Agent Link - April/May 2022

Agent Link - April/May 2022

APRIL/MAY 2022

INSIDE A Great Lesson Learned in 20 Years of Agent Recruitment

A Great Lesson Learned in 20 Years of Agent Recruitment

5 Business Podcasts to Boost Growth

This year marks 20 years since I first began working with insurance carriers; independent distribution organizations like FMOs, IMOs, and BGAs; and many other companies in our industry to help them attract the talent with which to expand. PR (public relations), marketing, and sales are intricately connected to agent recruitment. All three of them really are. Through the many years and hundreds of companies I’ve worked closely with, I’ve seen many things that had great success as well as many that dramatically failed. While a bit of luck and good timing frequently were factors, success and failure invariably correlates to applying the age-old fundamentals in PR, marketing, and sales and failure to the lack thereof.

One can promote and sell something until one is blue in the face, but if the reputation and the goodwill from the public isn’t there, marketing doesn’t seem to get the leads, or the sales

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require much effort. On the other side, goodwill from the general public can become so massive toward a company that marketing appears to be barely

needed and sales turn practically effortless. Goodwill doesn’t just happen. It is produced.

I remember about 12 years ago when there was a big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and a particular company practically lost all of its goodwill, and no matter how many front page ads and damage control they did, their sales plummeted and the brand faded. PR is a topic and is highly important in agent recruitment. A carrier, an IMO, an insurance-based broker dealer, or a local agency can make their marketing more effective and reduce the needed effort in closing by becoming more effective with PR. The most important lesson related to the relationship amongst the three topics is that agent recruitment is a strategy. A strategy is a long-term, coordinated plan. Companies that execute agent recruitment as a one-time, one-shot action can achieve some success, but it can be much greater when approached as a concerted and long-term action. One of many ways in which good PR and goodwill can be generated: your success or failure depends on providing good, genuine value to your public, especially when this is not attached to a sales campaign. Providing value upfront to those you want to help flows naturally, and it can be a way to help you personally, and your brand, to become better known and thought highly of. Your sales and marketing will pick up the benefit of that.

PR, marketing, and sales are like a triangle of elements that affect each other very closely. We are all familiar with how well effective marketing and promotion will affect sales. But less often do we understand the relation between PR and the other two of this magic trio. First pointed out to my partner and me by a very successful business owner, PR, marketing, and sales flow affect each other to either facilitate their flow or prevent it from occurring.

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These days, many Americans think of Memorial Day simply as an excuse to take a long weekend, but the holiday has an important history that shouldn’t be ignored. You may have assumed Memorial Day was founded by politicians, but it actually dates back to the Grand Army of the Republic, a group of former soldiers and sailors who fought for the Union during the U.S. Civil War. Member General John A. Logan is credited with the idea. He proclaimed May 30, 1868, the first ever “Decoration Day.” CELEBRATE MEMORIAL DAY LIKE A PATRIOT With These 5 Family Activities

All of these podcasts are available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and a variety of other platforms. ‘How I BuiltThis’ — Have you ever wondered what it was like behind the scenes in the early days of Coinbase? What about Expedia, Mailchimp, or Ben & Jerry’s? The “How I Built This” podcast from NPR dives into all of those stories and more during fascinating interviews with founders and CEOs. Find out what hurdles they faced, how they overcame them, and what lessons you can steal to level up your own business. ‘Entrepreneurs on Fire’ —This award-winning podcast is hosted by author and thought leader John Lee Dumas. On it, he interviews entrepreneurs like Tony Robbins, Seth Godin, Gary Vaynerchuk, Barbara Corcoran, and Tim Ferriss and extracts business tips for you. Tune in for episodes like “How to Raise $400 million on the Internet and Build a FinTech Business with Jilliene Helman” and “Earn More with LinkedIn Sales Navigator with Julbert Abraham.” ‘Business Made Simple’ — If you’re a fan of “Building a Story Brand” by Donald Miller, then “Business Made Simple” is for you! On this podcast, Miller hosts and offers strategies for building and optimizing your business. He covers topics ranging from “How to Escape a Villain Mindset” to “Is Word-of-Mouth Marketing Dead?” ‘BizChix’ — “BizChix” is catered specifically to women entrepreneurs and hosted by business coach and strategist Natalie Eckdahl.The episodes mix business and advice and training with on-air coaching calls and interviews. If you’re looking for specific tips like how to pivot your client base or get in the hiring mindset, this podcast will be a perfect fit for you. ‘Wisdom From the Top’ — Hosted by Guy Raz of “How I Built This,” this podcast expands beyond business leaders to glean leadership tips from all fields, including army generals, scientists, and reporters as well as CEOs. As the podcast’s description puts it, “You’ll hear accounts of crisis, failure, turnaround, and triumph, as the leaders reveal their secrets on their way to the top.These are stories that didn’t make it into their company bios, with valuable lessons for anyone trying to make it in business.” 2 www.AgentLinkMarketing.com 5 Podcasts to Boost Your Business Growth We’re Listening — Are You?

Imagine for a moment you don’t own a computer and neither does anyone else at your company. How would that affect the success of your business? It’s almost a ridiculous question to ask, because computing power has changed every facet of the insurance industry since the 1950s! Any IMO, BGA, or FMO working on paper alone would be laughed out of the marketplace. And yet, decades ago, some companies teetered on that brink.They hesitated to take the leap and embrace this new technology — and if they didn’t, their businesses fell apart. The same thing happened in more recent memory with the adoption of cellphones and the internet. Why am I proposing this hypothetical? Well, it seems likely predictive analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) are today’s computers. If you don’t embrace them (or at the very least explore their benefits), you’ll be giving your company a handicap and your competition a leg up. “A business that doesn’t change is a business that’s going to die.” –Frank Perdue CHANGINGTHE INSURANCE GAME The insurance industry may be slower to adapt to new technologies than other fields, but today it is arming itself with new computing power, AI, and advanced metrics to keep up with the times. Predictive analytics — defined by IBM as “a branch of advanced analytics that makes predictions about future outcomes using historical >Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6

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