The All Aboard Newsletter

Today we’re going to catch up on some happenings in Q1, Explore the 2024 agency strategy and how its going, plus talk through why I chose internet leads as the #1 channel to grow my agency.

Lets take a ride!

Q1 Results + Updates!

Y’all - Its been too long and we’ve got some catching up to do!

Here’s how the year has started so far.

January: 589 Items - $531,950 Written - $809,553 Annualized - 15 LSP (Sales)

February: 649 Items - $571,169 Written - $869,498 Annualized - 15 LSP (Sales)

March: 742 Items - $648,804 Written - $977,476 Annualized - 13 LSP (Sales)

P.S - I usually like to post my official screenshots of numbers, but since there are a few months here, you can find them on Facebook!

We’ve been in triage mode.

We’re retooling the sales team - We are down to 12 salespeople as I type this, but getting ready to hire 3-4 more producers to get to our goal of 15 people.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen quickly.

We’ve lost salespeople, but we’ve seen close ratio rise to more acceptable rates, and we’ve been able to get a lot smarter on our marketing spend. Good things are happening.

Not hitting a bonus in 2023 due to our Loss Ratio forced us to go back to the table, re-shift our investment, and ensure that our team was focused on writing less households, but bigger households. Unfortunately, our Loss Ratio keeps going up (All my homies hate Loss Ratio).

If executed properly, we will write more items and spend less money on marketing. That will allow our producers to work better leads, get paid more, and everyone wins.

Changing the strategy takes a lot of work though. It requires our agents to sell value more than ever. It requires them to do true needs analysis on their prospects and insure the entire household. To fill the need, you must first find a need.

So thats the update on production, I can go deeper, but this is already a long newsletter since its been a couple months.

As for growth, well we’re just over $38million now! With the growth from rate increases and the purchase of the TN agency ($460k in premium) we’re still rolling!

Retention has been tough, but luckily rates are baking in. The silver lining is that we went 40 items to the negative last month and grew $700,000. Pretty cool right?

So thats the agency update. Theres so much more to talk about, but we’ll leave that for next time.

Here is the highlight reel of Q1:

We bought an agency in TN!

In Memphis to be exact!

We had the opportunity to buy a very small established agency in Memphis for an incredible price. We couldn’t pass it up!

So now we’re navigating running agencies in two separate districts, on two distinct VC, AAP, and Y.E Bonus goals. We’re a part of the pilot for agents going multi-state and we’re doing everything we can not to mess it up for everyone else.

We’ve long been advocates for multi-state agents, so the better the agents in the pilots do, the better it is for the expansion of the program.

I have to give a lot of love to my DSLs Mattlanta and Cannon for all the help and support they’ve given. Thank you!

Securities Licenses

We made a commitment this year to stop talking about the things we’re planning to do with Allstate Financial and get started doin it.

Like Morgan Freeman in Shawshank - We gotta get busy livin, or get busy dying. But like… with financial services. Anyways…

I didn’t have my securities licenses coming into 2024, so its been a grind trying to knock them out before we wake up and its November.

In the last 9 weeks I knocked out 4 tests!

Variable Life: ✅ SIE: ✅ Series 6: ✅ Series 63: ✅ 

Only the Series 65 to go!

So if I’ve been less responsive by text, social media, or email bare with me while I knock this last one out!

Conference Circuit for Next Call Club

We’ve on the “circuit” for Next Call Club and have been to four events through the first three months of the year.

Some were related to the FCC rulings and the lead industry, while others were meetings of agents coming together to share whats working for them in their agencies.

And I just gotta say, we’ve got a busy summer.

Upcoming conferences:

• Farmers Embrace → April

• Allstate Tx Leaders Forum → May

• Farmers Leaders Forum CA → June

• Crazy 8 Summit → June

I will be speaking at the final three in the list, and then Im going to likely shut down the travel for the rest of the year! There are so many great events, but it will take something special for me to get back out there I think.

Learning is great. Applying it is even better and we’ve gotta be in the chair to do that.

So let me know if you’re heading to any of these events and I’d love to get together and chat about anything and everything.

If you’re looking for an event and you’re an agent focused on investing in your agency’s growth, consider the C8 Summit.

This is the first year the C8 Summit is being hosted.

I’m joined by 7 other agents who are some of the most giving people when it comes to sharing whats been successful for them.

We’ll have minimal, if any vendors, and its not a big shillfest.

Just a small, group of agents in roundtable discussions with 8 agents sharing whats working in their agency. We’ve all agreed to hold nothing back, we’re sharing what actually works for us.

I will be presenting on the strategy we’ve used to buy agencies, grow them, and (now) sell them. I’ll talk about how we get approved by the mothership and how we source deals. If that sounds interesting to you, consider coming.

Space is extremely limited.

Let me know if you’re interested or check out the link down at the bottom.

Strip Malls, not Skyscrapers

The “Skyscrapers and Strip Malls” analogy is one of my favorite business frameworks.

Building a Skyscraper means doing one or two things with intense focus, and having a goal to do those one or two things extremely well. For the first 5.5 years of the agency’s existence, we were building a skyscraper.

We focused on writing as much new business as possible as fast as possible.

Our goal was to get as big as we could as fast as possible, and that mean collecting a lot of policies and households very quickly. As a result, we were relentless in our marketing approach. If it qualified, we were going after it.

Single car? Sure

Someone who isn’t a home owner? Why not!

We were collecting households and customers with reckless abandon.

My feelings are summarized below.

It was a great strategy and it helped us build a $38,000,000 book in under 6 years. Now we’re taking rate increases, and the growth of the book as those rates bake in is an incredible thing to witness.

The hand we’re dealt though, has not changed. We’re still faced with Loss Ratio challenges (its going up - Yay!), we’re continuing to take rates, and after running in the red all 2023, we’re ready to get profitable again.

Enter the Strip Mall Strategy.

The Strip Mall strategy is where you focus on the customers you have and work to sell as many products or services to them as possible. Your goal is still growth, but in a different way.

Instead of only acquiring more customers to increase revenue, you focus on getting more revenue out of your existing customers. To put it another way, you get your current customers to pay more.

What does this look like?

It means writing three, four, or five lines of business as often as possible.

It means writing enhanced packages that include better coverage, accident forgiveness, or lower deductibles.

Its about selling value, which isn’t always easy when you’re working internet leads and the rates keep going up.

But its doable. It takes focus and a ton of training with your team. You need to believe its possible before they’ll believe its possible.

For something actionable I suggest you start with these areas:

- Ask if they have any rental properties.
- Ask if they have any business use vehicles or home based businesses.
- Ask for a referral on every good service interaction/sale.
- Include Flood Insurance and SPP quotes for Homeowners.

All four of these areas allow you to find more premium, add value for the insured, and get more without any additional spending.

Both the Sales Teams and the Service teams are looking for these opportunities.

If you’re built for it, Medicare and Life Insurance represent two other amazing opportunities. They don’t always help as much with your scorecard or bonus plan, but they’ll add much needed revenue, and hopefully boost your retention by making the relationship stickier.

Our results? We’re writing more “extras” aka non-auto and non-home items than ever, and we’re back in the black with profitability again!

Some years it makes sense to build a Skyscraper. Other years, a Strip Mall.

Just make sure you’re thinking about which you’re doing and then commit.

8 Tricks to Find Internet Lead Success

Internet leads can be amazing. They can also be terrible.

But what if I told you that 90% of the reason that agents succeed (or fail) with internet leads has nothing to do with the leads themselves?

Its true - Bad leads exist. Bad leads are rarely the problem though.

This begs the question: What is a bad lead?

Perhaps its better to invert the question: What is a GOOD lead?

A good lead, by my definition is one that answers the phone. They can be the best prospect in the world, but if you cannot get them on the phone, none of it matters.

Therefore, we go to the root of what is required for a lead to be “good.”

Aka - Someone needs to be willing to talk to you.

If someone picks up the phone, my view is they’re getting a quote. Thats the salesperson’s job right? To be interesting and get people interested.

Internet leads come from a variety of different sources. What I’m NOT describing are the major lead vendors like Everquote, Quotewizard, All Web Leads, you know the ones.

What I’m referring to are the actual ads, articles, emails, and searches that lead people to fill out a form.

There is a ton of nuance in how that consumer finds the lead form to fill out.

There is even more nuance in the strategies that agencies employ to work those leads. Everyone has a different strategy, so today I’m going to explain ours.

While I cannot lay the entire strategy out in a newsletter, I can give 8 areas to focus on and questions to ask yourself.

Whether you’ve been working leads for years, you’re just getting started, or something in between - these tips will help you

1.) Have a plan for SPAM

When was the last time your phone rang and it said something like “Telemarketer” or “Spam Likely?”

If you’re like me, thats most of the time. How often do you answer the phone when you see that?

What makes it worse is that often times, the person calling doesn’t even realize they’re flagging as SPAM and are curious why nobody is answering the phones.

But here is the issue: WE are the people calling and not getting anyone on the phone. We’re not the consumer, we’re the person “spamming.”

We flag spam, people don’t pick up.

Immediately, we think “These leads suck - they don’t answer the phone!” not realizing it might be a much bigger problem affecting ALL our outbound calls, not just the ones on leads we’re purchasing.

There are tools to help with this.

Some are reactive such as Number Verifier or Caller ID Rep. They tell you when you’re flagging SPAM, then you need to swap your numbers and remediate them.

Others, like Regal and First Orion are proactive. They white label the phone number, monitor continuously, and automatically fix the SPAM tag if it shows up.

The reactive services are cheap, and the proactive ones are…. not.

This is something Next Call Club offers to its clients, and other services might have “add-on” services like this, so feel free to ask around.

2.) Have a Contact Strategy (Cadence)

Depending on the carrier(s) you represent, you may have some restrictions about how you can contact your customers.

Some people can utilize phone, text, and email - others can only utilize the phone.

Regardless of the channels you use to contact people, you need to have a pre-defined contact strategy with a cadence (schedule) of each outreach.

Ideally, this outreach happens automatically through your CRM - most CRMS can automate the steps, others you can set them up and your producers will need to work it manually.

But before you build out the strategy, do me a favor.

Put yourself in the clients shoes!

If you were on the other end of that phone, how would you want to be contacted? Imagine what goes through your head when you get a phone call, text, or email from a person you don’t know or recognize.

Most of us make the mistake of building the cadence to get us what WE need, instead of how we can best help the client in the way they want to be helped.

Yes, the faster we get to the lead the better - True.

But if you were the client, would you want to get called 5x in the first day? What if its by 5 different phone numbers from your office?

What do they think? They think 5 different people are calling and the question “what the hell have I done” is going through their mind.

Do this, then map out the cadence.

I’ve helped tons of people repair their cadence because it was WAY too aggressive and people either blocked their numbers or stopped answering the phone.

I’ve helped others who have had a cadence that was way too passive.

Put yourself on the other end of that phone call. Imagine you are the consumer. Don’t fumble the relationship before you even have a chance to start one.

3.) Know your Niche.

The most common statement I hear when people are getting started with internet leads is: “I only want home leads”

Look - there are a lot of reasons to go after home leads. You’re guaranteed a homeowner, they tend to be a more serious shopper, and they close at a higher rate.

However, they’re typically harder to get in contact with, they’re more expensive, and there are significantly less people shopping for home insurance than auto insurance.

In our experience, Home leads close at a higher rate, but have a lower Return on Investment (ROI).

So understand what your RMPs (Underwriting Guidelines) allow you to write, and what they exclude you from writing.

If you limit yourself to Home leads only, you’re taking an already small niche and making it even smaller.

Do you have a product that is extremely competitive compared to others?

What about locations where your carrier crushes it? Or where every other carrier sucks?

How do you find out? For starters, ask your team to tell you when something is either very competitive or its not competitive at all.

Touch base with your District leaders to ask if they have competitiveness by segment, zip code, city, and more.

I’ll give you an example of what this looks like. In 2019 and 2020 we had two or three mobile home carriers in Florida.

Not only was the average premium near $2,000 per policy, but the commission rate was about 30% higher than the average H03 commission.

So I asked our lead providers if they could filter for Mobile Home Leads. They told me “Of course, we can exclude those.”

But I didn’t want to exclude them, we wanted them. We offered them an extremely low price for those leads since nobody else was buying them.

We wrote something like 80-100 mobile homes one month on less than $5,000 of lead spend simply by understanding we had a niche that paid well and everyone was ignoring.

The clients were happy to hear from us, and referred the entire mobile home park.

As a wise man (woman?) once said - There are riches in the niches. Know your niche.

Pardon the interruption!

Webinar Alert!

I will be teaming up with Vlad Cherchenko and The Insurnace Sales Lab to present on the strategies in this newsletter on Thursday at 2pm Eastern.

While I cover the strategies here, I will go into more detail and expand on various nuances for each of these 8 tips.

You do not need to be a member of Insurance Sales Lab to join the call.

I’d be honored if you checked it out!

The Link is at the end of the newsletter!

4.) Be strategic.

Using internet leads is a tactic to grow.

So what then, is the strategy? The strategy is one level up, on a more macro level.

The overall goal might be to write more new business, and the strategy to do that involves finding where you have an advantage. The tactic (leads) then, are the way to exploit that advantage.

So in short - find where you have an advantage.

Do you have a competitor taking rates in your state? Great! Target their customers while they’re upset.

Do you have intimate knowledge of the town-class by zip code or area so you can find the homes that better qualify? Great, choose those locations to target.

Do you have a carrier that can place hard to write homes like coastal areas? Those people would probably love to hear from you. Target them!

You get the idea.

Think strategically about your opportunities, advantages, and then focus on the ones you think others might ignore.

Thats where you’ll win the most.

Zig when others Zag.

5.) Create Success Criteria

Not everyone using leads is going to have the same goal.

For some people, its about getting as much new business as possible to hit a year-end or monthly bonus.

For others, its going to be about getting as much profit as possible.

And for a few, about getting the highest closing leads no matter what - even if it means paying more because their staff like them and it doesn’t cause them to burn out.

Whatever the goal is, make sure you share that going in so everyone can ensure they’re tracking the right data points to measure success towards goal.

A few quick and easy ones are:

• Cost per sale → Cost to acquire a HH → Lead Spend/# of sales

• Cost Per Policy/Item → Cost to get an item/policy → Lead Spend/# of items

• ROI → Revenue - Cost/Cost

A few other things to know are your contact rate and quote rates. If you don’t know what your goal should be, at least find out what the metrics are right now so you have a baseline to work from and improve upon.

6.) Set Expectations

When you start working with a new lead provider, what do you expect?

It depends on situation, goal, vendor, or timeline right?

Are you 100% the other party knows what you expect? Are 100% clear on what they expect?

Almost never.

Happiness is expectations meeting reality. Clearly defining what you expect, the success criteria (above) that you’ve set, how you want the partnership to go and more is worth laying out.

Your vendor/partner will appreciate it, and it will pre-empt a ton of miscommunications in the future when things stumble a bit.

Being on the same page saves everyone time, energy, and effort.

Don’t be demanding. Don’t dictate what you want. Thats not a partnership.

Talk to the vendor about what you need to feel comfortable and confident in the project. Ask them what they want and need to make this as successful as possible. They’ve had plenty of experiences where a partnership didn’t work out, and they can probably give you a couple reasons why things go off the rails.

7.) Share Feedback Early and Often.

The worst thing you can do if you want a vendor relationship to be successful is withhold data.

If you do, here is how the situation (usually) goes.

Leads were going great, so you stopped thinking about them. Weeks turned into months and one day, you realize you only wrote 3 items from them last month!

Thats unacceptable right? You call them upset, they get defensive, the relationship falls apart. You cancel and move on.

This is a waste of everyone’s time.

The way you avoid it?

Share the outcome data from your CRM often, but at least monthly. That helps the vendor help you. If they don’t know what is or isn’t working, they can’t make any changes to optimize it.

Its so easy to do.

Its the highest ROI you can get for 5 minutes of work.

The best partnerships are built on mutual trust and respect. If one party withholds data, it hurts everyone.

8.) Ask for Help!

When things aren’t going right - its easy to throw in the towel, and cut your losses.

There are 10 agents who say “internet leads don’t work” for every one agent who knows they do. It took me and the team several years to really lock in our internet process so it was both profitable AND scaleable.

When people say leads don’t work, I roll my eyes. The limiting belief is stopping them from growing. Meanwhile they can just ask any agents if they’ve had success and ask for help.

Sure - some agents who are killing it don’t like to share and help. But plenty do.

You don’t know unless you ask.

Don’t discount the vendors that you’re working with either. They have a vested interest in you being successful with their leads. If you’re successful, you keep buying them and you refer your agency owner friends.

Many vendors have resources, courses, one pagers, cadences, etc to help you with your process. What does it hurt to ask?

If you have any curiosities or questions on any of these tips, well….

Next Call Club can help - And I can help too. All you need to do is reach out.

Whether you’re not getting the results you want from leads, have yet to get started, or you’re aiming to take your agency to the next level, we can help with our Lead Purchasing Program and U.S based outbound calling services.

People tell me I should talk about what we do more often, so here is my shameless plug.

Curious how Next Call Club can help with leads? Click here: Next Call Club!

We’ve got two links for you today:

1.) I will be going into these 8 topics in more detail next week on a webinar with Vlad Cherchenko and Insurance Sales Lab → Register Here

2.) To Register for the C8 Summit, Click Here! Reply if you have any questions!

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And if you have any comments/question, I'd love to hear them. Just hit reply!