely under-indexed portion of an independent insurance agency's book of business, which is the small business segment. Now, the reason for that is that is ultimately

what our expertise was at Rogue Risk. And what I believe there is a tremendous opportunity in the market for agencies who address the need of small business owners. Now, why do I think this need exists? Well, I think it exists because there are a few misconceptions about small business. First and foremost is the idea that small business insurance is unprofitable. People write one monoline GL contractor who, you know, is the kind of individual who will like cancel their policy during the winter and then want to restart it. And it's constantly, you know, a pain in the butt. And they'll say, well, see, look, you know, because of this account, I'm telling you, these accounts aren't profitable. They're too much work. Look, those people exist. I can't say that they

don't, but I think there is this misconception that every middle market account you write is this, you know, perfectly put together thing who has consistent requests and knows how to do COIs and sends you perfectly put together schedules of property and of their auto fleet, et cetera. And that's not the case either. I feel like there is not enough conversation around what an enormous pain in the rear end middle market accounts are from a service perspective, right? We gloss over that because everyone wants to go on LinkedIn and thump their chest and look at this account I wrote and I called this person and I wedged my way in and use

this sales script and wrote their account or I BOR'd their account and come back to LinkedIn and hold up their kill, You know, like they went elk hunting and tell everyone, you know, I BOR'd a $50,000 revenue account and thump, thump, thump. And it's like, okay, well, that's amazing. And congratulations. That is not an easy thing to do. And I give you all the props in the world for achieving that. However, there is this lost part of the conversation because we do not track how many hours, how many, how many, how many minutes did it take for you to write that account? How much time did you have to spend building a list? How much time did you have to spend prepping your outreach?

How much time did you actually do outreach? How much outreach did you have to do? How many phone calls did you have to have, et cetera, et cetera. What is the cost to bring that account in if we're valuing your time and the time of any other individual who worked on the prospecting efforts of getting that account in your door? Are you capturing all that time and then associating per hour cost, say a producer's time is worth $250 an hour, $350 an hour, et cetera, depending on how much you value yourself. Are you taking the amount of time that it takes to actually get that account and bring it in, filling out the forms, et cetera, and accumulating all that and then applying it

to the ROI of that account? And then what about all the service time on the backend? Because again, I feel like this is completely glossed over with middle market accounts. It's like putting together the schedules, getting all the proper information, all the service onboarding, all the input into your agency management system and the carrier system. Because for middle market accounts, there's a lot of information and it takes a lot of data entry to get them into systems. So there's a lot of information and it takes a lot of data entry to get them into systems. And we just gloss over all that. Oh, it's a $10,000 account, you know, it's profitable. And it's like,

is it how many years until it's profitable? Like we't talk about these things, but we'll scrutinize every penny spent on inbound marketing or digital advertising or putting press releases out or doing any kind of advertising, marketing, et cetera. We'll scrutinize every penny associated with the ROI, yet we don't count any of our time when it comes to prospecting middle market. My point in saying that is not that middle market is bad. Again, I love middle market, and I think that it's an incredibly important part of building a diverse book of business and ultimately a profitable book of business. But I think we have to be fair to small business accounts

in that you can set up methods and systems and referral partners that allow you to streamline the production of inbound leads in a way that drastically lowers the CAC, the cost of acquisition. So done properly and thought through with intention, I believe that small business can be a highly profitable part of your business. Okay. The second misconception is that there's too much service work. We're going to address that. I'm going to get to that when we get to the how portion of this. And there's a little bit of, you have to have standard, but there is only too much service work in small business insurance if you allow there to be. And I ultimately feel like done properly using,

and we're gonna talk a little bit about the tiered service structure that we were building. There was one piece that we didn't ultimately get to. We'll talk about that, but there's a four tier service structure that we were building out at Rogue Risk before that business came to an end that ultimately I think addresses this

and setting expectations as part of as well. We'll talk about this in the how section. But ultimately, I feel like there is much more service work associated with a middle market account than small business accounts. While, and maybe in total volume of touches, there may be more in small business, but done properly, we can limit those touches to little micro interactions that provide value to the customer without pulling too hard on the resources of the agency. Okay. The diversity of account, another misconception that I hear all

the time about small businesses, the diversity of accounts associated with small business, we have a lack of expertise. We don't know how to write contractors. We don't know how to write a bakery, or we don't know how to do a consultant's E&O or professional liability, et cetera. We're going to address that. I think accounts under $10,000 in revenue are basically the same and that if you are, as long as you know the basics of commercial insurance, you don't need to be an expert to write small business. Small business is an expertise is essentially what I'm saying. I think that once you get beyond, let's 10,000 in revenue is an arbitrary number, but let's just use it beyond 10,000 in revenue. I think there can be levels of expertise that are necessary. And that's where things like where

Charles Speck talks about micro niche or et cetera. A lot of people talk about building niche markets. I think that's where there is some value in that. Below 10,000, small business is your expertise. It is your niche. Okay. And then ultimately, agencies who write small business insurance are seen as commodities by customers. And that's somehow middle market producers. They're the value creators and the differentiators where small business agents are somehow just commodities. And that is complete bullshit. Excuse my language, but that's just nonsense.

It's just complete and utter nonsense. That is someone trying to sell you something and really it's ego. That's all ego. That is chest thumping LinkedIn middle market producers trying to make themselves feel better by saying that somehow their value creators, but agents that write small business insurance somehow are a commodity. That's just complete and utter nonsense. So those are some very common misconceptions that I've heard,

that I've experienced in terms of clients that I've worked with. And I believe they're all false. Okay. So what's the reality? The reality is that if you believe personal lines can be profitable, then small business can be profitable. It's a very similar process. It needs to be packaged a little differently. And there's some nuances to it.

But ultimately, we need to think about how we package the flow, both the lead flow, the sales flow, and the service flow. We need to think about them similar to personal lines. And I do believe that we can be highly differentiated. I do believe that we can be value creators. We can be seen as partners in their business, but we have to set those expectations. We have to build that into our marketing, into our messaging and how we handle customers. If you treat a small business customer like you're not making crap on their account and that you don't care they're not going to be loyal to you right so again when i worked for trustedchoice.com i got to listen to

thousands of phone calls by of independent agents taking inbound leads from small business customers and personal lines but a lot of small business customers and personal lines, but a lot of small business customers. And we oftentimes talk to these people as if their accounts don't matter, right? Like we look at it, we're like, oh, this is a $1,500 Bob. I'm only going to make, you know, $175 on this. So, you know, I don't really give a crap. Well, 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

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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. People can sense that in the way you talk to them. So, you know, if you treat people like their account doesn't matter, they're going to treat you like you don't matter. This is fairly standard, like life relational things, one-on-one. I think, you know, the reality, and again, this goes to the differentiation thing.

Most small business accounts are actually, and the coverages associated with them are very similar. So what you're ultimately doing is marketing to a mindset. So when it comes to, say, middle market accounts over $10,000 in revenue, et cetera, I think you are both marketing to a mindset and to a niche. Where with small business, there are some nuances and exceptions, edge cases, et cetera. You are ultimately marketing to a mindset. You're marketing to a type of person who wants to work with your type of agency. And if you can get that in your head versus, you know, the specific industry or class of business that they are, you can be much more successful in small business. I think that small business provides a sustainability

of revenue. You know, let's say you're a middle market producer and you have 20 accounts producing 10,000 revenue in piece, right? So you're making $200,000 a year. And now you lose one of them, right? You just lost 5% of your income. And that's a pretty decent hit. You lose two accounts in a year and you just lost 10% of your income overall, right? Now, that to me is a sustainability issue. I think it's amazing that you can have less accounts and be, quote unquote, more focused on them, if that's true. But with small business, if you write over the course of a few years, 500 small business accounts and 10 of them leave, who cares? And I don't mean that to be so cavalier. I just mean like your business keeps going on. You don't have to worry about bonuses.

You don't have to worry about paying your bills. You don't have to worry about bonuses. You don't have to worry about paying your bills. You don't have to worry about hitting your contingency marks. Small business accounts can ebb and flow. And as long as you're net putting more on than you're losing through inbound and referral sources, et cetera, then you're ultimately creating a sustainability in your business that I believe creates the foundation upon which you can go out and take the shots at the middle market accounts, right? That's what I'm advocating for so much. And a lot of the content I'm creating right now is that it's not one or the other, it's both. It's having a small business division that supports your middle market division, right? It supports with that foundation of small business that, that kind of keeps your business fairly

stable, then you can, you know, when you have the bills paid with your small business, now you can go out and prospect the middle market accounts that are going to give you those big jumps up in revenue. And that to me is a much, a much smarter way to manage your overall book and business than basically acting like small businesses beneath you and just going after middle market accounts and prioritizing a niche that then for some reason, either through a regulatory matter or through a pandemic or through whatever, that just gets wiped out, right? I mean, I was talking to a good buddy of mine who's on the tech side in the insurance industry the other day, and he was talking about how so few people discuss the fact that an incredible

number of agencies went out of business during COVID. And to me, and I don't know the details of all these, and I'm searching for more information and want to do an entire video around this particular topic, but I think it comes back to sustainability. If you over-indexed on hospitality, restaurants, et cetera, and COVID hits, you're in big, big, big trouble, right? If you, hotels, right? If you went after, you know, whatever, gyms, right? Hotels, right? If you went after whatever, gyms, right? If you were big in

the athletic, youth sports, gyms, et cetera, you're in big, big trouble. And my point in saying that is not that you shouldn't have that niche or that that's a bad niche. I don't think that any of those are. What I'm saying is if you have that niche, but underneath it, you have a bedrock foundation of small business accounts from a diverse array of industry classes, then yeah, it's terrible. We take a hit, but we're still in business.

And that's one of the main reasons that I like small business in particular. And there's just a consistency. You can create a consistency of flow. You could do a hundred cold calls a day for an entire month and just not hit on an account, just not run into an account that's ready or the timing isn't right, et cetera. I know there's all kinds of tools and engineering your process. Don't come at me if you feel you need to around making sure that that doesn't happen. But I think we all can agree that there is a much higher likelihood that you can go a month or two or three without putting a big middle market account on the books. Where with small business, you can just be banging that cash register over and over and over and over and over again, you know, all week long, every month, uh, and, and keeping that consistent

flow of business. So, okay. That's my case for adding small business or making small business as much a priority or think of small business as a niche inside your agency that, that sits alongside maybe your two or three other middle market, uh, uh, niches that you have as well. Okay. So that, that's kind of my argument for that. If you buy it, if you don't buy it, I would love for you to hit me up in the comments on YouTube, whether you're listening on audio, jump over to the YouTube video and leave your comments there. That's a great place. Or if you connect with me on social, whatever, and leave your comments, I would love to know what you think about these concepts so far. I'm sure there are

many viewpoint that hold value and maybe disagree with what I'm saying. But I do firmly believe in this and having run departments and had an agency that had departments in both sides. Okay. So how do we do this? What is the reality of how we make this possible? And there's a few ways. We've talked about a lot of this stuff throughout previous episodes, but the how starts with inbound marketing when it comes to small business. This means creating content. This means going out and finding referral sources. This means doing some advertising. This means reaching out into your marketplace and doing a cold, say, email slash video outreach,

you know, Loom video, cold email outreach. That's something that we teach to, you know, whether you're working with us from like a fractional CRO perspective or you're doing insurance growth coaching with us, one of the things that we teach in addition to the pure inbound, the content marketing side of it, is also targeted cold email that includes Loom video.

So I think that's wonderful as well. Referral sources and content are the two places where I see the most bang for your buck, especially at the beginning. But you can supplement that and getting off the ground quickly with a cold targeted email slash video outreach, if that makes sense. All right. So that's how you get that consistent flow. Then you need to have a sales process, which works specifically with inbound leads. This is our one call close process. You can use whatever process you think works. However, I have seen, worked with, talked to,

listened to people who do this and if you apply an outbound or traditional sales process to pure inbound leads you are going to fail ah let me back that up I don't mean fail I mean you are going to you you will be missing optimization there will be there'll be lost conversions lost optimization in your process if you apply a traditional sales process to inbound leads. You just will. I would put my experience in handling inbound leads up against anybody's in this industry. And I will tell you unequivocally and every time that there is a different methodology than the traditional sales

process that applied specifically to inbound leads. That's it. I'm just talking about inbound leads. And if you don't use that methodology, you will be leaving business on the table. So without that, you do bring your ROI down because now you may be able to get your CAC, your cost of acquisition down through inbound marketing. But if you're then not converting, you're not maximizing your ROI. If you're not converting at the most efficient and effective rate, you're not maximizing your ROI. So with those two combined things, you can keep your cost low, conversion high, profit up. You need to properly set expectations for those leads when they come in the door.

You can't just drop them into your system and say, someone will reach out to you or whatever, or not tell them anything or not properly onboard them. If you don't properly onboard them, they're going to call, they're going to text, they're going to email. But if you properly set expectations as to what they can expect from your agency,

then they're going to do, your clients are going to follow whatever process you put in front of them. If you tell them, this is how I work and they choose to do business with you, then they're bought into the way that you want them to operate. But if you just write their business and throw them into your AMS and try to forget that they exist, then yeah, they're going to call you at weird times. They're going to ask weird questions. They're going to be a pain in the butt potentially. That's the same as a middle market account, right? That's the same as anybody. If we don't know what we're expected to do,

or we don't understand the process by which we're supposed to interact with your business as a customer in this case, then I'm just going to do whatever I think is right. And that's where I think a lot of this falls apart is we're not properly setting expectations for these clients. What does that mean? Set expectations to a tiered service structure. So in order to keep service cost low, which is something that we were highly focused on at Rogue, because before we started, before we implemented the tiered service structure that I'm about to describe to you, we were paying a lot for service. And what I mean is we were using a licensed American in the States for all service related tasks, which is the most expensive way to service accounts. So, okay. How does that work? What does this tiered structure

look like? Again, these are the things that we talk about and that we teach, whether it's to our fractional chief revenue officer services, fractional CRO services, our growth coaching, or eventually when we launch our kind of paid coursework and the structure associated with that, this is all the stuff that I teach. This is the next level down the rabbit hole. But I want to give you at least a taste of it here because I think it's very important. So there's a four-tiered structure. And think of it like a waterfall, right? There's different levels to it in which the further down the waterfall you go,

the more expensive the service gets for your agency. So the top of the waterfall is DIY. It's a portal. It's using your AMS or using a tool like Glovebox or whatever to do self-service tasks. This could be standard COI tasks. This could be standard COI requests. This could be change of address. This could be changing your payment method. This could be whatever your portal and either your AMS or like I said, a tool like Glovebox allows you to

do. You should be offering that to your customers because there are going to be some portion of your customers that choose that. And every customer that chooses to do the basic functions again, and the more you set the standard, the more you remind them, the more you push them towards using it, the more people are going to be comfortable with it. And the more they're going to use it. This is your least expensive way to serve as a customer. They log into a portal, they print out a standard COI request that, that, that obviously meets the parameters that you've set them to be able to do that on their own. And they move on and you don't even know that they were there outside of a report that you get. That's best case scenario. Customer's happy. They are exactly what you want. You had a

very low touch point in terms of cost associated with that interaction for your business, keeping the cost of service down. Okay. So let's say it's something that can't do DIY. Is there a way to automate it? Can you automatically transact this through a carrier portal or through a different tool or through, again, through your agency management system, your CRM, et cetera? Is there a way to automate this process so that, which is going to be slightly more expensive, you may have to use a tool like Zapier or add another insurtech tool to your portfolio, but is there a way to automate this process so that the customer still gets what they need with a very low touch point,

maybe just an approval from a CSR, et cetera, right? Level three is outsourced talent. So this would be agency VA. This would be using virtual assistants, offshore talent who can help you process these things, right? So these are people who know what they're doing, who are task oriented, who oftentimes are highly efficient, and versus hiring a licensed US-based American employee are less expensive. Again, keeping your service. Now, again, if you hit that level and now it's like there's like a problem or there's creative solutioning that's involved, or, you know, they just need to talk to somebody or they have, you know, for whatever reason, then you escalate to your actual in-house

CSR or account management team, which is the most expensive part. And by tiering, by waterfall tiering this service structure, you are limiting the amount of cost associated with that touch point as much as possible. And what that allows you to do is minimize your service cost. So by using inbound, you are reducing or minimizing your cost of acquisition. By using a system like the one called closed system, you are maximizing your conversion. So you're maximizing the accounts that actually close and bring in revenue. And by setting proper expectations associated with a tiered service structure, you're minimizing your cost of service. And by working this process, you are creating the highest ROI for your business

associated with small business and for your agency associated with small business and for your agency associated with small business. And then again, culture of cross-sell because small business customers, they're not going to want to deal. You get a nice middle market account. That person might be worth millions in net personal wealth, and they may want to work with a highly specialized high net worth agent, et cetera. And they may want to work with a highly specialized, high net worth agent, et cetera. And maybe that's not you, but with small business, you can cross sell their personal

lines. You can cross sell their life. You can look into referring relationships around health insurance, around 401ks. You can be a true value provider in that time and really round out that entire account because small business professionals don't have the time or really the inclination to work with 10 different vendors for all the things they need. I believe they have an abundance of desire to work with one person to solve their problems. And if you're cross-selling these accounts, the cross-sells become, I believe, very easy. And we saw that, right? If you're solving their problem upfront, cross-selling the other lines of business, maybe add in life insurance. You can add in personal lines insurance. You can look at like key person insurance, right?

Like key person insurance is something that oftentimes is not sold by agencies that to small businesses is incredibly important. Oftentimes they don't even know what it is. They don't even know that it's there. And these are all ways to make your small business segment highly profitable and a profitable foundation upon which you can then either hire people or remove yourself

because this is really tempidized process-driven operation. You can then either hire people or remove yourself because this is really tempidized process-driven operation, you can then go out, if you're the hunter-killer in your agency, and be that middle market monster that drives the big accounts in. So do our independent agents over-indexed on middle market accounts? I think that in general, we have an abundance of ego in our industry and we love thumping our chest. We love telling people about how big the accounts are that we write and how important it is to have minimum number of clients with a maximum amount of revenue. And again, I like making fun of those people because it's just fun. But ultimately,

I don't think they're wrong. I just think they're missing a piece, which is the small business market. And I think there's a huge opportunity in there. So many people are doing it. Most people, the vast majority of people are doing it either wrong or inefficiently or not at all. And what I see in that is enormous opportunity. Guys, I would love your thoughts on this. Leave your comments below in the YouTube video.

Or if you're listening on audio, come over to the YouTube video and leave your comments. I'm sure that you have opinions, feelings, experiences that you'd love to share about this particular topic. I know I touched on quite a few third rails throughout the video. And I'd love to hear from you because I really just want to start conversations around that thing. That's how we all get better, right? And I'll kind of close the video by saying, thank you as always for watching. I hope you subscribe. If you're not subscribed, share this video with

someone needs to see it. And, uh, I will see you the next time I'm out of here. I'm going to. Thank you. Thank you. so 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 OneCallClose 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 MasterOfTheClose.com. That's MasterOfTheClose.com.

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