Prospecting, the lost art and a CRM demo

First of all I really want to thank those who joined in on the webinar. It really went well! To those of you who replied a little late, I cut it off at a relatively small number of agents just to make sure it would turn out ok. It did.

We had a great chat session, traded ideas and some links. This was exactly my goal - to get independent agents together, brainstorm and trade information. We will absolutely be having one webinar per week and take it from there.

As everyone knows I'm using Marketing Campaign Solution's CRM for telemarketing and I'm going to offer a live demo. Anyone interested can punch into the webinar and I'll use the live desktop feature and three-way calling. This way you can see and year the action.

The CRM Predictive Dialer Live Demo Webinar:

This Wednesday the 30th at 1pm EST. Only licensed agents can attend and just email me for an inviation.


THE LOST ART OF PROSPECTING (or maybe "the lost art of working")

I firmly believe the single worst thing to happen to the insurance community is shared leads. It has taken what would have otherwise been a great career and turned it into a concept of sitting in front of your computer wearing sweatpants (you're wearing sweatpants, not the computer) and becoming some unmotivated drone.

The 8 hour work day has been replaced by numbingly waiting for a lead to hit your inbox and calling people back who haven't wanted to talk to you the 4 previous times you called. But hey - this is the 5th call so maybe they'll answer.

We have replaced hard work and building a local business with the thrill of easy money - yet that "easy money" seldom comes as agents, in great frustration, call lead after lead and hit voicemail after voicemail. Then finally you connect and get "you're the 5th agent to call me!"

That is not the insurance business people. Why are we not active in our local community? Why don't we advertise everywhere and participate in local events? Why? Because, like crack, we've been told we can get a quick fix without much effort.

There is a force in the universe that will not allow us to make a lot of money without a lot of work. I have a feeling a lot of new insurance agents also have the Carlton Sheets and Don Lapre courses at home.

More and more this field seems to attract lazy "get me rich quick" agents instead of agents willing to put their nose to the grindstone and simply work. This industry becoming just another "six figure" punchline for a bad infomercial.

We need to get back to building a business. We need to make 70% of our day prospecting/marketing and 30% sales presentations. Right now it's 10% of our day spent on prospecting and the good news is the other 90% is freed up - no one to present to!

Everyone needs to pick three and at any given point in time you're doing 1 of these three or presenting to a client:

1) BtoB
2) Telemarketing
3) A lead-producing activity such as local events, network clubs, etc...

We are greatly rewarded psychologically for working hard. Something inside us wants to give a pat on the back after a good hard productive day.

Conversely we feel bad about ourselves when we don't work hard - call it guilt. Then our self-esteem takes a hit since deep down inside we know we're support to be working hard, yet choose not to. At that point is a slide down a very steep hill as you start looking for the Sunday paper to hit.