Podcasts about business in real life

For the longest time I tried to motivate myself by thinking about how much money I was going to make, or how many people were going to want my service. Which never worked. Motivation is garbage. The beauty business, just like any other business is work. It's not fun work, it's hard work, and inevitably you're going to have to do things that you don't want to do. Sometimes you're going to have to do things that are inconvenient and unpleasant, but that repulsiveness alone will not motivate you- not any more than good times will make work fun: they'll only get it done. The payoff- financial success- comes when you learn how to discipline yourself into doing the right things long enough for them to become a habit. Then you won't give up when the weather gets cold, you won't give in when your body starts hurting, or when someone disrespects you (and there will be plenty of those moments). Your entire career in esthetics has happened because you refused- even when you felt like giving up-to wait patiently for the sun to rise again before heading back out into the field, waxing legs and booking appointments every single day for years straight . Discipline is what pays off financially! What is JUST 1 Thing that you know you need to do more of? esthetics , esthetician, aesthetician, schools for esthetician, esthetician school, esthetician school near me, medical esthetician, esthetician kit, esthetician license, how to be an esthetician, becoming an esthetician, how much money do estheticians make, pros and cons esthetician, Esthetician salary, Esthetician jobs, Esthetician jobs near me, Esthetician career, wik verma, wikki verma, esthetics school, marketing, social media, beauty biz launch, bold beauty boss, beauty For More Free Tips, Trick, and Ideas to Grow your Esthetician business Join the Marketing Ideas Group (it's worth every dime.... even though it's FREE): Beauty Biz Launch https://www.facebook.com/groups/beautybizlaunch

CONTRACTS - DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE SIGNING? Do you know how it could impact your career? EP - 59 For this author, contracts are a sensitive topic. Almost a hot button. My major in college was law enforcement….I was facinated by reading case law, often which is developed because of contracts. As a Certified Insurance Counselor, that's 90% of the training….what does the insurance contract say and how does it relate to what we as the agent do, what the insurance company does and what the insured does. Most people don't ready the insurance policy very often and in and in a digital world, that contract is often sent in the middle several other emails and just gets filed….not like the piece of paper that we once received and put in a filing cabinet.  I'm a stickler for reading contracts and I think a lot of it is my background. As an insurance agent, you have a few important contracts that you are signing, and it's important that you understand what you are signing where you put your signature could impact your career. For this discussion, I'm primarily going to focus on employment contracts, because that is what will impact you, the insurance agent, the most.  I'm at a place in my life that I won't sign another employment contract. In my world, also known as a non compete.  Before I talk more about contracts, I want to introduce you to our podcast sponsor, Insurancemailboxpower.com. I'm so excited to have them as a sponsor and if you haven't checked them out, please take a few minutes to go to insurancemailboxpower.com.  They've agreed to be the sponsor for a few episodes, so I want to provide you with ideas on how you can use this platform to grow your business. Since we are talking about contracts and potential new employees, let's say you are the owner hiring someone new. You want to make the experience of working for your agency one that is welcoming, where the new employee is excited to come to work and be part of your organization. What if you send them a welcome packet before their first day, include a coffee mug with their name on it, include a greeting card that talks about how excited you are to have them on your team and you send them some brownies to get them through the afternoon slump! You could just do that or you could create a drip campaign for all new employees where you sent them some love every few weeks or months depending on your budget and what you feel is appropriate. Maybe you send them a gift card, a personalized pen (with their name on it) a personalized water bottle, game set or even some sweet treats. Insurancemailboxpower.com has a lot of gift items to choose from and they are adding more every week. What is really nice about this is that you can brand what you send with your company information but you can also personalize it with the employees name on it, you can automate the campaign so that once you set it up, you can forget about it. But you can send the goodies throughout the year and make your employees feel like  you appreciate them.  Go to Insurancemailboxpower.com to get your free 14day trial and tell them debbie DeChambeau sent you! Now, let's get back to talking contracts When I first started in the industry, I worked for my dad and as a high school student, I don't think he was worried about anything. Also, he was just learning the business himself, so an employment contract was the farthest thing from him mind.  I stopped working for my dad after about 10 years and the next agency I worked for hired me on as a CSR/Account Manager. I was responsible for servicing the accounts, I didn't have much of a relationship with the clients, other than processing paperwork. I believe I had to sign an employment contract / non compete, but can't remember. It was the next 3 agencies I  worked for that had me sign contracts and it's something I'll probably never do again.  The first contract I had to sign was when I was hired as a producer. Every producer had to sign one and honestly, I was so happy to have the position, so it wasn't an issue. Until some things happened inside that agency that I couldn't stomach any longer and I needed to leave. The issue was I had built a relationship with a lot of people that I was their insurance advisor, they counted on me for my advice and it had taken me awhile to earn their business. The document I signed said I couldn't contact those clients for a certain number of years. This was pre internet, so they couldn't find me as easily as they could today, but I know a few of them tried and did eventually find me. I still couldn't write their business until the time had passed but they were not happy about that!, at all! And I felt I had lost some friends. When I left the first agency, I had an attorney review the contract so I had a full understanding of what I could and couldn't do. Why did I invest the money into having an attorney review? Because I'm not an attorney, I know how to read the contracts but I don't know the laws. I live very close to the MD/VA line. The employment laws between those two states are very different. ….Paying an attorney for one or two hours of service is much better than paying them to defend you in court if you are sued for violating the contract!  Contracts are real life. Employers have you sign them because they are serious about keeping their business. They will sue you if you violate them and then you will have to pay to defend yourself. Depending on how big the company you worked for is, could depend on how vigorously they pursue you….but they have deep pockets. You might not! The second place I worked for I thought was going to be a forever home, so again, signing the contract wasn't as big of a deal, but I did have it reviewed by an attorney before I signed it and the attorney offered a few suggestions to help me modify their contract to make it a little easier on me. They gave up one or two items, but they weren't anything of significance.  When I left the second agency, I again faced the same issue that I faced the first time...I had clients that trusted me, that wanted to work with me and that couldn't because of my contract. The good news / bad news is that I had not written that much business with the second agency before I realized what a crazy business it was. I'm serious when I say crazy…..their staff punched a time clock and literally lined up 10 minutes before it was time to leave waiting to clock out at 5:00. No one gave any extra at that agency. It was like a ghost town at 5:05. Completely the opposite of anything I had ever seen in the companies I had worked for in the past.   On Fridays we started the 5:05 club with the producers because we were the only ones left in the office. The 5:05 club was our in house happy hour. We had some great beer tastings then! The one really good thing about that agency was its location. It was an hour away from my home, but it overlooked National Airport...many of you listening might know it as Ronald Regan Airport, right outside of Washington DC. I saw Bush Sr. leave office and learned that when a president leaves office, they take a helicopter ride around the Capital ...at least up until #45 they did this, I could see that from my office. I also saw the funeral procession for Jacquie Kennedy Onassis as it arrived at Regan Airport. It was a stunning view looking at the Potomac River! It was easy to leave that agency but it was hard to leave that view! When I left that crazy office, I started my first agency. While being my own boss had been in the cards since I worked for my father, it was a lot harder to get started then what someone starting today has to go through.  I had been offered a position with Nationwide Insurance as an agent, but their contract stated that I had to sell a certain number of life products in order to maintain my contract. My issue then as it would be today is that what if their product wasn't the right fit for my client. I've clearly been on the independent side for too long, having access to all of the options that need to be explored for clients! What I remember saying since I started my own agency is that I would never sign an employment/non complete agreement again. I never want to leave the people who have built their trust with me because of a piece of paper. I don't think I am unique with this feeling but at the same time, clients come and go. So it shouldn't be the only driver in what we do but it definitely can have an impact.  There are a lot of industries that require their employees to sign an agreement, it isn't just insurance agencies. I'm perfectly ok with it so long as it's fair. There are some contracts that are very unfair and potentially worth fighting, if you have the resources. If you have listened to some of the earlier episodes, I talked about the business groups that I run in addition to running my insurance agency. For those of you who are familiar with BNI, my business groups are similar, but more about business development and creating opportunities inside and outside of your business. One of my members is a mortgage broker. After about a year of being a member, he decided he was going to start interviewing other lenders to work for because he wasn't having a good experience with the company he'd been with for 15 years. He was very mythological with his interviews and narrowed it down to two companies. The one that he decided to join really impressed him. The CEO flew in to meet him and his wife for dinner, discussed how he could reach him personally if he had issues, confirmed everything that was discussed with respects to office, salary, benefits, etc. .Mike, the mortgage broker, signe the contract and was so excited to work for the new company. He had a new role, felt really comfortable, was transitioning his business then we went into lockdown. Then the new business he brought to the new company wans't getting processed. He was told 60-90 days before he could get anything done. At his old company he was getting things done in 30-60 days. Some other lenders were getting things done in less than 30 days and he was having trouble competing. After 6 months of this, Mike was very frustrated. He decided to leave and was hit with a cease and desist letter from the company owner. The document he signed, which he did not have an attorney review for him, basically said that he could not get out of working for the company for a certain amount of time without having to pay back a certain amount of money and that he could not work for any other mortgage company for several years. I don't have the specifics but the big picture is that he is being held hostage with that company because of the contract he signed. He's now working with an attorney to get out of the contract which has cost him more than a few thousand dollars and he's not finished yet! He's a smart, educated man and he didn't have an attorney review the contract because he didn't think about it. I feel bad for him because I know he's feeling horrible about the situation and his life would be completely different if he had spent a few hundred dollars to get the contract reviewed. I'm sure the attorney would have told him what he was getting himself into and Mike probably would not have signed the contract as written. No body would! Now, you might be thinking, this is mortgage, not insurance and nobody in insurance would do that. Trust me, they will. You just have to decide how much you are willing to spend to defend yourself.  Earlier in the episode I mentioned an agency I went to work for as a CSR when I left my dads agency. This agency had 5 locations and the two managers at one of their locations decided to break off on their own after a few years. I know the agency had them tied up in legal work for close to 10 years. It was a mess! I believe one of the principals eventually left the insurance business completely and is now a legislator in some state out west. He just started his life over!. He also had like 15 kids, so he couldn't really afford a lot of legal bills for too long! Insurance agencies want to protect their business. It's their survival mechanism. As someone who consults with business owners, I understand and agree with this. But there needs to be a middle ground where people can leave and pay for their business at a known price ahead of time.  Not long ago I learned that lawyers don't operate this way, which surprises me, but they are so ethically bound that it does make sense. In the legal world, if an attorney leaves a practice, the firm must send a letter to all the clients, announcing that the lawyer is leaving and giving the clients their choice where they want to go. As a business consultant, I struggle with this because of the impact it can have on revenue, but as someone who sold insurance and had to walk away from friendships and people who trusted me, I love the way lawyers have to do this.  I sold my agency in the late 90's and focused on my business development groups, insurance and marketing consulting along with doing some public speaking for different organizations. In that time period, I had to take a job because of getting divorced and low an behold, another employment / non compete was put in front of me. This one I did sign and without any regret because I was not writing any insurance, My job was to build relationships with realtors and encourage them to use the insurance agency within the real estate company. Since I wasn't selling insurance, I knew there was nothing to worry about with that contract. When management changed and they wanted me to start selling, I knew my time there was short. Also, I really didn't get along with the new management. Not to bash anyone, but I'm about working for an organization where they treat their employees like people who have a brain, not treat them like they are idiots. There I go digressing again! I'm sharing with you some real life examples of contracts but what I want you to take from this is that you will be asked to sign contracts. You must read them, understand them and probably have an attorney review them for you so that you understand what happens if you want out of the contract. It only costs a few hundred dollars to pay an attorney to review it. If you don't have the money for that, ask your future employer if they would pay the attorney bill as part of your compensation if you join the company. If you don't join the company, there's probably a good reason that came out of the contractual review and you would then have to pay the attorney bill yourself but you'll be a happier camper because of it! The contracts you sign are written for a reason. Don't think they'll never enforce it, because if you violate the contract you signed, most likely, you will be sued! If for no other reason, the company will want to make an example of you to deter other employees from doing the same thing! There is one more thing that I want to say about getting your contracts reviewed and that is to make sure you are using the right type of attorney. What a lot of people don't know is that just like most insurance agents specialize in one area, so do attorneys.  So have your employment contracts reviewed by an employment attorney Have your business contracts reviewed by a business attorney If you need to sue someone use a personal injury or litigator type of attorney Hire an attorney that specializes in the area that you need and isn't a general attorney that does what you need once in a while. Read the website. If they say they do a lot, keep looking until you find the specialist! That wraps up this episode of the Business of Insurance Podcast. Don't forget to check out the sponsors website insurancemailboxpower.com. Tell them Debbie DeChambeau sent you. Thank you for listening. Until next time, keep creating opportunities! SHOW THE LOVE If you haven't done so already, please follow, like or subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast player. The terminology for this has been changing, but we want you to get our podcast when new episodes are published, so check the platform where you listen to podcasts and make sure we are in your playlist!  We are on all of the platforms including spotify, IheartRadio and Apple podcasts.and Google Podcasts. If you are listening to this podcast online and don't know how to listen to podcasts on your phone, reach out to our host, Debbie DeChambeau and she'll help you. SPONSOR 2021 sponsor: This episode of the Business of Insurance Podcast is sponsored by Insurancemailboxpower.com.  CONNECT WITH THE PODCAST ON SOCIAL FACEBOOK GROUP FACEBOOK PAGE TWITTER ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance podcast is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA - an entrepreneur, business advisor, insurance professional  and content creator. Her goal is to inspire you to think differently and explore ideas that disrupt the status quo.  Debbie has an extensive business and marketing background with a focus of helping insurance professionals be more successful.  She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and produces three other podcasts, Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed and Seniors We Love.  Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.  

EP 58 - A Business Needs Prospects To Grow  What is the best way to find them? Is there a magic formula? That's what we'll be exploring in this episode of The Business of Insurance Podcast. If you are responsible for business development in your firm, then this episode is for you. In many of the insurance groups that I'm in, the one topic I see the most discussion around is marketing. It's one of those aspects of being in business that people need to know about, because without some sort of marketing, there won't be any business coming in the door to pay the bills. In the insurance industry, there are some people talking like the've discovered America, when in fact, a lot of ideas have been happening for decades. Sometimes they are given a new name, sometimes there's a new spin  on how to deliver, but bottom line, there's not a lot that's new in marketing in the past few years.  If you are new to owning an insurance business, it might seem new to you, but most things that people are doing in marketing today have been around for at least 10 years and longer.  With that being said, technology is constantly changing therefore how we implement our marketing is always evolving. Adding marketing to your  business with success is another story.  I think it's important to say that marketing and sales are two different things. Marketing is the tactic to bring awareness and for getting the phone to ring, sales is getting someone to give you their credit card or payment information. Sometimes they are considered one, but in my opinion, they are two different skill sets. One person can and sometimes needs to do both, but without marketing you might not have any sales. You've heard me say this in other episodes, but you need a marketing plan and you must watch out for the shiny object syndrome. If you aren't familiar with the shiny object syndrome, it's when you hear of a new idea and want to implement it, without exploring if it will work with your current marketing plan. Let me explain a few concepts: Understand that a marketing plan, ,also known as a marketing strategy (see I told you some things just get a different description but they mean the same thing) - but a marketing plan is something you create to implement and measure. It's a road map. It shows what you want to do and when and how to get people to notice your business.  Let's just say that you are creating a marketing plan. In your marketing plan, you might decide to focus on referrals. Included in your plan around referrals would be the types of referrals you are going to develop - maybe you'll create some mailings or a system to get them from current clients, maybe you'll implement a plan to go to different networking events to meet new people, maybe you'll implement a plan to reach out to CPA's and develop relationships with them in hopes of getting referrals. Each of these ideas around referrals is a tactic, but you need a plan to make sure you get those referrals.  If I were to ask you how you were going to get new business and you said referrals, that's great but how are you going to do that? That's where your marketing plan comes into play. Let's break down the three ideas I just gave you, referral from clients, referrals from networking events and referrals from strategic partners like CPA's and bankers. If you want to get referrals from clients,  you might want to print cards that say The Greatest Compliment I could ever receive is a referral from you, my client. You might decide that with every new client you get, you send this card to them 2 weeks after the close of business.  Maybe you will also send a postcard 6 months after you get each new client reminding them how much you appreciate their business and that you are never too busy for their referrals.  With this one idea -you need to design the piece or pieces, have it printed and then establish a system for them to get mailed.  You also need to establish a tracking method so that after 12 months you can see if it was successful.  You also want to make sure you block time on your calendar to revisit it after 6 months to see how consistent you've been at executing your plan just for getting referrals from your clients.  It's great to create a plan but if you don't execute it, if you aren't evaluating the data, you are kinda wasting your time! Now let's talk about using networking as a way to generate referrals Will you join organizations? Which ones? Trade associations, local chambers, community groups?  Will you get involved?,How much time will that take and do you have the resources to manage it,  How many events a week or a month will you attend,  What follow up plan will you have for the people you meet after attending those events and  How will you measure your success? As you can see, creating a plan can be involved. In my opinion, the more detailed it is in the beginning, the more you will see and you can measure the success. I've brought up measuring your success a few times already in this episode. It's important. There's a saying in the marketing world...if you aren't measuring, you aren't marketing. I think it is very appropriate for business! Before I talk about another term that is essential in marketing, I want to introduce you to our podcast sponsor. They actually tie in nicely with what we are talking about today as they are another marketing idea for you to explore in your business. The concept isn't new, but it's a new platform to help you personalize, automate and stay top of mind with prospects and clients. It's called Insurancemailboxpower.com.  It's a card, post card and gifting platform with a built in lead development system. Today we'll talk about the birthday card feature. What if you started sending birthday cards and half birthday cards to all of your clients, friends and referral partners? You can put their name on the front and the inside, insert your signature and also brand the card with your contact information on the back! There's no ‘hallmark' on the back or anyone else's information….just yours or whatever you choose to put there., I like to put my logo, web address phone number and tag line on the back as another message branding my company.  When you go to insurancemailboxpower.com, you can get a free 14 day account and utilize all of the products available. Put $10.00 on to your account for postage and send a few cards to yourself so you can see the quality! They have a ton of online training available so you don't have to feel lost when you sign up . Check out Insurancemailboxpower.com and see how you can stay top of mind with your clients and referral partners. Tell them Debbie DeChambeau sent you! Now another term to be familiar with is marketing tactic.  A  tactic might be the networking piece I mentioned above, maybe it's email marketing, direct mail or just door knocking. The tactics are the items in the plan that bring awareness to your business and hopefully make the phone ring.  Here's where things fall apart and this isn't just for insurance professionals, this happens to a lot of people and businesses.It's a big reason why people hire coaches! This is what is known as the shiny object syndrome. Did you jump on clubhouse when it was all the buzz? Did you jump on tik tok with videos. If they were in the plan you created, great. But I'm guessing if you said yes to jumping on Clubhouse, it wasn't really part of your plan, there was just a lot of buzz about it and you didn't want to miss out. Maybe you went back and modified your plan, which is perfectly ok, but hoping on and saying your business need s a presence there is what I call the shiny object syndrome.  I've been teaching about social media since 2005. First We talked about LInkedIn, then Twitter, then FB. Then Instagram, Mixed in there was get on YouTube,your website needs to be mobile friendly, get online reviews, buy online advertising. I've talked about and taught about all of these over the years. The reality of it is, if it's not part of your plan, you don't need to jump on. Maybe you evaluate it to see if it make sense but don't jump on just to jump on. If you have plenty of business, if you have extra dollars to throw at it and you have a lot of extra time, then be my guest, but most people aren't in the position to throw a lot of dollars or time at something with no plan.  There are things going on in the insurance industry that some people think are new and trendy but honestly, they've been thriving in other industries and they are just catching on in the insurance industry. So let's talk about what's been around for awhile. Podcasting Email marketing  Referrals Direct mail Advertising Creating events  / Speaking for leads Trade show booths Writing a book Developing Courses You tube Video Social media -groups The new kid on the block I've talked about a lot of these tactics in different episodes of The Business of Insurance podcast and I'm sure we'll talk about them more in the future! When it comes to marketing your business, I caution you about trying to do everything on your own. When you have a lot of time and not a lot of money, it might make sense to do this, but you have to pay attention to the ROI.  Honestly, if you are in business, you must think like a business owner. The business owners that see the most success are the ones that can delegate. Do you need to know how to create a podcast….it won't hurt, but think about how long it will take you. Researching equipment, sound strategies, editing, promotion, and the list goes on. Hiring someone to do it for you will get it done faster; do you need to know how to create email campaigns? It won't hurt, but  you could be attending a networking event or making 10 prospect calls in the time it would take someone else to create the email for you.  If you are new to the business and working for yourself, please take some classes on how to run a business. Your local SBDC, SCORE and WBC are great resources. Go to SBA.gov for local information.  If you aren't sure who to hire to help you with your marketing, ask other businesses in your area for referrals. Join a mastermind group - just make sure it's not all insurance agents! Create your own board of advisors. It's also a way to make other business connections. Most business owners figure out too late that they should have a marketing plan. They realize too late that if they had had a plan they would have seen greater success sooner.  I know this because I've worked with many many business owners over the years. It's the feedback I get the most. So to recap what I hope you've taken from this episode - create a plan, map out the details of the plan. Set time through the year to review the plan and then modify the plan as needed.  Most importantly, avoid the shiny object syndrome. If a new marketing idea becomes all the buzz, evaluate it carefully to see if it makes sense in your business. Make sure you have the budget and staff to execute the concept properly. Ok, before we wrap up, I'm working on developing The Business of Insurance group on FB. I'd love for you to join. I really want this group to be for business owners who have opened their doors. It's a place to offer support, inspiration and idea sharing, not a group for recruiting, selling or asking about coverages. There's plenty of groups out there for that. There's a link in the show notes or you can seach for the group on FB. SHOW THE LOVE If you haven't done so already, please follow, like or subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast player. We are on all of the platforms including spotify, IheartRadio and Apple podcasts. If you are listening to this podcast online and don't know how to listen to podcasts on your phone, reach out to our host, Debbie DeChambeau and she'll help you. SPONSOR This episode of the Business of Insurance Podcast is sponsored by Insurancemailboxpower.com Stay top of mind with your clients and referral partners by landing in their mailbox, not their inbox where you might get lost in email jail! CONNECT WITH THE PODCAST ON SOCIAL FACEBOOK GROUP FACEBOOK PAGE TWITTER ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance podcast is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA - an entrepreneurer, business advisor, insurance professional  and content creator. Her goal is to inspire you to think differently and explore ideas that disrupt the status quo.  Debbie has an extensive business and marketing background with a focus of helping insurance professionals be more successful.  She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and produces three other podcasts, Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed and Seniors We Love.   Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.  

EP 57 Continuing Education for Insurance Professionals. I know, it's a boring topic, but I hope to get you thinking outside the box today. Many of you listening might already be doing this, but let's get more people heading this direction. Welcome to another episode of the Business of insurance podcast My name is Debbie DeChambeau, I'm the host of this podcast, I'm an entrepreneurer, business advisor, insurance professional  and content creator. I want to inspire you to think differently and explore ideas that disrupt the status quo.  Todays episode is for everyone in the insurance industry, but if you are dealing with clients or helping to train insurance agents, this episode is especially for you.  You see, getting into the insurance industry is fairly easy. You take a test, get licensed with a carrier or broker and start selling or working.  Most people say the license test doesn't really cover what is needed for the types of policies you will offer as an agent. In my opinion, that statement is 100% correct. It just covers the basics and even covers some things that many of us will never use in our insurance career. But we need to know them for the test. Once you get licensed in the insurance industry, you need to update your license every year or two or three, depending on the state you are in. For many people, they just go online, find a course that they can get the proper number of hours and are done with it until next time. It's an afterthought for many, just doing what they have to do to get by.  We are all busy, I get it.  In addition to barely getting annual CE's in, there are many licensed agents that don't have a dual license, they only have the original license. For example ….. someone that started with a life and health license never gets the property and casualty license. Do they need to???? NO!  But here's why I think it's important to have both. You need to position yourself as an advisor to your clients, not think of yourself as a sales person. The insurance industry has a bad reputation, and in some ways well deserved. It's too easy to get in to the business….but if you are in the business to do the right thing for your clients and not just make a sale, then you will position yourself as an advisor, a risk manager. Someone that is looking at all aspects of insurance protection so that your clients understand their options. If you only have one license, it can make it hard to expand your conversation.  It's hard to position yourself as an advisor because you don't know what you don't know. Just like your clients don't know what they don't know. With the internet, people have the opportunity to learn more, but there's also a lot of misinformation on the internet and it's our job to help our clients understand. That's what we get paid for!  A lot of people get their licenses and then consider themselves an independent agent and open their business doors. The licensing class is what they have to run their business! Minimal product training…., minimal industry training...minimal business training. There's a big learning curve in the industry and most people don't realize that until they are in the middle of it.  While it sounds so great to be on your own, working alone adds additional challenges to learning the technical components of the industry in addition to learning how to be a business owner. It becomes a ‘hope and pray strategy' that they are doing things correctly. In the back of their mind they know they have E&O and think they are good. For this reason, I think it's important that you expand your education and think about getting some additional certifications such as  CIC, CPCU or CRM on the property and casualty side to a CLU, CHFC or even a CFP for those with a life and health license. BREAKDOWN OF DESIGNATIONS:  CIC - Certified Insurance Counselor - geared towards the property and casualty independent side - takes a dive into policy forms and provides a lot of real life examples CPCU - Certified Property and Casualty Underwriter - like the name says, it's geared towards the property and casualty side - has historically been pushed on the carrier sde, particularly for underwriters CRM - Certified Risk Manager - there's a version for commercial and a version for personal lines. I think we could all benefit from understanding risk management.  CLU - Chartered Life Underwriter - it's the life/health equivalent of the CPCU CHFC Chartered Financial Consultant - geared towards financial consultants who are more on the life and health side - CFP - Certified Financial Planner - also geared towards financial planners  but more on the investment side - encouraging them to take a risk management approach for helping their clients, not just focusing on investments. My husband obtained his CFP shortly after 9/11. It was a time when the market was down and a lot of people didn't want to talk about investments, so I actually encouraged him to pursue it because I knew the value long term of how it could help him. While I didn't get the Cruts and Crats portion, I did review the property and casualty portion and could see it was in-depth and valuable. This is showing my geeky side, but I really enjoyed doing some of the reviews with him as I learned a lot for my own practice. This is a high level overview of some of the designations. Do some research to see what makes the most sense for your career. There are many other designations, and new ones are popping up all the time - for example, the CPIA which is the Certified Professional Insurance Agent which is for all agents, and focuses on sales processes, ethics and marketing using insurance as the platform. I earned the CPIA designation about 4 years ago and CiC designation  more than 25 years ago…. With the CIC designation, I have to complete a minimum of 16 hours a year doing an approved update so that I can keep using the designation. Yes, every year I have to update my designation by taking 16 hours through programs with the The National Alliance which is the organization that manages the CIC, CRM and many other designations. For this particular designation, you have to do the update before your birthday each year. I always try to take the sessions that are new, trendy, innovative, because a lot of them are the same and are repeated frequently.. For example, I was fascinated by cyber liability sessions back in the mid 2000's. Not enough businesses have cyber liability today and in light of recent hackings, they are probably more aware of it now than ever. So those people that paid attention to cyber liability years ago should be crushing it now! That combined with a good risk management strategy can open a lot of doors and set agents apart from the pack. In a recent CIC update, I took the medicare and medicaid session. Now,I've done that many times. I admire the instructor a lot. I took a session with him back in 2012 or 2013 and he blew me away. It was right  after the Affordable Care Act had been passed and he read the 2000 plus  pages of the document and taught us what we needed to know. We were talking about aspects of the ACT  before anyone. I digress…..The recent sessions I took were around medicare/medicaid and long term care and different uses of life insurance. I've taken several of this type of session many times over the years and I always learn something new. For example, this time I learned about the new hybrid life and long term care policies. Yes, insurance companies have finally figured it out!  What I always find interesting in these sessions is how many property and casualty agents know very little about life and health. These are agents that have been around for awhile. Many of them do this particular session because they are thinking about retiring in a few years and feel like it's time to start learning.  Think of all the missed risk management opportunities with their clients because they didn't know what they needed to know. Now, I would guess the same would apply to a life and health person sitting in on a property and casualty class but it's like the hands are in front of their face saying, no, I don't want to know about this. It's too overwhelming and my brain can't handle it! I'm not saying you need to be an expert...because I do believe in focusing on one area. But you need to know a little bit...you need to know enough to ask a few questions that could lead to an introduction to someone on your team.  Imagine writing car insurance for someone for 10 years and in year 11 they passed away. They left behind a wife and 3 children under 10…..and no life insurance. You talked to them every year updating their car information but because you focused on car insurance, you never asked them about life insurance. You were their trusted advisor……. In this scenario, you probably wouldn't get sued for not asking about life insurance, but there are circumstances that if you don't address certain issues, and then there is a loss, you could get sued.  As an insurance professional, it is to your benefit to position yourself as a trusted advisor. To take the sales notion out of it and make sure your client is aware of what insurance products are available to protect them. It's important for them to know what is not covered, just as much as it is important for them to know what is covered.  Don't make any assumptions.  I also offer this from first hand experience. You see my sister passed away at the young age of 36. She wasn't sick, she just didn't wake up one morning. She left behind 4 children. One under 5, one under 10 and 2 teenagers. She stayed home and did daycare. Her husband worked but they counted on her income as well. Plus, her staying home meant they didn't have any daycare expenses. When she passed, there was no life insurance. Financially, he was devastated. He lost her in come and had to pay for daycare, so it was almost a double whammy from the financial perspective. I was / am an insurance agent. I never talked to them about life insurance because I focused on commercial insurance. Losing a sibling is hard. Knowing that I never asked an important question is harder! Had I had the conversation, how different might their lives have been if there was some insurance to help them out? A lot of times people don't want to talk about other lines of insurance because they feel like it's sales, but the more you know the more you realize that asking the questions builds trust, it positions you as more of a professional than an order taker and someone selling insurance. We need to work on that mindset.  There are some people who have so many designations, you have to wonder if they ever work. While it is impressive, without a doubt and in my opinion they are probably 10 times more knowledgeable than I am, it's hard to be away from the office doing all of these classes to earn the designations!!  But having one or two designations, particularly the right ones, can make you so much more valuable to your clients and set you apart from other agents. I'm not a big fan of actually touting the fact that you have a designation but the knowledge that it provides you will definitely pay off. The insurance designation organizations haven't done a great job educating the public to look for professionals with these designations. The CFP designation is advertised regularly and most people who are looking for a financial advisor are aware to look for someone with that designation.  There are other ways to get an education in this industry. Self study, on the job training, having a mentor and through networking. I don't think that enough organizations have what I like to call focused networking and that's part of the piece that's missing. I few years ago I attended a conference for IAIP. I interviewed several attendees for the podcast and you can hear the conversations in earlier episodes. This is an organization that has been around for awhile but recently rebranded to be more inclusive. It's the International Association for Insurance Professionals, formerly known as NAIW, National Association for Insurance Women. Now, I'll be honest, I'm not a member and when I went to an NAIW meeting many years ago, I felt like the youngest person in the room and I know I wasn't the youngest at the recent event I attended. But, I could see how people might feel that way.  Yet because of the age difference, it might keep people away if there isn't an ongoing effort to bring in young people into the organization and make them feel welcome. But getting involved in an organization like this is a great way to meet people with experience, people that can answer questions and help you build your career. I would encourage you to be a part of at least one insurance organization to meet your peers. Those friendships will be invaluable.  So to recap, consider advancing your career by obtaining a designation or two, instead of just doing CE's to get them out of the way!  Position yourself as an advisor, ask questions like a risk manager and talk about what isn't covered so that people understand their risks. Get involved in an insurance organization. Not with the intent of getting business, although that could happen, but this industry needs professionals and that's what is promoted in insurance focused organizations. That wraps up the conversation about continuing education but I want to spend a minute to talk about marketing. What are you doing to stay in front of your clients and prospects? If you haven't done so already, check out insurancemailboxpower.com. You see, being top of mind is essential. Yes, you can send an email which is probably more cost effective, but you have to deal with spam, being part of 100's of emails that people receive each week and staying compliant with the Can Spam Act. You can stand out today by sending things to the mail box. A post card, a birthday card or even a be different and send a half birthday card. Not many people are doing that today! Check out insurancemailboxpower.com. And see how you can make a difference in your marketing! Tell them Debbie DeChambeau sent you! Thank you for listening to this episode of the business of insurance podcast. SHOW THE LOVE If you haven't done so already, please follow, like or subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast player. We are on all of the platforms including spotify, IheartRadio and Apple podcasts. If you are listening to this podcast online and don't know how to listen to podcasts on your phone, reach out to our host, Debbie DeChambeau and she'll help you. SPONSOR This episode of the Business of Insurance Podcast is sponsored by Insurancemailboxpower.com Stay top of mind with your clients and referral partners by landing in their mailbox, not their inbox where you might get lost in email jail! CONNECT WITH THE PODCAST ON SOCIAL FACEBOOK GROUP FACEBOOK PAGE TWITTER ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance podcast is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA - an entrepreneurer, business advisor, insurance professional  and content creator. Her goal is to inspire you to think differently and explore ideas that disrupt the status quo.  Debbie has an extensive business and marketing background with a focus of helping insurance professionals be more successful.  She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and produces three other podcasts, Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed and Seniors We Love.   Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram. 

Ben and Nathan discuss how everyone and their cat is in the next SpiderMan movie before discussing how some fake businesses would do in the real world. Follow us @Rogue_Opinion

EP 56 - Are You Leveraging The Mailbox For Marketing? Are you taking advantage of snail mail to stand out? Birthday cards, holiday cards, postcards and even newsletters can be sent through the mail and have a big impact on your marketing efforts. Here’s an overview of what we discuss in this podcast episode. Holiday Cards There are many types of cards that you can send. If you want to stand out, consider these types of cards Seasons Greetings, Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas Thanksgiving Cards Happy New Year Cards Birthday Cards Some of your clients don’t have their birthday recognized by anyone, getting one from you could be a wonderful gift and a great way to stand out. Send to  Clients Strategic partners Automate sending birthday cards: Email birthday cards - Constant Contact   Snail Mail cards using a new service called Mailbox Power Newsletters My audience is over 65, they appreciate having paper to read while reading morning coffee and not being attached to an electronic device all the time. Sometimes, it is nice to read things that aren't online and getting distracted by what can happen online.  Avoid the rabbit hole Postcards Tips for healthy living Best practices Recipe’s  Outdoor exercise tips Hand Written Note Cards Try to send one hand written note card a day. Make it a challenge for yourself Stay top of mind with your referral partners Referral Thank you card ideas Send 4 cards a year to referral / strategic partners Holiday Heart Healthy, something to get through the winter Welcome to Spring 4thof July Halloween Create Systems so that the activities don’t slip through the cracks. Use a CRM, an excel spreadsheet or a calendar to keep track of your note card activity and contacts. SHOW THE LOVE If you haven’t done so already, please like or subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast player. We are on all of the platforms where you listen to podcasts including spotify, IheartRadio and Apple podcasts. We’d love a review on apple podcasts. SPONSOR This episode of the Business of Insurance Podcast is sponsored by Lynn Michel Insurance. Do you know someone turning 65 that needs help with purchasing Medicare insurance? Let Lynn Michel be your business partner. They’ll take care of your client and make you look good in the process.  Lynn Michel Insurance, LLC 301-996-2328 Lynnmichel.com Connect with them on social media  Facebook, LinkedIn,  Twitter CONNECT WITH THE PODCAST ON SOCIAL FACEBOOK GROUP FACEBOOK PAGE TWITTER ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance podcast is hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA - an entrepreneur, business advisor, insurance professional  and content creator. Her goal is to inspire you to think differently and explore ideas that disrupt the status quo.  Debbie has an extensive business and marketing background with a focus of helping insurance professionals be more successful.  She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and produces three other podcasts, Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed and Seniors We Love.  Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram and Clubhouse @dldechambeau SPECIAL CREDITS Special thanks to Mihir Celly for editing this episode  

EP 55 I PASSED MY EXAM NOW WHAT? Life and Health This is the second part of our series on career opportunities in the insurance industry.  The focus is on the opportunities available to you as a life and health insurance agent. If you passed your property and casualty exam, be sure to listen to episode 54 where I talk about some of your options with that license. Life and health are completely different industries inside of the insurance world and both offer several options. So many people think insurance is all about sales. While it is definitely a component of the industry, there are a lot of other areas where you can work and not do sales. T For example, there’s underwriting, accounting, claims, and I’ve heard one of the departments that makes a lot of money is the actuaries. So if you are a numbers person, it’s something to consider! LETS EXPLORE LIFE OPTIONS DIRECT - Mass Mutual, Northwestern, Prudential - I’m sure there are others but these are some of the bigger names that people recognize Northwestern has a great internship program - Sean, Bob Quinn, Josh The positions I mentioned above from being an underwriter or doing claims would also be available with these types of companies. CARRIER - Another area on the carrier side is selling products to other agents. A very good friend of mine worked for Hartford for many years. He started just out of college.  His role was to work with independent property and casualty agents and help them help their clients. Ironically, when he first started with Hartford, my dad was his first agent client. It’s how we met. He went on to be one of the national leaders with Hartford before retiring. My friend has now started his own off shore insurance company and I hope to bring him on as a guest at some point because I’m really not clear what he’s doing today, but know he’s doing well!  SIDEBAR -except it just goes to show you that the opportunities are unlimited. INDEPENDENT - like the property and casualty agent, you can also be an independent life insurance agency, where you focus on selling life insurance products or some of the other products that I’m going to discuss in a minute. As a solo, you can go to an MGA or other broker that will help you get contracts without production requirements.  Think about approaching a small P/C agency and working with them with life and health. Many P/C people run from Life/health so this could be a win win for both of you! ANCILLARY - Other products that we often think of life insurance professionals selling are term insurance, whole life, final expense. long term care, and a hybrid life/LTC. LTC isn’t really a life product, but the hybrid version today is very exciting in my opinion and worth exploring as an agent.  There’s a lot of cool things you can do with life insurance. I’ll be honest, I’ve always been a basic life insurance agent, not selling anything too sophisticated, but there is a lot that can be done in this arena.  Once I brought my friend from the Hartford on an appointment to see one of my government contractors. He was talking about some sophisticated life insurance planning techniques to help the two business owners. They were talking on the same page although I must admit, I was a little lost in the conversation. There is so much that can be done with life insurance, it’s not just a straight term or whole life sale.  The more assets someone has, the more fun putting together life insurance policies can be because there’s more to work with! WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH HEALTH INSURANCE? GROUP - independent agent, work for a company like Kaiser Generally group health is for businesses. Similar to the last podcast episode when I talked about business insurance. Obviously, if you have a group, it’s a group of employees that work for the company.  2-50 50 and above INDIVIDUAL - this can be a tricky business, but there is a career here. The ACA is different in many states and many states have plans that work around the ACA. Sadly, there is not a lot of commission with the ACA plans and there is also certification, which can scare many people away! The money for you as an agent is earned when you can cross sell products such as dental, life and cancer. During the COVID pandemic, a lot of people are losing their group health insurance, so there is a lot of demand for individual health insurance plans. While they might not be able to afford other insurance products during the pandemic, if you take good care of people, when they do get back to work, they’ll be prospects for other insurance products then! MEDICARE - this is where I am today. I must admit, I love this part of the business, but there’s a lot to it. For one thing, if you want to sell medicare advantage and prescription drug coverage plans  you have to take an annual test called AHIP and you have to re-certify with each insurance company each year to sell and get renewal commissions. With many of the tests, you only get 3 tries and you have to get a 90% or better each time. Honestly, that can be nerve wracking and stressful. And the commissions aren't huge. But there’s a demand for the products and you won’t find someone on every street corner selling medicare like you might with car or life insurance. Most seniors need some sort of dental, vision and hearing plans as well as cancer insurance. When you can sell these products, your commission increases significantly and that’s where the business can be attractive. Medicare is highly regulated with a lot of rules and regulations. For some people, that can be a deal breaker for a career. The opportunity to help people is something I really enjoy so it’s why I love the industry so much. There’s also what we call ancillary products - these would be things like cancer insurance, dental and vision and hospital indemnity policies. Depending on the state and situation, there are many options for these. You probably wouldn’t want to just sell one of them but when packaging them with a life policy or health policy, you are really helping your clients and making some money at the same time.  There are career opportunities for each of the type of products mentioned, You can find positions on both the agency and carrier side. You’ll need someone to design the products, market them whether you are marketing directly to the consumer or marketing to other agents. Underwriting Claims Customer Service Technology How do you know who to work for? Finding the right fit isn't always easy! Most organizations are ethical and work above board, but there are some bad companies out there. Some are known as multi level marketing type companies. They’ve been around awhile and I don’t think it’s a good option, but ...I”m just going to leave it there. Do your research, talk to other agents outside of the company and get their input before putting your heart and soul into them. One of the most important things you can do as an agent is to look at the financial ratings of the companies you represent or work for. If they are struggling financially, do you really want to sell their life insurance policy? What if they aren’t around in 10 years to pay claims on the people you were trying to protect. If an insurance carrier has financial difficulty and can't pay claims, the State Insurance Departments are the back up system. As an agent, it’s not something your clients should have to deal with. This is where integrity is important and you don’t sell insurance just for the commission, you sell the insurance because it is the right thing for your client. You need to understand what is covered, what isn’t covered, what the rate history has been and you should always look at the financial ratings before presenting a product to a client.  I can’t stress this piece enough. I said this for the property and casualty side, but if you try something and find you don’t like it, there are so many other options to consider in the insurance industry. Don’t give up on this career path because the first job or the first boss didn’t work out! Pick one area, learn it and learn it well. Become the expert in the area then move on to something else.  Remember, there is a lot to insurance. It’s not simple and black and white. So many people really don’t give it a chance and so many people really don’t understand what is involved.  Most people don’t choose insurance as a career, most people fall into it. I encourage you to make it a choice as a career.  I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. This episode of The Business of Insurance podcast is brought to you by LynnMichel Insurance. Lynn Michel is an independent insurance agency helping seniors with their medicare benefits from medicare advantage to prescription drug and medicare supplements. If you have someone that needs help and this isn’t your area, please connect with Lynn Michel Insurance. They won’t take your clients from you, their goal is to help you look good! In the US, October 15 - December 7 is annual enrollment period for those on Medicare. If you know someone that is over 65 and currently receiving Medicare benefits, this is the time for them to review their plans and see if there is a new plan that makes more sense for them. During this time, medicare recipients are bombarded by mailers and commercials, so please encourage them to talk to a professional and review their options. If the professionals at Lynn Michel can’t help them, well refer them to another professional that can! If you aren’t focused on the medicare market, let Lynn Michel Insurance be your resource. Check them out at lynnmichel.com or connect with them on social.  That wraps it up for this episode. I hope you’ve taken away a few ideas that you can implement. If you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe but more importantly, please tell a friend or a colleague about the podcast.  Until next time, keep creating opportunities. SHOW THE LOVE If you haven’t done so already, please like or subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast player. We are on all of the platforms including spotify, IheartRadio and Apple podcasts. If you are listening to this podcast online and don’t know how to listen to podcasts on your phone, reach out to our host, Debbie DeChambeau and she'll help you. CONNECT WITH THE PODCAST ON SOCIAL FACEBOOK GROUP FACEBOOK PAGE TWITTER ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance podcast is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA - an entrepreneurer, business advisor, insurance professional  and content creator. Her goal is to inspire you to think differently and explore ideas that disrupt the status quo.  Debbie has an extensive business and marketing background with a focus of helping insurance professionals be more successful.  She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and produces three other podcasts, Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed and Seniors We Love.     Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.  

EP 54 - I PASSED MY EXAM NOW WHAT?  Property & Casualty The topic in this episode is a suggestion from one of the apple podcast reviews (iTunes). I’ve also heard from people that are just studying for their test, so I thought I’d create an episode to give you some ideas for your next steps. Even if you have been in the industry for a while, you might listen as a refresher or share with someone you are mentoring.  If you are in sales or thinking about going into sales, I’ve included a few extra nuggets for you towards the end. Since the core of this podcast is why the insurance industry is a great place for a career, I thought I’d take the question and offer some ideas. If you are listening to this and have other ideas, let me know and if I get enough of them, I’ll put together another episode on the topic. I passed my exam, now what Did you get your license before you were hired? Congratulations, a lot of people don’t do this, they get their license once they’ve been hired. I know some investment firms hire you and give you the first 90 days to get your license completed. That will put you behind the 8 ball because those 90 days could have been used for prospecting, and a good sales person will understand this. If you are someone that has chosen a career in insurance, getting licensed is the first step. No matter what direction you go with your career, it’s a big learning curve. The licensing portion is only the basics. A lot of what you learn in the licensing process is not what you will be dealing with in the real world. If you are headed into sales, you need to focus on the sales process first, but I would recommend that you take some other classes about 3-6 months into your career to expand your knowledge. Work towards a certification. It will set you apart from those that haven’t furthered their education,  many but more importantly, it definitely expands your knowledge base. It’s often a way to fast track the OJT. One little nugget Share about your license. Over the years I’ve seen many agents trust their employer with handling their license, from making sure they renewed it to making sure their CE’s were completed. The agents just went about their day to day duties until one day they realized their license had expired or they didn’t do their CE’s and then chaos sets in. My suggestion is that you stay on top of when you need you do your CE’s and your renewal and that you process your license renewal, don’t let your agency or employer be responsible for this.. You worked hard to get your license and you don’t want to take any chances.  Over the years I’ve had a few friends lose their license because they thought their employer had taken care of things, and they didn’t! Nobody wants to go through the licensing process twice! Now that you are licensed, let’s talk about working in the property / casualty side of the house.  CAREER OPPORTUNITIES For today, we'll focus on the agency side of things, not the insurance company side. Most insurance company personnel don’t have to have their license because they aren’t selling anything. At least that is what I think. I’ve never worked on the carrier side, so if I’m wrong, I know someone will correct me and I’ll update the show notes! On the agency side you work for a Direct Writer or an Independent Agency  Personal lines - protecting cars, homes, trucks, motorcycles, campers, boats, You might provide insurance for special art pieces or airplanes, you might need to protect their household staff or international travel needs. Depending on the market you live and work, some of these accounts can be over $10,000 and I’ve seen them over $100k. Some agencies have high net worth divisions that focus on the individuals that have a lot of assets that need protecting. Commercial lines - this is primarily business insurance. Look around you at where you eat, your gym, office buildings, amusement parks and contractors. Special events, franchises and medical facilities all fall into this category. In my opinion, it’s good to specialize in something. If you’ve listened to other episodes,  you’ve heard me say that I specialized in construction contractors when I was selling. At one time I knew every electrical contractor in town because of a special program we had.  Here's how unique the business can be: I heard a really cool story recently and it's how you can make insurance as interesting or as boring as you want. A friend of mine, also an insurance agent, has a client that does a big convention every year. All I know is that it is really big and it makes the client almost 90% of their annual revenue. Each year, they purchase event insurance. This year, as the agent was negotiating the coverage and premium, he kept asking for more coverages. The premium got up to close to $200k for this event.  Since the premium was so high, the agent started asking for everything to be thrown in to be covered. Even pandemic insurance! Not having any clue that we’d be having a pandemic. The policy was written last fall so the pandemic wasn’t even on the radar. His client's event is cancelled. The client is going to receive close to $40 million dollars because of what the agent negotiated. While this is an abbreviated version of the story, it’s an example of a few things in the industry that you’ll learn over time. One, everything is negotiable, you just need to know what to ask for, Two, every risk is different which makes the business so interesting. Whether you are dealing with a special event or insuring a doctors office, you’l have different insurance protections that you’ll want to discuss and that in my opinion is what makes this a great business. Personally, I'm a fan of the commercial side because it’s what I’ve always known and where I’ve always worked. There’s a need for people in both sides of the house and you just need to find a place that you feel comfortable and enjoy.  Let’s talk about the types of places you can work. We have Direct Writers and Independent Agencies Direct writer - someone that works for a company that only represents one company.  Allstate / State Farm / Farmers / Liberty Independent agent - represent multiple companies Small agency Large agency - Willis Tower Watson Consortium - HUB International National NFP Next I want to talk about some of the positions that you’d find on the agency side. The direct writer has a few of these but the independent agent has more of them. The direct writers often received these services from the home office. Sales: There’s inside sales and outside sales; Inside you might be responsible for selling to anyone who calls in or you might be responsible for making cold calls. Some of the bigger agencies might even have a call center, but I’m not a fan of those. I realize it’s a way of running a business, but there’s no personalization there. If you want to build a book of clients that you’ll have with you throughout your career, a call center isn’t the place to be looking!  Most of the time, but not always, personal lines is more of an inside sales position and commercial or business insurance sales is out of the office.   CSR / Account Manager:  Someone that manages the paperwork or client requests, policy changes, reviewing the policies when issued by the carrier.  Some sales might be expected but in many agencies, not required. Many agency principals wish their CSR’s would sell more, but the CSR doens’t usually think of themselves as a salesperson, so this is often a challenge for agency owners. Listen to episode 21 titled Steady Sales with Sheldon Snodgrass. We talk about the concept of helping CSR’s mindset.  There's underwriting i.e. looking at a risk and pricing it. Not done too much on the smaller agency side but larger agencies often have this capacity. There’s pricing policies using rating tools which are mostly online today but larger accounts also have pricing flexibility that smaller accounts don’t have, so larger agencies will often have some underwriters on staff for this purpose.  Marketing: two types on the agency side - and many direct writers don’t have this, it’s mostly on the independent side -  Marketing accounts to the insurance company Marketing the agency - someone who manages the social media, advertising, website, etc. This is a newer role on the agency side, but a critical one. Most of the direct writers do this for their agents Claims: Some agencies have a separate claims department. They want to manage the claim process and have the information flow through the agency before reaching the  insurance company. Some agencies have the ability to pay small checks on their own rather than having to wait for the insurance company to investigate which makes it easier for the insured to get back o their feet.  This varies from agency to agency, city to city and carrier to carrier. Loss control or risk management:  Often times larger agencies will have one or two loss control people on staff. This is a little more of a specialty position but one that is very valuable for agents to provide their clients. For example, a restaurant might need a loss control person to help them with purchasing the proper equipment for safety, for training staff on safety measures or to implement proper protections in the restaurant.  Life & Health: Some property and casualty agencies will also have a life and health division. I’ll talk more about that in another episode, but it’s an option.  As you can see, there are a lot of choices to consider if you want to work in the property/casualty side of the industry.  Insurance companies have similar types of positions. When you work for the insurance company your client is usually the agents, not the consumer. This isn’t the case 100% of the time because if you work for someone like GEICO or USAA, you are selling to the consumer YOU HAVE OPTIONS What I really want to leave you with here is that there are many options. If you are in a position that you don’t like, it shouldn’t be the end of your insurance career. Look for other opportunities like I’ve described here to consider. This industry needs young blood…...don’t give up too fast! There’s one other area I want to cover before I end today's episode and I alluded to it earlier in the episode.   Since many people are attracted to the industry because of sales, I’m going to add some ideas for you to think about while you are still studying for your exam. Outside Sales If you know you will be selling…..start talking about what you are getting into with your friends and family before you even take the exam. Don’t sell anything because that’s illegal, but start talking about it. Also, create your marketing plan. Too many people wait until they are licensed to think about this and you’ve wasted too much time already on prospecting.  A few things you can be doing:. Start building your linkedin connections Start setting up relationships with strategic partners Get involved with a networking group or start your own If your end game plan is to have your own agency, I would recommend that you work for someone for at least 2 years first. Why? There's a lot to learn! Over the years, I’ve taught classes on starting a business and that alone is a big learning curve, plus learning about the industry. Get some experience then think about going out on your own. It’s a lot easier to get carrier contracts today than it was 20 years ago, but there’s nothing better than having a track record when you make the leap!  Find someone with a training program  (pros/cons of going alone) Find someone that will give you some ownership if you make your numbers  Once you decide you want to work in the sales side of the insurance industry, start your marketing that day. Here's two books to get you started: Book Yourself Solid - Gets you thinking about what you are selling and what your messaging is It talks about some simple, effective ways to meet people It works Never Eat Alone - This book isn’t that much different than Book Yourself Solid with the exception that it get’s you thinking about who you know, which you’ll need that list when you start selling, and how to build your network. The reality is, why eat alone if you can eat with someone and potentially create business opportunities.  There are a lot of good books out there but these are two of my favorites. If you are going solo and opening  your own business, I would also suggest you read the E-Myth Revisited. It will get your business mindset off to the right start! Just substitute insurance when they say baker and it will make a lot of sense! That wraps it up for this episode. I hope you’ve taken away a few ideas that you can implement. If you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe but more importantly, please tell a friend a colleague about the podcast.  This episode of The Business of Insurance podcast is brought to you by Lynn Michel Insurance. Do you know someone who is turning 65? They need to consider their Medicare options and Lynn Michel focuses on helping them navigate the complexities of Medicare. If you aren’t focused on this area, let Lynn Michel be your resource. Check them out at lynnmichel.com or connect with them on social.  Until next time, keep creating opportunities. SHOW THE LOVE If you haven’t done so already, please like or subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast player. We are on all of the platforms including spotify, IheartRadio and Apple podcasts. If you are listening to this podcast online and don’t know how to listen to podcasts on your phone, reach out to our host, Debbie DeChambeau and she'll help you. CONNECT WITH THE PODCAST ON SOCIAL FACEBOOK GROUP FACEBOOK PAGE TWITTER ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance podcast is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA - an entrepreneur, business advisor, insurance professional  and content creator. Her goal is to inspire you to think differently and explore ideas that disrupt the status quo.  Debbie has an extensive business and marketing background with a focus of helping insurance professionals be more successful.  She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and produces three other podcasts, Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed and Seniors We Love.   Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn,  Twitter, or Instagram.  

EP 53 - AUTOMATING YOUR SYSTEMS This is the last episode in our email marketing series. If you haven’t listened to the others, I’d encourage you to start with episode 47 for the email marketing series and if you want to learn a little more about marketing, listen to episodes 44 and 45. The topic today is a little more advanced. With the exception of the concept around birthdays or anniversaries, I would not suggest you introduce this aspect of email marketing until you have your basic email marketing campaigns set up and running consistently.  We are talking about automation.  You might hear the term autoresponders or automation, for email marketing, it’s the same concept. Basically we are discussing  a series of emails that you can schedule in advance that are sent based on a certain trigger.  The trigger might be someone downloads something or it’s a birthday or they sign up for something.  It’s a series of emails that go out on a pre scheduled basis once the trigger has occurred. You might send one email or you might send a series of 10 emails over the course of 3 months. How many and how often are up to you and over time, things you’ll have to measure and probably revise. While for the most part, you set it up and your done, if you aren’t getting the responses you want, that’s where the revisions come in.  Many CRM programs have autoresponders built in. Check with your platform to see how much of this can be done with the system you're already using. If you have an older platform or you aren’t using an agency crm, then I’d suggest that you use an ESP (an email service provider). We talked about ESP’s in episode 48.  Integrate them so you don’t have to use two separate systems.  If you are in the process of looking at a new platform, I’d suggest that you look for a platform that can perform these services for you as part of the features they provide. Keep in mind some of the features that you should look for based on what has been suggested on other episodes in this series. There are many different uses for autoresponders. For this episode, we will focus on 4. Automate electronic birthday cards  Onboarding process for new employees Automated series for new customers Automated series for the digital documents that you give away So let’s start with an easy one: Automated Birthday Cards Sending a birthday card is one of the simplest forms of marketing you can do. I love the idea of sending birthday cards in the mail, but if you don’t have the budget or if your client list is really to big to do this effectively, I’d encourage you to look at automating birthday cards through email. It’s not as effective, but it does work! It’s a touch. It’s better than not doing anything at all.  Here’s how I would suggest you do this. Make sure you have the birthday for all of your clients and referral partners. Each platform is going to operate differently on how you set up the birthday cards. In Constant Contact which is the platform I’ve used the most, I put everyone with a birthday into a list and its triggered with the date of their birthday and then email is sent automatically. Every year, on January 1, I go in and update the card that is sent, I.e. update the graphic and then the email cards are sent automatically the following year on the right date.  Sending birthday emails is automated, it won’t get dropped if you get busy because it’s automatic. All you need to do is remember to change the graphic once a year, but even if you don’t do that, the email will still get sent.  Use marketing automation to onboard new employees Think about this - you bring on a new employee and what happens? They have an orientation on the first day, then paperwork for taxes, health insurance, employee handbook, etc and for the first few days can feel  overwhelming.  Then there’s an orientation about where everything is. They are put in front of a computer and depending on their experience level, they might be handed clients to work with and they are off and running.  Think of your first day on the job. Every company is different, but it’s usually on the first day, a ton of information is thrown at you and then you start working! And then you forget some of it and feel embarrassed having to ask about the simple stuff! But what happens is they forgot about what the kitchen policy is, they forget about what needs to be logged into for the first pay period, they forgot about who they need to contact for taking PTO or working overtime.  Your onboarding emails can cover these topics or whatever is relevant to your onboarding process. As part of your automated onboarding process, drip out the important stuff over a period of days or weeks to remind them of the things they might have forgotten. You could do that in all of them. This helps you to know the new employee is engaged and doing what you want them to do. By sending an automated email series using a platform that has metrics built in will also allow you to check if the new employee is even reading the email, much less taking the action you’ve included. One of the reasons I’m suggesting that you send more emails than less is that too much information in one email can get lost. When the subject line in each email tracks with the content, it’s easier to do a search to get the details. Remember the KISS principle. Plus, if only one email is sent and it’s really long, it’s very likely that it won't  get read in its entirety because it is so long.  So think about your new employee onboarding process. What are the steps that you go through and what could you automate? Once the process is set up, all you need to do is add the new employee’s email address and the rest will happen automatically! Here’s an idea for a sequence - but I’m sure your sequence would be much better. Keep in mind that I’ve been self employed for 20 years, working for myself mostly without a staff and things have changed in the onboarding world, so your list might reflect changes in procedures. Day 1 - welcome - include a video from the different key staff members to help them get oriented Day 2 - list of contact people - maybe include where they can find the list as it is updated or who is leading other departments that they might want to introduce themselves to. Day 3 - overview of kitchen policies - lunch etiquette Day 4 - employee handbook - highlight 3 items that you want them to understand. Give them an activity to complete on the handbook and that way you know they have  read the email! Day 5 - computer policies - email setup, templates, CRM details Week 2 - Frequently accessed websites for work to be performed Wee 3 - Schedule a meeting or lunch with agency owner (include calendly or scheduler link) Week 4 - expense reports, supplies,  Week 5 - 30 day check in - what are we doing well, what do you need help with I’ve listed 5 weeks worth of emails - 5 in one week and then one a week for 4 weeks, but you could do this as long as you need to. My list only includes a few topics but think about what you cover in your initial onboarding meeting. Take some of those topics and drip them out into an email. One of the things you could also do in each email is to have some sort of call to action in each email. I mentioned that for the employee handbook,  An automated series for things you give away Before I dive into this idea, when it comes to attracting new clients, you often need to get them to know like and trust you before they will do business with you.  While a lot of what we do in the insurance business is offer quotes, and we are always hoping to get someone to allow us to give them a quote, it’s very possible that they aren’t actually ready to make a switch to you yet.  They don’t know you well enough, they don’t like you or trust you enough to make the leap.  So your job is to stay in touch with them. You could add them to your regular email campaigns, or you could set up an automated system to keep them engaged, to show a little bit more about who you are and the value you bring to your clients and maybe through that series of automated emails, you’ll win them over sooner. There are many ways for doing this, but today we are talking about email marketing automation so I’m going to focus on email examples  In the last episode we talked about building your list and one of the ways to do it was to give something away.  Once you’ve come up with something to give away (also known as a lead magnet), then you want to drip some emails to them with additional valuable information in hopes of getting that person to trust you enough to do business with you. You can drip emails to a lot of people without having to talk to them and get business when you least expect it. Let’s say you are targeting business owners and you create a booklet about hiring best practices. When the business owner downloads the book, they are then sent to a list that is set up for your automation series and you can send them several emails as a way to stay connected. For example, the first email would be the booklet that you sent them The second email might be talking about contracts for new hires and why working with an employment law attorney is beneficial The third email might talk about  one or two coverages employers need for protecting their employees like WC and covering their equipment while working remotely or on travel The fourth email might have some digital security issues The fifth and final email might be about an event that you have, let’s say a monthly webinar that they could sign up for. The idea around having the monthly webinar series is that if someone downloads your booklet and also signs up for your webinar, they are interested on some level about what you are offering.  The webinar could also be an invitation for a meeting to introduce yourself and learn about their business. From there, you can implement your regular sales practices, but the first few steps, gaining interest have been automated for you.   Your work is creating the booklet which can be done in powerpoint and saved as a pdf, then you write out the emails, set them up in your automation platform and boom, you are done. Well, you’ll need to put the booklet on the website and create the sign up box for downloading the booklet, promote the booklet on social media and set up monthly webinars, but that’s it. You have the opportunity to attract a lot of new clients because of your hiring booklet. And once created, it can be a long term client attraction tool for you. If your company has a marketing department or uses a marketing firm for the website, reach out for ideas on how to get this on the website and automate the process. If you need someone to help you with this, let me know and I’ll introduce you to some of my connections. If you are focused on personal lines, you could create a booklet on safe driving - send a series of emails around this and end with a monthly safe driving session with local police or a local driving school.  I mentioned I’ve done a lot of speaking over the years. This is a tactic I used a lot as a speaker to get the email addresses of the attendees when I had no other way to get to know them. They always want the slides or some sort of handbook. I would then set up a series of emails that took the topic I was discussing further (usually marketing) with calls to action throughout the email series to get the person to contact me and see if it made sense for us to work together.  The beauty is that once you write this up, the work is done for you. I would recommend not creating the wheel every time. For example, if you are speaking to groups about insurance, you could give away your slides or a handbook. You could create a series of follow up emails that they receive after they download your giveaway. You are marketing to them even if you are doing 10 presentations a month and you only had to set up the automation series once! The thing to really think about here is what could you give away that would be worthwhile to the audience you are trying to attract. It’s going to differ for many of you listening, so I encourage you to think outside of the box! Be creative in what you give away. Another use of automation is for onboarding new customers. Once people say yes, and purchase from you, set them up in a series of emails that are sent automatically. This email series would be different from your marketing emails. How many you send, how frequently is up to you but at least 3 within a 3 week period.  So email number one might just be a welcome - thank you for your business and a list of contact people in your agency. Your second email might be an overview of how you work, and other services you provide  Your third email might be a reminder of how to handle claims Your fourth email might be about the monthly email newsletters you’ll be sending to your clients, maybe about a podcast you have created, a youtube channel or even to like your social media pages. It’s ok to have a little self promotion.  Your last email might be to ask them to leave you a review and include the links for the review.  By the way, if you aren’t asking for reviews, you must incorporate that into your marketing plan. I’d almost say get that up and running before you begin any type of email automation! So we’ve talked about creating an automated marketing email series for birthdays, new employees, new customers, and prospects that are interested in a giveaway that you are offering.  I want to reiterate that if you aren’t already doing regular email campaigns, hold off on the automation until you have that process up and running, then add the automated series.  Look at it this way, by creating regular email campaigns, you are taking care of your current clients and prospects. You are touching them with some consistency so they don’t forget you and you are adding value because of the content you are creating. It costs a lot more to bring on a new customer than it does to keep a current one happy so let that be motivation to set up the email campaigns before you start the automation series.  The birthday emails would be the exception and you might also delegate the new employee series to the HR department, but that would be a management function, not necessarily a sales function! I hope you found this series on email marketing beneficial. We’ll be getting back to interviewing professionals in the industry and talking about why it is such a great profession with our next episode.  If you are new to the podcast, please be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast player. Also, if there is a topic you want me to explore, please, reach out to me and let me know! I’m grateful to each of you that listens and to each of you that have sent me messages.  I love helping and I hope this series has helped you get through the crazy times we are dealing with. UNTIL NEXT TIME, KEEP CREATING OPPORTUNITIES SHOW THE LOVE If you haven’t done so already, please like or subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast player. We are on all of the platforms including spotify, IheartRadio and Apple podcasts. If you are listening to this podcast online and don’t know how to listen to podcasts on your phone, reach out to our host, Debbie DeChambeau and she'll help you. CONNECT WITH THE PODCAST ON SOCIAL FACEBOOK GROUP FACEBOOK PAGE TWITTER ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance podcast is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA - an entrepreneurer, business advisor, insurance professional  and content creator. Her goal is to inspire you to think differently and explore ideas that disrupt the status quo.  Debbie has an extensive business and marketing background with a focus of helping insurance professionals be more successful.  She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and produces three other podcasts, Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed and Seniors We Love.   Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram. 

EP 52 -  Collecting Email Addresses to GrowYour List This is the second to last episode in our email marketing series. If you haven’t listened to the others, I’d encourage you to start with episode 47 for the email marketing series and if you want to learn a little more about marketing, listen to episodes 44 and 45. In episode 47 we talked about list segmentation which is about managing your list, but it’s important to always be growing your list as well - why because that is new prospects for you. That’s part of marketing. In episode 47 we also talked about looking at your website for different ways you are collecting email addresses. Today we’ll take that a little deeper. Getting email addresses doesn’t just come from people visiting your website. You can ask on your social media posts, you can have give aways, contests, webinars, workshops, community events, things where people need to sign up for something and give you their email address in the process.   Why do you need to grow your list?  If you are someone that is investing in social media you might be thinking, “do I really need to do worry about email marketing?” My answer to this is  if you aren’t, you might be out of business before everyone else. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and whatever new platform is developed is rented space for you. Today, they are all free. Today, they control what people see, unless you pay them. It’s basically a pay to play game for them. So if you aren't paying, not many people are seeing your content. When FB first started with the business pages, as a trainer, I was telling everyone to create one. Those that did, those early adopters, had their pages seen...for awhile. Then FB went public and then they needed to start making money. So then the business pages weren’t seen as much and if you wanted your business page to be seen, you had to pay. Now its advertising The newest thing is groups. Build your community in a group. For now, everyone is seeing what is posted in your group. Before long, FB will have ads in the groups and you’ll have to decide how valuable it is.  I don’t fault FB. They are a business. Businesses need to make money. In the case of social media, it’s offered to the consumer for free, they get use to things, it’s almost like an addiction but AI decides what the consumer sees. The people you want to target might not be in their sightline.  By having the email addresses, you own it. You aren’t dependent on paying FB or even worrying about if FB exists because you reach your prospects and clients on your terms. Personally, I think that’s much better than having your business dependent on another! It’s really important to understand that social media is rented. You don’t really have people’s contact information. It’s hard for you to reach out to them.  With email marketing, you are in their inbox and as long as you are sending valuable content, they'll keep you there! Ok, enough about that.  I’ve used Constant Contact as my ESP for many years and I’ve been one of their partners for a long time as well. Since I’m not actively doing marketing for others today, I reached out to other CTCT partners in our community and asked them what they see as good ways of growing your list today.  Some of the ideas I’m discussing today are coming directly from them and these are people who are working with clients everyday, helping them with their marketing. If you want to check them out, check out the show notes at thebusinessofinsurance.com where I’ve linked to their websites where they were available.  What can you do to grow your list? Website - This is a no brainer and can be done a few different ways. In episode 47 I suggested you do a website audit.  Where are you collecting email addresses on your website? In my opinion, you should have some form of email capture on almost every page of your website. From giving things away to just getting more information, if you don’t ask, you won't’ collect.  This ties into what Amy Morales of Kapeesh Marketing says because she feels that many small business owners feel embarrassed or too modest to ask customers to follow them online or join some kind of digital marketing effort. Just as these business owners champion "shop small" and "shop local," they should feel empowered and completely capable of asking friends and customers to support them online and join them on an email list. I think some of this is because we don’t want more emails in our inbox so why should we ask other people for their email. I understand this but if you are sending out valuable information, people should be happy to get your emails. It’s the people that send out useless information that people will unsubscribe to.  I’ve seen this a lot over the years myself. I even see it today with the clients in my CEO roundtables at Select Business Team. People don’t want to seem pushy or upset anyone so they don’t ask for the emails and they don’t put the tools on the website or other platforms to get people’s contact information.  Just start with capturing an email, then you can get more sophisticated to capture other information.  Now I’m in complete agreement with Vee Tanner of The Biz Tech Wiz   who says, don’t put ‘sign up to get my newsletter on your website.  That worked 20 years ago, but it doesn’t work today. Not many people are going to knowingly sign up for your newsletter today. Some will, but many of us are in email overload, so we only want emails that we can use or benefit from! I recently started playing pickleball and I’m interested in playing in a particular community so when I found out someone was sending an email in that community about pickleball, I did sign up. It’s valuable to me! So while some people in certain circumstances will sign up when it says sign up for our newsletter, you would be better off calling it something else. If you just have the newsletter then say something like Get Information On Protecting Your Family or if you are focused on the B2B market, say something like  Get Details on Managing Your Business. Ideally you want to say something about staying in touch and offering something to download or get my free checklist or tool that benefits you. Amy Morales says this is what is working and can be done in several different ways. So, what can you give away? This is the million dollar question many of you will ponder.  Throughout this email marketing series, I’ve given you a few ideas but here’s a few more: Fire Escape route planning tool The most overlooked insurance purchases (cancer, umbrella, LTC, event, cyber Hiring a nurse advocate Caring for your Pets The topics for what you can give away are unlimited. It will take time to develop or you can purchase a white labeled piece which will save you a lot of time and probably money if you purchase it this way. Michael Loschke of Arista Advisors suggests that you have to have a compelling value proposition and the key objective is to become a close trusted advisor. He follows the advice of financier and philanthropist, Michael Milken's and suggests creating deep emotional relationships" (something to which every agent/sales pro should aspire) - Health, Wealth and Children. BTW, the latter is often pets for seniors and empty-nesters. ;) Ask people join your list  by phone or email or online zoom, "He’ll say to people, our clients receive special email offers and content on health, wealth, and children. May I add you to our VIP list?" Another way to Build your List is Webinars Webinars - Citrin Cooperman  is a large CPA firm and they have been doing almost weekly webinars on PPP loans during the pandemic. They hit the market early with their webinars and now they are pivoting to other topics but when they started the webinars, no one else was doing them. They kept going when others only did a few. Now they have pivoted but they’ve built up a loyal following because of what they offered during the pandemic. It’s not too late to start doing webinars around the pandemic. One of the hot issues that I’ve been reading about is mental health. Kaiser Foundation put together a return to work guide and a large portion was focused on addressing mental health. Aetna is doing a big webinar in June 2020 and a section is on mental health.  Does mental health apply to insurance?  You decide. While webinars are a great way to offer a service, if you promote the webinars on social platforms, when people sign up for the webinar you now capture their email address. During the webinar, I would offer another opportunity to give them something and have them sign up directly into your email platform to show that they signed up, but you could use their email address from signing up for the webinar and upload into your ESP pretty safely.  Workshops are very similar to webinars but are face to face. In 2020, I’m not sure how many people you will get to attend an in person workshop because of Covid. If you are listening to this podcast in 2021 or 2022, it might not be an issue at all! Like with webinars, your workshop topics can be about anything that will bring people together and help you grow your prospect list and email list. You can advertise them on your social platforms, send snail mail invitations, promote through your referral partners, put up flyers in different venues. Everything is focused on getting people to register or attend so that you can obtain their email address and you can stay in touch with them. There is a larger agency outside of Baltimore that started doing events a few years ago and 20 people showed up, now they have close to 100 people showing up every month. (at least prior to Covid they did) They’ve built their list by having these monthly events with speakers and inviting people - growing their list and their prospects at the same time.  Networking events  - Networking events is another strategy you can implement for growing your list. I like to call it offline to online. They  could be from ones you put together or ones put together by chambers, associations, social organizations or anyone bringing together a group of people for the purpose of meeting others.  One way you could build your list from these events is sending out a nice to meet you email afterwards, and having a link to give them something that they have to sign up for to receive. Or maybe you have a link to a webinar you are offering and you send them a link in the nice to meet you email.  Technically, if you have their email address you might be tempted to add them to your email list and you might be able to do this without getting into trouble, but if they sign up for something themselves, you are pretty much in the clear if you were ever reported. Again, get creative. If you go to a business networking event, maybe you have link to a business resource or maybe, and yes, I’m bringing up podcasting again, maybe you ask the person you met to be a guest on your podcast and you have them sign up on your website to get the details and that puts them into your list.  Another thing you could do is have people text to join your list. I’ve done this at speaking events in the past. I’ll ask the audience if they want to get a copy of the slides. Most people do so I’ll have a text number set up for them to text right there, they put in their email address and then they are emailed the slides. I now have their email address and am building my list! Jason Silver also suggested using a QR code. Other ways you could do this is to put it on the back of your business card. If you are in an office and clients come to your office, you could have them scan the QR code right there to get something.  Next, think about contests Jonathan Blotner - https://blotnermassmedia.com/  Contest marketing - sign up for a chance to win xxx maybe it’s a photo contest, Their friends vote on the best photo and the one with the most votes wins, but the votes have to be verified with their email address.  You might need to work with your marketing team to create and implement this, but I think it’s a great idea.  We’ve talked about giving things away on your website, having contests, having webinars, hosting events and attending events. There are many ways to grow your list but you have to be intentional about doing it.  Part of marketing is about nurturing relationships. Some people will find you on the internet, some people will be referred to you but not everyone is ready to buy when you talk to them. So what is your strategy to get them to like you, to trust you, to try you and get them ready to buy from you.  Email marketing is one tactic that you should be doing consistently. In the next episode I'm going to talk about marketing automation. It is how to take all of the ideas I’m talking about here for growing your list and automating the processes. For the most part, once the process is set up, it works automatically. It’s how you build your list even in your sleep! I hope the ideas we’ve been talking about are helpful.  BEFORE WE CLOSE OUT THE SHOW -  If you like what you’ve heard, please go to iTunes also know as Apple Podcasts and leave a review. It really helps with us getting noticed and helps the Apple Podcast algorithms as well! If you know someone that should hear this content, please share the episode with them. If you want to learn more about marketing, join the FB group called the Business of Insurance. I’ll link to it in the show notes and I look forward to meeting you there! If you want to connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, mention you heard the podcast in your request. It helps me identify the spammers from the listeners! UNTIL THEN, KEEP CREATING OPPORTUNITIES SHOW THE LOVE If you haven’t done so already, please like or subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast player. We are on all of the platforms including spotify, IheartRadio and Apple podcasts. If you are listening to this podcast online and don’t know how to listen to podcasts on your phone, reach out to our host, Debbie DeChambeau and she'll help you. CONNECT WITH THE PODCAST ON SOCIAL FACEBOOK GROUP FACEBOOK PAGE TWITTER   ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance podcast is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA - an entrepreneurer, business advisor, insurance professional  and content creator. Her goal is to inspire you to think differently and explore ideas that disrupt the status quo.  Debbie has an extensive business and marketing background with a focus of helping insurance professionals be more successful.  She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and produces three other podcasts, Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed and Seniors We Love.   Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.   SPECIAL KUDOS TO OUR CONTRIBUTING CONSTANT CONTACT MARKETERS: Amy Morales of Kapeesh Marketing and Make it Pop: Small Business Marketing Podcast heymakeitpop.com says that many small business owners feel embarrassed or too modest to ask customers to follow them online or join some kind of digital marketing effort. Just as these business owners champion "shop small" and "shop local," they should feel empowered and completely capable of asking friends and customers to support them online and join them on an email list. Most often it is that 1 on 1 conversation with clients and customers where they agree to join a list. Simply asking every client and customer when you shake their hand or meet with them if they're interested in receiving updates from you (and if they agree have them fill out an opt-in form) can be a great, engaged list builder. Jason Silver suggested using a QR code.  Michael Loschke of Arista Advisors suggests that you have to have a compelling value proposition and the key objective is to become a close trusted advisor. We propose offering significant value in the form of useful content. For 10 years, I have repeated financier and philanthropist, Michael Milken's advice for "engendering deep emotional relationships" (something to which every agent/sales pro should aspire) - Health, Wealth and Children. BTW, the latter is often pets for seniors and empty-nesters. ;) Asking by phone or email or online zoom, "Our clients receive special email offers and content on health, wealth, and children. May I add you to our VIP list?" Vee Tanner of The Biz Tech Wiz  don’t put ‘sign up to my newsletter and stay in touch but using ‘download, get my free checklist or tool that benefits you is working Jonathan Blotner - https://blotnermassmedia.com/  Contest marketing - sign up for a chance to win xxx maybe it’s a photo contest, Their friends vote on the best photo and the most votes and the email address verifies the votes.

EP 51 -  PULLING IT ALL TOGETHER If this is your first joining us, welcome. If you are interested in marketing and specifically email marketing, I encourage you to check out episodes 45-now where we’ve talked about creating a marketing foundation, segmenting your list, metrics creating content and today we are going to talk about email campaigns.   I’ve used the term email campaigns in several episodes and said I'd would explain it…..so here’s the explanation. Each time you create an email to send to your list, think of it as a campaign. I’m not talking about an individual email you would send, but one that you are sending to your entire list. One that you are creating for marketing purposes.  Think of it in terms of “what do you want to get from the email campaign”. What kind of action do you want people to take?  What is the result you want to see? An email campaign is pushing content to someone to pull a response from them.  One of the concepts mentioned in this series is that content is king. John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing actually says content is AIR. Your company can’t breathe today if it isn’t creating content. Whether it be articles, ads, video, audio, graphics...it’s all about content.  So when it comes to email marketing, you are pushing that content to your list, to your audience and to new prospects.  You want them to take action on the content that you are creating.  In addition, and this is more of a website tip than an email tip, but you want to drive people to your website as much as possible. There’s so many reasons for this but in a nutshell, the more people you can get to your website, the more likely you are to get new business.  So when we think of content for your email campaigns, also think about creating the content on your website and pushing it out by linking it in your email campaign. Use your email campaign to drive traffic to your website! Let me go back to the hot chocolate example I gave in episode 50 for creating content. What if you wrote an article about the best recipes of hot chocolate. In your email campaign, you talk about one of the recipes then link to the article that is published on your website for the rest. Are you thinking “but that’s not insurance related, why would I put that on my website?” That’s ok…...you are human, most of us drink hot chocolate or make it for our kids, so why not drive traffic to your website with hot chocolate information and maybe they’ll stick around and get a quote while they are there! Your email campaign is pushing content - hot chocolate recipes and your response is getting them to click the link on the email campaign so they go to your website and get additional recipes. While they are on your website, they learn more about you and you have more opportunities to connect with them on other digital platforms. (this is tied to retargeting, FB pixels, google analytics and a few other areas which again, is not the subject of this podcast episode series.) This isn’t an episode about websites, but creating content for your email campaign. I just think it’s important for you to understand that creating content for your website is huge. Driving traffic to your website and having a website that you own is essential, I have not done that at this time for the business of insurance. I don’t want to come across as a hypocrite, telling you to do one thing and doing something different myself, but my decision is intentional. If you go back to the original intent of this podcast, it’s to talk about why working in the insurance industry is such a great career path. I’m not selling anything so I’m not worried about how many people visit my website. I’m not sending out any email campaigns so it’s not essential to me ….at least for right now.  Things could always change I’m saying this because if you look at the website for the business of insurance podcast, it’s very basic, very simple. It’s actually created by my podcast host, Libsyn.  However, I do script out each episode and have some links in each episode for SEO purposes. These are all things you want to be doing on your website and with each piece of content that you create as well. If I wanted to send out an email campaign and drive traffic to my website, I could easily do that because each episode has it’s own url and it is easily sharable. If I want to take an episode url and share it in an email campaign, it’s easy to do. That’s important for the content that you create for your email campaigns. So an email campaign is a little more than sending an email newsletter. It’s a marketing tool that has a goal and a system for measuring your results with a lot of moving parts in the middle.  Hopefully you find that explanation helpful. Other ideas for creating your email campaign.  Create a card or announcement Promote a celebration or a milestone Automated birthday emails - I’ll talk more about this in episode 52 but this is a great use of automation and emails Press release Invitation to an event or webinar Special offers and deals Surveys and polls Business letter Newsletter just information - so long as it is valuable Drive traffic to your website Share on social media What should your email look like Most importantly, it needs to follow your brand - same colors, fonts (if possible) and graphics that reflect your brand.  Less is more -  Don’t put everything into one email campaign. You’ll lose people from overwhelm. Remember the KISS principle. It works well for email campaigns also This is where you have to be a creative writer - or hire someone who is. Use phrases to get people’s attention so they will read what you are sending but you don’t want to be spammy or salesy.  Mobile Friendly Keep your call to action above the scroll line Graphics are good but they need to be relevant They need to be the right size You want to make sure you own the pictures and avoid copyright issues They should be in line with your brand.  You can use Canva to make your own graphics, you can purchase them from Canva and other online sites - I’ll link to the website so you know you are going to the right website.  Watch for app sumo for deals for buying lifetime subscriptions photo companies Make your graphics clickable Link to website Social media Something that allows you measure Make sure you use text labels in case images aren't displayed by the recipients email program. Be sure to test images on different devices (phones, laptops, tablets) Recognized sender - Who will be in the ‘from’ line Producers Owner Marketing Sales Just the agency Compelling subject line Create your subject line after your email campaign is complete. As I mentioned earlier, a good writer will know how to do this.  Take advantage of the pre-header text - it’s another opportunity to capture attention 2 seconds using 2 works to get people to take action today When to send Track in your metrics -  Use common sense.  As your list grows you might need to do this again to see if anything changes Those are the major points you want to think about once your campaign is created.  In this series, The Power of the Inbox, we’ve covered a lot. We’ll be publishing 2 more episodes in this series, one about growing your list and the other about automation. Both topics are a little more advanced.  Up to this point, you’ve been given a lot of information to get your emails created. Have you started?  Share what you are creating. Join the Business of Insurance FB group and lets’ talk.  If you like what we are creating in this episode and other episodes, please go to apple podcasts and leave a review.  Until next time, keep creating opportunities. SHOW THE LOVE If you haven’t done so already, please like or subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast player. We are on all of the platforms including spotify, IheartRadio and Apple podcasts. If you are listening to this podcast online and don’t know how to listen to podcasts on your phone, reach out to our host, Debbie DeChambeau and she'll help you. CONNECT WITH THE PODCAST ON SOCIAL FACEBOOK GROUP FACEBOOK PAGE TWITTER ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance podcast is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA - an entrepreneurer, business advisor, insurance professional  and content creator. Her goal is to inspire you to think differently and explore ideas that disrupt the status quo.  Debbie has an extensive business and marketing background with a focus of helping insurance professionals be more successful.  She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and produces three other podcasts, Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed and Seniors We Love.   Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.  

EP 50 - WHAT TO WRITE ABOUT This episode is for those of you who are business owners, marketing and sales.   This is the continuation of the series that started with episode 45 on marketing.  This episode takes a deeper dive into email marketing, specifically about creating content.  What will you write about? It’s one of the most asked questions  If you are just getting started, have  your staff go through their outbox and write down the topic of the last 10 emails they sent to clients. What was the topic?  On the P&C side, they were probably on certificates of insurance, changing vehicles, adding jewelry, claims, and during the pandemic, what’s covered and not covered. Right there you have 6 topics that are insurance related. But do you want your email to be focused on insurance? Do you want your email to be focused on business or the community? There’s no wrong here. Your content needs to be valuable and relevant to your audience,  based on your location, your niche, your agency goals.  This is where planning is essential. What do you want your brand to represent.  For some of you in rural communities, talking about what is going on in the community could be essential. Or creating your own events could be the focus of your emails.  Maybe you mix it up a little and one campaign is about insurance and one is about the community.  If you are focused on the business market, maybe you feature one of your business clients - interview them  If you are focused on the marine market, maybe you write about new trends in the industry.  Maybe you just send out email campaigns based on the holiday of the month. There’s a lot from donut day to peach pie day with some of the better known holidays as well.  Here’s where you start Create a content calendar. This is as simple as taking a piece of paper and dividing it into 2 column with 12 boxes. This is assuming you are sending one email campaign a month, but even with this strategy, you could send more per month., and I’ll show you that in a minute. In the left column, write each month of the year. In the right column, you write down the topic you’ll write about.  You could pick 12 insurance topics from the list I recommended you create a minute ago from sent emails. Another idea is to pick the holidays - you can google yearly holidays and you’ll see many lists of different holidays during the year. You can pick one a month and then create a calendar around that.  Here’s an example of doing something not related to insurance at all but something that might be of interest to many of your clients and prospects. And if you are creative, you can probably incorporate some insurance into some of these as well. Jan National Hug Day, National Milk Day, National Bird Day, National Hot Chocolate Day Feb World Cancer Day, National Cheddar Day, Presidents Day, National Pizza Day Mar International Women’s Day, National Napping Day, World Kidney Day, Spring Equinox April Bicycle Day, Denim Day, National High Five Day, National Siblings Day If you used National Hot Chocolate day, you could offer hot chocolate at your office for the day to anyone that comes by, get a stand in a local park and serve it or at a polar plunge event. You could send out one or two announcements about the event, write an article about the history of hot chocolate, offer different recipes for making hot chocolate, create a contest about who likes it with marshmallows and without. So many opportunities to touch the community and meet new people that could potentially be prospects and clients for you! If you are targeting homeowners, young families and life insurance, maybe you pick bicycle day. What if you raffled off a bicycle, maybe you have a bicycle clinic at your office and invite members of the community to bring their bikes by for a check-up and hire a local bicycle shop to help out. Maybe you have a helmet awareness day on bicycle day to help kids understand how to properly wear them and make sure they are properly fitted.  Now here’s something for those of you focused on business. Start with a theme of the month - then see what other activities you can create around the theme as part of your marketing.    Jan Budgeting - Interview a CPA, a money manager and provide a list of resources for creating a budget. Talk about the benefits of a budget and maybe create a contest for people to create a budget in January and submit to you for a prize drawing in February. Feb Legal - interview a business attorney - what do business owners need to address in contracts - contracts with employees, with vendors, with subcontractors. Consider having a virtual session where your clients can ask questions. You could also bring in an attorney with a niche, maybe an employment law attorney or a bankruptcy attorney for Q&A.  Mar Strategic Partnerships - most businesses grow on referrals. Yes, there is a lot of business that comes from online advertising, but if you were to survey most service businesses, they’ll tell you they get a large portion of their business from referrals. So turn that into a theme. Talk about strategies, networking opportunities, using linked for creating partnerships and paying vs. not paying for referrals.  April Content Marketing - just like I’m sharing my knowledge with you about email marketing, you can do the same with your clients. There’s so much you can talk about with content marketing from email to blogging, podcasting to creating videos. You could have a different topic each week. Bring on a different expert for each topic. If you want to do more than just creating email campaigns using a content calendar, you can expand this to a monthly theme of marketing ideas just based on one topic. For example, let’s take budgeting. That works for both individuals and businesses. In addition to making it part of your email marketing, create a few graphics for social media, Do a FB live or two with different experts on budgeting. When it’s safe to be in groups after the pandemic, offer workshops where people can come in and work on a budget as a group.  Now, you might be thinking, we are an insurance agency, not an event planning organization. That’s true, but remember, marketing is about providing valuable information, using an email campaign to promote is a way to find new prospects. I understand expanding past sending an email campaign might not be right for your agency, but it’s something to consider.  This type of content might not be valuable to everyone, but it will be to most, particularly if you have your list segmented and target the right audience. If you really feel like your agency has to focus on insurance, look up claims around hot chocolate! I’ll bet there’s something out there! What I've done here is provided you with a very simple way to create a calendar. One topic a month one email campaign a month. That’s ok if that’s what your agency decides. Maybe for the first year you send one a month, track the results then decide if you want to add more in year 2.  Can you see how creating the calendar also helps to create a theme? So your task for this episode is to create your content calendar. Start with the month after you are listening to this podcast and find a theme for 12 months. Build it out, decide who will write the content, what it will include, the deadlines for each campaign and then get it scheduled. Who will follow up to keep the project on task? The more you identify this up front, the more success you will see. If no one on your team is marketing for you, hire someone to create your email campaigns. If you need recommendations, reach out to me and I’ll connect you.  That wraps up this episode.  If you like what you’ve heard, please go to iTunes and leave a review. If you know someone that should hear this content, please share the episode with them. If you want to learn more about marketing, join the FB group called the Business of Insurance. I’ll link to it in the show notes and I look forward to meeting you there! If you want to connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, mention you heard the podcast in your request. It helps me identify the spammers from the listeners! Until next time, keep creating opportunities.. SHOW THE LOVE If you haven’t done so already, please like or subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast player. We are on all of the platforms including spotify, IheartRadio and Apple podcasts. If you are listening to this podcast online and don’t know how to listen to podcasts on your phone, reach out to our host, Debbie DeChambeau and she'll help you. CONNECT WITH THE PODCAST ON SOCIAL FACEBOOK GROUP FACEBOOK PAGE TWITTER ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance podcast is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA - an entrepreneurer, business advisor, insurance professional  and content creator. Her goal is to inspire you to think differently and explore ideas that disrupt the status quo.  Debbie has an extensive business and marketing background with a focus of helping insurance professionals be more successful.  She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and produces three other podcasts, Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed and Seniors We Love.  Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram. 

EP 49 - Marketing is about Measuring. When it comes to email marketing, there are several metrics you can measure to determine how well your campaign did. It’s important to set goals for these metrics which will help you track the progress of your campaigns as well. If you are someone that has sent email campaigns in the past, this is something you want to look at for prior campaigns and future campaigns and for those of you that haven’t sent anything yet, this is information for when you do. Inside of your ESP, there should be a place for  you to see different metrics from each campaign. You should be able to see how many people unsubscribed, how many emails bounced, how many email in- boxes were full, how many emails were opened, not opened and how many people clicked on the different links you put inside the email campaign.   TODAY WE ARE FOCUSING ON  Bounces,  Unsubscribes and  Full email boxes.  At the end of this episode I’m going to share one very valuable tip for email marketing.  One of the key indicators of how you're doing with your email marketing is to track and review your unsubscribes. Many people will say it’s how many opens you have, but if people are reading it and unsubscribing, it’s a bigger problem.  If people are unsubscribing, it is usually an indicator of 3 things:  You aren’t sending valuable content You are sending too much content Your audience isn’t interested in what you have to offer any longer It’s that simple. The content you send is important. I spoke about this in episode 47 when I gave the example of an agent in NYC sending emails about drainage problems when most of the people on the list were renters or condo owners. If this agent were to send a lot of email campaigns that weren’t relevant to renters and condo owners, then they’ll lose a lot of subscribers and that is an issue in the long run because your prospect list begins to dwindle, for the wrong reasons. It’s essential that you send relevant, valuable content and while it might take extra work, it’s also important to tailor it to the audience rather than being too generic. Another reason why people unsubscribe is that you are sending too much content. You are in their inbox too much and because they really aren’t seeing the value or they aren’t interested any more, they don’t want to see you.  Look at your own email inbox. How many people send you emails every day or every week?  How many of those do you keep and read or just delete? How many do you completely unsubscribe from? What’s your reason for unsubscribing?   Most likely that’s the reason many of the people you send email campaigns to also unsubscribe.  I’m a believer that if you evaluate your own behavior, most likely, it’s similar to others as well. That will help you manage your email campaigns. The last reason people unsubscribe is that they aren’t interested in what you have to offer any longer. This can be tricky. A realtor friend of mine was talking about her email list yesterday and said she gets people that don’t want to see information she is sending out about upcoming listings, but they do want to know about the happy hours or events that she is hosting. (and she and her team have done some very elaborate outings in the past) One of the ways you can manage this is to put a questionnaire at the unsubscribe box asking questions about why people are unsubscribing and if they still want to get emails related to certain content.  By asking this information and giving people options, it could help to salvage a few unsubscribes.   This also ties to list segmenting which I discussed in episode 47 as well. If you have an email list that you haven't sent any emails out in awhile,  you’ll need to send an introductory email or two and let the reader know what you are doing. Give them the option to unsubscribe as part of the content that you send.  Doing this helps you to set a baseline for unsubscribes.  Pay attention to your clients unsubscribing as well. If you have clients that unsubscribe and then you send an informational type of email campaign (like Covid-19 specific information) they might not get it because they unsubscribed to your list.  If people do unsubscribe, you need to look at why, but then let them go. Don’t worry about the ones that unsubscribe, just keep working to create better content and reduce the number of  unsubscribes. Let’s talk about bounced emails.  There’s a few reasons why emails bounce. One is a great marketing opportunity the others are just numbers and there’s not much you can do. When an email bounces and it’s because the email address is no longer good, it’s a indication that your prospect or client has a new email account. Hence, the marketing opportunity for you because maybe they have a new job or they started their own business or maybe they retired. In some cases it’s going from one email provider like yahoo to another like gmail.  Regardless, it’s your opportunity to reach out to them and get the new email address. It’s your opportunity to talk to them and see what changes are taking place in their life. Maybe create a business opportunity for yourself or one of your strategic referral partners. Other reasons why emails bounce include their inbox is full or they are out of office.  One other reason why they bounce is that the email service provider you are using has been blocked by the company you are sending to. For example, in my CEO roundtables, one of my members is a banker with PNC bank. When I send emails to his PNC account they always bounce because I use Constant Contact and PNC blocks Constant Contact. If I send the emails to his personal email address, then there isn’t an issue of him receiving them. Some companies will let their employees white list emails, but not all will allow that, so it’s important to keep an eye on this type of bounce metric as well. It will tell you when you need to get personal emails and not business emails! HERE’S YOUR VALUABLE EMAIL MARKETING TIP: NEVER, NEVER, NEVER BUY AN EMAIL LIST.  It’s the easiest way to get reported as spam and if you get reported as spam too many times your email account will be shut down and it is a very expensive proposition to get it back online.  If you haven’t heard of this before, you are probably thinking I’m crazy. Well, hopefully not because I’ve seen this first hand. In the early 2000’s I was involved with an international networking organization. They did monthly events and with each event, there were 3 events. Initially, we were encouraged to build our lists as much as possible. Personally, I knew better because of my knowledge on email marketing, but not everyone knew the rules. A lot of people just added names without permission and therefore, they were reporting spam. Well, this international organization was shut down. Everything email was shut down. It took them almost 3 weeks to get back up and running. As a result they implemented strict protocols regarding email addresses, but the damage had been done. Imagine not being able to communicate with clients for 3 weeks because of no email. Buying an email list is basically buying a list of email addresses that hasn’t given you permission to  email them. Some platforms like Mail Chimp require a double opt in, so that email list you bought and uploaded will have to give permission to have you add them to mail chimp. Constant Contact flags you if you try to upload too many emails at one time and will contact you to discuss the emails you have before it lets you send to them. If you aren’t truthful about where the names came from and get a lot of spams, you’ll get shut down by them. It’s not something you want to go through. While the intent of the CAN SPAM act is to have an opt out feature, it’s also better if you don’t get reported for spam.  And here’s a little side note….did you know that most CGL’s today do not provide coverage for the CAN SPAM act? Initially they did, but that’s been added as an exclusion now!  I learned that a few years ago in a CIC update I took! - ok, done with the sidebar, if you aren’t sure, read your carrier’s CGL’s and see what they say about the CAN SPAM act. And if you aren't familiar with the CAN SPAM act, then I’d  encourage you to google it and read about it! WRAPPING UP If you like what you’ve heard, please go to iTunes and leave a review. If you know someone that should hear this content, please share the episode with them. If you want to learn more about marketing, join the FB group called the Business of Insurance. I’ll link to it in the show notes and I look forward to meeting you there! If you want to connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, mention you heard the podcast in your request. It helps me identify the spammers from the listeners! Until next time, keep creating opportunities.. SHOW THE LOVE If you haven’t done so already, please like or subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast player. We are on all of the platforms including spotify, IheartRadio and Apple podcasts. If you are listening to this podcast online and don’t know how to listen to podcasts on your phone, reach out to our host, Debbie DeChambeau and she'll help you. CONNECT WITH THE PODCAST ON SOCIAL FACEBOOK GROUP FACEBOOK PAGE TWITTER ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance podcast is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA - an entrepreneurer, business advisor, insurance professional  and content creator. Her goal is to inspire you to think differently and explore ideas that disrupt the status quo.  Debbie has an extensive business and marketing background with a focus of helping insurance professionals be more successful.  She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and produces three other podcasts, Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed and Seniors We Love.  Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram. 

EP 48 - WHAT ESP SHOULD YOU USE? This is the continuation of the series that started with episode 45 on marketing. Today we are talking about your ESP - your email service provider.  Maybe you have one that you already love but the question is, are you utilizing it to the best that you can. Maybe it’s time to take a refresher course with them. Maybe it’s time to upgrade to another platform.  I’m not going to tell you which platform to use but I am going to encourage you to make sure you are maximizing the performance of the platform you are using. There are a lot of platforms to consider. I am very familiar with a platform called constant contact. I’ve used them since 2001. The platform has grown over the years and they've provided me with training modules for the last couple years and I have done probably 100 workshops using their material. Another popular platform is MailChimp. A lot of people like it because it is free. It is my understanding they do have some good tools built-in but again I'm still a bigger fan of constant contact. I'm partial I'm not going to deny it, but I'm not here to sell you on it either. But if you want to use it let me know when I can get you a good discount code. A few other popular platforms are AWeber and  Emma. I haven’t used either one of these, but I’ve heard good things about them. One factor to consider is free vs. paid. Usually a paid platform comes with great support while a free platform has minimal support. So, depending on your tech level, paying for one that has support might be better than spending hours trying to figure  out one of the free ones. I think these four platforms are good for the beginner email marketer, the smaller agency that doesn’t have a CRM. There are many CRM’s that have built in email marketing platforms. Learn how to use them and use them regularly. Other Platforms If you listen to other podcasts, you might hear advertisements for Click-Funnels and Convertkit, Active Campaign and Hubspot. These are also good platforms, but they have some advanced features that might not be necessary if you are just going to send out one or two email campaigns a month. If you are a coach, selling digital products or if you are experienced at email marketing and you are ready to take it to another level, then these platforms might be worth considering. There’s a few new names on the market that I’m not familiar with at all and they include SendinBlue, Omnisend and Pabbly. So use at your own discretion, but in the research I did for this episode, their name came up more than once. Here’s my advice. If you just want to keep it simple, if you just want to send emails to your prospects and clients, you don’t need a lot of fancy features. You need a platform that provides the following: Metrics such as bounce rates, opens, and click throughs and  one that has good templates that are also mobile responsive and today a template that looks like a letter is good enough. Not too many graphics because it slows things down and not too many colors because it’s just too much. You also want to make sure the platform has the unsubscribe option. (actually that’s essential so that you stay in compliance with the Can Spam Act) You want something that is easy to use - if it’s not, you are never going to be consistent with your marketing. One of the CRM’s I used has email built into it but honestly, it was so difficult to edit. It was easier for me to use a separate ESP Some other features you might want to consider are tagging, automation, A/B testing, and resending.  If you aren’t doing much email marketing now, if you don’t have a big list of email addresses for prospects, if you just want to send emails, then stick with Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, Emma or Aweber. Don’t worry about all of the fancy features that some of the ESP’s provide.  What you should focus on is a platform that doesn’t frustrate you and that fits the basic bill! Most importantly, only choose another ESP if your CRM doesn’t give you the features you can get in a different platform for email marketing. I’m not suggesting that you change platforms but if you aren’t using one, now is the time to do your research.  If you listened to episode 45 where I talked about the special facebook group I’m starting, we’ll talk more about these platforms and if you have any questions, we can discuss them there. Just keep in mind that nothing is perfect! As one platform adds a new feature that makes it hot, the others usually follow with a similar feature, it just takes time to get it created so there’s a lag time.  Do your research but don’t take too long. The idea here is to get started.  It’s not fun to switch platforms but it's better to do it when your list is smaller.  That wraps up this episode.  If you like what you’ve heard, please go to iTunes and leave a review. If you know someone that should hear this content, please share the episode with them. If you want to learn more about marketing, join the FB group called the Business of Insurance. I’ll link to it in the show notes and I look forward to meeting you there! If you want to connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, mention you heard the podcast in your request. It helps me identify the spammers from the listeners! Until next time, keep creating opportunities.. SHOW THE LOVE If you haven’t done so already, please like or subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast player. We are on all of the platforms including spotify, IheartRadio and Apple podcasts. If you are listening to this podcast online and don’t know how to listen to podcasts on your phone, reach out to our host, Debbie DeChambeau and she'll help you. CONNECT WITH THE PODCAST ON SOCIAL FACEBOOK GROUP FACEBOOK PAGE TWITTER ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance podcast is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA - an entrepreneurer, business advisor, insurance professional  and content creator. Her goal is to inspire you to think differently and explore ideas that disrupt the status quo.  Debbie has an extensive business and marketing background with a focus of helping insurance professionals be more successful.  She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and produces three other podcasts, Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed and Seniors We Love.   Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.  

EP 47 - THE IMPORTANCE OF EMAIL MARKETING AND SEGMENTING YOUR LIST This episode is being produced for those of you who are business owners, marketing and sales.   Listen to episode 45 before listening to this episode. Episode 46 is also worth listening to. In episode 45 we discuss the marketing foundation, identifying your ideal client,  getting your messaging right and creating some content: Do an email marketing website audit  Do a review of what you are giving away to get email addresses  Look at where the email addresses are going when you collect them.  Today we’ll focus on two areas. Why email marketing is important  Segmenting your list Email marketing is the best form of marketing. On a recent webinar about email marketing. The host showed a picture of a Wall Street Journal article from January 2019   and the headline said “ Email is the hottest form of marketing.” That was even 15 months ago (from the date of this recording). FB, IG, TW, LI were doing well a year ago. So why would the WSJ publish an article like that? You own it  You control it and  You determine where and when it is seen. (i.e. lands in someones inbox)   Facebook, twitter, IG, LI all have algorithms and they decide what you see, when you see it and how much you see. That might not sound fair, but each of them are businesses. Each of them wants to make a profit.  Most importantly, you might use one of those social media platforms but you don’t pay to get on the platform. So what do you expect to get for free?  I'm not going to talk too much about the pro’s and con’s of being on the platform, but from a business perspective, from a marketing perspective, it’s important to understand that these free platforms can do what they want. You then decide if you like their rules and want to take advantage of what they have to offer, and pay them to do so. Learning Tip: You don't own the content on social media platforms. They determine when you see things, who’s posts you see, what your viewing experience is like.  If one of those platforms goes away that audience goes away. Did you know that a few years ago Twitter was in financial trouble? They were considering going out of business? Since our current President uses the platform, a lot more people are using it and therefore, it’s not in trouble right now, but they were talking about closing down a few years ago. It wasn’t long ago that people were spending thousands of dollars to build their following on Twitter.  Imagine a company like yours that spent a lot of money and effort to build a following and then one day twitter went away. That was almost a reality for many people and businesses. What good is it to have a thousand or fifteen thousand followers if you can only connect with them on social media - and then you can only connect when the algorithm says so! Since most of you listening are insurance professionals think of this from a risk management perspective,  How would you advise your clients to minimize a business interruption claim if twitter, FB LI went away. You tell them to get contact information, get the email addresses of the people they are connected with. So truthfully one of the best marketing strategies that you could have is to build your audience on those platforms by having strategies in place to collect their contact information and the easiest first piece of data to collect is their email address.  You have got to get their contact information so that you can be visible on your terms, not on someone else’s terms. Not every email gets read, but by landing in the inbox you are at least seen! It’s a touch. Also email isn't going anywhere. I don't care what anybody says, it's the way that people communicate. Until that changes, email is a super powerful form of communication. Today yes people text, yes, people talk on the phone, yes, people are connecting on social and during this pandemic, virtually,  but the inbox is still there so at least for now and I'm going to say the next five plus years unless something new comes out, email will still be used. And even if something new did come out, people have to adapt to that technology. Back in the 90’s it took people a long time to adapt to email.  Most people are slow to change. For that reason alone, email isn’t going away anytime soon! The second topic for this episode is your list.  In the marketing world, it’s called list segmentation but that’s an industry term. Plain and simple, it’s managing your list. It is important to know that managing your list is essential for your marketing success. Some of you will have more work to do than others when it comes to your list.  In episode 45 we talked about looking at how you are collecting email addresses. They will go into a list of some sort. Maybe it’s just an excel spread sheet, maybe it’s into your CRM, maybe it’s into your ESP. (emal service provider). But once they enter your list, how are you segmenting them or is everyone going into one bucket? How are you dividing them up so that when you send an email campaign (and I’ll explain campaign another time), what buckets are they going into or is everyone going into one bucket or the same list? This is what is important.  So your task for this episode is looking at your list.  Are you breaking people's names out by personal and commercial lines? By Life by Health by home by auto? Are you breaking them out by prospects vs. clients? If you are focusing on commercial insurance, are you breaking them out by industry, like contractors, restaurants, consultants, startups,  What about breaking out your list by referral sources so maybe it's your accountants, maybe it's your lawyers, maybe it's your real estate lenders. By having lists, it opens up additional email marketing opportunities for you. You can customize the content to talk directly to the reader based on their list. For the purpose of this example, let’s say you worked in NYC and most of your clients and prospects lived in the city. What if you were to send an email out about how the grading of the soil around the house can impact flood issues in a basement. If they live in the city, they are probably in a condo or an apartment so this information is not relevant. But if you worked in NYC and targeted prospects outside of the city that live in houses, this content would be relevant. So by segmenting your list of homeowners vs. condo’s vs. renters you would be able to target the right audience with your email..  Here’s another example: Let’s say your agency is in the rural part of the state where most people have farms. If you were to send an email that focused on the 5 things to consider when purchasing condo insurance, do you think your farmers would find it relevant?  Probably not. You’d be better off sending an article about alternative ways farmers can generate income. That will get their attention.  If you don’t have your list segmented, it’s hard to customize your emails  Again, keep in mind these are just examples, but hopefully it makes it clear about why segmenting your list makes more sense for the emails that you send. When you send the wrong content to the wrong list, you begin to lose interest. People will unsubscribe. They’ll potentially report you as spam.. And trust me, you do not want anyone reporting you as spam. It’s the first way to get your email shut down.  I’ll talk more about all of this in another episode. Having a segmented list allows you to focus your email marketing campaigns on the targeted audience. How much you take your list and divide it or segment it is up to you. I will tell you from experience, the more you segment, the more success you will have. It also means more work but that’s what separates the winners from the losers! If you are focused on golf courses and contractors, consider segmenting those two lists because while they’ll have some similar needs as businesses, they also have a lot of different needs that you can focus on in your marketing. You could have each of them in a general business list and then have each of them in the contractor or golf course list. Breaking them out into  separate lists will help you target your messaging so they feel like you are speaking directly to them. Another reason for segmenting your list is that you can personalize who is sending the email.  Let’s say that you have 5 sales people in your office. 4 are focused on commercial and one is focused on personal. Each of the commercial sales people can create a list of their prospects and the emails to those prospects can be specifically from them, not a general email from the marketing person. It provides the sales person with more brand identity so that when they call the prospect,they’ll be more easily recognized and it also keeps the content focused on businesses from going to the stay at home parent. If the agency sends an email from a name the prospect does not recognize, it’s possible that the recipient won’t recognize them as easily when they follow up for the business. All of this takes more work but it is also how you get the best results.  You might be thinking that you are selling insurance and you aren't a content creator or an email marketer. But in this business today we have to be multi talented or we need to hire someone to do this for us.  If you need someone to help you with your email marketing, reach out for referrals.  It’s so important to have good valuable content for your audience but personalizing it creates better results. Here’s a recap of what we discussed today: Understand why email marketing is essential - it’s not going away and it’s not controlled by algorithms. Take a look at your list -  are they segmented and are the email addresses in the right list?  What type of lists make the most sense for you and for your agency.  Do you have personal vs. commercial, prospects vs. clients? Homeowner vs. renter? How many lists or how much you segment is your decision but the better the list, the better the results! That wraps up this episode.  If you like what you’ve heard, please go to iTunes and leave a review. If you know someone that should hear this content, please share the episode with them. If you want to learn more about marketing, join the FB group called the Business of Insurance. I’ll link to it in the show notes and I look forward to meeting you there! If you want to connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, mention you heard the podcast in your request. It helps me identify the spammers from the listeners! Until next time, keep creating opportunities.. SHOW THE LOVE If you haven’t done so already, please like or subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast player. We are on all of the platforms including spotify, IheartRadio and Apple podcasts. If you are listening to this podcast online and don’t know how to listen to podcasts on your phone, reach out to our host, Debbie DeChambeau and she'll help you. CONNECT WITH THE PODCAST ON SOCIAL FACEBOOK GROUP FACEBOOK PAGE TWITTER ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance podcast is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA - an entrepreneurer, business advisor, insurance professional  and content creator. Her goal is to inspire you to think differently and explore ideas that disrupt the status quo.  Debbie has an extensive business and marketing background with a focus of helping insurance professionals be more successful.  She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and produces three other podcasts, Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed and Seniors We Love.   Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.  

EP 46 - JOIN OUR FACEBOOK GROUP If you are an agency owner, a sales professional or doing the marketing for your agency or company, this episode and the next few are intended to help you retain your current business and continue to add more clients during these challenging times and beyond. When this podcast first launched, we had a FB group but wasn’t promoted much.   Well with the coronavirus, it’s time to get it rolling again and you are the one that will benefit. It’s a way of giving back. Especially during these difficult times. Here’s the plan: First, it’s not a sales pitch. We aren’t creating programs to sell. We don’t want to do the marketing for you. There’s enough people doing that and we can introduce them at some point.  The goal is to share our knowledge and help you be more successful. So head over to facebook, look for The Business of insurance group on FB and apply.  Why should you join the group? The conversation will focus on marketing. We’ll have guests to answer your questions.  It’s a work in progress. It’s for insurance professionals only, other than the marketing professionals that I invite. You can be an agency owner, a marketer or in sales. I don’t care if you are on the carrier side either. We will do a reference check so if your profile doesn’t say anything about your insurance career, you probably won’t be admitted! (that’s a basic marketing tip) It will be positive group and focused on marketing. If anyone enters the group to sell you something, or recruit you for something, they will be  removed. Log into FB, search for the Business of Insurance group and click to join the group. (like the business of insurance page while you are at it) CONNECT WITH THE PODCAST ON SOCIAL FACEBOOK GROUP FACEBOOK PAGE TWITTER ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance podcast is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA - an entrepreneurer, business advisor, insurance professional  and content creator. Her goal is to inspire you to think differently and explore ideas that disrupt the status quo.  Debbie has an extensive business and marketing background with a focus of helping insurance professionals be more successful.  She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and produces three other podcasts, Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed and Seniors We Love.   Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.    

EP 45 - Develop your Marketing Foundation In this episode we discuss the importance of a marketing plan and why you need to have one. We discuss some of the components and offer ideas for building your strategy. While every good marketing campaign starts with a good plan, we also provide you with three items to complete to begin building out a successful email marketing campaign. WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM LISTENING Components of a Marketing Plan Identify your ideal client Develop your messaging Create content Email Marketing Conduct a website audit Identify what you are giving away Review where the email addresses are going once people give them to you SHOW THE LOVE If you haven’t done so already, please like or subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast player. We are on all of the platforms including spotify, IheartRadio and Apple podcasts. If you are listening to this podcast online and don’t know how to listen to podcasts on your phone, reach out to our host, Debbie DeChambeau and she'll help you. CONNECT WITH THE PODCAST ON SOCIAL FACEBOOK GROUP FACEBOOK PAGE TWITTER ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance podcast is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA - an entrepreneurer, business advisor, insurance professional  and content creator. Her goal is to inspire you to think differently and explore ideas that disrupt the status quo.  Debbie has an extensive business and marketing background with a focus of helping insurance professionals be more successful.  She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and produces three other podcasts, Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed and Seniors We Love.   Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.  

EP 44 - Things are changing rapidly with the coronavirus, so as business owners, it's time to pivot. It’s time to focus on your business even though everything around  you might seem a little crazy.  If you have been in the insurance industry for awhile, this is not the first time we’ve hit a rough patch. While this one might be more severe, we’ve had situations in the past that have had a big impact on business.  In the 70’s we had the oil crisis when gas was rationed. We could only purchase gas on odd and even days, depending on how your tag ended. We didn’t have the internet then, so if you were in sales, you couldn’t really go see people if you ran out of gas. It could have become an excuse to not sell if you didn’t plan accordingly.  In the early 2000’s we had .com bubble, the 9/11 attacks and around 2007/2008 we had the subprime mortgage crisis.  All of these recessions impacted business.  While not every business survived, most people bounced back. If they didn’t stay in their current profession, they found another. Those that thrived, invested in marketing. They didn’t panic; they didn’t go into wait to see what would happen mode, they took charge and put their name out there.  What is happening today with Coronaviris is unpresented, yet, we will all bounce back. Business will continue, particularly the insurance business.  As insurance professionals, we are needed more now than ever.  As business owners, now is the time to focus on your business.  I’ve done a few episodes on marketing, but today, more than ever, it’s essential that you ramp up your marketing efforts. This is what will separate the winners from the losers.  Don’t freeze. Don’t panic.  If you listen to the news too much, it can paralyze you. Minimize the amount of time you spend on social media. I’m a big music person, so my solution is to crank up the music and dance like nobody is watching! I’m not saying ignore the news because it is changing so rapidly, we need to stay on top, But you can listen for 30-60 minutes and know everything you need to know for the day. Or you can go to your favorite news publication and read 2-3 articles and be well informed.  Things to consider for business survival I’m a believer that you want to first start with the business that you currently have.  No matter how many clients you have, pick up the phone and call them. Start from the back of the alphabet! Divide the alphabet between different staff members. Set a goal for how many calls a day you want made, and when you want all of the calls completed. In my opinion, the sooner the better. You might get some push back about what to say. Start with, Hi!, we are here and wanted to make sure you are ok. If you need us, give us a call.  Sure, you can send an email, but it’s not as personal. They will remember you for calling and checking in on them. Depending on how long this goes on, you might need to make the calls 2-3 times.  In business it costs more to onboard a new customer than it does to keep an old one. That is why I recommend focusing on the current customers first.  As you talk with them, you’ll get different concerns and then as a company you might find a way to address them. Some of the concerns or questions that are asked could be used for marketing pieces in some of the examples I’ll be suggesting in a few minutes.  So have a system to track the calls that have been made and the feedback, concerns, questions that are asked. Then do a recap with your staff. If it is just you, do your own analysis! I believe in the next 10 days, you should be ramping up one or more marketing campaigns. I would suggest a 3 prong approach at first because this is not the time to sit back and wait. I’m going to provide some suggestions that aren’t super expensive to implement. Other than time, it doesn’t cost anything to call people. Marketing Ideas To Consider Virtual Education Sessions Personal lines could do sessions on proper nutrition. Partner with a nutritionist and have a conversation about staying healthy when confined to the indoors. Bring on an estate planning attorney to discuss wills and medical directives, bring on an accountant to talk about how this might impact personal taxes Commercial lines - Bring on an business attorney and talk about business planning; bring on an accountant to talk about financial management and find a marketing consultant to talk about marketing.  Most of the ideas I’m going to mention in this episode would be great tips for your commercial clients and prospects. This is a great time for you to be offering valuable information! It doesn’t have to be just about insurance! You can use platforms like zoom, go to meeting or webex. It’s my understanding that some CRM’s have a platform built in. I have’t seen that but if your CRM has something built in, take advantage of it! Advertising Now is the time to start doing some advertising. I’m going to start with online but I also think there are other ideas that will also work. Online will be Google, FB, LI, IG and Twitter. Other platforms as well if they are relevant to your market such as Yelp, Angie’s List or Manta might be worth investigating.  Google, FB and IG are ideal for personal lines. They can be used for business but I’d do a lot of testing before throwing money towards them when you are trying to attract business clients. If you want commercial business, Google and LI will be your ideal platforms. My recommendation is that you hire someone that specializes in this. If you want to learn to do it in house, there are classes you can take but I’d suggest hiring a marketing consultant to work as an outsourced CMO for a few months until you have it down correctly. You can waste a lot of money doing it wrong. It’s not hard but you need to have the foundation right before investing the money and that’s where the CMO can help.  If you want some direction on where to find people that offer this service, reach out to me, you can find my contact information in the show notes at Thebusinessofinsurance.com I’m not a big fan of advertising in magazines or newspapers, unless it’s a specific trade magazine. For example, if you are targeting golf courses, advertising in a golf magazine is worthwhile. But advertising in the local glossy magazine might not get you the ROI you are looking for. Do you have clients or colleagues doing podcasts? If they’ve been consistent, offer to be a sponsor for a few episodes. You want to be strategic with who they are targeting, but this is an underused way to advertise so it’s worth considering. Direct Mail. I know, you are probably rolling your eyes, but because no one is sending direct mail right now. Think about it. It’s the ideal time to get noticed. Trust me. Most people will be home right now. They’ll have a few more minutes to digest the mail. If you send the right mailers, you’ll see a response. Now is the time to design, create and implement your direct mail strategy. How about sending a 12 month postcard series. Send this to your prospects. Work with a graphic designer to make it look professional or use Canva. Ideally you want it to be on the bigger post cards so that they stand out.  A few ideas, springtime gardening tips, summer grill safety,and  home fire exit plans. They key here is that they don’t need to be about insurance. They can be about things that will be of value to the reader. Even better is tips that are worth saving so they don’t throw away the post card. Partner with a local retailer and offer a discount code on the card for them to make a purchase! Get creative! If you have clients that can help, even better. For example, if you have a client that does home inspections, see if they’ll offer a 15% coupon to all of your customers for doing a deck inspection or a home inspection. People who own their homes should have them inspected every 5-10 years. (Most people think they only get inspected when they buy them, but things go wrong when they own them as well!) Here’s another idea - partner with a local restaurant. Ask them to provide a recipe for one of their dishes, then ask them to provide a discount coupon for something. Maybe buy the dish and get a desert or side dish. It would be a great way to partner with a restaurant and help support them while marketing as well.  You could do the same type of partnership for your commercial clients. Do you know a small payroll service or business coach?  Offer business tips and then a coupon for service.  You are adding value to your prospects while helping your clients as well. All while creating unique marketing pieces. If you are looking for ideas for the series of postcards that you are sending, refer back to the calls you make to your clients above. Ask them a few questions and I’m sure from those conversations you will get a lot of ideas for your postcard series. Online reviews This might be a time to implement an online review campaign. Many people will be home reading emails so now is the time to capture them. Consider platforms like Grade.us, Podium or Get More Reviews. If you want to do some research, look up ‘online review platforms or reputation management software and read some of the articles. Some of the well known platforms like Yelp and Angies list are pay to play meaning that if you don’t pay their fees, they won’t promote you. So proceed with caution with sights like that.  Something else to consider regarding online reviews is Google My business. If you haven’t set up your google my business page, do so now and direct your clients to leave a review there. One of the platforms I referenced above will help with that. Where do most people do their searches today? Google! So it’s important that you are getting reviews on a google platform!  On a side note, and this is more for online management than anything, is to search your business name. Don’t go directly to your website, but search your company. Look at all of the directory sites, is all of the information consistent?  Most likely, it isn’t. Spend some time making this consistent. If your company has the budget, look into Yext. It will make sure all of your directory sites are consistent. The issue with paying for this platform is that once you get it set up, you’ll need to keep paying because when you cancel, everything reverts back to how it was before you signed up with them.  Email Campaigns If your company didn’t do email campaigns before, consider adding them to the mix now. Like with the postcards, they should be valuable. Don’t promote your agency. No one cares about that. What they care about is what you can do for them. I’m winging a few of these ideas right now but for the next 4 weeks you could do the following: Week 1: Exercise Tips to Help During Stressful Times Week 2: Top 10 shows on Netflix and Amazon that your staff recommends Week 3: Places to go outdoors (assuming that we are allowed outdoors in three weeks!) Week 4: Cooking in bulk ideas  Other ideas would be similar to the postcards. Normally I wouldn’t say send an email a week, but during these stressful times, if the content is valuable, you’ll be ok. Watch the metrics, the unsubscribes and the bounces and manage accordingly. If too many people are unsubscribing, cut back. Also re-evaluate your content. On many platforms you can do A/B testing to a small sample to watch the metrics as well.  If you haven’t done any email marketing campaigns before, reach out to a marketing specialist for guidance. It’s not hard, but you really want to make sure that they are valuable. That’s where most people make mistakes! Podcast  Ok, I’m bringing up the podcast again. If you’ve listened to other episodes on marketing, you’ve heard me mention that a podcast is a great sales and marketing tool. You can sit in your office or your home and schedule podcast recordings all day long. Get a zoom subscriptions. It’s $15.00 a month.  You might only need it for one month. If you can get 20 recordings done, you’ve put yourself in front of 20 prospects and created some great content for your website. I haven’t gone into great detail about each of these marketing strategies, but I’ve given you an overview and some ideas on how to get started. If I were to prioritize, 1) make the phone calls. 2) Send out email campaigns to both clients and prospects that have given you permission to send. While those are in motions, design your postcard or online campaign to be launched in the next 2 weeks. I know, it seems like a lot, but trust me, now is the time to be marketing! Now is the time to stand out. Now is not the time to curl up under the covers and wait to see what happens. You are business owners, managers and sales professionals. Business requires marketing.  Pivot and get started. Thanks for listening. If you like the information, please share with another business owner or professional colleague. Until next time, keep creating opportunities. SHOW THE LOVE If you haven’t done so already, please like or subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast player. We are on all of the platforms including spotify, IheartRadio and Apple podcasts. If you are listening to this podcast online and don’t know how to listen to podcasts on your phone, reach out to our host, Debbie DeChambeau and she'll help you. CONNECT WITH THE PODCAST ON SOCIAL FACEBOOK GROUP FACEBOOK PAGE TWITTER ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance podcast is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA - an entrepreneurer, business advisor, insurance professional  and content creator. Her goal is to inspire you to think differently and explore ideas that disrupt the status quo.  Debbie has an extensive business and marketing background with a focus of helping insurance professionals be more successful.  She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and produces three other podcasts, Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed and Seniors We Love.   Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.  

EP 43 - This episode provides you with risk management ideas to consider in the event your office needs to shut down due to the coronavirus. Most people will telework but there are areas to address with this from servers to IP protocols, internet access to telephone trees.  Also consider remote calls, remote signatures and communicating with your business customers. The intent of the episode is to get business owners thinking. Better to be prepared than scramble at the last minute.. CONNECT WITH THE PODCAST ON SOCIAL FACEBOOK GROUP FACEBOOK PAGE TWITTER ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance podcast is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA - an entrepreneurer, business advisor, insurance professional  and content creator. Her goal is to inspire you to think differently and explore ideas that disrupt the status quo.  Debbie has an extensive business and marketing background with a focus of helping insurance professionals be more successful.  She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and produces three other podcasts, Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed and Seniors We Love.  Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.    

INSURANCE PODCAST WITH CHRISTIAN BRINDLE EP 42  - Our guest, Christian Brindle, is taking his content marketing to another level. His topic is boring to most yet his audience needs the information. Creating content has increased his business in ways that he never expected. Christian and I are part of a few FB groups focused on Medicare. When he was ready to publish his latest book, The Insurance Funnel: 9 Simple Tests Every Insurance Policy Must Pass Before Purchase, he asked if anyone had a podcast that he could be a guest on, I raised my hand. It’s ironic how someone you only know through a social media platform has so much in common with you.  I started in the business working for my father, as did he. We both have podcasts and we are both published authors, except he’s published more books than me! He’s an inspiration for sure! Christian’s podcast, The Everything Medicare Podcast, is published 3 times a week, but when he started,it was very sporadic. He talks about how the podcast has helped his business and why he is now publishing 3 episodes a week.  I’ve listened to many of the episodes. As I move into the medicare space in my insurance practice, I’ve tapped into every resource I can for learning. His podcast is full of a lot of good information. During this conversation, we talk about a lot. From working with family to his podcast sponsor, it’s informative for anyone looking to do some different type of content marketing. What content creation has it done for his business?  The podcast alone has brought in so many referrals that he’s had to get licensed in several states to accommodate the clients. The book is a great calling card to initiate a conversation with his strategic partners and potential clients. The content he has created has quickly positioned him as an expert in the field. Did you enjoy that conversation? If so, please go to apple podcasts (also known to many as iTunes) and leave us a review. If you have friends or colleagues that you think would benefit from the conversation, please share the podcast with them as well. Nothing makes me happier than to hear other insurance professionals creating a podcast or publishing a book. It levels you up, provides almost instant credibility and positions  you as an authority.  For Christians podcast, it was really exciting to hear how it has helped his business. Since I’m now in the medicare space, I started another podcast called Seniors We Love, and while I don’t specifically talk about Medicare throughout each episode, it is sponsored by my agency and as part of the sponsorship, I provide a medicare nugget in each episode. I’ll report back in a year as to how that helped my business.  I originally booked him as a guest to help him promote his book but learning about how he got into the business and the podcast was part of why I enjoyed the conversation so much. If you are thinking about writing a book, find a way to get it done. If it’s an insurance book, write something that you can use as a calling card to get directly in front of your prospects. It will make a difference! If you want to learn more about Christian, go to his business website, ChristianBrindle Insurance Services.com, or connect with him on his social platforms.  Don’t forget to check out his book, The Insurance Funnel: 9 Simple Tests Every Insurance Policy Must Pass Before  Purchase. You can find it on Amazon. Until next time, keep creating opportunities ABOUT OUR GUEST – CHRISTIAN BRINDLE  Christian Brindle is on all of the social media platforms and his books can be found on Amazon. His podcast can be found on Apple Podcasts (iTunes), Spotify, Stitcher and your favorite podcast player.  Connect with him on: LinkedIn  Facebook.   Twitter Website Podcast - The Everything Medicare Podcast Book - The Insurance Funnel: 9 Simple Steps Every Insurance Policy Must Pass Before Purchase CONNECT WITH THE PODCAST ON SOCIAL FACEBOOK GROUP FACEBOOK PAGE TWITTER ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance podcast is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA - an entrepreneurer, business advisor, insurance professional  and content creator. Her goal is to inspire you to think differently and explore ideas that disrupt the status quo.  Debbie has an extensive business and marketing background with a focus of helping insurance professionals be more successful.  She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and produces three other podcasts, Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed and Seniors We Love.   Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram. 

EP 41 - If you haven’t listened to episode 40,  it would help set the scenario for the conversation in this episode. Welcome listeners from Agency Nation. In January we were added as a content contributor and they are promoting this podcast to their audience. Agency Nation is also producing their own podcast and there are a few other podcasts on the platform, so check it out if you aren’t familiar with them.  The core of this podcast is to talk about why the insurance industry is such a great profession with segments on different professions within the industry, personal development, marketing for those of you in business development and anything else that is beneficial to insurance professionals.  SPONSORED BY PODCAST, INC 2020 We are talking about three areas from episode 40. The first is sales, the second is mastermind and the last area is advisors.  WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM LISTENING What makes insurance agents more than sales people Ideas on training new producers Asking questions that aren't on the insurance application How to position yourself as an advisor and build your network at the same time Leveraging your business relationships How not to burn out your spouse HOW TO LEAVE A REVIEW If you have an iphone or an iTunes account, would you leave us a review?  It provides us the opportunity to get discovered by other agents. Log into your account, look for our podcast Business of Insurance then go to Ratings and Reviews and let us know what you think of the episode. SHOW THE LOVE If you haven’t done so already, please like or subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast player. We are on all of the platforms including spotify, IheartRadio and Apple podcasts. If you are listening to this podcast online and don’t know how to listen to podcasts on your phone, reach out to our host, Debbie DeChambeau and she'll help you. CONNECT WITH THE PODCAST ON SOCIAL FACEBOOK GROUP FACEBOOK PAGE TWITTER ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance podcast is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA - an entrepreneurer, business advisor, insurance professional  and content creator. Her goal is to inspire you to think differently and explore ideas that disrupt the status quo.  Debbie has an extensive business and marketing background with a focus of helping insurance professionals be more successful.  She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and produces three other podcasts, Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed and Seniors We Love.   Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.  

PLANNING FOR A NEW SALES PRODUCER WITH REMMIE BUTCHKO EP 40 - Our guest, Remmie Butchko, is the CEO of Georgetown Insurance located in Silver Spring MD. In this episode, he talks about his career first as a producer then as an agency principal and the road to success.   QUESTIONS WE ASK Describe your current position  How did you end up in this profession? What do you like about what you are doing? What do you wish you’d known before you started in this position Where do you see yourself in 5 years in this industry? How would you describe your career right now? ABOUT OUR GUEST – REMMIE BUTCHKO Remmie Butchko is the CEO of Georgetown Insurance. The agency was started by his parents and he is now managing the operation. Connect with him: LinkedIn,  Website Facebook.   Twitter CONNECT WITH THE PODCAST ON SOCIAL FACEBOOK GROUP FACEBOOK PAGE TWITTER ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance podcast is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA - an entrepreneurer, business advisor, insurance professional  and content creator. Her goal is to inspire you to think differently and explore ideas that disrupt the status quo.  Debbie has an extensive business and marketing background with a focus of helping insurance professionals be more successful.  She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and produces three other podcasts, Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed and Seniors We Love.  Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.  

EP 39- A conversation about working in this amazing industry. This industry is actively recruiting for talent but insurance isn’t a profession that many people think about when they are in high school or college. Many people enter this industry by chance or because their parents were in the business. Once they dive in, most people love it. The cool thing about the industry is all of the options.  Today's guest didn’t have the typical career path. Her experience might be helpful to someone wondering what direction to take with a career in insurance.   Episodes 31 and 34, were recorded at the regional conference for the International Association of Insurance Professionals and this is another conversation from that conference. Many of the participants spoke about their careers in the industry as well as the association itself and the benefits of being a member. This is a continuation of those conversations.  Geraldine Plott who provides some great insight into the organization and ideas for you to consider for future personal growth. She also talks about her career path that might provide some of you listening ideas for areas to pursue.  One of the things that Geraldine and many of the other attendees mentioned is that they had to be dragged to a meeting. They didn’t want to go. Yet once they got there, they never stopped going. So many of us are busy, we have a lot of choices and it’s often difficult to attend meetings, much less get involved. Depending on what you want out of your career, being part of an association in some capacity can be beneficial.  Think about finding an organization to get involved with. Maybe it’s the International Association of Insurance Professionals, maybe it’s your state insurance association or maybe it’s a local organization that serves the community. There is so much value when you get involved. We just have to make the time to make it happen.  SPONSORED BY PODCAST, INC 2020 Will we see you at Podcast Inc? If you have a larger company, let’s say more than 50 employees, or maybe you have multiple locations or a sales staff that is always on the road, how are you communicating with everyone?  As the company grows, it’s easy to loose the small business feel where everyone knows the owner of the company and gets to talk to them. When you have multiple locations or a remote staff, it’s easy for communication to feel out of reach. This conference is about creating podcasts for internal communication. Getting the CEO, the HR department, the Marketing department and other department heads to talk to the rest of the employees through a podcast.  Often times these conversations happen at annual meetings or quarterly roundtables, but when this happens, you have a limited amount of time and everyone is vying to get their message heard. It’s difficult to go too deep into a conversation because of time.  Take your sales meeting and turn it into a podcast. Take your Managers meeting and turn it into a podcast.  Record the conversations, make them available to your staff and increase the communication in the organization. At this conference, we are bringing together companies that want to create podcasts for internal communication and talking about best practices.   We will have sessions on IT considerations for keeping this information inside the organization. We will have sessions on creating systems for HR  and marketing for curating content and guiding teams on delivering. There are many podcast conferences being held across the country but this is the first that specializes in internal podcasting for business.  WHEN:  May 1, 2020  WHERE:  Washington, DC.  If you have a larger company, let’s say more than 50 employees, how are you communicating with staff. As the company grows, it’s easy to loose the small business feel where everyone knows the owner of the company and gets to talk to them.  This conference is about creating podcasts for internal communication.  We are talking about creating a podcast that only your employees will hear…..not the outside world  This is a conference where someone from HR, Marketing and specifically communications and IT need to attend.!  If you have an agency with multiple locations, are part of an insurance company or a vendor in this space, we’d love to see you there if it makes sense for your company.  Go to podcastinc.co to get additional details. This isn’t just for the insurance industry, there will be other industries in attendance such as banks, non profits and government agencies. We will have limited seating, so if you think this will make sense for you, don’t wait too long to register.  SHOW THE LOVE If you haven’t done so already, please like or subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast player. We are on all of the platforms including Spotify, IheartRadio and Apple podcasts. If you are listening to this podcast online and don’t know how to listen to podcasts on your phone, reach out to our host, Debbie DeChambeau and she'll help you. KEEP CREATING OPPORTUNITIES CONNECT WITH THE PODCAST ON SOCIAL FACEBOOK GROUP FACEBOOK PAGE TWITTER ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance podcast is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA - an entrepreneurer, business advisor, insurance professional  and content creator. Her goal is to inspire you to think differently and explore ideas that disrupt the status quo.  Debbie has an extensive business and marketing background with a focus of helping insurance professionals be more successful.  She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and produces three other podcasts, Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed and Seniors We Love.   Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.  

EP 7 - This is a podcast about what happens with seniors, from caring to financial issues, behaviors to independence and everything in between. In this episode, you’ll get insights on why you need to be with your senior while they are in the hospital. These are specific items that happened to me while my mom in to the hospital 6 times within 3 months.  My mom was probably one of the worse types of patients. Hopefully some of these items will never happen to you. You’ll have knowledge in the worst case scenario! Top 10 Reasons why you need to be in the hospital with your loved ones! Keep Them Covered Stay In Bed  Tissues Notes MRI Chargers Reminders Remote Control Cell Phones Flight Risk SPONSOR INFORMATION Lynn Michel Insurance, LLC If you know someone over 65 that is still working, this message is important for them. If they are on their employers plan, have them verify that it is credible coverage. They should get a letter every year with this verification so that when they decide to stop working or they no longer want the employers health insurance, they won’t be penalized by medicare for not having credible coverage. Without this confirmation, the penalty can be substantial and expensive for someone in retirement.  If you know someone turning 65 that is still working, have them contact Lynn Michel Insurance and discuss their options. There is no charge for the call.  Lynnmichel.com 301996-2328 debbie@lynnmichel.com SOCIAL MEDIA FOR SENIORS WE LOVE Connect with us on our social media platforms for Seniors We Love Facebook Instagram Twitter ABOUT THE HOST Debbie DeChambeau is a content creator, business and marketing strategies and professional insurance agent. She has spent many years caring for family members from raising her neice and nephew, caring for her grandmother and caring for her parents (of which she had more than most people) Her love for podcasting and for the insurance industry have her creating content that help seniors with their insurance decisions as well and caregivers understand what to expect in their new role. She is a believer in continued education for her profession and earned the designations as a Certified Insurance Counselor and an Accredited Advisor of Insurance.   She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and hosts three other podcasts Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed and Business of Insurance.  Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.    

EP - 38 In this episode, you’ll learn about a few the hosts favorite podcasts of 2019 and the value they can bring to you as an insurance agent.  FAVORITE PODCASTS BUSINESS AND INSPIRATION BRIAN BUFFINI - I’ve been a fan of Buffini for a long time. It’s the one podcast I look forward to every week...It plays every Tuesday  morning. His methodology is so simple. His podcast is usually very inspiring and he has some great guests. While his message is  primarily focused on the real estate industry, his ideas will also work in the insurance industry. Brian does throw in a little bit about is coaching business, and that turns some people off. I ignore that part and love the ideas he shares.  For those of you that work in personal lines and do a lot around homeowners ….his podcast will provide some insight into the real estate business which can help you with your conversations with your referral partners.Occassionally he talks about the state of the real estate market which I think is helpful for those in our industry. MARKETING BUILD A BETTER AGENCY - Hosted by Drew McLellan and mentioned in episode 37. While this podcast is focused on marketing agencies, so many of the concepts discussed work for business owners. He’s talking about real issues that business owners need to think about. You’ll get some ideas herer for your business with some marketing ideas mixed in! DUCT TAPE MARKETING - John Jantsch - something you might not know about me is for the last 10 years, I was a part of Duct Tape Marketing. I found out about the organization when he released his book The Referral Engine. Since I was in the referral training business, I thought I’d get some good systems for teaching people about referrals. When I joined in 2009, the internet was exploding. Creating content was essential. So instead of absorbing referral strategies, I started building websites, creating email campaigns, doing social media posts. After a few years, I started to realize that I didn’t like doing any of that. I went on a speaking spree for a year before my caregiving role kicked in. I’m no longer part of the network, but I’m a big fan of John and Duct Tape Marketing. One of the things he would talk about from the beginning was creating a podcast. It seemed overwhelming to me at the time considering I was learning so many other things. In retrospect, I wish I’d focused on the podcast and stayed away from websites and the other marketing tactics I was offering. I think podcasting is the best sales tool out there. It’s a great platform ...hence I have 4! This podcast is one of the older ones and many people model their podcast off of Duct Tape Marketing! SPONSORED BY PODCAST, INC WHEN:  May 1, 2020  WHERE:  Washington, DC.  If you have a larger company, let’s say more than 50 employees, how are you communicating with staff. As the company grows, it’s easy to loose the small business feel where everyone knows the owner of the company and gets to talk to them.  This conference is about creating podcasts for internal communication. Getting the CEO, the HR department, the Marketing department and other department heads to talk to the rest of the employees. Often times these conversations happen at annual meetings or quarterly roundtables, but everyone is vying for time, and can’t always deliver the deep messages they want.  We are bringing together companies that want to create podcasts for internal communication and talking about best practices. We are talking about creating a podcast that only your employees will hear…..not the outside world  This is a conference where someone from HR, Marketing and specifically communications and IT need to attend!  If you have an agency with multiple locations, are part of an insurance company or a vendor in this space, we’d love to see you there if it makes sense for your company.  Go to podcastinc.com to get additional details. This isn’t just for the insurance industry, there will be other industries in attendance such as banks, non profits and government agencies. We will have limited seating, so if you think this will make sense for you, don’t wait too long to register. PODCASTS ABOUT PODCASTING If you are into podcasting or want to learn more about podcasting, I have 3 podcasts to recommend. I’ll keep this brief since many of you might not be interested in podcasting. But I am and listen to a lot of podcasts on the subject. NEW MEDIA SHOW - Todd Cochrane and Rob Greenlee - Both of these two are icons in the podcasting space. They’ve had this show for almost 10 years. If you are interested in the industry, it’s the one to pay attention to. SCHOOL OF PODCASTING - Dave Jackson - Dave has also been podcasting for a long time. He’s teaching people how to podcast. He’s in it every week. If you think you want to start a podcast, check out his show and his program. He’s good! Podcasting is his gig.  THE FEED - this podcast is co-hosted with Rob Walch and Elsie Escobar, both podcast hall of famers. It’s the marketing arm for Libsyn which is a podcast hosting company. I have three of my podcasts on this platform and one of them on Blubrry which is Todd Cochranes company. They talk about issues around podcasting and around LIbsyn. Always good stuff.  CRIME When I was training for the NY Marathon in 2018 year, I listened to a lot of crime podcasts. I’m a slow runner so I spent a lot of time training and listened to a lot podcasts. My major in college was law enforcement, so I’m often intrigued by crime stories, but I don’t listen to them too consistently. One of my favorites is Up and Vanished, the first season but the second season didn’t keep my attention. This is a true story and they found the criminal as a result of the podcast, so don’t google this one…..just start from episode 1 season one.  I also listen to Crime Junkie and will pop on Small Town Dicks every once in awhile.  INSURANCE I have my share of insurance podcasts that I listen to but some of them just turn my stomach…..so macho, old boy network that I struggle with them. The content is usually good, but I can’t handle the locker room ego crap….so I’ll let you find the insurance podcasts you like! If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m about diversity, inclusion and I feel very strongly about  supporting and promoting women. Insurance is a male dominated profession for some reason and someone needs to stand up for women in this industry. When I look at conferences being planned, the first thing I look for is how many women speakers there are….and their titles. If there aren’t any women or diversity on the speaker list, I call out the conference planner.  I’m doing my small part and I hope some of my younger peers will do the same in promoting women. To those of you in the insurance space creating podcasts and promoting women in the industry, I salute you! I listen to them, I pay attention.  Don’t make them the token episodes, make sure you have a balance of women and diversity on your episodes.   If you didn’t know this, I have a few other podcasts that I produce. One of them is Divorce Exposed. Insights for staying married, inspiration for surviving divorce. It’s a passion project for me and if you listen to episode one of this podcast, you’ll get a good idea of my background. Another podcast is Business In Real Life. This one started out promoting my clients. It’s been like pulling teeth to get my clients to agree to a podcast interview, so it’s evolved into ideas about running a business. I now use it as a tool to promote my business groups. Its the first podcast I started and it will probably be benched the first as I focus on this one, and the other two. My most recent podcast is Seniors We Love. Since I’m back in the insurance business, focusing on medicare insurance options, I’m using it as a tool to market my new agency. I want to talk about seniors who deserved to be remembered. Eventually I want to turn some of the episodes into a book that can be handed down families so their loved ones aren’t forgotten in the event that digital goes away! If you listened to episode 37 where I talked about year end planning, my own planning is focused on these podcasts and growing my new agency. Let’s see how I practice what I preach! I’d love to know your favorite episodes. Go to the Business of insurance FB page and leave a note about the podcasts you enjoy! Let me know what you like about it as well! Until next time, keep creating opportunities. YOUR HOST: Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA - an entrepreneurer, business advisor, insurance professional  and content creator. Her goal is to inspire you to think differently and explore ideas that disrupt the status quo.  Debbie has been an insurance agent for over 25 years and has an extensive business and marketing background. Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.  

EP - 36  What happens when your life is turned upside down because you have to care for a family member?  In this episode, our host, Debbie DeChambeau, talks about the challenges and joys of caregiving and how it can impact a professional life. She provides ideas for talking to your clients and prospects about taking steps to prepare for the difficult times. This isn’t an episode on financial planning,  just thinking bigger. You’ll find ideas for helping your clients and having an advisor mindset, not just selling the product they want to buy.  As insurance agents, you know a lot. The longer you are in the business, the more you learn. It’s an industry that is not stagnant and with new technology new exposures arise. Insurance companies develop products to protect these exposures, and the products evolve over time. It’s an industry that keeps you on your toes because of all of the changes.  The core theme of this episode is that you know more than your clients and it’s important that you share your wisdom as much as you can to offer strategies and ideas to help them make educated decisions.  Check out our other podcasts Seniors We Love and Business In Real Life

Did you know that people are turning 65 at a rate of 10,000 people per day and that number isn’t expected to decrease for a few years?  That’s a lot of people turning 65. A lot of the people who have had Great accomplishments throughout their lives Their stories might not have been told and if they have been, they might not be remembered. Welcome to seniors we love, a podcast designed to honor the people who have made a difference in our lives. Who might not have gotten the recognition they deserved any other way.  It’s where we share stories of people who have made a difference  Mixed in we talk about some of the difficulties they’ve experienced and some of the joys of their adventures. Trailblazers in their own subtle way. I hope throughout this podcast to share those stories of people who really made a difference and mixed in between some of the stories will probably be some of the difficulties of the senior life that people experience  My name is Debbie DeChambeau and I am the host of this podcast and in 2019, I am also a caregiver. I didn’t plan to be a caregiver. I didn’t go looking for it.  People tell me they don’t know how I do what I do. It’s something I have heard all of my life. Honestly, I just do what I think needs to be done and I keep moving forward. I’m a survivor. I don’t think twice about it. I focus on having a positive attitude  and I think in many ways that’s what keeps me going In many ways I might have set myself up for it because I am so caring. I’m not afraid to jump in and try to figure it out. And I’m not that good at saying NO.  My sister passed away in November, 1999. She was 34 and left behind 4 children. A year after her death, her husband was floundering so I was asked to care for her two youngest children for awhile. I went from two kids to four overnight. I figured it out. I was raising 4 children for over a year. What a challenging time that was in my life. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I managed the care for my biological father during the last year of his life. You see he ended up in the hospital once a month and would be there for a week at a time. It was an hour away, but I drove there every day, met with the doctors, coordinated the care then came home to take care of the 4 kids. He would misbehave in the middle of the night and they would call me to come and sit with him because they didn’t have anyone else. While caring for him was different than the caring I’ve done for others, his taught me a lot that has helped me over the past 10 years. I also have a step father. Actually if you want to learn a little more about me outside of this podcast episode, go to episode 1 of Divorce Exposed, another podcast I host and you’ll get a lot of my backstory.  I digress.  When my step father passed away, he had a brother that he looked after every month. This was my Uncle Merrill. On the way to the funeral, I learned how much my dad was helping his brother. I said to my uncle, if you ever need any help, let me know, I live in a big house and I’m happy to help. It was my way of letting my dad know how much I was part of his family. Another story for another podcast. Little did I know that within 6 months he would be living with me. He was with me for almost 10 years. I was his caregiver and I’ll talk more about him in another episode. My mom and I have had an interesting relationship over the years. For the first 30ish, she was an alcoholic. Once she was in recovery, we made up for all of the lost years. I always told her there was a room for her in my home when she needed it and that I would never put her in a nursing home. I don’t believe in that.  3 years ago, my mom moved in with me. It was a short visit because she had fallen off the wagon and it was like reliving my teenage years. Fast forward 3 years and she is again in recovery but she’s also very sick and currently in hospice. I’m her caregiver. It’s so much more than I ever imagined. I’m good at providing medicine, doing laundry and keeping people doing the right thing. I’m not so good at some of the other duties of a caregiver. I really don’t like changing the porta potty or cleaning the wounds. With my sisters children, I had a husband who helped and I was 20 years younger! With my uncle, he did almost everything for himself, or at least tried to.  My mom is a primadonna. She wants everything done for her. That might be because she currently weighs 79 lbs. And  is also a fall risk so she can’t do much. But she doesn’t make it easy. Living with my mom for the first time in 30 years has been quite an adjustment. I’ve learned so many things about her that I was never aware of. Or maybe I just forgot or didn’t see them because of the alcoholism.  There’s a reason we didn’t get along when I was a teenager, but I don’t think I was the issue! (wink wink) Because of the caregiving I’m doing for my mom, I decided to create this podcast. I’ve learned so much about her and I think it needs to be shared. Not in a negative way, but in a way that inspires others.  I want to showcase how amazing people are. The little things that make a difference that don't always get talked about. I’m also an insurance agent. I started working for my step dad when I was 15. After my sister passed, I stepped away from the industry for awhile. I kept my license and did my required continuing education credits each year. I’m a certified insurance counselor, so I’ve taken a lot of classes. I kept my insurance license because I didn’t know what the future would hold.  While caring for my mom and trying to figure out her medicare benefits, I was so  overwhelmed. I figure if I’m having trouble with this stuff, how can seniors and other caregivers figure it out. I’m an insurance agent and I’m struggling. I realized why I kept my insurance license all these years. I’m now back in the insurance business as a medicare agent. I’m a resource for anyone eligible for medicare, helping them navigate the confusing waters. It’s a world filled with acronyms. Mops, QMB’s DSNPs to SEP’s. And the list goes on for the acronyms! I started my own insurance agency called Lynn Michel Insurance. Lynn is my middle name, Michel is my youngest son's middle name. He hates that name so I’m hoping to showcase how beautiful it is! I’m also hoping he’ll decide to join me in the business one day. If nothing else, It’s a lot shorter than DeChambeau!  So if you know a senior that needs a review of their medicare insurance, I’d love to be the person you talk to. Technically, I’ve been an insurance agent for the past 40 years, and at the time of this recording I’m almost a year in the medicare space. Being new is a good thing. I’ll be thorough, do the research and provide you with the options that you are looking for. Everything is fresh because of all the studying I’ve been doing. While everything is highly regulated by CMS (centers for Medicare and Medicaid services) and I mean highly regulated, I’ve also completed the certifications for Part C and Part D. Talk about complicated. So if you need someone to talk to about medicare, go to LYNNMICHEL.com or call me at 301-996-2328.  As a caregiver and as an insurance agent, I understand this complicated world of looking out for the Seniors We Love. I’m super excited to share these stories with you. I hope they motivate and inspire and provide talking points for your family as we remember the seniors we love.  If you have someone you want me to talk about, please reach out to me at seniorswelove@gmail.com  Seniors we love is my 4th podcast. If you want to listen to my other podcasts they are titled Divorce Exposed, Business In Real Life, The Business of Insurance and I hope to release Single and Over Sixty soon. I’ll link to them in the show notes which you can find at seniorswelove.com

Welcome to Seniors We Love, a podcast designed to honor the people who have made a difference in our lives. Who might not have gotten the recognition they deserved any other way.  Most of us go through life making a difference, even if only in small ways. Most people have accomplishments that are never recognized. These might include running the school school PTA, volunteering for 10 years at the local food bank, coaching Little league or simply walking through the community cleaning up trash. It could be a small invention or traveling to remote places or caring for others. Everyone has a story. There are so many seniors who shouldn’t be forgotten.  Their activities deserve to be remembered, cherished and celebrated.  For example, there is a lake in the community where I live. Someone started a group to clean up the lake twice a year. This person promotes the event, recruits the volunteers, They work tirelessly to find sponsors to provide the materials from gloves to bags, ladders and pick up trucks. This person's story should be remembered.  Another one of my neighbors was very involved in having a church built many years ago. While I knew he was attended the church, I didn’t know how involved he was in the design. He was a boater. If you look up in the church, you can see the bottom of a boat. Very clever. I didn’t learn that until I attended his funeral but how cool would it have been to hear the story and have it available for others over the years! I want to know: what was the motivation behind behind what they do  Where does the passion come from   Why are they giving their time And a lot more You see, that's the kind of stuff I think we really want to know. Maybe they are a grandmother and they want to teach their grandchildren about taking care of mother earth. Who’s talking about them and remembering them. For all the people that walk around the lake or attend the church, do they know the backstory?  Do you have seniors like this in your life that have a story that isn't being told? Please reach out to me as I  want to talk about them or to someone who can talk for them and share their story.  That’s what seniors we love podcast is going to be about. Mixed into the conversation will be things that seniors need to be thinking about or things that caregivers might need to think about for their seniors. At some point we might talk about taking away the keys or we might talk about health insurance or we might talk about final expense planning or we might talk about hospice. Topics and conversations that relate to seniors that many of us might not be aware of. My name is Debbie DeChambeau and I am your host. This is my 4th podcast and If you want to listen to my other podcasts they are titled Divorce Exposed, Business In Real Life, The Business of Insurance and I hope to release Single and Over Sixty soon. I’ll link to them in the show notes which you can find at seniorswelove.com I’m super excited to share these stories with you. I hope they motivate and inspire and provide talking points for your family as we remember the seniors we love.  If you have someone you want me to talk about, please reach out to me at seniorswelove@gmail.com  This episode of the Seniors We Love Podcast is brought to you by Lynn Michel Insurance. If you have a senior in the US, most likely they are on medicare. It’s a health care plan with many options that many seniors aren’t aware of. From DSNPS to Troop, MOP to PDP, the acronyms alone can be confusing. When you work with an agent for prescription drug or part D coverages, they go through some stringent certifications. This applies to part C, Medicare Advantage as well. Talk to Lynn Michel and get all of your questions answered about your health care options through Medicare. Call them at 301-996-2328 or check out their website lynnmichel.com (spell it out) Enjoy Seniors We Love. Tell your friends and family so that we can spread the word about the important people in our lives  

ARE YOU PROTECTING YOUR MEDIA? EP 35 - In this episode of The Business of Insurance Podcast, Debbie DeChambeau discusses concepts that agency principals and marketing professionals need to consider around the content being created. With marketing platforms changing faster than most people can keep up with, it is often hard to understand their impact right away. For example, if your employee creates their own brand on social media in an effort to attract new business, do you own it or is it theirs? If an employee is hosting your podcast and decides to leave, can you replace them? What about your video’s? Do you owe them any compensation for the media that continues to run online after they leave? These are just a few of the issues we discuss in this episode.   JOIN OUR FACEBOOK AND LINKEDIN GROUP FACEBOOK GROUP WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM LISTENING Conversations you should be having with your marketing team and legal counsel How to put all the marketing information in one location  What are the obligations surrounding the voice or face of your digital media? ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA. Debbie is an insurance agent with an extensive business and marketing background. Her focus is helping insurance professionals be more successful. She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and hosts two other podcasts Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed. Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram. Coming soon. Single and Over Sixty and Seniors We Love

INTERNSHIPS, LEADERSHIP AND UNDERWRITING Ep 34 - The core of this podcast is to talk about Insurance and what an amazing industry it is. From talking to company employees, association staff and those that are contributing to the industry.  Our guests in this episode are both underwriters and members of IAIP. From their start as interns to their adventure into the agency side, they provide a unique perspective into many aspects of the insurance industry. In this conversation we discuss: Internships and how they are a great introduction into the insurance company side of the business Leadership programs offered by IAIP Which side is your bread plate and which side is your water glass? The value of being Voluntold (no, it's not a typo!) Why you need a concise elevator pitch RESOURCES International Association of Insurance Professionals  Facebook Group ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA. Debbie is an insurance agent with an extensive business and marketing background. Her focus is helping insurance professionals be more successful. She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and hosts two other podcasts Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed. Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.  Coming soon. Single and Over Sixty and Seniors We Love

TAKE YOUR ONLINE CONNECTIONS OFFLINE EP 33 - Today we are talking about growing your business using an old fashioned tried and true method, by referrals.  WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM LISTENING Specific strategies for building your referral marketing plan Ideas for getting in front of the people that can refer you business Suggestions on how to have an effective first meeting with your strategic partners who can refer you business Tactics for adding value that will build effective relationships that will generate referrals If you think this information would benefit a friend or co-worker, please share with them.  RESOURCES Check out episode 17 where we take a deep dive into podcasting for insurance professionals Check out episode 32 where my guest provides great tips on using LinkedIn for business. JOIN OUR FACEBOOK GROUP ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA. Debbie is an insurance agent with an extensive business and marketing background. Her focus is helping insurance professionals be more successful. She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and hosts two other podcasts Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed. Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.  Coming soon: Seniors We Love

  EP 32 - If you are an insurance professional, an agent bringing in new business or the principal of an insurance agency, this episode is for you. If you aren't in the insurance business, but want to learn more about LinkedIn, you will find a lot of value in this podcast episode. Our guest today is Karen Yankovich. We met last fall at a podcast conference. She is a LinkedIn expert helping professionals build a profile and utilize the platform for business development.  She is a fellow podcaster and is the host of Good Girls Get Rich, so I’d encourage you to listen to her podcast for other tips around LinkedIn and marketing! QUESTIONS WE ASK What should the focus be on the LinkedIn profile? When is the best time to post? Why are keywords valuable for LinkedIn? How can we find business using LinkedIn? Is LinkedIn still relevant today? JOIN OUR FACEBOOK GROUP FACEBOOK GROUP RESOURCES Transcription service that is reliable and reasonably priced - Rev.com  Karen’s podcast - Good Girls Get Rich Get free tips on linked #linkedinquicktips Check out upcoming LinkedIn workshops  Freelinkedinworkshop.com ABOUT OUR GUEST – KAREN YANKOVICH Connect with Karen on her digital platforms:  Website LinkedIn, Facebook.   Twitter Podcast - Good Girls Get Rich Instagram ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA. Debbie is an insurance agent with an extensive business and marketing background. Her focus is helping insurance professionals be more successful. She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and hosts two other podcasts Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed. Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.  Coming soon. Single and Over Sixty and Seniors We Love

LEADERS UNDERSTAND THE VALUE OF HARD WORK WITH JESSICA PRUITT EP 31 - Jessica Pruitt president of Lebanon Insurance agency. She was recruited from a fast food restaurant, worked her way through different departments and is now owns  the insurance agency. Jessica discusses the work she did over the years that she thinks positioned her for being the right person to run the agency. Her office is located in a part of Virginia that is somewhat old school, so she had to deal with prospects and clients wanting to speak to a man. Some finally agreed to work with her and some took their business elsewhere. She’s persevered and grown the business as a woman and is beginning to make a name for herself in her community. INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF INSURANCE PROFESSIONALS This podcast was recorded at the regional conference for International Association of Insurance Professionals. For those of you that have been around for awhile, you might know it as NAIW, but they did a rebranding a few years ago to open it to both men and women. I had to privilege to interview several of the attendees of the conference. Watch for those conversations in future episodes. The most impressive benefit for being part of this organization is their focus on leadership training. Personally, that in itself is worth the investment of this organization. Most of our leaders don’t get trained, they just end up in the role. To be an effective leader, there are some important skills that you need to develop, and IAIP has a program for building leadership. IAIP offers a training unique to insurance professionals, both on the agency and company side, so if you are not familiar with them, check them out. Their national conference is in Las Vegas June 6-8th OF 2019. I’ll link to their website in the show notes, but I really think it’s worthwhile to investigate. I wouldn’t look at this as a networking event, although I believe that meeting with your peers in the industry is an added benefit, but the training and the leadership component, is invaluable. CHECK OUT IAIP CONFERENCE HERE If you like what you hear in this podcast. Please share with a friend or coworker! This is one of many episodes you’ll hear from the International Association of Insurance Professionals regional conference in March of 2019. ABOUT THE REGIONAL CONFERENCE I mentioned that I found that conference by accident. I was doing some research on insurance speaking opportunities  and the IAIP regional conference showed up. Ironically, I was planning a weekend vacation to the beach for my birthday and discovered the conference 4 days before I was scheduled to leave. I reached out to the conference organizers, said I’d be in the area and asked if I could interview some of their guests. The members  were so accommodating. We did our recordings in a penthouse suite overlooking the ocean. If you are familiar with Ocean City MD, we were at The Dunes Hotel. One side was The Ocean the other side was the bay, and Jolly Rogers. I haven't been to Jolly Rogers since my kids were very young and had no idea how big the park was. Seeing it from the top floor of The Dunes Hotel was super special. I’ll include a few pictures in the show notes at The Business of Insurance .com You’ll hear a variety of stories in upcoming episodes of women pioneers in the insurance industry. I know that you’ll find them inspiring. Technology is changing the way we do business but when you hear some of the stories from those who have been around awhile, the slow changes might make more sense to those of you newer to the business of Insurance! THE BUSINESS OF INSURANCE FACEBOOK GROUP One last note, I’ve started a FB group called The Business of Insurance. Its will be a group for running your agency from leadership to sales, marketing to management and everything in between. CLICK HERE TO JOIN THE BUSINESS OF INSURANCE FACEBOOK GROUP If you are more of a LinkedIn user thaN FB, don’t worry, that group will be live shortly. ABOUT OUR GUEST – JESSICA PRUITT Jessica Pruitt  is the owner of Lebanon Insurance Agency. Connect with her on: Her website LinkedIn Facebook  ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA. Debbie is an insurance agent with an extensive business and marketing background. Her focus is helping insurance professionals be more successful. She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and hosts two other podcasts Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed. Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.  Coming soon. Single and Over Sixty and Seniors We Love

DIFFERENT MARKETING IDEAS FOR INSURANCE EP 30 - This episode is a follow up conversation to episode 29. If you didn’t listen, I would encourage you to listen to my conversation with Ben Page before listening to this one, so that the concepts will make more sense. Normally I would offer my thoughts at the end of the episode, but since our conversation was so long, and believe it or not, I edited out about 15 minutes worth, I decided to make it a two part series to be more respectful of your time. Aside from selling ideas, Ben brought up several topics from social media, online reviews, writing a book and referrals that I think we could explore a little bit. This will be a higher level look at those topics and maybe one day I’ll take a deeper dive into more of them.   REFERRALS So let’s start with referrals. I love talking about referrals. It’s the core of what I’ve spent the past 20 years doing. Helping professionals see the opportunities that come from a solid referral strategy. I thought I’d elaborate on the process a little here. It’s important that you get in the habit of telling people that you get most of your business from referrals. Remind people because they will forget. For those clients that you get from referral remind they regularly because they understand the value of doing business through referrals. If someone found you online, educate them on your referral process. I’m not suggesting that you pay for referrals or have any type of a contest for referrals. Personally I think that’s a little tacky. While there’s nothing wrong with sending a starbucks gift card or something like that when you receive a referral, I like to see that as a surprise, not something that is promoted. You want quality referrals, not just a referral from anyone with a license. The more you educate people on the type of clients you want to work with the more you will see that type of business referred to you. I also want to be clear about the educating people on referrals component. There’s a sleazy way to do this and a casual professional way to do this. The sleazy way is to ask for 5 names of people you can call. Ugh….I hate that and would never do something like that. I know some of you listening have done this and think it’s ok. It doesn’t work in my world. What I like is to plant the seed. Educate people and remind them, because they forget. Be casual but consistent and you will see referred business. It’s like I say on this podcast, if you like what you are hearing, please tell a friend or coworker. I’m asking for referrals, in a very subtle way. STRATEGIC PARTNERS In one of the other podcasts I produce called Business In Real Life, I did an episode on strategic partners. If you want to listen to it, I’ll link to it in the show notes, or look for the podcast and go to episode 7. You can also go to my website, selectbizteam.com and look for it there as well. That episode is about creating a marketing plan for  your strategic partners. For example, making a list of the strategic partners for your industry. As an insurance agent selling business insurance, these would include business bankers, business attorneys, CPA’s that work with businesses and financial advisors that do a lot of 401k type of business. If you are selling personal insurance, you might have realtors, mortgage professionals, financial advisors and and maybe a home builder  as your strategic partners. Start by making a list of 20 people in each profession. You could have 100 names that you are working with, but that’s ok. You’ll weed some out because they aren’t a good fit or they don’t do enough business to support the type of clients you work with. Once you’ve made your list, see who else knows them by checking LinkedIn, FB and other social platforms. Next step start inviting them to coffee. Have a list of questions you want to ask them about how they run their business and find out what types of clients they are looking for. You need to discover who they refer to , what it would take for them to refer to you and how you can best help them. Maybe you’ll offer a comprehensive review for their clients and have it approved through them before you show the client or maybe you offer to create an event together and invite a few clients to introduce to that strategic partner. The point is to start the conversation. For some, you might need to have a few, for others, you’ll only have one and for the last group you’ll find an opportunity to do something right away! The other part about working with strategic partners is tracking. This is the essential component of referral marketing. TRACKING THE DATA That’s a good segaway into talking about CRM’s. Ben brought this up in our conversation and I really think it’s worth elaborating on here. Old school, pre computers, we used 3x5 cards. We had several boxes we stored them in and made notes on them. It took a few minutes to write things out, but it was easy to take them with us, we didn’t need any electricity to make them work and the information didn't get lost in cyberspace somewhere! It was a system and I’m a big believer in systems. Today, all of that has been streamlined into the computer in the form of a CRM - client relationship management system.  Ben mentioned that a lot of agents are frustrated with the CRM their agency has so they use sticky notes, write things in a book or have an excel spreadsheet. They have several systems because there isn’t a good electronic tool to organize the sales function. When I first started using computers, I loved a program called ACT. I haven’t really found anything to replace it but their original online version was so bad that I had to move away. I’ve heard they’ve gotten better, but I’ve moved to a different platform today. Everything I do is in the cloud, so I needed something that would be mobile with me!  I’m currently using something called Zoho. I don’t love it, but it’s something I started using about 10 years ago. I went through the process of trying a lot of free programs and I must say, they didn’t have the customizing capability that I wanted. INFORMATION FOR YOUR CRM If you aren’t using a CRM or are thinking about it, I would suggest you start with an excel spreadsheet. Write out all of the data that you regularly collect on prospects. The basics like name, address, company, etc. are standard but what else are you collecting. Do you have their Date of Birth, spouses and children's names, do you collect their CPA, their financial advisor, their attorney information? I’d work with a spreadsheet for a few weeks, making sure you have all the information you want, then look for a CRM that allows you to customize the program to match your spreadsheet. A CRM is really just a glorified spreadsheet, but it also has some other features built in that make it more powerful than a spreadsheet. MANAGEMENT CRM OPPORTUNITIES From an agency principal perspective, having a good CRM is essential. Producers might come and go but having a CRM with a lot of prospect information is invaluable. Requiring your producers to use your CRM keeps all of the information in one location so that anyone can access it. If you have a producer that leaves, you’ll still be able to pursue the prospect because all of the information is in your CRM. One of the things you can do with the CRM is keep track of conversations. As an insurance agent, that’s essential and it’s also valuable for someone in sales. Your CRM should be able to identify who made the note, the date entered and allow for a follow up date to be set from that conversation. The better CRM’s will sync with your calendar and notify you each day of what tasks you need to complete. Now lets say you are tracking birthdays to send cards or call on their birthday….set the calendar in the CRM and you’ll be reminded. The right CRM will allow you to print out the calls and tasks for the day. This will keep the producer on task and not let any opportunities slip through the cracks. It also lets the agency manager see what is in the producers pipeline which can help with projections from a work flow and financial perspective. EMAIL MARKETING A good CRM will have a good email marketing component or will sync with one of the more common email platforms like Constant Contact or AWeber. You can set up ‘drip’ campaigns for prospects to stay in front of them throughout the year if you didn't win their business last time. I’ve had many people tell me that they use their google or outlook calendar to keep track of to do’s and prospects. That’s good for the individual producer but unless everyone has access to that calendar, a lot of information could get lost, so in the big picture, I don’t think thats the best route for an agency. TEST DRIVE YOUR CRM Do your research. As I mentioned in episode 29, SalesForce is a great program, but it’s not super easy to learn and can be very expensive. It can be modified to fit your business, but at a cost. HubSpot has a CRM that is free but I’d only consider that if you are a solo agency. It’s also very limited. I haven’t used the paid version so I can’t really comment on it. If you use hubspot, I’d love your feedback on the CRM tool they have available. Ask your peers what they are using. Take a test drive before you make a solid investment. Give a lot of thought to how you will use your CRM from seeing what’s in the pipeline and where the prospect is in the sales process to keeping track of strategic partners;  track your wins/losses; size of sales; marketing activities to develop the business and how many touches before you actually obtained a meeting. There’s so much data you can get from a good CRM that can help with your sales activities. Having all of this in one location allows the sales manager or the business owner great data or making decisions about managing the sales team and forecasting business. I think finding the right CRM can take awhile so if you aren’t using one now, just use the spreadsheet and try a few out before you make the big leap. This isn’t something you want to keep switching because it’s time consuming to set up and to learn to use effectively. GOOGLE MY BUSINESS Another area Ben mentioned and this was briefly, but I think its essential is online reviews. A simple place to start is Yelp and also GMB also known as Google My Business. If you haven’t set up these two accounts, please do so before the end of the week! Particularly GMB. That’s really an episode in itself. But think about it,  where do most people search….hopefully you said Google. Having your GMB account set up helps people find you easier. One of my clients is an accountant and she just moved to Delaware and will be working in both MD and Delaware. We had a conversation about GMB and the next week she set up her account in Delaware. She had 3 calls within 30 days for business in Delaware and that is the only type of advertising she did and I wouldn’t really call that advertising…..she just created her account and that’s how she was found. I would also recommend that you have your clients go to GMB and leave reviews. Unless something happens to Google, they’ll be seen there for awhile! IS THERE A BOOK IN YOUR FUTURE The last topic I want to talk about is writing a book. Stay with me….this might not be as unrealistic as you think. First of all, while it might seem like everyone is writing a book these days, there is no reason why you can’t be one of them. I mentioned in my conversation with Ben, that I use my book as a marketing tool. If I have a prospect I want to meet with, I’ll package up the book, and mail it to them with a note. ”Please enjoy and let me know what you think.’ I’ll call them a week later to make sure they received the book and then ask if I could have 5 minutes of their time to introduce myself. 80% of the time they say yes and then we take the conversation further. I was one of 5 co-authors of my book and we each had a different reason for writing it. Having a few co-authors made it easy to complete. Each of us had different tasks and the cost of production was reduced because there were several of us. So if you like the idea, consider bringing a few people together to write the book. BOOK MARKETING There’s a whole marketing strategy behind writing a book if you want to get recognized on Amazon and other book publishing platforms. If you use the book as I am, you don’t really need to worry about the marketing strategy but we were #1 Amazon best sellers for a short time! You can also use the book as a platform to get on other podcasts or as a guest blog post. Publicity is good for your agency! Wondering what would you write about….well, insurance is fairly boring so you might want to find something a little more exciting. What’s your niche in the business? Are you working with start up business owners? Companies with multiple locations? What if you wrote a book that talked about sales or marketing strategies for that specific niche? What if you wrote about leadership or HR issues? Risk management isn’t a bad idea either. I know some of this seems boring but so many people don’t know about these things. Don’t write a novel, just a small book maybe 20-50 pages. You could have it look like an ebook or you could make it odd shaped. I’m not suggesting that a book is going to make you famous, but it’s a unique way to create authority for yourself and deliver a calling card that is different than most of your competitors. SELF PUBLISHING There’s something called Create Space which is an amazon platform and you can self publish there and just order the number of books that you need. If you want to know more about any of the ideas I’ve mentioned in this episode, let me know. You’ll find people talking about referrals a lot, but CRM’s, online reviews and book publishing aren’t as mainstream! WRAP UP I’ll wrap up this episode with a thank you for listening. I hope some of the ideas got your attention. If I were to suggest you do one thing from this conversation it’s to make sure your agency has set up its GMB page. It’s simple to do. Just like you post on social media, be sure to post on your GMB page. Update the photo’s regularly too! ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA. Debbie is an insurance agent with an extensive business and marketing background. Her focus is helping insurance professionals be more successful. She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and hosts two other podcasts Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed. Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.  Coming soon. Single and Over Sixty and Seniors We Love

DO YOU QUOTE INSURANCE OR OFFER SOLUTIONS? A CONVERSATION WITH BEN PAGE Episode 29 - Taking control of the conversation instead of just doing what everyone else is doing will set you apart from your competitors. Creating your own process takes time and effort, but in the long run, you will develop clients that want to work with you because of how you treat them, not just because of the price you offer. When talking to a prospect, if you are offering proposals because that’s what they are expecting makes you just like everyone else. Develop some targeted questions that aren’t just underwriting based and begin the process of WOWing your prospects and clients. 2019 started with big goals for the podcast and one of them was to publish a new episode every week. For a few weeks, I was consistent, but my mom has been very ill and has been in the hospital more than she’s been out. I’m the only child left,  so I’ve been there managing her care. One of the benefits of being self employed is that my schedule is flexible, but realistically, there are only so many hours in a day. I really want to get back to my weekly publication, so hang in there with me please! As an insurance agent, the lessons learned from caregiving make great stories to share with your clients to make sure they have the proper aging plans in place! No one thinks they are going to end up in a nursing home ….. But are they doing the proper planning in the event something like this happens. If this isn’t an area you are familiar with, please meet with a few estate planning attorneys and elder law attorneys and learn about some of their processes. I mentioned this in another episode, but this is extremely valuable information for you to help your clients that will potentially lead to life and long term care insurance for you. Regardless, it’s good advice to be sharing with your clients if you see yourself as an advisor and not just an agent selling policies.   Why consider International Association of Insurance Professionals? A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending the regional conference for International Association of Insurance Professionals. For those of you that have been around for awhile, you might know it as NAIW, but they did a rebranding a few years ago to open it to both men and women. I actually found the organization by accident because I was looking for something completely different, but one of the things I learned is that they focus on leadership training. Personally, that in itself is worth the investment of this organization. Most of our leaders don’t get trained, the just end up in the role. To be an effective leader, there are some important skills that you need to develop. IAIP offers a training unique to insurance professionals, both on the agency and company side, so if you are not familiar with them, check them out. Their national conference is in Las Vegas June 6-8th OF 2019. I’ll link to their website in the show notes, but I really think it’s worthwhile to investigate. I wouldn’t look at this as a networking event, although I believe that meeting with your peers in the industry is an added benefit, but the training and the leadership component, is invaluable. CHECK OUT IAIP CONFERENCE HERE Lastly, before I introduce our guest, I want to thank Wade Galt for his review of the podcast on iTunes. This is the first review and it’s from someone that I don’t know and haven’t spoken with. As much as I’m grateful for the review, I’m flattered by how you perceive the information I’m providing here. I’m not in my 20’s or 30’s but I’m well aware of technology and how it can be used in business and I’m hopeful that every generation listening to this podcast receives value because there’s an old saying that applies to almost everything in life and that is ‘what’s old is new’! Technology provides a lot of opportunities but a strong solid referral strategy passes the test of time. If you are new to the podcast and haven’t listened to the back episodes, check out episode # 24 which is also about sales.   ABOUT OUR GUEST – BEN PAGE Ben Page is an insurance agent, agency principal and a published author. Learn more about him at his website or connect with him on social. LinkedIn Facebook YouTube Check out his book on amazon ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA. Debbie is an insurance agent with an extensive business and marketing background. Her focus is helping insurance professionals be more successful. She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and hosts two other podcasts Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed. Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.  Coming soon. Single and Over Sixty and Seniors We Love

YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW WITH NICOLE ORISME Episode 28 - Today’s episode is a little different. It’s an edited replay from one of my other podcasts, called Business in Real Life. I feel like this is a topic that is beneficial to insurance agents so I’m sharing it on this podcast. If you are an agency principal, particularly one that is somewhat new or focused on personal lines instead of business insurance, you might not be as up to speed on HR issues as you need to be. This conversation will provide you with some of the issues that you need to be aware of that will help keep you out of hot water. If you are selling or servicing insurance and focus on business clients, this information will also be valuable. It will give you some talking points with your prospects and clients that can set you apart from your peers. If you aren’t in either of these categories, I still think you’ll find some great nuggets in this conversation. Our guest is Nicole Orisme, President of NLH Contracting. She started her business a few years ago and has grown rapidly every year. She helps her clients with creating employee manuals, discusses the proper strategies for hiring and firing employees, and does things from an HR perspective that most business owners aren’t aware of. One of the things we discuss is that hiring help, not just in the HR capacity but making the decision to hire someone to do some of the lower paying tasks sooner than later. With technology today, we often feel that we shouldn't hire anyone. Afterall, we can answer our own phone, we can answer our own emails, we can schedule our own meetings. When you are feeling overwhelmed with your work or business and you are trying to figure out why, we have a good exercise for you to consider. It might seem overwhelming, but you only need to do it for one week. Create a chart where you write down what you are doing every 15 minutes. Then take a look at the end of the week at how long things are taking you. Are there tasks on that list that should be done by a minimum wage person or lower wage person that your hourly wage? Most of the time, the answer is yes. The reluctance is to not hire because you might not have the revenue to support it, but what we have heard over and over from this exercise is that you actually double your productivity because you can focus on more revenue generating tasks instead of spending your time doing lower skilled tasks. Something I’ve been saying for a long time is that we need to bring back receptionists and administrative assistants. Before voicemail and email, it was rare to see the business owner answer the phone or open the mail. That was assigned to someone else. With the evolution of technology, those professions have been minimized but the successful business owner understands that having help is how to succeed faster. While voicemail is efficient, how much easier is it for you to read a quick message and call someone back? Sometimes people can leave 5 minute messages, and if you get 5-10 of those a day and you’ve just spent over an hour just listening to voice mail messages. How much did that cost you in productivity? How much time do you spend just unsubscribing or deleting the junk emails? All of that takes time which is time you could be doing tasks that generate revenue or grow your business in some capacity. I share this not to have you rush out and hire someone, but take a look at what you are doing and see if the tasks match your wage level. Does it make sense to make a change? Just something to ponder. Do you have your HR processes in place?  If not, you might want to contact someone that specializes in HR. You don’t need to have someone on staff full time, you can easily outsource this department and pay by the hour or a flat fee for their services. The goal here is that you want to make sure that you are doing this part of running the business correctly. For those of you in sales, knowing a few HR companies can also be a great strategic alliance for you. They have clients that need insurance and you have clients that need  HR! WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM LISTENING When you go into business and have employees, you have a lot of issues that need to be addressed. These include: Payroll Handbook Benefits administered correctly Compliance Employee manuals Independent Contractors Risk of not having the proper documents in place. Making sure you are following FLSA Hire an assistant sooner than later! ABOUT OUR GUEST – NICOLE ORISME Nicole Orisme who is the owner of NLH Contracting.  Her website is the same as her company name: NLH Contracting.com.  Connect with her on Linkedin Facebook If you need advice from an experienced human resources consulting firm, contact Nicole.  She and her team can keep you out of a lot of hot water! LIKE THE SHOW One of the ways that we grow this podcast is with people like you sharing with your friends and coworkers. Do you have a spotify account? If so, you can now find this podcast on that platform as well If you really like the show and want to help even more, please go to iTunes and leave a review. This works best if you have an iTunes account. SCHEDULE A CALL One of the benefits of listening to this podcast and finding the show notes is that you can schedule a 30 minute call to get some feedback on a current business challenge. It gives us an opportunity to talk, and see if it makes sense to work together. If you want to schedule a call, click here to access my calendar and schedule a time that works for you. ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA. Debbie is an insurance agent with an extensive business and marketing background. Her focus is helping insurance professionals be more successful. She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and hosts two other podcasts Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed. Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.  Coming soon. Single and Over Sixty and Seniors We Love  

TIPS FOR THE NEW PRODUCER WITH KOURTNEY MORTIMER Episode 27 - What’s it like to be fresh out of college and selling insurance? Our guest today talks about some of the challenges and opportunities she’s having. Kourtney Mortimer was a marketing major in college and after one summer internship, she knew a desk job wasn’t in her future. After 3 interviews she was hired as a producer with a wonderful agency. They’ve provided her with a lot of opportunities, from sales training to networking. Her energy is contagious and we should all be so lucky to have a Kourtney in our office! TOPICS WE DISCUSS Being young and selling insurance Best practices for insurance agency marketing Selling your niche or selling the business that comes to you OTHER EPISODES FROM IA&B FUTURES CONFERENCE Marketing Magic with Sydney Roe of Agency Nation episode 15 Closing The Gap with Chris Cline of Westfield Insurance episode 16 The One Thing with Steve Harvill Episode 18 Attitude with Sam Glen episode 20 Listening with Sandra Biagini of Progressive Insurance episode 25 INFORMATION ON THE NEXT IA&B CONFERENCE This is another episode in our IA&B Futures Conference series. If you missed this conference in 2018, I would encourage you to put it on your must attend list in 2019. The date has been set for October 8th and 9th 2019. If you go to the IA&B website you can get the details.  ABOUT OUR GUEST – KOURTNEY MORTIMER Kourtney is an account manager with Reed, Wertz, & Roadman. She‘s a arising star with a passion for golf. Connect with her:   Website LinkedIn Twitter ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA. Debbie is an insurance agent with an extensive business and marketing background. Her focus is helping insurance professionals be more successful. She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and hosts two other podcasts Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed. Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.  Coming soon. Single and Over Sixty and Seniors We Love Check out or page on Facebook, The Business of Insurance

Should You Trademark Your Business Name? Episode 26 - This is a replay of an interview that I did on another podcast I produce called Business In Real Life. Our guest is an intellectual property attorney and the information was great for business owners. Since you, the business of insurance podcast listener might be working with other business owners, or you might be a business owner yourself, I thought I would share the episode here. It’s so important to understand why intellectual property needs to be protected and why it needs to be done correctly. You’ve heard me say this more than one, but position yourself as an advisor to your clients. And as an advisor, it’s important to know about IP law. How insurance protects and doesn’t protect, although we don’t discuss the insurance aspect here. In the beginning of the recording, I talk about some real cases. Make sure your clients aren’t making the same mistakes. If you are an agent looking to create content, this is a topic not a lot of people are talking about, but it’s really important! Radiance Harris has been practicing IP law for nearly a decade. She is different than many attorneys because her pricing is based on packages. Decide what you need and you can see on her website what it will cost you. It’s a unique model for a law firm and we talk about why she set up her practice this way as well. QUESTIONS WE ASK RADIANCE What is intellectual property? Why does a company need to protect their IP What happens if a company just puts a ™ after their content? How likely is a business to be sued if they violate a trademark or copyright? RESOURCES Are you interested in learning more about Select Business Team? Check out where we have teams.  If we don’t have one in your area, we can help you start one in your area. Give us a call to discuss further at 301-996-2328 or schedule a meeting on our calendar Click here to access calendar   ABOUT OUR GUEST - RADIANCE HARRIS Radiance Harris is the founder of Radiance IP Law. Her firm specializes in protecting intellectual property. Connect with Radiance: Radiance IP Law Website Facebook Twitter - @radianceharris Instagram - @radianceharris ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA. Debbie is an insurance agent with an extensive business and marketing background. Her focus is helping insurance professionals be more successful. She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and hosts two other podcasts  Business In Real Life  and Divorce Exposed. Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.

ARE YOU AN AGENT OR AN ADVISOR? Episode 24 - How you position yourself with your clients makes the difference on being perceived as any 800 number or an ongoing valuable advisor. If you are an insurance professional, an agent bringing in new business or the principal of an insurance agency, this episode is for you. In this episode of the Business of Insurance podcast, we are talking about life insurance and other planning that everyone should be discussing with their clients. It’s easy for us to tell people that we can save them money on their insurance, but what we are really doing is protecting them from a financial loss. Can you really put a price on doing that? Sell on Advice and you put yourself on the same level as an attorney and an accountant. We should be providing the same level of information that other professionals offer. You might already be doing this, but how consistent is your process?   IDEAS WE DISCUSS IN THIS EPISODE Look at the big picture. Get out of the commodity game Create resources that you can recommend to your clients Develop questions you can ask that will position you differently from other agents Create a system inside your CRM to prompt these questions Take classes on products outside of your comfort zone By doing the right thing as an advisor, you will actually save people more money than they could imagine because they had the proper financial instruments in place. ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance is hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA. Debbie is an insurance agent with an extensive business and marketing background. Her focus is helping insurance professionals be more successful. She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and hosts two other podcasts Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed. Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.

BUSINESS AND MARKETING PODCAST WITH SHELDON SNODGRASS EPISODE 21 - Today we are talking with Sheldon Snodgrass who is the founder of steadysales.com a sales training organization that focuses on the insurance industry. Sheldon helps sales minded service professionals. While many sales trainers focus on those in outside sales, Sheldon has some unique offerings for customer service representatives. After serving as a 1st Lieutenant in the US Army, he obtained his MBA then opened the doors to his company. He has gift with how he helps his clients and he shares several of those ideas in this episode. QUESTIONS WE ASK What brought you to the insurance industry? What type of marketing are you doing to find new clients? What is your biggest business challenge? When are you publishing your book? WHAT YOU'LL LEARN FROM LISTENING The mindset of a CSR around sales Ideas on how to get rid of typical sales language How an old fashioned ‘tic’ sheet can impact results Selling from a place of integrity BOOKS RECOMMENDED Daniel Pink To Sell Is Human Drive The link for these books is to our affiliate program with Amazon. If you choose to purchase these books, we will receive a small amount of revenue.  ABOUT OUR GUEST – SHELDON SNODGRASS Sheldon is the owner of The Steady Sales Group. Connect with him on: LinkedIn Website ABOUT THE HOST This episode of the Business of Insurance is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau, CIC, AAI, CPIA. Debbie is an insurance agent with an extensive business and marketing background. Her focus is helping insurance professionals be more successful. She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and hosts two other podcasts Business In Real Life and Divorce Exposed. Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.

EPISODE 36 WITH RUSSELL LACEY OF ELECTRIC ADVISORS Thank you for joining us today for episode 36 of the the Business In Real Life podcast. Our guest is Russell Lacey of Electric Advisors.  This is an unusual conversation in that it’s more educational about his business than information about how to be successful in some capacity. For some of you, it might even come across as boring, but trust me when I say it’s information that many business owners might not be aware of. If you aren’t a business owner listening to this, but you work with business owners, then you will also want to hear this because you can share the knowledge with your clients and prospects and position yourself as a valuable resource. If you want to reach out to Russell, his contact information is in the show notes, or you can search for ElectricAdvisors.com and you’ll find him on the website. We have a lot of listeners from around the world so I’m not sure this information will apply outside of the US and for that I apologize.   This conversation was recorded in 2018 but isn’t being released until 2019. If you listened to the episode about rebranding, I discussed my struggle with the podcast name...and as a result, I didn’t release many episodes in 2018. Russell got slighted in that struggle I was having but that doesn’t mean the conversation isn’t important. I’ve known Russell for close to 20 years and watched him build this business from the beginning. As social media was taking off, I’d offer suggestions on how he could leverage it. Like many businesses, he went through a trial and error period, figuring out what was working and what wasn’t in the digital space. In this episode he talks about what he’s doing today for business development and I think you’ll be surprised at what is working! We start the conversation with him talking about his business. WHAT YOU’LL LEARN: How an energy broker can help small to midsize businesses save on energy costs Old fashioned outreach tactics that work How to educate your customers when they don’t know they need you ABOUT OUR GUEST – RUSSELL LACEY Russell Lacey is the President of Electric Advisors. Learn more at electricadvisors.com Connect with him: LinkedIn Facebook. Twitter - @eapowerchoice ABOUT THE HOST This episode of Business In Real Life is produced and hosted by Debbie DeChambeau. She is the owner of Select Business Team, llc and has an extensive background in insurance, business and marketing. Her focus is helping insurance professionals be more successful. She is the co-author of Renewable Referrals and hosts two other podcasts The Business of Insurance  and Divorce Exposed. Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram or follow FB business page at Select Business Team.  

INSURANCE PODCAST WITH SAM GLEN AT THE IA&B FUTURES CONFERENCE 2018 Episode 20 - Welcome to another episode of the Business of Insurance podcast. If you are a returning listener, welcome back. If you are new to the podcast, welcome and enjoy! Be sure to download this podcast on your favorite podcast player so that you don’t miss any episodes! If you aren't sure how to listen, scroll down and we've provided instructions. ABOUT THE HOST My name is Debbie DeChambeau and I am an insurance agent talking about the benefits of working in this amazing industry called insurance. I’m a podcaster who helps insurance organizations create podcasts as a sales opportunity and I help conferences keep the conversation going after the event has ended. Debbie also hosts Business In Real Life podcast and Divorce Exposed.  Connect with Debbie on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram. Check out her book Renewable Referrals INFORMATION ON THE NEXT IA&B CONFERENCE This is another episode in our IA&B Futures Conference series. If you missed this conference in 2018, I would encourage you to put it on your must attend list in 2019. The date has been set for October 8th and 9th 2019. If you go to the IA&B website you can get the details.  OUR GUEST Our guest today isn’t in the insurance industry but is a motivational speaker with a twist. He’s a self taught artist and brings art creation into his presentations.  Sam has taken his struggles and turned them into something positive. He’s been through what many of us go through and has found a way to work through the down cycles through positivity, by managing his attitude. I know it might sound a little woo woo but as someone who focuses on always having a positive attitude myself, I completely relate to what he is talking about. I’m not going to go into my life struggles here, but trust me when I say that for as long as I can remember, and this goes back to my teenage years, I have intentionally focused on a positive attitude. I believe it’s what has gotten me through some difficult times and continues to impact my daily life today. Being positive, being happy takes work because sometimes life can be challenging! If you are working in the insurance industry, you might occasionally experience some of those challenges. Sam has written several books about how attitude affects the workplace, leadership and relationships. We also talk about Courage, how it is relevant today, finding courage in each other and how we need courage every day. Here's the artwork he created during his presentation. OUR SPONSOR If you listened to my conversation with Sydney Roe and and Steve Haravill, you probably heard me mention that I also facilitate CEO roundtable groups. Now you might be thinking that you are’t a CEO but I believe that you are the CEO of your life, therefore, you are a CEO. I’m looking to put one together in 2019 for insurance agents. Depending on the interest level, we might have one just for agency principles and those in the C suite (those of you in operations, management and in leadership roles)  and one for producers. If I have enough other professionals, I’d be happy to coordinate that but for now I’ll stick with the C suite and producers. Consider them an informal board of advisors. You see, the sooner you surround yourself with your peers, the sooner you will learn things and experience growth. As I put these together, I’ll make sure that there is some geographical distance between participants. If you are interested, connect with me on LinkedIn or send me an email to Debbie@selectbizteam.com.   My experience in the insurance business, my knowledge of marketing and my exposure to running business provide you with ideas that will help you catapult your business. This episode is brought to you by Constant Contact. It’s an email marketing tool that allows you to stay in compliance with sending mass emails as well as lets you create beautiful templates that match your agency brand.  Try Constant Contact free for 30 days. Click here for your free trial. HOW TO LISTEN TO PODCASTS Do you have an iPhone? Look for the purple podcast app and download. Do you listen to Spotify? Search for The Business of Insurance on the platform. Do you have a droid phone? Download the Google Podcast app and search for The Business of Insurance podcast or download the Stitcher app. Both work on the phone. There are other podcast players in your phone store that you might like better that what we've indicated above. Try a few and see what you like best! How did you find this podcast?  Maybe through a social media post, maybe a search in your podcast player? Maybe we interviewed one of your friends. Could you do us a favor? Go to iTunes, stitcher or google podcasts or spotify and leave a review - we’ve included instructions on the website, thebusinessofinsurance.com If you like what we are talking about, please tell a coworker about the podcast! You’ll make our day  

EPISODE 34 BRANDING AND REBRANDING  You see, after this episode, the Select Business Podcast is rebranding and will have a new name and a new iTunes Graphic. This podcast was started as a way to promote members and clients of my company, Select Business Team. At Select, or as it has been nicknamed, SBT, we host business roundtables. Meetings where different professionals come together and talk about different aspects of business development. Our members include employees and owners, professionals and those in sales. Most of our members are in service businesses such as lawyers, accountants and real estate, but we also have some other industries represented. The Original Intent When the podcast was started, it was truly designed as a way to interview members and help to promote them. After all, we’ve had almost 10,000 downloads so someone is listening! Initially a few of them jumped on board, but since many of them don’t listen to podcasts, it was hard to have them see the value of being a guest. It’s almost been like pulling teeth to get some members on as guests, so recording has been slow. Earlier in 2018 we sent out an email to our list of non members, looking for guests and had several people sign up for an interview. Apologizing About The Name As a podcaster, I am very active in the podcast community. I host a monthly meetup in Maryland and I speak to organizations about podcasting. When I am asked about the name of my own podcasts, I always apologize about the name of this one. Don’t get me wrong, I love the name of my company. Its reflective of what we do but I don’t love the name of it for a podcast. So after many months of struggling with this, the decision was made to change the name. Business In Real Life The new name, Business In Real Life, is reflective of the conversations we’ve been having at Select but allows me to still be happy when I say the name of my podcast. If you didn’t know, I actually have two other podcasts, of which I never apologize about their name. One is Divorce Exposed, the other The Business of Insurance. I didn’t come up with the name, Business In Real Life on my own and I want to give credit where it is due. A few years ago, I was going to start another business with the same name with another woman who I adore and together we came up with this name. Regrets Unfortunately, my life took a downward turn and I couldn't move forward with anything new and left her hanging. It is something I have regretted but emotionally I wasn’t in a good place and couldn’t do anything. I haven’t really talked about this period in my life publicly too much because I’m just now coming out of it. Maybe on another show i will. But Lori Gartenhaus and I collaborated on this idea and the graphics that we are using for the re brand. She’s an amazing individual and one of my regrets is not being able to move forward with her. For those of you listening in the DMV area, if you have heard of Gartenhaus Furs, that was her family company. She sold it a few years ago and now does a lot of business consulting. If you ever have the opportunity to work with her, your investment will be worthwhile! Next Steps  The new name, Business In Real Life, will be the same format as before, just a new name. As we move forward with making the change, we hope that you will continue to listen and share the show with your business colleagues. If you are a business owner and interested in being a guest, reach out to me at debbie@selectbizteam.com with a summary of what you’d like to talk about. I really want to mix things up and know that this is the right path forward. Other Podcasts Of course, if you want to check out my other podcasts, Divorce Exposed and The Business of Insurance, I won’t be upset! Thank you so much for listening and until next time, keep creating opportunities! About The Host  This episode of the Select Business Team podcast is produced and hosted by Debbie DeC...