As a business owner, it’s natural to feel busy and rushed off your feet. Do you often feel so overwhelmed with running your business that you sacrifice staying up with what’s new in marketing and managing vendors? Sometimes it’s so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day that you overlook a critical aspect of marketing – measuring your return on investment (ROI).
Here are a few signs that signal that you need a system to track your marketing ROI.
#1: You aren’t sure what sources are driving leads.
Do you know how many phone calls your social media marketing drove? Can you compare that to how many calls you got from your search advertising campaign? It might be time to upgrade to a marketing system that tracks these details on a routine basis and provides you with 24/7 reports. Even small businesses can enjoy get this info, and doing so can provide huge dividends. When you know what is driving your inquiries, you’re able to hone in on that marketing tool.
#2: You rely on notes and memory to track conversions and sales.
Look for a system that manages and records the whole conversion process – from citing the source of every conversion like a phone call, email, or web form, to capturing the lead’s contact information in one digital system. This way, you won’t have to find a scribble on a piece of paper to know where a prospect or customer stands.
#3: You rely heavily on intuition rather than statistics.
Although there’s something to be said for intuition when it comes to running your business, marketing is something that can and should be measured. Make sure your marketing vendors are providing clear reports that help you see how your marketing programs impacted the bottom line.
To learn more about how to be successful in your business, contact Mike Stromsoe’s Unstoppable Profit Producer Program. We can offer guidance, helping you perfect your professional posture. We also offer a premier wealth creation program that helps you to work less, earn more, and enjoy life.
Managing yourself can improve your business relations.
Theodore Roosevelt once said this about success: “The single most important ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.” If you want to achieve greatness in your business, you have to be ready and willing to do what it takes to build lasting relationships. Of course, we are talking about relationships with your clients. Of equal importance, however, are your relationships with your carriers. Mismanage either type of relationship, and you won’t have a successful business for long.
Relationships, and even personal connections that lead to business, are the crux of your business, which is why you need to focus on the two major elements of a successful business relationship. First of all, you must treat relationships with ultimate respect. When you engage with somebody, look that person in the eye. Apply the Golden Rule to even the most casual acquaintance and treat people the way you expect to be treated. Secondly, you must be quick on your toes and ready to get to the point because success loves speed. People want to know who you are and why they should bother talking to you almost instantaneously, and it only takes people a few seconds to figure out whether or not they want to have a relationship with you.
One of my greatest mentors, Jim Rohn said, “If you want to have more, you have to become more, we attract exactly what we are.” As far as business relationships are concerned, that’s the key. You must constantly be working on yourself to become more because when you become more, you become more to other people. And when you are more to other people, you can give back more to a relationship. The law of reciprocity is always in effect—and it’s going to come back to you.
Therefore, the best way to manage business relationships is to manage yourself, and to bring more to that relationship than anybody else. Consequently, more will come flowing back in your direction. So, give it out freely and be ready to accept it when it comes back your way—and that’s all in your preparation.
Contact Mike Stromsoe’s Unstoppable Profit Producer Program to grow your business, create financial security and have more freedom to live life on your terms!
How to engage with your audience using social media.
Engagement is good for most marketing campaigns. We spend countless hours, dollars, and other resources researching and creating out content, but all that effort is for nothing if we’re not engaging anyone. We want our audience to reach our content and find out how we can help. To help you actually engage with your social media followers, check out these tried-and-tested tips.
Personalize Your Social Experience
Throughout your social postings on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more, ensure that each space speaks to a different persona. Twitter is great for casual interactions, Facebook is a great consumer market, and LinkedIn thrives in the business-scape. When you understand each social media platform’s experience, it’s clear that content built for a space like Instagram won’t perform as well somewhere like LinkedIn.
Reply to Comments
A great way to spark engagement is to reply to comments on your business’s posts. Whether it’s a simple ‘Thank you!’ or a question that asks the individual about their experience, find unique and fun ways to get talking! If your audience feels like they’re being heard, they’re more likely to keep an eye out for your future posts.
Be Consistent
Despite where you choose to build your next great social empire, remember that consistency is essential to sustained social engagement. Posting regularly creates a relationship with your audience, and irregular content strains that engagement. Keep content consistent and relevant.
To learn more about how to be successful in your business, contact Mike Stromsoe’s Unstoppable Profit Producer Program. We can offer guidance, helping you perfect your professional posture. We also offer a premier wealth creation program that helps you to work less, earn more, and enjoy life.
How insurance agencies can structure their compensation models.
A gifted team doesn’t just show up every day and work hard for no reason. They have bills, they have expenses, and they have many of the same needs and wants that you do. That is why we have worked to find ways to motivate our team through a competitive and attractive compensation model that is a little different from our counterparts in the insurance world.
A few years ago, we pulled everyone off a salary-based model and went to an hourly model (against the advice of many colleagues). We took the salaries that we had in place and divided them into a comparable hourly wage. It worked out better for most of our people since there are certain months that have five weeks, and they now get fairly compensated for working overtime. We also rebuilt our commission model based on production, with no limits or caps. We now base commissions on new business written, with a retention piece built into the compensation model and much more.
We’ve also got multiple incentives built into our compensation model to encourage team members to earn more. We have become pretty creative over the years—there’s almost nothing I won’t try to motivate my people through compensation and incentives. Our team members get to play “Wheel of Fortune” each month. We also have incentives in place where team members can earn extra commission percentage points. We have referral goals—and reaching or exceeding those goals entitles them to split a pot of cash (usually around $2,500). We constantly try to keep things moving and exciting because we have found that the very best people want to work in a fun, stimulating, progressing environment.
When it comes to people’s money, make it as easy as possible for them to understand it and get more of it. We created a compensation sheet based on an idea that was shared with me years ago. Here is what the sheet includes (broken down year by year):
Base salary
Yearly bonuses
401k contributions made (including matches through our 401k matching program)
Social Security balance
Health insurance premiums (paid for them by our company)
Other company-paid benefits
E&O (Errors and Omissions) premium payments (paid for them by our company)
We add it all up and share the totals at the end of each year with every employee. During our monthly one-on-one discussion, I say, “This is what you earned last year. Now you have a benchmark for next year. Let’s talk about your goals for next year and how you can exceed this number.”
Why have we retained so many of our people over the years? Because we share these kinds of things with them, we help them understand what their value is, we commend them when they do a good job, we hold them accountable when they need to improve, and we keep them in line doing the things that lead to a profitable business. We want to continue
To learn more about how to be successful in your business, contact Mike Stromsoe’s Unstoppable Profit Producer Program. We can offer guidance, helping you perfect your professional posture. We also offer a premier wealth creation program that helps you to work less, earn more, and enjoy life.
Agency owners and producers – Do not miss this event!
Ramp up your skillset with this 2-day live boot camp: Million Dollar Sales Producer! On April 19 – 20, 2018 in San Diego, CA, Million Dollar Sales Producer, Jesse Parenti, finally reveals his closely-guarded secret that led to his surge in success. Not only that, but you will get access to Mike Stromsoe, The Unstoppable Profit Producer, and The Unstoppable Russ Castle, Agency Principal and Niche Authority. This is a rare opportunity that these two experts are on stage together!
Creating a niche and doing better than competitors is what every business needs to be successful. At this event, you will learn how to completely dominate your marketplace, how to tune into your niche, and engage your audience for success.
This event is not one to miss! You’ll get access to industry tips, tricks, and advice from leaders who have been there, done that, and are still doing it. Don’t wait – Reserve your seat today!
For more information, click here or call 800-770-9984 today. We’ll see you there!
It’s a common feeling for business owners to feel like they’re bothering clients when they ask for a referral. More often than not, customers will happily leave a nice review if they feel they’ve had particularly good service. However, it isn’t always high on their list of things to do. So that your business can get the referrals it needs and deserves, check out these tips to earn more referrals.
Change your attitude about referrals. Stop telling yourself that you’re asking for referrals. Instead, think of it as benefitting your business and caring about customers. In fact, you could be saving your clients’ friends thousands of dollars. Changing your mindset towards referrals will help you to ask for them!
Hand out referral cards. Make up cards with your logo, agency contact information, and a spot that says ‘Referred by _____’. Handwrite your client’s name in the blank space and give it to them to pass along. You could either send these out in the post or hand them to your client when you see them so that they can immediately put them in their wallet or purse.
Practice your referral talkpaths. It’s well worth rehearsing that you’d like to say to clients thinking of referring your business. After all, just a few sentences or a good thought can help to spread the word about your services.
Add a recommend-a-friend functionality on your website. This strategy continues to be effective time and time again. Have a page or box somewhere on your website that allows people to send an email to a friend recommending your agency.
Include it in your email signature. Your email signature is a block of text that automatically shows up at the bottom of your emails. Most businesses have their name, contact information, and maybe a link to their website. This place is a great opportunity to request a referral because it’s not a direct email asking a client, but it does allow the reader to quickly forward on your contact information to friends and family.
Thank referrers on your Facebook page. When you receive customer referrals, go out to your social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) and thank the people who have provided referrals out in the open for everyone to see. Not only does this show the referrer how much you appreciate their gesture, which should get you more referrals from them, but it shows everyone else how you appreciate referrals, encouraging others to leave you one!
To learn more about how to be successful, contact Mike Stromsoe’s Unstoppable Profit Producer Program. We can offer guidance, helping you perfect your professional posture. We also offer a premier wealth creation program that helps you to work less, earn more, and enjoy life.
In 1896, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, published his first paper entitled “Cours d’économie politique” in which he proved that approximately 80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the population. He developed this conclusion by observing that 20 percent of the pea pods in his garden contained 80 percent of the peas. Now, well over 100 years later, thanks to Pareto’s observation about his garden peas, the business world still uses the Pareto Principle, more commonly known as the 80/20 Rule.
When applied it to business, it means that 80 percent of revenue comes from 20 percent of customers. I’ve done the math in my own business, and I’ve found it to be true—approximately 80 percent of our revenue is generated by 20 percent of our clients. Those clients then become the top 20 percent of our client base. All customers are important, but the practice of what I call client segmentation ensures you are not neglecting your top clients in the course of a busy workday.
Client segmentation involves identifying the best 20 percent of your clientele and developing a retention plan that ensures they remain loyal clients. Here are some questions you can ask yourself to determine whether client segmentation is right for your business:
Do I know who my top clients are?
Does my team know who our best clients are?
What am I doing for the top 20 percent of our customers?
Are my people on the phone with them regularly?
Are we giving them special recognition?
Do they get preferential treatment when they call?
In a lot of instances in the business world, the most time-intensive clients—and those who create more problems than positive outcomes—are the ones who represent the least amount of business. They are the complainers, the ones who are always behind on payments. That is why client segmentation is so vitally important. You must have a set process in place for how you treat your top clients so that they don’t “slip through the cracks” while you’re busy putting out fires.
The client segmentation process can be complex. The set-up process takes considerable time and effort from a detail-oriented person who is talented enough to understand this mindset and to go through your entire client book. We’ve chosen to segment our clients into three categories:
AAA clients
AA clients
A clients
We have found that 80 percent of our revenue is generated by 20 percent of our clients, and those 20 percent become our AAA clients. We make a concerted effort to pay extra attention to those top customers. This system has liberated us to the point that we now feel empowered to occasionally “fire” a few customers. We don’t
actually kick them out or send them a Dear John letter. We simply stop fighting their battles, and they fade away. Other times, we encourage them to find an insurance relationship that better fits their needs, enabling us to spend more time on people who are more profitable for our business.
Client segmentation makes the process of uncovering opportunities within your existing customer base much more streamlined and achievable. You can work to move A clients and AA clients up to AAA status by cross-selling and continuing to strengthen the relationship. In fact, you can even make a game out of it. Offer your team a crisp $20 dollar bill for every client they move up a level in the segmentation.
If you want your business to continue to grow, take the time to organize your client database in a way that allows you to get the most out of current customers, helps you allocate your time wisely, and enables you to identify which of your clients are the most influential and well connected.
Contact Mike Stromsoe’s Unstoppable Profit Producer Program for a premier wealth creation program that will help you work less, earn more, and enjoy life!
Every business owner knows that retention is necessary to build and maintain a successful insurance agent. You know small boosts in retention will grow your long-term profit immensely. You know it costs more to get new customers than to keep current ones. Overall, you know you need to improve your retention strategies to get the most out of your time and benefit your business. Here’s how you can do just that.
Acquire More Customer Contacts
It’s best not to harass your clients, but it is wise to send them emails often to let them know you are there for them. Be sure to vary the method and make sure you’re always bringing value as this will help to ensure they don’t start shopping around. A few ideas to get you started are postcards, emails, phone calls, seminars, policy reviews, holiday cards, birthday cards, letters, webinars, community events, and more.
Cross Sell More
The more insurance lines you sell to someone, the higher their retention rate. After all, if they have multiple policies and services with you, they’re less likely to want to uproot and find another business. What’s more, it’s usually cheaper for them to bundle their insurance coverages, so everyone wins!
Perform Annual Coverage Reviews
If you rarely perform a coverage review, make it easy on yourself and start with a small goal of doing one coverage review a week and start with your best clients. Remember that even if the client declines the offer to review coverage, they’ll still appreciate the gesture. In fact, they may even choose to review coverage themselves and then get back to you about increasing their policy.
Strengthen Your Onboarding Process
Ensure that your new clients feel like they’ve just joined a family – rather than just performed a business transaction. If they feel welcomed in by a business, they are more likely to feel loyalty to that company.
Be Proactive
When a client is going to receive a big premium increase, be proactive about it. If you’re open and honest, the good clients will appreciate it. You can also give people an opportunity to change coverages around or identify any additional discounts to reduce the effect.
Give Referrals to Your Clients
If you’re a regular source of referrals for clients that own small businesses or work in sales, then it’s likely they’ll never leave you. When you become a valuable resource, you’re offering an irreplaceable service on top of the insurance advice.
To learn more about how to be successful in your business, contact Mike Stromsoe’s Unstoppable Profit Producer Program. We can offer guidance, helping you perfect your professional posture. We also offer a premier wealth creation program that helps you to work less, earn more, and enjoy life.
Most people who run their own small businesses don’t believe they can afford a personal assistant. In my opinion, you can’t afford not to have a personal assistant! There is only one you—and that means you shoulder the primary responsibly for turning your business into more than just a one-man or one-woman show. Hiring an assistant to do the more routine daily tasks frees you to work ON the things that are the highest leverage items for your business. I have a list of over fifty items that my personal assistant does every month. She doesn’t always get to every task each month because we’ve worked to prioritize the list from highest to lowest, but she always gets it done—and done remarkably well.
Personal assistants give you the most important thing you can have when trying to grow your business: Freedom. Hiring a personal assistant means you have allowed yourself the freedom to live life on your own terms, the freedom to be an entrepreneur, the freedom to work in the areas where you shine the brightest, and the freedom to manage your own time.
Contact Mike Stromsoe’s Unstoppable Profit Producer Program for a premier wealth creation program that will help you work less, earn more, and enjoy life!
I remember the day we first started doing newsletters. It was years ago. We printed them on plain white paper and had to manually peel and stick the mailing labels on each one. It was a painstaking task that required a team effort each month because of the sheer magnitude of man-hours needed to complete the process. We sometimes used first class postage as a way of keeping our list clean. When you mail something first class, the post office will send back the ones with void or invalid addresses, at which point you can remove the invalid address from your list.
We found that first class postage was too expensive to use every time, and we finally resorted to bulk mailings, which was a messy and unorganized procedure. After a while, we realized that we were in the insurance business, not the printing or mailing business. We finally found a better system, which is to send the electronic version of our newsletter to a printer who also handles the mailing. Today, we don’t see a paper version of the newsletter until it arrives in our mailbox (we always sent a copy to ourselves to make sure things look right).
Our system has come a long way, and so has the newsletter itself. We started with a four-page newsletter on white paper with black ink. After we realized we didn’t want the newsletter to look like every other piece of mail, we switched to goldenrod-colored paper. The newsletter is a lot of work, and there are some months that we just don’t have time to put one together. So, we started using “61 Second Postcards.” We wanted to maintain that TOMA (top of mind awareness) and ensure that we were presenting our customers with something of value every month. So, we started sending out 5 ½” x 8 ½” postcards that included a themed topic:
January—Tips for playing and driving in cold or icy conditions
February—It’s all about love and Valentine’s Day
March—It’s the luck of the Irish on St. Patrick’s Day.
April—We talk about glorious springtime and Easter.
May—Tips for celebrating safely on Memorial Day.
June—Some ideas for having a fun summer break.
July—Fireworks safety tips for the Fourth of July.
August—Ideas for back to school month.
September—Getting ready for fall (and Labor Day).
October—Spooky tips for Halloween.
November—Celebrating family on Thanksgiving.
December—In the holiday month, the possibilities are endless.
So, on the months that the newsletters do not get prioritized, we mail out the 61-Second Postcard as a way to keep in touch with people. We also include a PDF version of both our newsletters and postcards on our website in case someone doesn’t get one in the mail.
Whom do we send these to? The answer is to as many people as possible. We send one to all of our clients, other names in our database, and to our center of influence list—which is a list of people who are not clients but are influential in our local community. It keeps us in front of them, and it reminds them to contact us. A lot of clients will contact us out of the blue and say, “I just got your newsletter, and it reminded me to call you.”
After we started sending the newsletters consistently, we saw retention skyrocket, which affected our bottom line by at least three points. What does that mean in terms of revenue increase over an eight to ten-year period? Here’s how to figure it:
Write down your annual revenue number, and then calculate three percent of your revenue. Then take that annual revenue increase and multiply it by the lifetime span of a customer (eight to ten years is a good average). If you think you’d like to have that much more revenue, then it’s worth nurturing your clients with a newsletter. I have found that over the years it’s meant up to seven figures for our business.
When it comes to newsletter content, the more personal and relatable the better. We always like to include a personal story from a team member or a client, a featured client of the month, and a trivia section. I was recently helping a client of mine determine what to include in his newsletter. He was considering adding his picture on the front, but I told him to make it even more personal. One of this client’s passions is helping less fortunate youth. He actually brings kids in off the street and makes them part of his family. So, I told him to take a take a picture of his entire family (including all the kids he’s taken in) and make that the focus of the newsletter. Even though it doesn’t pertain directly to the insurance business, I told him, “What better opportunity than to share your story with people? They will instantly get to know you. They will know where your passions lie, and they will know where your heart is.”
For our featured client of the month, we also sent them a Harry and David gift basket along with the title. A few years ago, a client had received the gift and called us to thank us. The client left a long message stating how he and his wife couldn’t believe it when they got the basket. After all, how often do you get a gift for buying insurance? Always be thinking of ways to go above and beyond for your clients to make them feel special.
If you are going to include an article, make sure it was written by someone on your team (not just copied from the Internet). This gives your team ownership in everything that you’re doing. In terms of pictures, photos of kids and animals seem resonate with readers. In our newsletters, my grandkids are often in the spotlight. We’ve appointed our grandkids to be the Directors of Safety to protect our clients (through safety tips in the newsletter). People love it—and when they see pictures of smiling kids on an insurance newsletter, it stands out.
It doesn’t have to be about children; the point is to match your personality to what’s going on in your agency. You may think people won’t read some newsletter from their insurance agent, but if you think that, you are underestimating your own importance. This is an important relationship for them—after all, you are protecting everything that they have to lose.
To learn more about how to be successful, contact Mike Stromsoe’s Unstoppable Profit Producer Program. We can offer guidance, helping you perfect your professional posture. We also offer a premier wealth creation program that helps you to work less, earn more, and enjoy life.
