Agent Link - October/November 2021

Agent Link - October/November 2021

OCT/NOV 2021 INSIDE How to Double Your Recruiting and Distribution How 130 IMOs Stacked Up During a Secret Shopper

A Timely Secret That Can Double Your Recruiting and Distribution

The First Thanksgiving Menu

30-Year-Old Advertising Tips That Still Work

about it but aren’t taking action.The latter can use the proactive influence of a good closer. Combined, these two groups represent a select 10% of all prospects, and we’ll return to that.

When I first started in sales more than 20 years ago, prospecting was an entirely different ball game. I could make a sales call with confidence, knowing that the person I was trying to reach would either pick up the phone or call me back. It’s not as easy today as it was 20 years ago. The biggest problem I hear about from sales people is not being able to get a prospect on the phone. Many recruiters and wholesalers fill at least these three strategic roles: procuring more business from existing clients, bringing in cases by closing new producers, and to top it all, fishing for new qualified prospects. As challenging as getting people on the phone has become, prospecting eats up considerable time resources and affects team morale — if you’re talking to the wrong candidates. The truth is that time is a precious and a limited resource, and time is money.This begs the question: Does your team in charge of bringing in new business have a time allocation strategy? As much as closers prefer to speak with the more “serious” prospect who is evaluating options and fairly ready to take action — a producer willing to make a commitment to your program — most closes will only occur after a series of positive interactions. Studies show that at any given moment, out of a room of 100 prospective producers, only three will be actively “shopping” for a new opportunity and ready to move forward, while 6–7 are thinking

Another inconvenient fact is that it can take up to 12 positive interactions before a prospect closes. Doing the tenacious follow-up it really takes to optimize your closing percentage with prospects requires patience, organization, and creativity. And each of those ingredients translate to time. When conducting a secret-shopper study with 130 IMOs and evaluating how closely they followed up with prospective producers — see Page 2 with more about our telling findings — it was clear that the large majority is not investing enough time on follow-up, all while knowing recruiting teams are spending more than a fair timeshare speaking with inactive or unqualified producers when fishing for new business. As mentioned earlier, the latter can erode team morale in addition to wasting valuable time. We invite you to visit DriveDistributionGrowth. com and see a one-minute video with new ideas to tackle this very common challenge.

3 READY TO TAKE ACTION % % 7 INTEND TO CHANGE

Top 10 %

30 HAVE A NEED

ARE NOT READY TO ACT %

lower 90 %

30 DO NOT %

HAVE A NEED

30 NOT INTERESTED in YOUr COMPANY %

Image credit: Jeremy Miller, recruitment expert and author of “Sticky Branding.” *Graphic has been modied.

Another 30 are open to a conversation and will show mild interest in your opportunity. While these have a need for your services, the timing is off. Perhaps they just don’t have the right case in front of them; they require nurturing and follow- up. Another 30 don’t think they’re interested, and the remainder are not sufficiently receptive to even hear your message. But what happens as your team engages the more qualified prospects? It’s not a course totally free of obstacles.The more successful producers, likely those you want to recruit and onboard, are successful because they’re active and busy.They’re likely to miss your phone appointments. Confusing that for a lack of interest or not being serious about growing their practice is a costly mistake.

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1 +800 535 4545 -Senia Gramajo President, Agent Link

... continued from Cover

Once upon a time, my partner and I became quite intrigued after we delivered separate recruiting campaigns for two very similar companies with quite different outcomes. Both were carriers with a big presence in the market, targeting the same audience and with similar value propositions. What became intriguing was how the carrier with bigger brand recognition saw much lower numbers of contracted and producing agents than the other. After a side-by-side campaign comparison, we found that the company with better numbers had a very strict follow-up policy that recruiters followed closely, whereas the bigger brand did not. Management at the company with better numbers had both procedures and the metrics in place that kept recruiters focused and incentivized their follow-up in every way.The other group just didn’t place the same emphasis on it. It was clear that follow-up is a huge difference-maker when it comes to closing and generating new business. We decided to study the topic thoroughly and establish a benchmark for how much follow-up is enough and how little is too little. Here, the works of Allan Dib, Chet Holmes, and Jeremy Miller, three different authors (the latter also a recruiting expert), were invaluable. Their work shows that it can take up to 12 positive interactions before a prospect closes. However, 50% of sales people simply give up after a first unsuccessful attempt at closing, and as many as 90% give up after a couple follow-up attempts. Whereas only 8% of closers are creative and tenacious enough to generate more interactions with prospects, 80% of prospects only close until after a seventh interaction with the closer.This explains why the stellar closers seem to bring in most of the business. It isn’t that follow-up helps you close a few more sales. It’s that most of your closing is in the follow-up. And so, we set out to probe 130 different IMOs via a secret shopper, testing their follow-up with prospective producers. Our findings weren’t only telling but astonishing. We found that the majority of IMOs only respond via email to communication coming from a prospective producer versus a call. Only 16% of IMOs responded to an initial reach by a prospect on the same day. Not only did most IMOs give up quickly when the interested prospect didn’t respond, but also, only 11% of IMOs appeared to have a systematic approach that included at least three attempts to get a prospect back on the phone after initial engagement. How 130 IMOs Stacked Up During a Secret Shopper

The F Than What Wa

Producer Recruitmen What Only 11% of BGAs a and How to Avoid Bein

Our full report summary and takeaways that could help your team raise efficiencies and get more business are available for you at AgentRecruitmentAndActivationSecretRevealed.com.

Download the www.AgentRecruitmentAndAc

2 www.AgentLinkMarketing.com

E very Thanksgiving, we gather with our families and friends and pig out. Turkey, cranberry sauce, and stuffing, oh my! But did the Pilgrims actually eat all the same foods we do today? When we sit down at the Thanksgiving table, we are blessed with mashed potatoes, candied yams, green bean casserole, turkey, stuffing, and pumpkin pie. However, if we wanted to be historically accurate, we would need to change up that dinner spread a bit. Historians know of a few foods on the table that Pilgrims and Wampanoags shared at Plymouth Colony in 1621. Wildfowl, corn (in grain form for porridge), and venison were sure to be served at the first Thanksgiving. Wild turkey was also a common and abundant food source but wasn’t likely the main course as it is today. A few days before the first Thanksgiving, the colony’s governor put four men in charge of hunting for birds for the feast, and they very likely returned with some turkey.

However, as far as mashed potatoes are concerned, in the early 1600s, most Europeans and the Wampanoag had no idea what a potato was.They weren’t cultivated in North America until the 1700s. Likewise, cranberries were still very new to the Pilgrims, and they didn’t yet use them for food — instead, they used them to make dyes for fabrics! For dessert, pumpkin pie was not yet a thing either. Although the Pilgrims liked pumpkins, they didn’t have the butter and wheat flour needed to make pie crust. Instead, they hollowed out the pumpkins (just like Halloween!) and filled them with milk and honey to make a custard and then roasted them. Although our Thanksgiving meals have changed over the years, it still is a fantastic time to get together and celebrate. In the spirit of evolving traditions, don’t be afraid to innovate to add your own personal traditional twist to the holiday as well!

First nksgiving as on the Menu?

nt Secret Revealed and IMOs Understand, ng Among the 89%

HAVE A LAUGH!

e report at: ctivationSecretRevealed.com

5 +800 535 4545

Optimizing Your Cost of Producer Acquisition

Phase 1: Having the Proper Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

But before achieving a more ideal alignment, one may need to examine some of the barriers that could prevent it. 1. Not Having Measurable or Achievable KPIs My front desk anecdote is an example of this, but there are similar scenarios in our industry. For example, let’s say that there’s a BGA whose primary value proposition to producers is truly exceptional service, and that is promoted heavily in their recruiting literature. But what if no KPIs measured it? This team could be giving each other thumbs up regarding their service without a concrete way to improve and grow producers’ referrals. Metrics that could solve that scene might include a KPI measuring the speed at which quotes go out or the average length of time a case gets past underwriting. It could include First Time Resolution (FTR) measuring if issues are handled to the producer’s satisfaction in the first call or Net Promoting Score (NPS), a metric that could reflect their producers’ willingness to recommend that BGA to others.

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