Insurance Agents Think Tank

Craig Pretzinger and Jason Feltman are The Insurance Dudes, host of The Insurance Dudes Podcast, the best resource for agents in the industry. They help agents compress their learning curve to achieve exceptional results.

Craig and Jason built the #1 podcast in the industry from scratch by dedicating their time and energy to delivering episode after episode of actionable content.

Today they talk to Todd all about a hot topic: telemarketing. Tune in, and you’ll learn:

• The biggest mistakes to avoid when telemarketing.
• How to reduce turnover in your agency.
• Tactics to turn normal agents into superstars.
• Keeping your agency going (and growing) even when you’re on vacation!

Links & Resources

• Merrill - Online Investing Solutions, Trading, Guidance & Tools
• Sales Genie

The Insurance Dudes’ Links

• Website: TeleDudes
• Podcast: The Insurance Dudes Podcast
• Facebook: The Insurance Dudes Group - Facebook
• Instagram: @insurance_dudes_podcast
• LinkedIn: The Insurance Dudes Podcast

Episode Transcript

Jason Feltman: [00:00:00]
Here’s the thing: the old school of cracking the whip, coming down on people, it doesn’t work. It de-motivates. You’re the coach. You have to coach them into it. The most expensive thing in an agency is turnover, and then the retraining. So that would be the skill that I would get good at before constantly hiring and firing. 

Todd: [00:00:27]
All right. I am here with the Insurance Dudes, right? That’s what you guys call yourselves.

Jason Feltman: [00:00:33]
We are the dudes.

Craig Pretzinger: [00:00:34]
That’s what they call us.

Todd: [00:00:36]
Well, Hey, Jason and Craig, really glad to have you on. You guys are listening to the Insurance Agents Think Tank Podcast, I’m your host, Todd McLain. You can find us at AgentsThinkTank.com to listen to all our podcasts.

Again, Jason, Craig, thanks so much for coming on. Today’s podcast is all about telemarketing. It’s a hot topic, right? And over the years we’ve slowly been getting hit with TCPA, with different kinds of calling laws, it just feels like it’s getting more and more difficult to telemarket. So I’ve been getting inundated with people asking, how are you doing it?

How, what are you doing? And so I thought it would be really good to have a podcast on telemarketing and you guys are experts way more experience than I have in telemarketing. So I’m really glad that you’re here. Thank you very much.

Jason Feltman: [00:01:28]
Thank you. This is awesome.

Craig Pretzinger: [00:01:30]
Thank you, Todd. 

Todd: [00:01:31]
Tell us a little bit about yourselves, Jason, and then Craig, can you tell the audience who you are and what kind of agency you have? A little bit of background.

Jason Feltman: [00:01:41]
Yeah. So my name is Jason Feltman. I live here in Huntington Beach, California. started, in the insurance industry about a little over four years ago, bought a struggling book. didn’t know how to sell anything. At first and really try to figure that out my first year, towards the end of the first year, realized that we could actually maybe even bonus.

So, took some money out and invested into some live transfers, that was able to get us into bonus territory, which could make this thing actually, give us enough capital to, to, to start rowing the boat here. So once, once, we were able to do that. we realized real fast that live transfers were expensive.

They were in short supply that the, super inconsistent I would pull out my hair every time one didn’t work out or, you know, one dropped and, and my, you know, the agents didn’t get it or something. And, so it kind of freaked me out. So, as I was talking to some of the, Some of the lead companies, they were saying that they basically buy these leads, right.

They buy internet leads from, from all these aggregators and then they, they have a pool of them. They can’t sell them all. There’s more supply than demand, but they’re also there. No, they’re not only selling to seven other agencies. They’re also calling on them, generating live transfers to the leads that they’ve already sold and then transferring them to the agents for, you know, sometimes over a hundred bucks a transfe...

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Because if somebody has a 10% contact rate and out of those 10% of contact, maybe only half get a quote versus you have somebody with a 30% contact rate and only half get a quote, which company should you invest your money into going forward? It's a no brainer, right? The one that let you quote the most

Hello and welcome to the insurance agents think tank podcast. I'm your host, Todd McLean. Today's topic is  one that I hear all the time. Hey, Todd, what do you think about this marketing source? Or what do you think about doing this kind of marketing? And so I really wanted to dive into a fundamental difference between passive marketing and active marketing.

It's a subject that many agents don't even consider before building their marketing systems in their office. So don't forget, you can check out this podcast out on agentsthinktank.com. Let's dive into the differences between active marketing and passive marketing. So when I was a new agent, something that I wish I would have been taught upfront is I need to consider, am I doing more of an active marketing type, or am I doing more of a passive marketing type?

And let me kind of like dive into what I mean, because this is really marketing 101. If you're not considering, you know, anytime that you get into a different marketing source, you should consider. Is this active marketing or passive marketing. And do I have too much of either in order to hit my goals?

So let's go into a different couple of , Examples of what each might be. So passive marketing means you're waiting for someone it's passive to raise their hand in order to get a quote, things like referrals, direct mail, a door to door, right. You're asking people for something in order later, at some point.

To get them to reach back out to you now with passive marketing. What I like to tell agents is be careful about passive marketing, depending on how competitive you are in your market. I've seen way too many agents struggle to, you know, for example, build referral relationships, in the Dallas area as a farmer's agent.

If I try to build mortgage referral relationships, I'm going to get my butt kicked because we're just not that competitive on home in my current market. I'm not saying don't do it. I'm just saying you want to be cognizant of your competitiveness in your market for passive types of marketing campaigns.

The other type of marketing campaigns that you can do are active type of marketing campaign. So you are actively trying, you know, going out there, shaking hands, kissing babies. Careful post COVID world. Right? But you're actively asking people for a quote, you can control your destiny. You can control the amount of quotes that you're doing because of statistics.

So that again, with passive marketing, you're waiting on active marketing, you're controlling because of the numbers. Right? So with active marketing, Well, technically with both, you want to know your numbers, both active marketing. It's really important to track your results and so forth in order for you to scale.

So let's go into some examples, active marketing for newer agents. I see all sorts of agents when they get into the, to our industry, they start buying internet leads day one, right? So internet leads are active. There are people that are going online, filling something out, raising their hand for a quote.

But again, there's being sold probably the three to five different agents, especially newer leads. Right. And one of the things that I want you to be really cognizant of with internet leads is buying them from multiple lead companies up front, do not pick one lead company. You need to have at least two, I recommend three and test them out for 60 to 90 days, because what I want you to track is what your contact rate and your quote rate is for those carriers for those lead providers.

Because if somebody has a 10% contact rate and out of those 10% of contact, maybe only half get a quote versus you have somebody with a 30% contact rate and only half get a quote, which company should you invest your money into going forward? It's a no brainer, right? The one that let you quote the most, but if you only tried one company, you would never know that.

And you'd just say internet leads suck. And I'm never going to try that again. Right. But at the end of the day, you're able to control your quote volume because you can put the. You know, just a click of a mouse book pad, you can turn up your volume or turn it down. And so how I do it in my office is I have direct mail through smarketingmail.com, a mail provider that I created due to with direct mail, passive marketing.

Passive marketing that you can kind of control based on the volume that you send out. So with a passive marketing system, like direct mail, you have to be really careful about not sending enough volume, because if you're contact, rate's not there. Yo...

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On the first episode of the Insurance Agents Think Tank podcast, we’re talking to Jeremy Olson and Kristin Isaacson, who run Role Play at the Olson Agency; the first and only live sales training program for insurance agencies.

This episode is all about making money from online leads, a critical source of income for insurance agents during the pandemic, when we can’t do roadshow events or meet prospective clients in person!

In this value-packed podcast, you’ll learn:

• Jeremy & Kristin’s top tips for increasing sales.
• How they keep their customer retention rate over 90%.
• How to make sure you’re spending your budget for online leads effectively.
• And so much more!

Links & Resources

• EverQuote for Agents

Jeremy Olson & Kristin Isaacson’s Links

• Website: Role Play at the Olson Agency

Episode Transcript

Jeremy: [00:00:00]
On the first part of the call, we all know what’s coming. We all know people are going to say, Oh, I was just looking online. I just thought I’d get an online quote. Can’t you just tell me or send that to me in an email or I got to talk to my spouse or, Oh man. You’re the fifth agent to call me. We all know what’s coming.

It’s being the best at that and making the most of your at-bats, that’s going to really change your close rate and how many you sell from these.

Todd: [00:00:30]
Welcome everybody. I’m really happy here for a dish to kick off our episode number one for the Insurance Agents Think Tank podcast we have two amazing guests for the show today, Jeremy and Kristin, they, Jeremy is one of the largest Allstate agents in the country also has Role Play at the Olson Agency. And then of course, Kristin, who does all the work, right, the right hand, right hand for Jeremy. I’m so I’m so glad for you guys to be on episode number one. And, you know, this episode is really all about the trick to making money off of insurance leads, right? Aggregated online leads, especially with the pandemic. You know, a lot of people were relationship driven.

You should still be relationship driven. Right. but now with the pandemic, we gotta, you can’t really do road show events or, you know, there’s a lot of sources in, in person sources that got cut off. And so we have a lot of people just jumping into internet leads. And so I really wanted to create a podcast about how do you make money off of those?

Right. Cause everybody tries them out. I hear so many times that insurance leads don’t work. Right. I’m sure you guys hear that all the time, but you guys have really found a way to make that successful. And so I’d love to, I mean, Jeremy, I’d love to hear your story about how, how you came to be and how you, how you made them work.

Jeremy: [00:01:53]
Yeah, no. And, first of all, I really appreciate, and am honored to be your first guest. And I really do find it kind of ironic that the topic is internet leads because I, so I’ve been an Allstate agent. This is my 24th year now. And for my first 22 did not buy a lead. I heard all those same stories. You know, these, these types of things they don’t retain well, they just shop price.

They’re closed rates, terrible. They’re just not good. And so, ever bought leads my first 22 years. two years ago, I was given some pretty high goals by, by my company and I knew we had to change things. And so that’s when we developed this whole arm of the business. In fact, we have 11 people now on our outbound team that just work internet leads.

So we did, we went from zero leads to a significant amount of leads, and we’ve learned a lot of things along the way, things not to do things to do. And that’s what, that’s what we’ll share with you today. Perfect. Yeah. 

Todd: [00:02:51]
I think, I think what people want to know most is what not to do. Right. It’s how do I, how do I save myself from making these mistakes?

I’m not paying for these mistakes. What’s the quickest way to that, you know, the, the end goal of making money off of leads. So I actually want to ask you first, you know, which, how do you know which lead provider to find, because there’s so many different lead providers, where do you even start? What would you say about that?

Jeremy: [00:03:19]
Yeah, I w I would say, first of all, that’s changing every day. and you know, that would be the first thing first tip that I would give anybody getting into the lead game. Is, you’ve gotta be consistent. This isn’t something that, you know, I hear a lot of agency owners say, O...

Watch the video version of this show on YouTube »

On this episode of the Insurance Agents Think Tank podcast, Todd tackles a question he gets often: What should a producer’s daily tasks look like? The answer is key to your agency’s success. Getting your producers working on the right things—with the right systems in place—makes the difference between stagnant sales and a skyrocketing agency!

Tune in to learn:

• The #1 mistake sales agents make when hiring producers.
• How many internet leads you need to close one household.
• What should you do when your direct mail contact rate is low?
• The peak times to reach prospects and maximize your contact rate.

Todd gets super tactical in this episode—don’t miss it!

Links & Resources

• Insurance Agents Think Tank on Facebook

Episode Transcript

Todd: [00:00:00]
The moral of the story is you have to have a system set up in place. You have to know what the statistics are. You have to be willing to commit, to invest in a marketing plan and payroll in order to see scale that generates the returns. They’re not hiring a producer without a marketing system in place, and really wasting their time trying to get it to work with a new producer without statistics. 

Hello and welcome to the Insurance Agents Think Tank podcast. I’m your host, Todd McLain. And this podcast is all about how to grow and scale your agency. Today’s topic is a question I get often: Todd, what do your producer’s daily tasks look like? What do they do on a daily basis? And don’t forget, you can check out this podcast and all our other podcasts on our website AgentsThinkTank.com.

Be sure to search for our Facebook group on Facebook. It’s the Insurance Agents Think Tank. So let’s dive into our producers’ daily tasks. This is a really complex question, right? It’s there’s so many variables and it all depends on what is your producer do. Okay. Meaning, do you already have set up marketing in place or did you hire a kind of producer slash hybrid?

Meaning, are they going to also produce their own marketing? Because this is probably the number one issue I see agents make when they hire producers, you don’t already have a marketing system in place that’s generating a set amount of quotes. 

So you don’t know what your closing ratio is on average and your contact rate is on average for that marketing type it becomes impossible, or you make unrealistic expectations from the get go, because you might be having that producer generate their own leads.

And in reality, what you really created was a position where somebody is not only a producer, but they’re also a marketer. And when you give somebody that much responsibility, You have to rethink what their goals need to be and what their daily tasks look like. So, I mean, back in the day when I started my agency, I also had a producer/marketer until I got to the point where I realized, okay, I just need one marketer and they’re going to generate leads for me because now I can statistically find out, all right.

If I have them on a dialing system and they’re using these scripts and I’m coaching them on those scripts, they can generate. You know, out of a hundred calls, they contact 10 people, they generate one quote, Then I quote it call it because I’m the producer as the agent. And then what I ended up doing is then building out departments within my office.

I built a sales team, which is my producers. I built a service team, my CSRs, and then I have a marketing team. And by departmentalizing that I was able to really dive into numbers to help me understand how to scale. Who needs, what type of training, and really dial in on what things I need to look into.

So first and foremost, for this podcast to really help you, is, do you have marketing in place or are you making your producer also be a marketer now? 

What kind of leads is your marketer, or I should say producer calling is really important too. And I’m going to share my screen here. If you’re on YouTube, if you check us out on YouTube, you’ll be able to see my notes. If you want to, it doesn’t really matter. You don’t need them to go to YouTube. You can listen to the podcast, but the first thing I want to make sure we do before structuring a producer’s Day, we’ve got to figure out how many calls they need to make to make the sales that they need to make, to generate the premium they need to generate.

So, first and foremost, you need to figure out what are their goals. How are they going to pay for themselves? How’s your marketing structured. Okay. In order to do that, we need to look at, for each marketing type, what is the contact rate of that lead type...

Watch the video version of this show on YouTube »

Craig Wiggins scaled his agency to $40,000,000/yr, and he knows a thing or two about hiring! In this episode, you’ll learn all about how to hire the agents you’ll need to scale your agency, and how to avoid the “hiring emergencies” that push you into bringing on the wrong people.

You’ll learn how to cut the guesswork out of your hiring process, so you can bring new agents on with confidence. Along the way, Craig shares interview techniques from his years of experience, so you can understand who you’re really hiring.

Should you be looking for a specific personality when you hire? Craig has the answer. He’ll also share the #1 question to ask before signing a new agent!

Links & Resources

• Job Search - Indeed
• Team Hired
• Radical Candor — Be A Kick-Ass Leader And Empower Your Team

Craig Wiggins’ Links

• Website: Craig Wiggins Coaching & Consulting – Transforming Your Insurance Agency
• Facebook: Allstate Insurance: Craig Wiggins - Home - Facebook
• LinkedIn: Craig Wiggins - President/CEO - Wiggins Agencies, Inc. - Allstate

Episode Transcript

Craig: [00:00:00]
When you make hires, it’s not just the interview. It’s not just the pay plan. It’s not how you search, how you recruit. It’s how you onboard and how you truly develop these people so that they accomplish what they need to accomplish. If you will do that, you know, and Zig Ziglar said it before, right?

You help people get what they want and get everything that you want. I’m a firm believer in that if I take their goals and I look at the agency goals, chances are those things intersect and everybody’s good. 

Todd: [00:00:32]
All right. Welcome to the Insurance Agents Think Tank show. I’m your host, Todd McLain. And this podcast is all about how to build and scale your agency. Today’s topic is all about hiring. That’s a big topic. It’s a hot topic right now, especially with agents trying to scale after this last year and a lot of changes going on in the industry.

So. There’s a lot about this topic, especially, you know, back in the day when I started, I would just like throw up an ad on Craigslist because I thought I needed to hire somebody. And I didn’t really go through all the befores and afters about, you know, the consequences of not thinking through hiring somebody.

And I noticed as a new agent, I was churning staff less than right. And so I, I think this podcast is really important to have somebody like Craig Wiggins. Who’s our guest, you know, an expert in all things hiring and scaling agency. So Craig, thank you so much for being on the program. And if you want. so if you want to check out this podcast and see all of our other podcasts, just go to www.AgentsThinkTank.com and you can see all the episodes and download all the episodes. So again, thanks again, Craig. Now can you tell the audience, for people who might not know you tell us a little bit about yourself.

Craig: [00:01:46]
Yeah, well, Hey, thanks. First of all, I appreciate the invite. I appreciate being, getting the opportunity to come on the podcast with you. I’ve started the insurance business about 25 years ago. Started scratch. really had no clue what I was doing. I scored low potential twice on their, on their entrance exam.

Had no movie, no education, no experience. I went to college, but as soon as I found out that you could leave whenever you wanted and they wouldn’t call your mom and your daddy. That that was pretty much college for me. So I don’t know how I even got into this deal. I don’t know how they, they approved me for contract, but they did.

And, you know, I got started in and, Didn’t take me long to figure out maybe they were right about that assessment. Maybe I was low potential. Cause it was really hard. And you’re talking about, you know, the struggles that you had. I had all kinds of struggles, especially with people, you know? So

Todd: [00:02:36]
Well don’t feel bad because I dropped out of college my first semester. So we did something right. 

Craig: [00:02:42]
It took me a little longer. I’m like I’m sitting in classroom and this guy just gets up and leave. And I’m like, dude, that guy just left. He didn’t ask him. He’s like I said, in high school, you can leave. If you want to leave. I’m like, well, it’s like 75 degrees outside....