Six steps to broker success
It’s time for the hard truth. People have more important things to do than hear your pitch. It doesn’t matter how smart you are or how smart you say you are. Businesses cannot win in an arms race of experience and expertise. Your agency may have 50 years of experience and he has 1,000 clients, but you don’t have to go far to find someone bigger.
Insurance brokers face a double challenge. They live in a world full of distractions. Do your prospects want to hear you talk to yourself or watch something on Netflix?
Show me don’t tell me
This is where all the LinkedIn prognosticators and business tycoons chant their favorite business buzzword, “differentiation,” they say. Talk about how unique you are, they add. But that’s like resting on a laurel, and it doesn’t work. Everyone is unique. Everyone is smart. Anyone can say those things.
But no. You can’t just talk about yourself. That’s the key here. You are not important to your clients or prospects. Not just them, but their business, their employees, and their customers. You are here to ensure their success by providing their underlying exposure.
Show your worth
Risk Management 101. You can’t solve a problem if you don’t know it exists. To expand your business book, you need to connect with where your prospects are sitting. It means understanding who they are, their problems, and forming insights about them to help solve them. Let’s take this step by step.
Step 1: Find the Problem
Uncovering your prospect’s pain points isn’t always easy. They may not even be aware of some of them. You can help them discover them and show a lot of value in the process. prize. What pain points do prospects experience based on the following:
- Industry: If your prospective customer is a final mile transportation company, how are gas prices, insurance, transportation, or staffing issues hampering your business?
- Position: Where are your prospects? Local regulations and customs requirements can be major obstacles here. This is especially true for businesses with employees in multiple states.
- Employer size: How does the size of your prospects affect your business? Bigger means more regulatory compliance. It could also mean more kinds of exposure that you may not have faced before.
- Behavior: What attitudes and behaviors does this client focus on? What topics come to mind?
Then think about each issue and detail you laid out. How many of these are your prospective customers aware of and actively working on? Conversely, how many are unaware of or not actively working towards a solution?
Gathering all that information requires the most important skill in a broker’s toolkit: listening. By the time you collect all the data, you’ll have a better understanding of your prospects. This makes it easier to connect, communicate value, and close deals.
Step 2: Determine Risk of Loss
It is a well-documented fact that people are more motivated by the risk of loss than by gain. This is a gift for brokers. Most of a broker’s value comes from mitigating risk. Now that you know what your prospect’s pain points are, you can take the next step. Try to assess and communicate the potential for the loss according to the prospective customer’s situation. Especially because it aligns with the pain points and exposures that prospective customers have. For example, remember that last-mile delivery company. How would their business be affected if a disaster were to disrupt roads and block delivery routes? Clients may require special compensation for these business interruption losses. But do they have it?
Let’s look at another example. Let’s say a small flower shop employs many high school students to do deliveries during the summer and after school. If changes in local laws make it difficult or impossible to hire high school students, what are the implications for your business? You may not be able to fix this scenario at first, but you can help your prospects think ahead and get on track. It gives you a chance to fix it. It also helps identify where additional value can be added within the agency’s service portfolio. This is the perfect opportunity to show your worth.
Step 3: Connect Pain to Solution
Think a little more about its portfolio of services. There are many services brokers use to help their clients reduce risk. Therefore, it helps brokers to retain and win new business. Think about the risks you see in all your clients as a whole. What are the common exposure or coverage gaps that these services can address? Is your client having trouble handling HR or compliance? Perhaps it’s cybersecurity? Or work safety?
The bottom line is having the right set of services that differentiates you from your competitors. By researching each prospect’s situation, you can learn about direct negotiations with prospects and help improve the agency as a whole.
Step 4: Create Insights
It seems easy to tie a prospect’s pain point to one of your solutions. But in practice, it can be difficult to get it right. Let’s say your prospect is having issues with compliance. Simply saying that there are “safety tools” and it’s an easy and quick fix can get the conversation going in the right direction during a call. But in the long run, you need to make sure that your solution addresses the problems posed by the problem.
In situations like this, you need to let go of the jargon and find out what the client is really getting in the way of. Giving them tools that only allow them to report doesn’t necessarily help. In fact, it may just create extra work. You need to look deeper into your solution to make sure you’re filling the right gaps. In this example, you can see that even if you don’t have any, you can pay attention to tools that help you interpret the guidance and applicability. The client doesn’t have to be an expert here. Be the one who listens carefully and can help prospects connect the dots.
Step 5: Understand your Contacts
When you talk to a prospect or someone, you have to think about who you are talking to. It’s all about the audience. Many brokers have small but strong teams with marketing, sales, and even creative roles. Such outfits don’t have the resources to do advanced persona research. But take a step back and think about who you’re trying to communicate with.
On the one hand, think about your client’s business. We’ve already talked about client pain points, but what about priorities? Carriers care about gas price fluctuations, fleet management, telematics, insurance pricing, and more. With these things in mind, you can get your message across to that audience.
But don’t stop there. Think about the people you are talking to with these prospects every step of the way. If you’re talking to an owner/operator or risk manager, you’ll know where their heads are when it comes to the business. But if you look deeper, what kind of people do you associate with? What are their hobbies? Do they volunteer information about their families? These are not details that need to be exploited. Rather, it’s the details you need to use to connect with prospects. That connection is critical in establishing a strong partnership that can withstand whatever the future throws at it. You can also tweak your message in the future to make sure it really appeals to that audience.
Step 6: Effective Communication
Now combine the first five steps to create a winning combination. Now you know your prospect’s business. you know them You can better understand what keeps them up, what drives them, and what they need. All these points can now be connected using metaphors and examples that appeal to them. You don’t even have to be a poet to do this. Consider how all of these dynamics apply to a sport (especially a sport your client likes) or a hobby such as gardening.
Finally, let’s return to the shipping company example. You might tell them that, like a car racer, they need to think about what they would do if all the tires in their car went flat. It’s the same as if a flood wiped out an important road on your route. These are eye-opening obstacles, but they don’t have to be. There are steps you can take proactively now to avoid future catastrophes.
Well, let’s go back to the flower shop. Using teens to make deliveries has worked for a long time. But what if the law suddenly changed and this became impractical? Clients get frustrated and leave and never come back. In fact, it’s a lot like gardening. After years of trouble-free gardening, he may not be ready when the trees grow enough to shade his tomatoes, and suddenly he loses a year’s worth of earnings before he can act.
The point of this exercise is not to scare prospects. Pandering to them is also not the point. The point here is to communicate your goals for their business.
- Hear them talk
- Discover some potential dangers along the way
- Identify ways to deal with them
- Offer expert advice and tools other brokers may not have thought of
- Form a vested interest in this individual’s continued success
- Explain in an informative and compelling way.
It’s a win-win scenario.
