You’re Hiding, And Your Business Knows It!

Most new insurance agents don’t fail because they’re lazy or “bad at sales.” They fail because they build their business as a copy of someone else’s highlight reel. When you spend your early months chasing whatever another agent claims is working, you end up with generic marketing, awkward messaging, and a process you can’t sustain. 

We walk through a different approach: embrace you. Your background, past jobs, failures, and wins aren’t baggage, they’re your advantage. We break down how to turn your story into clear insurance branding that feels authentic in appointments and consistent in marketing. We also dig into the power of a strong “why” and why clients buy trust and connection before they buy a Medicare plan. If your why is solid, you stand out fast in a sea of cookie cutter agents. 

You’ll also hear practical ways to apply this to your Medicare insurance business: better answers in presentations when prospects ask why you do this, smarter networking with centers of influence, and building online visibility through content if that fits your strengths. We wrap with a simple “audit your life” framework to uncover your differentiators and a mindset for learning from both wins and failures without repeating the same mistakes. 

If this helps you, subscribe, share it with one agent who needs it, and leave a review so more insurance business owners can go from unknown to unstoppable.

Transcript

Welcome And Core Problem

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to the Invisible Agent Podcast, the show for insurance agents ready to go from unknown to unstoppable, where visibility, strategy, and real-world execution meet. Hosted by Dave Cheatham and Mike Sorensen.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

Hello again and welcome to the Invisible Agent Podcast. My name is Mike Sorensen, and each week we go through different ways to help you go from unknown to unstoppable in your insurance business. And this week, we're going to talk about what we think is one of the number one mistakes new insurance business owners are making when they start out. And this all starts actually from a uh song I was actually listening to this weekend. It's one of my favorite songs by uh an artist called Jack Johnson. I was listening this weekend, and this lyric really hit me, and it kind of summarizes a lot where I think new business owners come from when they get in to insurance. And it is everybody thinks that everybody knows about everybody else, but nobody knows anything about themselves because they're all worried about everybody else. And and this just

The Comparison Trap Among Agents

SPEAKER_01 1:18

floored me. And why is because we see a lot of brand new um agents and insurance businesses get into the space and fall into this trap of comparing, copying, and assuming every other insurance agent they see has this whole thing figured out and just trying to copy everything they do to grow their business. Or they'll what they'll do is they'll ask other insurance agents what they're doing, and they'll actually tell them they're getting better results than they actually are, in theory. And what actually happens is that person they're asking is telling you these results that aren't really happening for them because they're also worried about what everyone else thinks about their business as well. So they try to inflate what they're doing to make it seem better than it actually is when they're actually not doing that well. And it just creates this pattern of everyone just worrying about everybody else when really they should be focusing on themselves and what they do and what they bring to the table instead of worrying about everybody else. Because the moment you understand who you are, and again, what the song says is like the moment you understand who you are and worry about yourself, you will get farther and you will do better than trying to, you know, worry about literally everybody else in the space. So this episode, I really wanted to break this down because this is something every time I talk to an insurance business or someone who's new into the space, they they ask pretty much the same questions. What's everyone doing the right business or make more clients, or even ones who are in the space and just struggling is like, what's everyone else doing is the pretty much a very common theme. And it's it's not about what everyone else is doing, it's more about what you are doing, and that's the biggest unlock for people to start growing, is worry about what you're doing because there is an aspect of going out in the space and figuring out what everyone else is doing to kind of get like a temperature, but that shouldn't be your map of how to get from struggling to successful. It is only taking the temperature to understand where everybody else is at, but not making it your mission to exactly what

Meeting Dave And Embracing You

SPEAKER_01 3:09

they're doing. And I and I tell you this because I I mean I've been in charge for you know six plus years now and was at a successful agent. Then yeah, I got hired into management of a carrier, and then you know, got promoted within a carrier all the way to uh a sales director. And you know, even myself, there was an element of looking at everybody else, comparing myself. So I'm not gonna sit here again on my pedestal and say, this is what you need to do, because I fell into the same trap of just doing what everyone else was doing to be successful. It gets you to a certain point, but doesn't ultimately I think get you to where you want to be. And and and I met Dave, and you know, I met Dave two years ago, and he had this really cool way about him and just like really trying to uh accentuate the differences of individual agents and what their different strengths and different weaknesses are, and understanding them to ultimately create something that is for them. And you know, I didn't realize this until later in my agent career. I started finding different avenues just by embracing myself. You know, we we started redeveloping our training program at the end of this year, and we're talking about something called embracing you. And he really wanted to be inside of like how we start structuring agents, marketing, how we structure agents to to grow their business. And, you know, ignorant of me, I said, you know, why are we why are we adding, you know, this is something I think people start to develop over time. And it was something he we actually wanted to put inside the training program called a section that actually called we call embracing you. And I said, why are we adding the state? And he said, everyone's staring at everyone else's business and everyone else's lives, thinking it's absolutely perfect, it's going the way we want, but no one is actually paying attention to themselves or their business, and they're just ignoring their own strengths and their own things they bring to the table. And from the very beginning, that could be actually the number one thing that can make you better in a marketplace is by embracing your own self. So by telling agents, by telling agents to stop imitating others, and by starting to pay attention to what actually moves the needle and what actually you know best in yourself and what you are good at, which is you mean understanding your own story, understanding your own background, understanding your experiences and strengths that you carry that nobody else does. Because that will lead you to avenues that didn't lead John Smith, the agent down the road, or Mike agents down the road, because they had different strengths. They had different things they were good at, and they followed that trail to where they are now. So just because an agent was successful doing it XYZ way doesn't mean XYZ way is the way we have to jan everybody into this system to be successful. It doesn't work like that. If it were that easy, everybody would be successful, but it's not. There are different ways that we can do this to make sure you are. So those elements of your own story, your background, your experiences, your strengths, that creates your business and gives you the path to grow. You just have to be willing to look yourself in the mirror and understand who you are and where you came from and find ways to use that to your advantage. That lesson itself will change your business and the way you view how to grow or even how to develop your messaging to prospects, both from a conversational level and from a marketing level in print or online social media. So we're we're gonna discuss just a few tips that I think will help you maybe even clarify your messaging, clarify the way you talk to prospects, clarify the way you hold appointments, clarify maybe how you do print marketing or online content to essentially differentiate yourself in a marketplace full of people who are trying to do the same things by the same systems, by the same leads, how to differentiate yourself by actually embracing you. Okay.

Use Your Background As Advantage

SPEAKER_01 6:52

First one is don't ignore your background because it is not baggage, it's actually an advantage. Your experiences are your experience, and that seems uh fairly obvious, but it's the truth that I mean, myself, even like when I say that out loud, it's like duh, but it's something I didn't do at the very beginning. And for me, I still wrote over 220 plus applications in my first year of writing business, but I didn't embrace me. I did it the way everyone else told me to do. And again, it got me to a pretty successful level, obviously, but it did have did it have to be as hard. I don't think so. What you have done and what you have accomplished should be the leading sword in what makes you different. So you have a unique take and maybe unique frame on how you approach maybe trying to find more clients, or when you work with clients, a unique framework that people will will resonate with versus Susie down the road. Because everything that we talk about, of it, maybe even starting with your why. And it's something we work with every agent on because there will be hard days. There will be days that are great, but in the sales cycle, there'll be more hard days than there will be easy days, at least at the beginning. And the person who has a stronger why will endure a lot harder times than the person without it. So, and your why is something that isn't something that should be something intrinsic and something internal. It should be something you share because that is how we connect as individuals. Simon Senect had a great talk. It was a TED talk, it's probably one of the most viral ones ever. And he talked about, and it's again something fairly obvious. It talked about people don't buy what you have or even how it works. They buy why you do it. Because ultimately, they can do their own research and just buy that product by itself. Like if you're a Medicare agent, like they could go on Medicare.com and sign themselves up, no problem. But they want to work with an agent because they want a relationship, they want someone to help them, they want the service, right? So when you're looking at developing your why, you want to make sure it is strong enough that doesn't include money. Want to make sure it's strong enough that if you set it to a group of people, you said it one-on-one, you know, it's gonna attract people to you and it's gonna push people away, which is okay. But your why should be something that should be a leading sword for people to connect with you so they understand who you are and why you do something before they may even talk about product. Because if there's someone I'm sitting down with, a salesperson, or if it's someone that's, you know, a financial advisor, insurance guy, uh maybe they're selling Louis Vuitton bags, it doesn't really matter. If I connect with them on a deeper level by further than a sale, and you know, something why they do something, or maybe something we have in common or something we have an alignment with, I am more likely to follow that person, or even maybe buy from that person than the person who I have zero things in common with, maybe really don't have a lot of similarities, maybe don't align with why they do things, or maybe they just not someone I really want to work with. Now, from an agent standpoint, if I'm working with somebody who has a deep connection and a passion for service to helping seniors for someone who got into this because they heard they can make six figures residually, who's the person you'd rather work with? I mean, I get we're here all supposed to make money, but if your leading sword is the service and your passion for seniors, versus maybe you're not talking about essentially why you're here to make money or you know, you're not leading with that sword, but you're just not talking about anything like that. And tell me in what situation that that person who talks about how they got into this because they wanted to serve seniors, they wanted to help people, and they have a deep-seated passion because they saw people get taken advantage of of the system or you know, list out reasons as to why you got into this just by talking about why you got into this, as long as it's not something about where you're just a money hungry person, this levels you up compared to literally everybody else from the get-go. All right. So that's embrace that because it is not baggage, it's it's something that'll actually make you more of a it again, and the see if really plain Jane insurance agents, like it

Build A Strong Why People Trust

SPEAKER_01 10:49

will make you look better and it will give you advantage in the set. Your upbringing, your past careers, your failures, your hardships, your successes, they will shape you and how you will connect with people. For example, myself. When I got into Medicare, I was 24 years old. I was a millennial trying to sell to people who are 65, telling them what to do. That is looking at objectively, that is an extremely decline. One, I'm 24, I barely know what I'm doing myself at the time. Number two, I was a millennial, which, if anyone of you who are listening to this are a millennial, you know that we don't have a very good optics aren't good on our generation. And if you're someone outside the millennials uh looking at millennials, you can probably agree, like, yeah, sorry guys, you just you don't have a very good look in the when it comes to generation, not a very good generation. So, and I'm also trying to sell to seniors who have much more life experience than me. How could I use what I used to do in my past, my success, my failures, my hardships, to shape the way I can connect with them? Because ultimately there are people that have failed in my position, being so young, being in the industry, that didn't know how to connect with people, maybe didn't know how to sell, maybe didn't know even how to get in front of seniors. So one of the unique things that I came from was if anyone's familiar with the restaurant Olive Garden, cool. The hot the biggest huge population of people who go to Olive Garden are generally two categories. It's families and it's seniors. We had a substantial amount of senior population out dying in Olive Garden. So when I was in college and I was waiting tables full time a week, I mean, I'm seeing hundreds of seniors a day serving hundreds of seniors a day. So I learned how to connect with them. I learned how they want to be treated. I learned how to gain respect. I learned um how to be polite. I learned how to be kind. I learned how to pull information, how to connect with them on a deeper level than just, no, here's your here's your pasta and sauce. So that gave me a unique perspective on connecting with seniors that not a lot of people had, because I got to talk to them every day for like four years, hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of tables a week to be able to get that perspective. So when we say use what you did before to figure out a way how to use it to your advantage, I definitely did because when I went to a home and talked with a senior, I was extremely comfortable. And when I talked with seniors at Olive Garden, I understand what a lot of crap they're going through. I heard this Medicare thing when I was serving tables. It was things they were struggling with. It was finances, it was money, it was how long are they gonna live? Are they gonna have enough money when they pass away? I heard all those things. So when I knew about connecting with seniors, about once I understood the Medicare part, I already

Life Lessons From Olive Garden

SPEAKER_01 13:35

understood a lot of their pain points. I knew how to speak to them before I really even knew how Medicare even worked. So those past experiences you have do play a role in what you're gonna do going forward and can shape the way you connect with them. When it comes to like failures, hardships, and successes, like my other previous job was at Best Buy. Learned how I again I had learned how to sell when I was 18 years old from a supervisor in the lifestyle department that was called. And he told me, if you don't know it, fake it till you make it. And in the meantime, read all the tags and all the products and learn what it does. That was my sales training. And it took me a hell of a lot of repetitions of just talking to people, learning how to connect, learning what not to say, learning what to say, learning what to say at the right time to say it and how to move and ask for the sale. Like, and through Best Buy at the time, they wanted us to like interact. I don't care a clipboard with all my sales, like they wanted us to keep track of all that stuff. So for me, it was all about having a ton of conversations. So for me, I took that experience and added with the Olive Garden experience. Like now I know how to sell and had a lot of repetitions doing it. Now I know how to talk to seniors. It actually created a perfect environment for me to actually be successful in this business. I just didn't know where to find seniors, which that goes into coaching and trying to help people do that. But ignoring your background is like throwing away your brand because everybody has a brand. It's just whether they know it or don't know it. And if you know it, now how do you project that? And there's a lot of different ways you can use this to your advantage. If I'm trying to show you the difference on what makes me me, besides doing that on a one-on-one level, how am I going to use what makes me different to my advantage? Am I can I do that through my marketing? A lot of agents do not use this to their advantage in their marketing because they're using cookie cutter carrier stuff where they're using lead vendors with our directed or BRC mailers that don't show a unique perspective of you. That's why at FFSG, none of our stuff is ever branded us. It's always branded you. It's always branded the agent, it's always branded the business because we do not want to be your brand. We have our own brand. We don't want to be known to Medicare beneficiaries anymore. We want agents to know who we are. So when we're marketing, we want to market you to seniors and what you makes you different specifically. So inside of marketing is a great way to start using what makes you different, maybe your why, maybe what uh area you're in, why it's so important to you. If it could be family attributes, it could be your how your roots in the community, how long you've been in the community, whatever message you can put together that can differentiate you in a sea of call centers, big agencies, big marketing budgets that connect you to the area you're in. Number two, in presentations. This seems kind of odd, but again, people buy what you do, or people buy why you do something more than what you do or even how you do it. So, and your your background of why you got into this business is super important to people actually connecting with you. So, presentation is a good way to do it. If I'm an agent again, I'm gonna go back to exactly what I did before. Like at some point, they're gonna ask the question, why did you get into this business? And you better have a solid, scripted answer that just comes off like butter. Because that question, ultimately, they're asking you that, they want to know what kind of person you are. Did you get into it for a real passionate reason? Or like what I said very early on was, well, I don't have a college degree, and I did the restaurant business, I went into the car business, now I'm in insurance, so I went into the three industries that people are successful in when they don't have a college degree. This was my last job. Like I literally said that out loud once. And you know, luckily enough, like they thought it was funny and they still wanted to go go forward and actually work with me, but that could have easily backfired. In presentations, like once you're building rapport with them, like they're understanding a lot about you just like you're understanding a lot about them. And these unique qualities that you bring to the table will come to the forefront at some point because they're gonna ask you, why did you get in this business? Do you have family? Like, and you can even share, like they might even ask, like, what'd you do before insurance? Like, these are things you should be using in your presentations, especially your why, because that is an easy connection point that if you it's done right, people can connect with on a great level. Networking as well. And I'll cheat, I'll lump in content as well into this last one. Networking and content. For those of you who are online not making content, you're missing the boat exponentially on your visibility in your market. And especially if you have a strong message, you have a strong background of understanding what your strengths and weaknesses are. And if being in front of a camera and public speaking is one of those strengths, and you have a very strong lie, man, you have an opportunity to seize your area more than everybody else by a long shot. Because there is a lot of Medicare businesses out there that are not visible online, and even more that are not even making content. So that'd be something very important. But another area is you can do is from a networking perspective, if you're networking with business

Turn Your Story Into Marketing

SPEAKER_01 18:45

owners, if there's centers of influence, if there's if you're going around working with CPAs, financial advisors, being casualty agents, like you want to understand why they're in the business, and they're gonna want to understand why you are in the business. And I'll tell you right now, if money is the first thing out of your mouth or out of their mouth, you're probably turned off a little bit. Because we all know it's all implied we're here to make money, but it's how we make money is who is gonna be very important and why you got into the business. So when we're looking at this, and you're looking at now that you understand what's, why, and how you're doing the business, and maybe looking at your background as far as how you want to leverage what makes you different, if that's gonna be in marketing, if that's gonna be in presentations, if that's gonna be networking, you're starting to make content, start talking about why you do this and share your passion through here. Are there skills that you're learning right now that you learned in your old job that can now help you with this new job? Because again, talking about Best Buy, talking about Olive Garden, those are skills that I developed in old jobs that I brought into my new job. So now that you know all these things about your past and background and how you want to leverage marketing, now it's that we're gonna look at skills that you actually learned in previous background or jobs or experiences that you can bring to the forefront to leverage in this new venture, creating and growing a Medicare insurance business. Those are probably the two most important things to look at is how can I share my message on who I am using all the experiences, background, and cultivating a message that makes sense that people can connect with. How can I share that message? Once that message is shared, what skills do I already have or what skills do I need to learn more of that I've gotten from previous jobs and experiences that I can use and leverage to grow my business? Again, Olive Garden, I learned to connect with a ton of seniors and learn how to talk to them. A spy, I learned to talk to a ton of people and how to sell, what to say, how to say it, and when to say the right thing. Like that was a high volume number of things that I leveraged when I got into Medicare. I just had to do the same thing again. Talk to a lot of seniors, leverage the activity that I was doing. Same thing. That was a longer section. But number two is audit your life. An easy way to start doing this, audit your life. Put together, like if you're going to write a biography of yourself, sit down and actually look at your journey. Like, where did you come from? Put it together like you're writing a biography, just like bullet points. And with each new job or experience, success, hardship that you went through, ask yourself these questions. What did I overcome? What skills did I build? And what perspective do I now bring that others probably would not have? Because those questions will start creating this message. Or at least you understand what makes you different in a C of the plain Jane insurance agent. This is going to be your foundation and to not shy away from it. Because ultimately, once we have, once we understand the skills that we bring to the table, once we understand our messaging, now we have to find an avenue to be able to get that messaging out there. And that's just what do I, what can you do now? Or what do you new avenue you can do that you enjoy? Like if that's content, if that's direct mail marketing, if that's doing leads, what avenue can

Use Your Why In Presentations

SPEAKER_01 21:45

I do to share this message that I actually enjoy doing? So you can do a lot of it and talk to a lot of different people and share it with. Because the more people you share these, share this your background, share your messaging with, the more that people can connect with you. And that's when you start building a tribe of. People to build your business who align with the same things that you align with. Again, not everyone has degree on every single topic, but there are, I believe, there are foundational things that people want to align with to know that we're going to be working well together. Number three is look through the windshield, but don't ignore the rear view mirror. You should, your business should always be forward-focused. Eye is on the vision and your eyes on the road ahead. But you can't pretend what happened in the past isn't something that you should take, is something that you shouldn't have to, you shouldn't take into consideration going forward. Because the reason we learn history in elementary school and high school is so we don't repeat the past. So if there is mistakes made in your business, or you're in the you're in the process of a struggling business right now and you're trying to grow, there are things you are doing right now that you should not continue doing going forward. First thing we should always do is one, learn what can we do, what can I do next time that is better, or how can I avoid stopping this from happening again? Or how can I make this if it's a good thing? How can I make this happen more often? Those things you need to ask yourself because without doing a kind of a temperature check on things that are not working, we need to evaluate those. We need to learn from it. And then we have to find a way to avoid or stop doing what is ultimately slowing down the business. I think a lot of, I've talked to a lot of Medicare agents in my past six years that

Networking And Content Visibility

SPEAKER_01 23:21

understand that maybe what they're doing isn't working, but they have no other option. So they just keep doing it, just keep growing more and more frustrated. Or you have some people who actually learn and just stop doing things altogether. And then there's a small population that actually stop doing what's not working, learn from it, and try to do something better. That is where the real magic comes in to making sure that your if your business is going to be successful, there are things that you're gonna run into that are not going to work out. You're gonna try something that fails. You're gonna try something that is ultimately not gonna work. And from that point, we need to make sure you never do that again. And if we do do it again, how can we make that better in time? And if we can't make it better, avoid doing it all together. But if it's a good thing, we want to figure out how can we just do more of it? Because if it's working and it's returning, uh, if you give me some ROI, it's gonna return on our investment, then how do we continue to do more of it? Okay. Your past, especially the negative parts, can be turned into positive fuel. So when success happens, ask yourself why it happened. It's really funny. They talked about in basketball, no one questions when the shot goes in, but everyone questions when you miss the shot. So when the shot goes in, ask yourself why that worked. When you had something successful happen in your business, whether that's you sold your first Medicare Advantage plan, maybe you sold your first double, sold a Medicare Advantage plan and a dental vision plan, maybe you sold a uh, maybe you you scheduled three or four appointments in a day uh

Audit Your Life For Differentiators

SPEAKER_01 24:43

calling leads, maybe you went to a seminar and booked 10 appointments at a seminar. Whatever you did inside that vacuum, inside of that thing we're looking at, ask yourself why it went so well. Learn why it went so well, and then continue to implement processes that will foundationally change the way you do business. Because the moment you do something successfully over and over again and ask yourself why it happened, learn from it, and implement systems that can continue to do that. You not only have now created a machine, you are created a machine that you can also teach other agents to do. Whole other topic, but just for you. Same thing with failures. Failures, I think, is all obviously more important because a lot of times we continue to do the same things over and over again, expect a different result, and we just become the same doing so. Failures will happen all the time. Ask yourself why. Learn from it, implement a way that doesn't happen again. Or when you choose to make a different decision in your business, evaluate why things didn't work out in the past and find a new way to move forward. If it's you bought leads before, a great example. Uh, there was an agent I ran into who for AEP decided to buy some business reply card mailers, right? Spent hundreds of dollars on business reply card mailers to get 46 business reply card mailers back exactly, and made zero sales on it. If you're an agent listening to that, you have two options. Never do that again, right? Or two, if I'm gonna do that again, I'm gonna have a way to make sure that when I get those mailers back, I have the speed to get back to the client. So I'm the first one who calls them. Two, I'm gonna be way more persistent. Three, I'm gonna have way better scripting available. And four, I'm gonna make sure they're local. Those are just the frameworks that if I'm calling BRCs, that's what I'm gonna do. So if you're in a situation where something doesn't work out, we need to evaluate why we need to learn from it and implement ways that it doesn't happen again. Okay. Number four is uh probably one of my favorites is lean into you. The greatest mistake new insurance business owners make is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. I saw this firsthand across a lot of agents. When you try to do something outside your comfort zone, which you should, I'm not saying you should not step outside your comfort zone. When you do so, we have to make sure that we are consistently learning from that. But if you are trying to do something that is against how you want to do business or maybe against your current skill set, where there has to be a ramp up period to make sure you're slowly going outside your comfort zone without being completely overextended and you're just in a bad

Learn From Wins And Failures

SPEAKER_01 27:13

spot. For example, early on in my like field training career, we had an agent, and at the time, this is when like seminars were like peak, where everyone was trying to do seminars because they were you know driving 10, 15, 20 plus people inside a room. Uh, inside my my thought process at the very beginning was like, hey, if you want to write a bunch of business, you just got to do seminars. It's easy, simple solution. Send out you know, 500 to 1,000 direct mail pieces out, advertising event. You'll get 10, 15, 20 people in a room. They're golden. Well, guess what? We sent out the mailer. We had about 12, 13 people in the room. I was in the back because I was a field trainer to make sure he was doing okay. Thought we did enough prep. Agent came to the front of the room, and fro is like a deer in headlights. To this day, this person is still in insurance, but she did not want to do public speaking in that format. She is more of a very small group, if not a one-on-one base agent. So, again, that is just a fear of what she had that she didn't want to do that anymore. Again, there's a whole other conversation about like, well, if she developed the skill to do public speaking, yes, that's not something she wanted to do. That's not what she wanted to do. She wanted to do more one-on-one work. So we have to ask ourselves if I don't know how to do it, am I comfortable learning it? Or if it's something I don't want to do, do I just not want to do it? Just find another way I want to do business. Because that's ultimately the questions you got to ask yourself. Just the same thing with me. When I first got started, it was a lot of like calling leads. It was a lot. Did I like doing it? Absolutely not. It was a lot of long days, but it produced me business to the point where I got successful enough where then I moved into seminars. And in my time when I started doing seminars, I then started networking because I had a father-in-law who was very successful in Madison and networking in Madison for 30 years. So he started bringing me to events where I started to meet more people and I met more financial advisors. I met CPAs and I met a lot of people that, you know, I just connected with. And then I got really good with networking and talking to people. So it kind of led me to new avenues, new skill sets, and we're at the point where I didn't have to call leads as much. So I didn't want to do business calling leads again. If I went back to being an insurance agent again, I wouldn't call leads anymore. That was a necessary evil at the beginning. I developed that skill. I got it. But that's not the way I want to do business anymore. For you, you have to understand which way you want to do business. You have to understand your strengths. What do you actually enjoy doing? Because I guarantee you, you will market consistently a lot longer, or you'll do a certain thing a lot longer if you actually enjoy doing. Because there is unfortunately, there's a lot of agents that do that try to market a way that they don't enjoy doing, but they do it out of necessity. Then that comes into discipline. Because it's no longer a it's no longer a is this successful or not successful. A lot of marketing will be successful, we do it long enough, but it's like, will I wake up tomorrow and want to do this? And then your discipline gets into comes into play. And it's do you have discipline or not to get up and do it or stay home and stay in bed? Um, but if you enjoy doing it, it's not do I have to get up and do it. It's I get to go do this. Big, big difference. Your story. How did you get here? You want to understand how did you get to this point and look back on your past to develop that story of how you actually communicated to your audience because it is a it's a huge brand builder, very successful people in the world. You probably can tell if anyone you follow on YouTube or even like do social media is like they you you you look up to, you probably have a good idea of their story where they came from. Why? Because you probably heard it once and you connected on a deep level. Now you'd watch much of their content. Same thing. Your personality. Some of you probably watch the this podcast and probably stopped at this point because maybe you just don't like the way I talk, or maybe the speed or cadence I talk, and maybe you still like my face. I don't know, but or maybe you just don't like the way I portray information, my personality. And that's okay. I don't I don't dog you for that. That can potentially happen. But everyone's personality is a unique leading sword that will attract and push away certain individuals. And that's okay. Because the people who do listen to this and actually do find this valuable and like the way I project information and talk, maybe like the way my face looks, whatever, they will enjoy this content a lot longer. And for me, I'll be more successful because I'm pushing away people that don't really necessarily like the way I work do work and attract people who do, which is good for us. And for you, it's the same thing. If you your personality will jive with people, and it won't jive with some people, and that's okay. We don't have to, you don't have to make every single client you sit down with your client. It is okay to fire people at some at certain levels, even at the beginning. And there's certain people you just, hey, I'm I don't think we're I don't think we're a good fit. And that's okay to admit, and okay to actually tell people. You don't need everybody because ultimately it'll slow down your business if you try to bring on everybody because it just it'll start clashing. And then your experiences, how it actually shaped you, because there are definitely people who've gone through some bad situations that shaped the way they do business a lot differently than the way I do. I didn't come from in a really bad situation. I grew up in a nice way, in a nice, relatively comfortable type environment. You know, had both my parents still married. Like those are, and I you know, went to public school, went to college. Like that is that is a my own story and my own experiences that I can kind of speak to. But for people who've been in worse situations or maybe even better situations, use those things to your advantage. Make it part of your story and how it shaped you and why you do what you do today. Because I guarantee you that'll be resonant, that'll resonate a lot more with people than you would expect. Your authenticity builds far more trust than any really prepared script, any pitch or any strategy ever will. Because the moment people understand you, understand your brand, understand your story, understand your why, you will connect with people a lot easier than not telling anybody about you and try and do it only through other marketing channels that are just generic, basic telemarketing channels. You'll have a lot harder time growing your business if you just try to put yourself in this cookie cutter mold. And not to say you're not going to be successful. I'm saying it's going to be harder. I speak from experience when I tell you that. Because again, I wrote a lot of business in my first two years in uh in business. And from an outside looking in, I was a successful

Lean Into Strengths Not Seminars

SPEAKER_01 33:10

agent, but it doesn't mean it was easier. It was significantly harder because the way I did business, if I knew what I knew now, I would definitely have changed the way I did business. I still would have to do a lot of activity and do what I did, but there were elements that I would have shaped differently about how I talked to prospects, how I did presentations, maybe how I would do content or network. There would definitely be different conversations that I would tweet that maybe would job with people more or push away the people that ultimately became very big time sucks in my business. Ultimately, the way people will begin to see if you are who you portray yourself to be. So be you. Because if you try to be anything else, your your chances of success far diminish than if you actually be you and embrace the things that make you different and unique. Because tell me, when you're looking at very successful people, we can talk about athletes, we can talk about entrepreneurs, we can talk about maybe successful educators over our time. Every single one of them, they don't all have the same story. They don't all have the same perspective. They don't all have the same, even the same skills, the same attributes. They all seem to be different. Why? Because they use that as their leading sword when developing their brand, when developing their company, developing their identity. No one becomes super successful because they blend into the rest of people. It's because they stand out sometimes, and mostly in a good way. There are there are people that do it in a negative way, in a controversial way, to kind of get their name out there and not say that's good or bad or wrong. It's just another way of doing it. So for you, the more you can lead with how much different you are than the rest of everybody, it will not lose you sales. Actually, gain more sales and actually gain a tribe of people that identify with the way you see the world. Because the way you see the world is significantly different than the person right next to you. Even the the way that even in my own family, I see the world significantly different than in my own family. And we grew up in the same household for years, we're taken care of, we're nurtured the same way, we're taught the same information from the same people, went to the same schools, had the same teachers. Yet I see the world very differently. So for you who is listening to this episode right now, and why you're watching this in some way, when we talk about understanding who you are, where you came from and those experiences and creating a message that you can share with the world, that is the most important thing you can do. And then figuring out the skills necessary to be able to document that and push it out into the world, whether that's through public speaking, whether that's through networking, whether that's through traditional marketing methods, whether whether that's through content making, whether that's through one-on-one conversations, developing that framework so you can push that message out there. Because I'll tell you, people knowing you and understanding you is the biggest advantage you have, and it's the highest likelihood that you will be successful. Again, I hope this podcast, I hope this these last couple podcasts have been showing you the way to go from unknown to unstoppable and really how to do it in these baby stuff type way. You're not going to do it from one episode, you're not going to do it from even one idea here. It's a cultivation of learning, implementing,

Authenticity Builds Trust And Tribe

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and repeating that process using the information we're giving you. We are we're growing this whole channel organically. We are not doing any paid advertising, maybe we'll throw it up on social media or something like that. But we really, this podcast will grow if you share the information with another business owner, Medicare agent, insurance agent, if you found it valuable. And if you didn't, well then you don't have to listen anymore. But keep following, keep listening, keep sharing so you can learn how to take your business from unknown to unstoppable. Thank you again for listening, and we'll see you on the next one.

SPEAKER_00 36:44

We do not do any paid marketing to promote this podcast. It only grows if you find value in this and share it. Keep following as we show insurance business owners how to go from unknown to unstoppable. Thank you for listening, and we will see you next week.