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This is how you can get direct access to 90% of your best prospects, start conversations, and generate new appointments daily – in under 20 minutes – to stretch your dollar farther, less the cold-outreach stress.
In this episode you’ll discover the secrets behind:
- How to trigger maximum creativity in yourself on demand
- The #1 social network financial advisors and insurance agents can use to find 90% of their best, QUALIFIED prospects
- One tweak you can make in your marketing efforts to boost your performance 78% higher than your peers
- A ZERO cost option for generating multiple appointments and new prospects every day
- How and why to keep things SIMPLE when marketing online
- The VALUE first approach to take when executing this simple strategy
- A simple, low-cost tool for HYPER-TARGETED prospecting, and why you need to niche down
- The exact ROIs and stats you should be expecting, and a FREE template to get you started
- A tool that allows you to get 61% more profitable leads
Transcript
Note: This Advisorist Podcast transcript was created in part by computers – Please forgive any grammatical or spelling errors…or sentences that just downright don’t seem to make sense! Please compare to corresponding audio if clarity is needed.
Jeremiah: Hi, it’s Jeremiah DesMarais and I’m here with Devin Ambron and today we’re going to dive into how to get insurance and financial services appointments onto your calendar using LinkedIn. Welcome to today’s Advisorist podcast. Devin, how you doing today?
Devin: Doing excellent and I am excited to talk about LinkedIn because I think it’s a really cool avenue and I’ve got a lot of cool tips to share.
Jeremiah: Awesome. Remember, if you haven’t listened to episode one we call that our kind of grounding episode where we go through the hierarchy of return on investment for Insurance and financial services marketing, so we are on tier number two today. So if you haven’t done that, you definitely want to go back and listen to episode one and two because they build on each other and today is going to be all about LinkedIn for many reasons. We love it. We’ll get into it today, but as always, whenever we start an internal meeting or we even do one of our Power Hour calls for our private members inside of Advisorist, we always start off with a moment of gratitude. Research shows that a moment of gratitude before you get into a meeting to listen to something, solve a problem or overcome a challenge or just be present with your family, it puts you in a much better place and actually it can help you live longer.
Jeremiah: So why don’t we have more meetings of attitude of gratitude. Right? Alright, Devin, I always put you on the spot to go first. So I’ll flip the script today. I’ll go first. Yes. What am I grateful for today? Well, I’m really grateful for my amazing wife. You know, today I went to the gym and it was just awesome because as I was in one corner working out, I saw her on the other corner working out and I was just so grateful to have a wife who cares about her body, who cares about her health because I know it can be really difficult out there in some marriages or relationships. You have one person who really cares about their health and the other person doesn’t really care about it. It’s not a big deal. It’s not important to them. But really as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized the importance of having a strong mind and a strong body, so I’m just so grateful for my wife, Anaise, who loves to take care of herself just as much as I do. So what about you? What are you grateful for? My friend?
Devin: Electronic brains. Oh, and one thing that I think is a huge, huge thing and I utilize throughout the year is keeping an archive of things that people show me. Things that I may want to read later. I’ve read over 300 non-fiction books over the last decade or so and one thing I find is we’re very information starved but we don’t take action on those pieces of advice and so what I’m grateful for is technology allowing me at any time on my phone to access that and also archive things so that way I can help live a better life and share that with others too.
Jeremiah: You don’t. I think that you are a great example of productivity and I know you actually teach classes for our members on that. What is the app that you love to use or your favorite electronic brain?
Devin: Asana is my number one app and what I do is I use, if any of you familiar with any project management software are one called Trello, t r e l l o, they have cards and the cards can be moved in between different buckets and so what I do is I have an inbox of things that go in there, some ideas, and then I will either move them to take action on or not. I won’t get too deep on that, but I would say Trello and Asana are absolutely it. They’re an old fashioned paper and pen. Don’t discount that and just categorizing it in a hierarchy.
Jeremiah: Yeah, that’s brilliant. I love to use Evernote. That’s kind of my electronic brain where I store and I tag ideas, articles, inspiration things for my personal life, things in service and so forth.
Devin: So Evernote’s great.
Jeremiah: Awesome. Let’s get started today. As you know, and in every episode of Advisorist, we care a lot about not just the health of our businesses but the health of our minds and bodies. Speaking of minds, right, so now it’s time to kick it off with today’s mind and body tip.
Jeremiah: Looking for a way to be more creative or innovative? Try raising your eyebrows. In fact, when you’re trying to be more innovative, as study suggested, simply raising your eyebrows can affect your creative ability. A study published in the Creativity Research Journal tested this oddly simple theory and found that the group with raised eyebrows exhibited higher creativity than the group ask to furrow their eyebrows. The idea is that by raising their eyebrows and widening their eyes, it’s sending signals to the brain to take in more perceptual information, so the next time you need to find a creative solution to that crazy underwriting issue, quit scowling at it! Raise those eyebrows, open your eyes wide and see if you’re can hack your brain in working harder to find the key.
Jeremiah: All right, well let’s dive right into LinkedIn. So here’s why we’ve placed LinkedIn on top or the next in line for the highest ROI activity. So a couple of statistics, not too long ago, LinkedIn did a study. Now you might say that’s a little biased because LinkedIn is kind of bragging about themselves, but there’s actually a lot of credibility to it and I’ve seen this in the front lines as well and in the past four years and specifically I’ve taught high level sales teams in commercial lines, property casualty, in financial planning, retirement services, and even business to business software sales, how to leverage LinkedIn and I’m constantly amazed at how well they do when they do it right. A recent study showed that nine out of insurance decision makers and influencers used an agent or broker for at least some of their insurance purchases. So think about that, Devin. You’ve got a social network that 90 percent of the people who own an insurance policy used an agent or a broker to get it done.
Jeremiah: I mean these were people who did not go to the Internet and buy a binding policy. There are people who used an intermediary, which I think is massive. Then on the flip side of this study, they went out and they asked the agent and brokers, how was LinkedIn working for you? Forty three percent had found a new client. Forty three percent had generated an opportunity, 42 percent used it for referrals, and there’s a whole program we teach to members where we teach you how to use LinkedIn for power of first strategies. Thirty one percent secured a meeting. Now those stats are amazing, but if we step out of LinkedIn and we look at the other studies, for example, Forbes did a study not too long ago that showed that 78 percent of sales professionals who use some form of social media performed better than their peers and you back that up with another study which was done by IBM showing that 55 percent of all buyers do their research using some sort of social network.
Jeremiah: It just goes to show that if you want to be a higher performing sales professional, and even if you consider yourself a trusted advisor or an insurance broker or any one of the higher sounding names, you’re in sales, right? In fact, everybody’s in sales. We’re always trying to sell people an idea or a concept, whether we think it’s ethical or not, and you have the wide range of spectrum of sales to go into that, but I’m assuming if you’re listening to this podcast today, you are ethical. You can serve people. You do want to help people. That’s why we love LinkedIn. The other thing is you can start for free and I think for a lot of people that’s almost a difficult thing to wrap their heads around, Devin, because I see so many people when we show them things that are so simple, easy and free, they almost don’t do it.
Devin: Yes, like they don’t believe it, right?
Jeremiah: Like, yeah, that looks too simple.
Devin: But the simple things like we talked about a little bit earlier, was that sometimes the simple things executed is really what makes success.
Jeremiah: Exactly, exactly right. I know you and I have been through a marketing experiment I know in the past six months where we highly complicated things and it was just amazing how when we just went back to the simple basics, we saw the highest ROI we had ever seen
Devin: And you bring up a good point asking the question that we ask now is how we can simplify. This is also something that you listen to or can also do not only with your marketing but your entire business.
Jeremiah: Amen to that. So let’s talk about the wrong way to use LinkedIn. So the wrong way to use LinkedIn is really how 90 percent of insurance and financial advisors use it and that is a glorified resume and you see this all the time where people just put up, you know their standard boiler plate template.
Jeremiah: I am a financial advisor, I am an insurance agent and so forth, and all they do is accept inbound connections. Some people don’t. They just only accept from people that they actually know. And we’ll talk about that a little bit, but the wrong way to use it is just a simple brochure, or let’s call it a CV, right? An online CV. A lot of people treat it that way. That is the wrong way to use LinkedIn. The right way. Let’s talk about that. The right way to use LinkedIn is as a method and a tool of connecting, reaching out, adding value and setting appointments and we’re going to talk about various ways to do that, but it’s about you initiating the connection. It’s not about sitting back hoping, waiting that it’s going to work. Now after you get to a certain point, you’re going to see how you will no longer need to do that.
Jeremiah: And you know, I’ve just been so humbled. My profile, I started working on my LinkedIn profile years ago, and I made it a little habit that every time I met somebody via email, I would send them a personal introduction on LinkedIn and now I think I’m up to 22,000 1st level connections and every day I probably get another 10 or 20 coming in. I have a whole queue of about 400 I have to go through, so if any of you listeners have tried to connect with me, so I got a little bit of a backlog. I got to do a better job than that.
Devin: That is incredible!
Jeremiah: But because it’s following simple techniques and strategies. Right? And then adding value by posting now because I have 20,000 people connected to me whenever I post something, I have a hundred people liking it and then all their friends see it and then they say who’s this guy?
Jeremiah: And then they come back and they connect. So you see the vitality happen over time? No, that’s not gonna happen for all of us, but we’re going to give you the baby steps to get started with. So devin, why don’t you take us into who we connect with because I think that if there’s one thing that can make the biggest difference for our listeners and the Advisorist family and Advisorist nation today is really knowing who to connect with.
Devin: Yes. And one thing we’ve talked about through episode one and two, which we keep alluding back to is our audience and that can be whoever we’re looking to connect with, ideal prospects or people that might help us get to where we want to go. And sometimes we may connect with people that are not directly who we want to do business with, but maybe they know someone or maybe they’re connected to an organization or something that you can also add value.
Devin: And so a few things we think about is how can I add value to this person and how can this person do business with me and do I want to do business with this person? And one question I have for you Jeremiah, in your experience is what do you find working really well for finding ideal prospects on LinkedIn?
Jeremiah: Absolutely. So what we teach in our private membership program, but I want to share with everybody today, is properly using the search feature of LinkedIn. In the top left hand section of LinkedIn as of today, because they’re always doing changes to their UI [user interface] is you have the ability to use a keyword like CEO, CFO, HR person, and then write the name of the city and that’s free. So when you use the feature to run a search, you want to think about who is the ideal prospect for your particular product or service, and I think that’s probably one of the hardest things for people to do is to niche themselves.
Jeremiah: Let’s make a no Devin to do a future episode just on choosing your target audience because I find so many advisors and agents just try to be all things to all people and what happens is they dilute their message and when they want to start any form of marketing, it is so wasteful because their message doesn’t resonate with anybody. Anyways, I digress. So in the top section you want to start with the title and the city. So CFO, Boston, HR manager, Chicago, business owner, Dallas, that’s what you would start with, and then as you go down the list of the results, you can look at each company or each person specifically and you can see how many years they’ve been in that position and if they’re an ideal fit for you. Now you can do all of that for free. And what I do recommend, Devin, is if you’re willing to invest in yourself, you want to upgrade to LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which is about $79 a month.
Jeremiah: But if you think about it for the cost of about eight, $900 a year for most advisors and agents today, if you sell one or two policies or for some of them, if they just get one new client, the ROI would be five to 10 times their investment in Sales Navigator. And the reason I recommend sales navigator for anybody who’s going to be serious about LinkedIn prospecting is because you can get much more focused. For example, when I host live classes, I asked people in the audience who’s your ideal target audience? And most of them say, you know, CEOs, I say, okay, great, what city? Boston, great, now how many employees? And they’re like, oh my sweet spot is 50, right? So they start to narrow it down and you know, in sales navigator you can get very narrowed down with the size of employee groups you want to deal with.
Jeremiah: And obviously a CEO of a 5,000 person company is going to be a lot harder to connect with and the CEO of a 50 person company for example. So that would be the first thing is I’d recommend is focused on the right people. And then what you want to do is you want to remember the two magic numbers. So if you’re not driving, remember these two magic numbers is 50 and 10, 50 and 10. That’s 50 outbound connection requests a day. 50 outbound connection requests a day. That’s what you want to be doing. And the reason is even with a free account, LinkedIn will allow you to reach out and ask to be connected to 50 people. Now when you’re with an upgraded account like sales navigator, because LinkedIn is making money off of your account, they opened that up, you can go, you know, 80, 90 people, some people will try to max it out to 100, but some people have been put in “LinkedIn naughty prison” for doing that and I do not recommend that even despite what any other guru might say, we don’t recommend that to our members.
Jeremiah: We want it to treat this like barbecued ribs low and slow.
Devin: And they’re watching behind the scenes. Right? You’re not seeing any sort of progress update on that. It’s more of an algorithm. Right?
Jeremiah: Exactly. But we’ve seen that anybody who stays under like 85 is totally safe. Anybody that tries to push the limit is not going to work. The other thing I want to share is that the metric of anywhere from 20 to 37 percent is what we’re seeing our members get in terms of accept to connect ratios. So if you, for example, reach out to 50 people a day, it’s quite likely that you’ll get 15 of them to say, yes, I’ll connect with you. And it’s very important in your connection message to not be salesy or even hint that you’re trying to do with sale. And for you Advisorist private members out there, we have over 17 templates in the private member’s area that you can use to connect with others.
Jeremiah: But I’ll give you one today that is really simple to use. You can say something. So let’s say, Devin, I wanted to connect with you…. I would say something in my connection request message, right? So this is when I hit to connect. You always want to add a little note, especially if you’re trying to prospect somebody, because if they just see your title and it says insurance agent or financial advisor, they’re going to be like, ah, I don’t have nothing in common with this person. They’re trying to sell me. They’re going to smell you a mile away, but you want to approach it more of a power connector.
Jeremiah: So I might try something like, “Devin, I just want to congratulate you on all your accomplishments. I noticed that we both live in work in the same city and I thought it wouldn’t hurt to connect. Hope business is going great, Jeremiah.” That’s it.
Devin: Sounds very warm and personal,
Jeremiah: Right. And there’s a lot of variations of that. You can use common universities that you attended, like alumni. So I had one commercial lines advisor out of New York City who did a search for everybody from her Alma Mater. Didn’t matter what year they were and she started reaching out, “Hey, I noticed we both went to x university and I thought it wouldn’t hurt to connect. I’m class of 95, you know, and then go tigers”. Right? Like whatever the name of the team was of that university and she got flooded with people who wanted to connect and share stories and so on and so forth. She actually had to stop implementing new things because she had a backlog of people to reach out to
Devin: And that reminds me of. It kind of goes in line with what we’re talking about with email is everything we do in our episode two is everything that we’re doing that sounds and seems more personal is getting better responses. So it’s really cool to see those themes also carrying over into LinkedIn.
Jeremiah: Nice observation. The next thing you want to do is once people agree to connect is what do you say? Right, and in some of my higher level training programs, we’ve developed nine different approaches to get in the door with decision makers and affluent prospects that really do not position you as a financial advisor or an insurance agent. I’m not saying you will find wins if you do, but keep in mind that our industry is one of the most colored industries in terms of judgment, right? It’s that old butt of the joke where nobody wants to talk to the insurance agent at the party or so forth because unfortunately there’s been this whole tribe of insurance agents that did it really bad in the seventies, eighties and nineties, and have made it really hard for those in the 2000’s and now the 2010’s to get over that stigma of the insurance agent that is running after everybody with a business cars wanting to talk about a life policy.
Jeremiah: Unfortunately, we still live with that even today and it’s going to take a while to get over it so we don’t recommend that you lead in with, Hey, I would love to talk to you about a second option on your life insurance plan or something like that. Instead, it’s much better to…. I’ll give you one technique that one of our members use to build a very significant practice. In fact, he was getting three meetings a day just virtually. Right. So he was getting so many meetings he couldn’t meet people in person. He just booked them back to back and he used a platform like zoom or skype to just do the meetings with them and he approached it from a networking standpoint because the guy’s really a networker at heart. After training and helping him out, he realized that he had more fun and had more success trying to connect people than just trying to, you know, come across as a sales agent.
Jeremiah: So what he did was say something simple like, “Hey Devin, you know, I’m working on my new year’s resolution and I’m looking to network with people more this year. And I’d love to network with you, find out a little bit more about your business and who’s a good power partner for you. I kind of do all my meetings via skype and zoom, so it’s really simple and easy. Here’s a link to my calendar so you can just book yourself. Does that sound good to you?” And by virtue of doing that and because he was connecting with the right kinds of people that wanted to network, typically solopreneurs entrepreneurs, business people, he grew that into a group that today as well, over 11,000 people in his private group and he does live meetups every couple of months where he features members of his group and he gets an unlimited supply of clients from that. So it’s really important to be thoughtful about the approach you take.
Devin: Sounds like he’s really a go giver as well.
Jeremiah: Absolutely. He totally approaches everybody. He meets as a go giver. So devin, I think it’s time for. In addition to the tips we gave out today and the cool scripts, I think it’s time for today’s marketing tip. What do you think?
Devin: Let’s do it!
Jeremiah: Today’s marketing hack is about which advertising platform can get you 61 percent more profitable leads, Google or bank. This one comes from a top producer out there, my old buddy, Sy. Once Sy started using ad words to generate leads, he found it by advertising instead on the Bing Yahoo Platform, he was able to generate leads at a much lower cost without sacrificing quality. The reason came down to simple demographics. Google tends to attract younger, more tech savvy consumers under the age of 35, while Bing users tend to be a little older with families. The latter were within his demographic for selling health insurance plans for families and they were more likely to fill out a web form. He also found that Bing generated more traffic for key insurance related search terms, and as a result, his clicks from that network were 61 percent cheaper. So you’re marketing hack for today from Advisorist is to test out your ad platforms. You may be how much money you can save. That’s it for today’s marketing hack. We’ll see you on the next episode of Advisorist with yet another one to help you grow and scale your practice fast.
Jeremiah: All right, I love personally love that tip now because I said it, but it really is a fantastic tip.
Devin: It was really good.
Jeremiah: All right, Devin, we’ve come to the conclusion of episode number three. So let’s do a quick recap. We talked about a mind and body tip. We learned why LinkedIn is one of our favorite social networks. To get a very high return on investment to book appointments in your calendar. We talked about the wrong way to do it, right – where you just leaving it as a CV. We talked about the right way to do it – where you’re very intentional and thoughtful about the types of people we talked about, how to use the free search, how to use the sales navigator search as well. We also gave you the magic numbers of 50 and 10, so 50 people a day and just as a reminder, once you’ve connected with people.
Jeremiah: The other magic number 10, which actually I forgot to say in the episode I’m going to give it to you right now, is it’s very important to keep it nice and low for the number of people you reach out to every day. So if you’re using a free account, you know, 10 people a day, maybe a little more is great. But I found with most people’s timelines and time constraints, you know, doing 10 personal messages a day to try to get a meeting or a networking call setup is very doable and reasonable and under 25 minutes a day. And then if you have a paid account, you can go all the way up to 100 people a day. Some people go crazy, they go 200 a day, but you’re really only going to have that once you have built up massive momentum. So remember those two numbers and we talked about the difference between a free and a paid account and of course what to say in order to get those meetings by emulating some of the success our members have had.
Jeremiah: Now remember, if you’re an advisor is to member. We have an entire training on this called Power Prospecting inside the members area. So if you need a little refresh, we actually go into the tips, the scripts, the strategies you watch over my shoulder as I rank an advisors profile to number one in the LinkedIn search engine. So there’s a whole bunch of stuff that is available for you as a private member. If you want to learn more about that, go to Advisorist.com. If you’re somebody who loves to read episodes as well and go back and kind of highlight notes, every episode has a transcription underneath it. Just go to Advisorist.com to get the transcript of this. And of course our private members get the full execution sheet and the training that goes along with this. And in the next episode, we’re going to continue to drive deeper into the education.
Jeremiah: We’re going to go into the next level of the hierarchy of marketing performance for insurance and financial services, when we dive into paid ads. Specifically, we’re going to go into a practical case study of how one advisor generated a $5,000 payday using simple ad techniques with a massive return on investment. Do you think about that, Devin?
Devin: That sounds epic! Count me in.
Jeremiah: Awesome. Everybody – well thank you so much once again for listening to the world’s most loved podcast for insurance and financial advisors. My name is Jeremiah DesMarais, and I’m here with my good friend, Devin Ambron. We’ll see you on the next podcast. Bye for now.
Jeremiah: Hey, Advisorist nation. Are you ready to take your insurance or financial services practice to the next level and are you prepared to fill your calendar with high quality appointments and bring so many leads that you get to pick and choose with whom you’re going to work with? If yes, then be sure to check out Advisorist, a premium members only community of insurance and financial advisors who are striving to excellence inside this community. You’ll learn the strategies and tactics that most successful service providers are using and you’ll be able to implement them and see results faster than you ever thought was possible. Get all of the details at Advisorist.com/membership. We’ll see you inside.
For more strategies and tactics, join our exclusive community of insurance and financial advisors at advisorist.com/membership
