Agent Link -June 2019

Agent Link -June 2019

AGENT LINK To empower those who change lives for the better

JUNE 2019

THE POWER OF PRODUCER PERSONAS How You Can Leverage Your Existing Base to Fuel Growth

to. You think you know who someone is while you're in the middle of marketing to them, but truly separating out each persona illuminated something different. Senia: Was your strategy affected? Matt: Yes and no. We picked up some accounts on the persona of the higher-end advisor. We got in and started having conversations. We identified who the agent is, how we can help, how we have experience — all these factors that make their life easier, and that credibility is helpful. We picked up some big accounts because of that. Senia: That’s wonderful. How much do you feel another IMO or BGA can benefit, and what impact can it have? Matt: It’s directly proportional to how well you use it. We all know the big challenge in our industry: recruitment. At every level, we all have the same challenge. We want agents to be responsive, but we need to know who we’re talking to first.The idea behind it is finding a niche and figuring out the message they want to hear. It’s a message that says, “Here’s how we help the producer.”Whether it’s how we make life simpler for multiline agents or how we demonstrate credibility with higher-end agents, the message transcends all other noise. We have more in store for you in this issue, both about using personas to help your recruitment efforts and about additional insights from our clients. Enjoy! -Senia and Stu Gramajo

to thoroughly adapt it for our clients.Through helping hundreds of carriers, BDs, and wholesalers recruit and with our upwards of 150,000 conversations and interviews with producers, we’ve gained unparalleled insight into what motivates agents and advisors to make connections and write business. Essentially, we’ve made insights into what fuels independent distribution growth.

This is a situation where we don’t know what we don’t know.The illumination that comes with discovering these insights is rarely suspected, but nothing ignites as many bright strategic ideas or renewed excitement in recruitment as reading the final reports on clients’ ideal personas. We’ve watched it happen over and over, and every time, seeing the excellent results and our clients’ reactions is incredibly rewarding. Many of us know intuitively that our target market is not the vast majority of independent agents, but what we often overlook is the undiscovered and unexploited insight available in our very own book of business: our very own list of producers. As excited as we are to tell you more about the process, our clients’ results are even more exciting. Here are some outcomes Matt shared with my partner, Senia, during a recent conversation about producer personas. Senia: How did you like getting these insights from the producer persona? Matt: I thought it was a necessity. It gave us a different perspective on who we’re talking

Recently, our client Matt shared a valuable takeaway during a conversation with us. We were talking about producer personas, and he told us how illuminating it’s been to look at recruitment from this new angle. Previously, he was coming up against the same recruiting challenges that other IMOs, BGAs, and carriers experience. What changed for Matt was discovering the power of producer personas. Before sharing Matt’s takeaway, it’s pertinent to have some background knowledge about producer personas. We developed this proprietary process at Agent Link to help our clients gain more insight into their ideal producers’ expectations. It has been crucial in helping clients grow their distribution. Using producer personas, they can align their marketing strategies to win more contracts and production from the select types of producers they want to bring in. (Find a more complete article on this topic inside this month’s issue.) Agent Link’s process is an adaptation of Adele Revella’s concept of buyer personas, a widely- known methodology in the marketing world. We’ve leveraged our decades of experience in the insurance and financial services industries

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MAKE A POSITIVE IMPACT

3 Strategies for Genuine Community Involvement

Even if most of your agents and advisors are located all over the state or even country, the place your business calls home is a huge part of your identity. When a company makes a point to get involved locally, it's doing more than making new connections and getting its brand out there - it's also making a positive impact on the place it calls home. Most companies experience a slowdown in the summer. Here are some strategies to take advantage of that lull and create a plan for your business to get involved in the community and be a good neighbor. Support a Local Charity Every town boasts its share of charities and nonprofits looking to make a difference. Find a cause you believe in, then help out.This could mean donating a portion of your revenue to a local women’s shelter, volunteering as a company at the soup kitchen, or sponsoring a gala that raises money for a children’s hospital. Supporting charities demonstrates your values and attracts the kinds of customers who share them. Join a Parade This sounds unconventional, but sometimes it pays to think outside the box. Most towns put on a Fourth of July parade in the summer, so why not join in? Building a float could be a great team-building exercise, and a lot of people will turn up and see your mobile advertisement in the parade. Being in the parade shows that you’re part of the community, and when you top it all off by tossing candy to the kids, you’ll really make an impact. WorkWith Local Schools Your company could donate school supplies or even sponsor a program. Art and music programs are often the first to suffer from budget cuts, so support from a local business could make a huge difference. Donate art supplies to the classroom, sponsor high school theater productions, or offer scholarships to help young musicians pay for new instruments. Keep the arts alive by helping the kids in your community do what they love. These suggestions require time and resources to pull off, but making the effort can transform your company from just another business in a sea of many to a pillar in your community.

The 3 Cardinal Rules of Effe

Don’t Be ‘That Guy’

The average businessperson reads and composes more than 120 emails every day, but there is an overwhelming amount of business emails that seem to be written with no apparent regard for the reader. A massive chunk of people’s workdays is wasted wading through irrelevant, unclear, or incomprehensible messages. To remedy this issue, it’s vital to understand the keys to effective online communication, both to stem the tide of annoying and unnecessary emails and to protect your reputation as a professional. Here are three rules for effective email communication. 1. Tighten it up. When your message is sitting in an inbox packed with dozens of others, it’s essential to respect your reader’s time. Make the contents of the message clear from a glance at the subject line. Your subject line is what will draw the attention of the recipient — or lead them to skip over it altogether — so be specific and relevant. In the body of the email, your reason for emailing, as well as all the important points, should be immediately clear. Keep it as concise and as transparent as possible.

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Agent Link in the News

ThinkAdvisor Highlights Our Study’s Findings: Specialization vs. Variation

policies seem to be a lot more likely to cross-sell many other life, health, and annuity products.” In contrast, Bell says, “The percentage of Medicare Advantage specialists who said they sell variable annuities was at or close to zero.” You can read the full article on the ThinkAdvisor site. While these findings may not be surprising in our industry, the study illuminates critical points of leverage you can use to align and focus your recruiting strategy for better results. Emphasizing just how much of a challenge prospecting is among specialists, our research offers key insight to carriers, IMOs, and BGAs. It highlights the immense opportunity for you to improve your offerings to independent agents or advisors who sell your products. By doing so, you offer them a solution that’s ignored by a large part of our industry. If you’d like to see the full results of our quantitative study, email Stu at [email protected].

Recently, a feature in ThinkAdvisor shed new light on significant findings from a quantitative study Agent Link conducted last year. Through surveys of over 1,200 licensed insurance professionals, we looked at how an independent agent’s level of specialization affects their expectations and behavior. Analyzed exclusively by Agent Link with Director of Market Research Stu Gramajo at the helm, the results illuminate the difference between agents and advisors who specialize in selling one type of insurance and those who don’t. Past studies, surveys, and research assessed agents’ responses as a homogeneous group. However, what our research conclusively shows is that agents who sell cash-accumulation life insurance products but don’t specialize in it represent an entirely different set of opinions and behavior than producers who do specialize in permanent life products. Our study inspected and revealed exactly what products each specialist is cross-selling and with what degree of probability. As ThinkAdvisor’s Insurance Editor Allison Bell summarizes, “Agents who focus on selling Medicare supplement (medigap) insurance

2. Write like a human being. Many professionals assume that the need for brevity means they can get away with short, robotic missives. Managers are especially guilty of this, sending out single-sentence messages in all lowercase letters with nary an emotion. We get it; you’re busy. But it’s worth taking an extra moment of your time to craft an email that carries the human element as well. It’s important to take a professional tone and to keep communication brief, but you can still write, to some degree, like you talk.This will show recipients that you take communicating with them seriously. 3. For the love of all that is holy, reply to the emails you receive. Again, you’re busy, and you’ve got to prioritize your work, but consistently ignoring emails is a clear sign of negligence and will make you unpopular among your coworkers. If you don’t have time to think of a clear answer, a simple confirmation that you received the message goes a long way. While you can safely ignore all those companywide filler emails you receive each week, you need to show your coworkers and contacts that you’re willing to put in a little effort and that you’re on top of your responsibilities. tive Email Communication

HAVE A LAUGH!

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1. The Power of Producer Personas 2. Become a Pillar in Your Community The 3 Cardinal Rules of Effective Email Communication 3. Agent Link in the News Have a Laugh 4. 3 Ways to Keep Up Productivity During the Summer

DEFEATING THE SUMMER SLUMP 3 Ways to Keep Up Productivity During the Summer

during the summer, there’s an easy way to remedy it: getting a little exercise. Since the sun is shining, why not take advantage of it while you work? Try scheduling a “walking meeting” outside, or implement exercise breaks every couple of hours. Moving around boosts productivity, and doing it outside can be a great change of scenery. Dress Down If shirts and ties are the norm at your business, you might want to consider embracing the laid-back vibe of summer by relaxing the dress code a bit. It’s a small way to ensure employees don’t feel like they’re missing out on all the perks of summertime without losing productivity. Plus, who wants to wear a suit in July? It’s tough to compete with the allure of a warm summer day, but sometimes those days can work to your advantage if you make a few simple swaps in your everyday work routine.

June 21 marks the official beginning of summer and the productivity slump most businesses experience.The sun’s tantalizing rays draw your eyes from computer screens or conference room meetings to the outside world. A weekend of fresh air, sunshine, and cool evenings on the back porch infiltrate your mind. Your productivity is sapped, but you’ve still got work to do. So, what can you do? Here are a few ways to combat the summer slump. Relax theWork Hours If you’re in a management position, consider tweaking the standard 9-to-5, Monday through Friday schedule a little bit. Some businesses will implement a 9/80 schedule, meaning employees work 80 hours in nine days instead of 10, so they can get every other Friday off. Some businesses will let employees work half days on Fridays during the summer, and others will let employees work remotely on certain days. Get Moving Sitting at a desk for eight continuous hours can stagnate productivity at any point during the year, but

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The Secret to Irresistible Marketing

The Art and Science of Listening First

When it comes to differentiating your company, developing your own producer personas will give you a new level of insight and guide your company to breakthrough success. Many brokerage agencies and financial firms fail to differentiate their messaging and end up creating nonspecific marketing for every type of producer they can support.This results in less than compelling copy, not to mention poor results. In a case study of Apple’s 2008 launch of the iPhone 3G in Japan, Revella’s book illustrates the value of buyer’s insight and how catastrophic it can be to market without it. Apple released the iPhone in January 2007 to incredible success in the States. However, the technology company hadn’t considered that Japanese buyers had different mindsets and needs. In a country where 50 million cellphones were sold the previous year, Apple sold a dismal 200,000 units. With minimal research, as Revella points out, Apple could have discovered that by 2008, Japanese cellphone users were used to phones shooting video, a feature the iPhone 3G didn’t yet have. Many Japanese cellphones also included chips for debit card transactions and train passes, so Japanese consumers had expectations the iPhone 3G failed to deliver on. Two years later, Apple returned with an improved product and a more effective campaign, but they had learned their lesson the hard way. So,What Exactly Are Producer Personas? And How DoThey Make Recruitment Easier and More Effective? The term “persona” is widely used in the world of marketing. However, some confusion exists between personas and traditional customer profiles or avatars, and it is important to address that confusion. While profiles or avatars give us a layer of insight into our audience through demographic attributes like licensing, affiliations, and market focus, their traditional overviews lack crucial insight. Traditional profiles don’t tell us what’s making producers less than happy in their current settings.They don’t name a producers’ key motivations when onboarding with a new organization.They also fail to signal what due diligence they’ll undertake and which sources and influencers they trust.

Imagine for a minute if we could listen to people’s thoughts. Imagine how our relationships could be affected if we could not only listen to what our spouses were saying but also to what they were thinking. We’d be much better closers if we could listen to customers’ undisclosed objections when the sales process wasn’t going as expected. As marketers with this capability, we could create irresistible campaigns.They would be so precise that they would anticipate concerns and even handle objections ahead of time. Do you remember the 2000 comedy “What Women Want,” starring Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt? Gibson plays the role of Nick Marshall, an executive promoted to creative director who is tasked with creating a campaign that appeals to female consumers. An accidental electrocution leaves him with a new power: the ability to hear women’s thoughts. At first horrified, Nick eventually realizes there are real advantages to being the only straight man in the world who knows exactly what women think. When I discovered the writings of David Meerman Scott and Adele Revella’s concept of buyer personas, I felt like I’d come across this superpower in real life. One marketer who’s quoted in Revella’s book explains what it was like to gain such insight: “This is almost like cheating, like getting the exam paper weeks before the final. Instead of trying to guess what matters, I now know not only what the customer wants — I realize how she goes about it.” As we shared in the cover article, Agent Link adapted this methodology to create a process we refer to as producer personas. Similarly, we applied the process of leveraging our proprietary industry >Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6

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