Stop Running Sales Meetings. Start Running Game Film.

You're running sales meetings every week, and your pipeline still can't predict what will close. 

Randy Schwantz breaks down why the three formats most agencies default to (the town hall, the pipeline review, the book club) produce exactly zero revenue, and walks through the hot seat model: 45 minutes, one producer, one target account, where they define, defend, and develop specific wedges against the incumbent holding that account. 

One Cincinnati agency ran this process for six months and their producers started winning accounts they'd been circling for years. If your producers walk into prospect meetings without knowing exactly where the incumbent is underserving that account, they're not competing. Listen now. 

If this episode was helpful, share it with a producer or agency leader who needs it. 

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Transcript

[00:00:00] I watched an agency owner spend 90 minutes in a sales meeting recently. 12 producers in the room. Pipeline was up on the big screen TV. A couple of big personalities talking a lot, holding court, talking [00:00:10] about sports, and then it shifted to the softening market. And most of the other producers just kind of hiding below the radar.
And then they quickly reviewed the opportunities up on the big screen, and what came out of it? [00:00:20] Nothing. Zero new revenue came from it. And here's the thing, the agency owner, he knows this. His producers know it. Everybody in that room knows it. They walk in, sit [00:00:30] down, go through the motions, and walk out exactly as they were.
Nothing new, no change, no one got better. And no one's gonna make any more money because [00:00:40] of it, and the leaders still can't predict what will or won't close.
Welcome to the Agency Growth Machine podcast, where it's all about transforming [00:00:50] potential into profit. And now your host, Randy Schwantz
 I've seen the same format, 90 minutes, same room, [00:01:00] same s- big screen TV, produce something completely different.
I've seen producers walk out of that room with a strategy to beat the incumbent, to close deals they couldn't get traction on in [00:01:10] the past. Same room, completely different meeting. The difference? I'm gonna share it with you in a moment, so stay with me. Now, here's the question every agency owner wrestles with sooner or later: Do [00:01:20] you even need to have sales meetings?
Some say no, let your producers run. Trust them. Get out of the way. The more time they're in meetings, the less time they're in front of prospects, and that [00:01:30] argument isn't crazy. The data backs it up. Sales reps across industries spend about 28% of their week actually selling. The rest goes to CRM entry, email, [00:01:40] admin, meetings, blah, blah, blah, right?
Meetings that cost US businesses an estimated 37 billion a year in lost productivity. 37 billion. That's a lot of conference rooms [00:01:50] going nowhere, and here's another number. 63% of meetings happen with no predefined agenda. No agenda. Just gather the team and see what comes of it, and you know what comes of it, [00:02:00] whatever the loudest personality in the room decides to talk about.
So the skip the meeting crowd has a point, but here's where I push back. I was working with an agency owner out of Cincinnati, 11 [00:02:10] producers. Organic growth had been flat for several years. He ran a sales meeting every Monday at 8:00 AM sharp, coffee, whiteboard, the whole thing, and it looked like a well-run operation [00:02:20] from the outside.
And when I sat in on one, I saw something I've seen 100 times. Three things were happening, and none of them were driving revenue. First, there's the town hall portion, [00:02:30] agency owner updating everybody on what's going on, new carrier relationships, compliance stuff, office news. Important? Yeah, sure. Does it help a producer walk into a prospect [00:02:40] meeting on Thursday and win?
Nope. And the second part is what I call the spreadsheet liars club. You pull up the pipeline, go account by account. "Hey, where are we on Acme Packaging?" "Still in review." [00:02:50] "Okay. What about Meridian Manufacturing?" "Well, I'm following up with them this week." And it's just round and round. You know, the numbers look good on the screen.
Predictable revenue? Mm, not really. Almost [00:03:00] none. Because most of what's in that pipeline is optimism, not opportunity. And the third part is the book of the month club. You find a good sales book. The team reads it. You talk about [00:03:10] it, some great concepts, kind of inspiring, but Monday morning comes, and nobody can connect the concept to the call they have at 2:00 PM that afternoon.
That's not a sales meeting. That's [00:03:20] activity theater. And listen, that's not a knock on the guy. He's running an agency, managing relationships, fighting fires, handling everything that lands on a owner's desk. He's [00:03:30] stretched, and like most agency owners, he's got a few high performers doing the heavy lifting.
And a lot of producers hovering right around the average. So he bounces from idea to [00:03:40] idea hoping something sticks, looking for that thing that transforms it, and most of them are still looking. So here's what almost nobody in this industry is willing to say out loud. [00:03:50] There is no such thing as your producer winning an account without the incumbent losing it.
It's a zero-sum game. There is no win-win. There is [00:04:00] only win-lose, and your producer's either going to be the winner or loser, but he won't be both, and that's the only math that really matters. Your producer walks in to [00:04:10] see a prospect. The prospect already has an agent. It's the incumbent, and that incumbent might or might not be doing a good job.
We don't know. We do know they've got the relationship advantage. They've [00:04:20] got years of history on their side, and for your producer to win, that incumbent has to lose. So the only question that matters in any sales meeting is this: What does [00:04:30] our producer do that the incumbent doesn't? Where is that prospect being underserved right now by the incumbent agent but doesn't know it?
Now see, if your producers can't answer that [00:04:40] question with specifics, they're walking to that sales call with virtually the same positioning as the incumbent. But, and this is a big but, they don't have the incumbent's relationship. And look, you already [00:04:50] know this. In fact, you've done it dozens and dozens of times in your career.
You, because you have the relationship with your clients, you got last look. You match what [00:05:00] your competitor brought in. You kept the business. You rolled your competitor. So isn't it only rational to think that this is happening to your [00:05:10] producers if they aren't 100% totally prepared to exploit the weakness of the incumbent agent?
And that's why they lose, not because they're bad, but because they weren't prepared [00:05:20] to win. Most sales meetings never get anywhere near that question. The town hall section doesn't get there. The pipeline review section doesn't get there. The book club section definitely doesn't get [00:05:30] there, and every week that passes without that preparation is another week the incumbent keeps the account.
Okay, so if those meeting formats aren't the answer, what is? And I'm [00:05:40] gonna show you exactly what the Cincinnati owner started doing. 90 minutes, same room, completely different game, and I'll tell you what happened six months later. Now, think about [00:05:50] how the best football coaches prepare for a game. They don't just run drills.
They don't just watch inspirational film. They watch game film of the opponent. They study the other [00:06:00] team. They build a specific plan to beat the specific team in front of them. Bill Belichick didn't walk into a Super Bowl with a general game plan. He had a plan for that team, [00:06:10] that quarterback, that receiver.
He identified the specific thing the opponent did well and did poorly and built the game plan around that. That's the meeting model most agencies [00:06:20] are missing, and here's what the Cincinnati owner started doing. He called it putting a producer on the hot seat, not in a punitive way, in the way a great coach reviews game film.
You pull up the tape. [00:06:30] You study the opponent. You build the play. 45 minutes, one producer, one target account, and then he did it again with another producer, another target account. You put that account [00:06:40] up on the big screen, the prospect's business right next to it, whatever you know about the incumbent, the agency currently holding that account, and then you walk the producer through three moves: define, defend, [00:06:50] and develop.
Define what you do better than the incumbent, and it's not better service, we're local. It's specific, concrete, actionable things you do that the incumbent [00:07:00] doesn't do. And then defend. Defend how you do it better. If you say you have a stronger claims management process, walk through it step by step how it actually works because [00:07:10] if you can't defend it in this room, you won't be able to sell it in front of your prospect's conference room.
And number three, develop. Now you build your wedges. We gotta get our prospect to think, "Wait, I [00:07:20] never looked at it that way. My guy's not doing that." And it's not one wedge, it's, like, three to five. That's what gets the incumbent fired. That process repeated week after week, [00:07:30] producer by producer, and here's what it does.
It forces your producers to get specific. No more generic positioning. No more, "We give great service." They walk out of [00:07:40] that room with a prepared, targeted strategy for a specific account built around the specific gap between what they offer and what the incumbent delivers. And when they sit across [00:07:50] from that prospect, they're not hoping something lands.
They know exactly what they're here to say. The Cincinnati owner ran that process for six months. His producers started winning accounts they'd been circling for [00:08:00] years, not because anything changed about what they offered, but because they finally got clear on how to talk about what they offered in a way that exposed exactly where the prospect was being [00:08:10] underserved by the incumbent.
Look, coaching isn't a spreadsheet. It's preparation. Alignment isn't a town hall meeting. It's knowing exactly why you're better and being able to prove [00:08:20] it. The 90 minutes didn't change. What happened in those 90 minutes did. Look, subscribe, share this with somebody on your team, but before you go, I wanna leave you with something.
Commercial insurance selling has [00:08:30] gone through three eras, and right now you and your agency are living in one of them. Selling 1.0, that's how your daddy did it. Three by five cards, Yellow Pages, the whole strategy. [00:08:40] Get them to like you, find the coverage gap, quote it, and hope you win. No real differentiation.
Win a few, lose a few, that was the game. And then selling [00:08:50] 2.0 came along. They called it consultative selling. Ask better questions. Find the problem that the prospect wants to solve, and then you kind of sprinkle in some technology into the mix, [00:09:00] Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, nice dashboards. And you know what it actually produced?
A pipeline report your manager could pull on Friday. That's about it. The generic training lived in a binder. The [00:09:10] generic technology lived on a browser. They never talked to each other, and the agency didn't grow. And then selling 3.0, or what I call sales fusion. Instead of [00:09:20] generic training, train to bust the incumbent relationship.
Instead of generic technology, how about tech designed to match your sales process? Instead of quoting, how about [00:09:30] winning? Bigger accounts, higher close ratios, faster growth, and there's only one source for that. It's called Bignition. That's not a binder and a dashboard that don't talk to each other.
That's one system [00:09:40] running the whole game. That's Bignition. You can find out more at thewedge.net. And if you like the video, drop a comment. I read them, and I respond. Hi, I'm [00:09:50] Randy Schwants. Keep busting the incumbent relationship. I'll see you next week.