In this video, you’ll learn a marketing secret that will transform your sales in 2024.
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Video Transcript:
This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.
When you are staring at an empty sales pipeline, you start to take a desperate sales approach. You start to try to talk to anybody. A lot of agencies today have producers who are struggling with the following.
Number one, they do not have a sales process. There’s zero sales process. Not only from the team level at the agency level, each producer lacks a sales process.
Number two, all too many producers are staring at an empty sales pipeline. So if you ask them how many opportunities you have right now, the answer is not many. Which leads to the third problem, and that is when you are staring at an empty sales pipeline, you start to take a desperate sales approach. You start to try to talk to anybody.
You come off as desperate in your discovery meetings. Your prospects can sense that in all of this desperation and this helplessness, this hopelessness, is making it impossible to win any kind of business today. What did we do for this team that helped them get some clarity? Which bread, that confidence they need to go out and execute a weekly marketing strategy.
Number one, we focused on who they’re talking to. The first question I asked this team is Who are you talking to? And we spent a good 2 hours getting very clear on who this agency’s ideal prospect is. Now, when it comes to identifying your ideal prospect, you have to get very clear on a couple of things. Number one, what does this prospect look like demographically?
Location, revenue, number of employees? Maybe it’s an industry. Are they blue collar? Are they white collar? What is it about this prospect that makes them a good fit demographically? But on the other hand, you can’t skip the psychographics. From a mental standpoint, why is this prospect a good fit? Who are these people? What do they believe? What do they stand for?
How do they make decisions? You see the reason we have sales success in the first place is because we find people we can work with who are like us. It’s that simple. We find people like us. And if you can get clear on who you’re trying to target, especially within the psychographics, go find people who stand for what you stand for, who believe in what you believe in.
This is where you start building a much clearer picture about who you are targeting. Now, the second question that we spent a copious amount of time on and got very clear on is what are you saying to them? So once you’ve figured out who you are talking to now, you got to figure out what you’re going to say to them.
And what this team learned was a very important marketing tip that more agencies need to hear. And that is, whose story are you telling? If you look at 95% of the insurance agencies in this industry and you look at their marketing, most of them, 95% of them are talking about themselves. All of their marketing talks about the agency, how long they’ve been around, how many resources they have, all their affiliations and partnerships.
And they’re constantly making them the hero of their own story. When the solution, the answer the unlock is just shifting all of your marketing to your prospect store. You see, you’re not the hero of this story. Your prospect is the hero of that story. The only thing your prospect cares about is what’s in it for them. They don’t care how long you’ve been around.
They don’t care how big you are. They don’t care about all your resources. They want to know what’s in it for them. And so we got very clear about what this team is going to be saying to attract the ideal prospect. So we built the ideal prospect story. Now, you can go back to past episodes where I’ve spent a lot of time on how to storytelling, make it very simple for you.
You want to tell better stories, follow this framework. There is a hero with a goal who has a problem. That problem is keeping them from their that goal. Therefore, they need a guide. Who is you? Who has a solution that helps them avoid failure and achieve success? That’s storytelling. 2000 years old. If you apply that framework to your ideal prospect by building the ideal prospect story, you’re going to start attracting more of the right people.
And when you attract more of the right people, guess what? You start having better sales conversations. The right prospects start coming into your pipeline, not just any prospect. And then the third question is where are we saying it? So once we’ve uncovered who we’re talking to, what we are saying to them. The third question you have to be very clear on is where are you going to say it?
This is your channels of marketing distribution, and this is where traditional insurance sales training is still far too outdated because the majority of the training today is still focused on cold calls and cold emails. What we call the cold 1 to 1 approach, it’s not as effective as it used to be. It takes a lot longer than it used to To have any kind of success where you’re putting your marketing strategy has to be more expansive today.
You have to be doing more things. You see, there’s a grid that Alex Formosa calls the core four, and there are four ways you can outbound. You can reach out to prospects. There’s cold. One, two, one. There’s warm. One, two, one. There’s warm one too many and there’s cold water money. What we did with this team that completely unlocked how they are going to get their marketing message out faster was focusing on the one to many, the warm one to many.
How are you going to use social media? How are you going to use webinars? How are you going to use maybe having a podcast? How are you going to use public speaking? These are all channels to get your message out far, fast and wide. Please take these words of advice today and just get clear on the following three questions.
Who are you talking to? Remember, focus on the demographics. Focus on the cycle. Psychographics Get an ideal picture of what this prospect looks like. Number two, focus on what you are saying to them. Build their story. And number three, have a clear plan of where you are going to see it. Whether you decide to use cold calls, cold emails, referrals, social media webinars. I don’t care. But create a clear weekly plan that you are going to execute every single week.
Business is no longer about who you know. Business is about who knows you. In a noisy industry like we’re in gang, you got to get people to know who you are.