- You need to be a marketer.
You need to be able to advertise your services
in your community and get the word out
about your business.
Are you a good marketer?
You're not.
I'm gonna tell you why in this video.
(swoosh)
I'm gonna have somebody right away in the comments say,
"I do this every time."
Cool, I love you.
Whoever you are, tell me that in the comments.
Prove me wrong.
But the majority of agents don't do this.
You don't market yourself.
You go into the house
and maybe you got a lead card
and it was a Humana lead card,
and you're going out to talk about Humana.
And you have all of your Humana brochures
and you're talkin' about Humana,
and you go right into it,
and you're really deep into it,
and they love Humana, they're sister has Humana,
and you're talkin' 'bout Humana,
and the whole time this client is thinking about you
as a Humana sales agent,okay,
and substitute any company for this.
You're already off to a bad start,
because you went right in hard on the product,
on the company, on the benefits of that core carrier.
Okay?
You are the person that you need to go hard on,
not on their strength, their commitment,
their AM Best rating, their star rating.
Not them, on you.
You are the agent.
You are the interchangeable part of this.
They can get Mutual of Omaha
from thousands of people in your town.
They can get AARP from their call center,
from their direct mail campaign, from their captive agents,
from thousands of independent agents.
They can get Medico, they can get Aetna,
they can get Signa, from thousands of different people.
But you don't market yourself.vvvvvvvvvv
Now young people, a lot of the young people
don't market yourself because you're like,
"Well, I'm young, "I don't have that much experience.
"What am I going to talk about?"
And the older people, you don't think about it,
because you're kind of thinking,
"Well, I've been doin' this a long time.
"They'll see by the way I talk.
"I'm very experienced.
"I'm knowledgeable in this,
"and they'll understand the weight of my experience
"comes to bear when I'm making my presentation."
And you're thinking whatever you're thinking,
but you don't think to sit and actually market yourself.
You need to do this.
If you've gone to any of my training seminars,
this is something I've been hitting on for years,
and I learned this as an agent in the field
when I had people calling me and saying,
"Mutual of Omaha,"
if you can think back to 2011,
"went up 20% and you're my Mutual of Omaha agent
"and I hate you,"
and brick through my window.
Okay?
Or "Conseco just went bankrupt,
"and you're my Conseco agent and I hate you
"because I hate Conseco,"
And I kept getting these calls
from every time somethin' would go bad,
and I kept thinking, wait,
they're thinking of me as a representative
solely of that carrier, whatever I sold them.
And so I learned to distance myself.
I said, "Yes, I can sell Humana, AARP, Mutual of Omaha,
"United World, United American.
"I can sell all of these products.
"I'm an independent agent."
What does that mean?
How many of you explain to your clients
that you're an independent agent.
I ask people in seminars all the time
and people raise their hand,
and they're like, "Yeah, yes, Sylvia, let's move on.
"I tell them I'm an independent agent."
I say, "Specifically, what do you tell them?
"What do you say?"
And they say, "Well, I'm an independent agent
"with 25 years experience," and blah, blah, blah.
They gave that one millisecond of weight
to the independent agent.
People don't know what independent agent means.
You have to tell them.
That's why when I film these videos,
and I say leave me a comment,
I point down, scroll down, in the comments,
scroll all the way to the bottom.
If you're on your cell phone,
all the way past all the other suggested videos,
and it will, the very bottom of your screen,
it'll allow you to leave a comment,
and I explain it very elementarily,
because people don't know.
People don't know what an independent agent is.
You have you tell them, and you don't.
You have to market yourself,
before you talk about their product.
Their product's there.
Talk about you.
Because they can get that product anywhere.
Why do they want to work with you?
That's the question.
Why are you in their home?
Why are they in your office?
I'm an independent agent which means,
this is the part you aren't doing,
which means that I work for you
and I'm not an employee of any of these insurance companies.
Therefore, when I come out to your house,
I want to talk to you and find out what your needs are,
and then figure out which product
I feel would be the best for you.
And then you and I are gonna to work together
as a partnership to try to narrow it down
and try to get you on the plan
that you feel more comfortable with.
It's a completely different equation
then if I am a captive employee for Mutual of Omaha,
because I'm gonna tell you that Mutual of Omaha is the best
and you should buy Mutual of Omaha.
This is something we all know.
We know it, and we know the great value
an independent agent brings,
but we do a terrible job of marketing it.
We have to explain it to them.
Just saying, "I'm an independent agent"
means nothin' to them.
You have to go to the next step
and be very elementary, and do what I did.
Just give those scenarios.
So the thing I'm talkin' about is marketing yourself.
Slow down.
Don't be so fast to go into the product
that they specifically have told you
they want you to present.
You're gonna get there.
But take a little time at the beginning
and market yourself.
You know, tell them some stuff about who you are.
Okay?
Really big in 4-H, whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever.
Okay?
Talk about you.
Don't think you're going to bore the crap out of them
by saying that you play in a seniors tennis league
and you're actually pretty good.
Or, you know, you're really into sodoku
and crosswords and you do it every day.
Or that you love gardening
and you have a beautiful bed of perennials
that takes all your free time on the weekends
and you just love whatever.
You have something that you're passionate about.
Share a little bit about your personality,
because they're not, they're not
checking to see if they should be buying this plan.
They know they can get that plan.
They know that they can call the company direct.
They know they can go to that company.com and buy it.
They're getting mailers like non-stop from that company.
They're checking you out.
Do they want to work with you?
And you don't talk about you.
Just step out a little bit of your comfort zone
and try it and stand out in your client's mind
from all the other people that they work with.
There are other professionals,
and all the thousands of other insurance agents
that could sell them the exact same products
that you are going to sell them.
Happy selling.