You Can’t Score From The Bench, Get In The Game!

Everybody says they want to be great. Almost nobody wants the daily grind that greatness requires. We take a hard, practical look at what separates the agents who write 30 apps a year from the agents who become the person everyone watches and thinks, “they are in a league of their own.” 

We use Michael Jordan’s path as a business framework: mastery of fundamentals, relentless reps, and a refusal to coast. That translates into real insurance sales behaviors you can control right now like consistent prospecting, role plays, tighter presentations, and higher call volume. We also challenge the perfection trap head-on: waiting to feel ready is just procrastination with better branding. If you want better results, ship the content, make the calls, run the appointments, then refine. 

Next, we get tactical about modern visibility. Your online presence is your reputation, and prospects judge you before you ever speak. We talk digital footprint basics like LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, clean profiles, and consistent posting that creates implied credibility. Then we hit the trust accelerant most agents underuse: reviews. Google reviews and testimonials are the closest thing insurance agents have to championship rings, and a simple review process can compound referrals fast. 

If you want to grow an insurance agency without chasing shiny objects, this is your roadmap: be useful, be relevant, and be consistent for long enough that the market cannot ignore you. Subscribe, share this with an insurance agent who needs the push, and leave a review so more agents can find the show.

Transcript

Welcome And The Greatness Standard

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 0:27

Hello and welcome to another podcast of the Invisible Agent Podcast teaching you, insurance agents, how to go from unknown to unstoppable. Today is a very special episode, I think, for me, because I'm a huge sports fan, and we're going to be teaching you how to be the Michael Jordan of your business. Because everybody wants to be great, but very few are willing to do what greatness requires. So today I'm going to show you how to become the Michael Jordan of your business, the producer, the leader, the professional that people watch and say, damn, they are in a league of their own. How do I be that guy or that girl? And if you feel like you're stuck, plateaued, or performing way below your potential, this episode is hopefully maybe the slap in the face and the roadmap you exactly

Jordan Got Cut And Responded

SPEAKER_01 1:14

need. So let's jump in and let's first start off with the quick story of Michael Jordan's path from where he became the world's greatest basketball player of all time to being cut by his high school basketball team, which is the most wild story I've ever heard in my entire life. So if you don't know, when Michael Jordan was in high school, he got cut from his basketball team. And it really hadn't, I don't think it had nothing to do with him actually being good enough. I think it was because everyone else just showed up more prepared. And that humiliation fueled what looks to be now probably the most legendary work ethic of all time. Because he was the first to practice and he was the last to leave. And showing up early, even when he was the best player in the entire world and challenging players on the court, he knew he was better than just to humiliate them because he had what seemed to be the most relentless competitive uh competitiveness ever. So it actually had not it wasn't even on the basketball court. It was cards, workouts, shooting drills. He would literally challenge anybody. If they challenged him, he would annihilate them to the nth degree. Even so much when he was retired, hearing about a basketball player on the Bulls that said he could beat Michael Jordan one-on-one, he actually came from his retirement into the practice facility just to beat him one-on-one and then leave after not even playing basketball. Like that's how competitive the man was. So the biggest reason why he was kind of the greatest person, I think greatest basketball player ever, was because he never just coasted on town. Because even when he was the best player and beating people and annihilating them on the court, he wanted to do more and he would not let anybody pass him by in the process. And that all started with one, him mastering the absolute fundamentals of the game. That's jump shot, that's footwork, that is his defense because he was like a defensive player of the year, I feel like a few times. And from a conditioning standpoint, he was always on the court. There wasn't this like load management stuff. He was always on the court. So for you business owners, when it comes to conditioning, that's like consistent prospecting, the presentation skills, and the closing. So translating what Michael Jordan did on the court and even off the court, teaching you this is you don't have to be the most talented. Like for me, I got an insurance back in October of 2019. I sold my first policy on October 14th of 2019. And within three months, I was out producing most veterans in the area that I was in. And it wasn't because I was more talented with them. I just was more consistent than them. I was in every single training, I was doing role plays, I was making more phone calls, I was sitting in more appointments, and I was selling more to clients. When you look structured in that way, it wasn't a hard thing to do. It was very simple. I mean, not saying it was easy, but it was a very simple thing to do is show up when everyone else wasn't, be consistent and don't get bored in the process, and look at the process over perfection. Because yes, I wasn't the best, but I did it every single day. And for those of you who are looking at, hey, I don't want to do something unless I'm perfect at, or I don't want to, I don't want to go market because I don't know everything about the product yet, like you were just holding yourself back because doing is the perfect time to do it. It's not waiting for you to be perfect at it, then going to do it. Because ultimately, if you do, when you go to do it and you realize you're not perfect, it's just gonna be a big hit to your ego right then and there. Michael L. Jordan wasn't magical, he was methodical. And really the points I'm gonna kind of cover today is gonna kind of break down exactly how you apply this mindset and hit what he did on the court and even off the court to how you implement that into your insurance business. So,

Done Beats Perfect Every Time

SPEAKER_01 4:41

first one being, and I kind of already alluded to it, is done is better than perfect. So for me, reps are a lot more important than perfection. For those of you who are like going through like all these like, you know, you know, and I love self-help books, you'll see a bunch of them here on here on my back. But like you can learn a lot in a book, but your first hundred appointments, your first hundred sales calls, will teach you more than any of these books can do in those amounts of pages. Because the real life experience of doing the work will be a lot more than you reading in a book. And for those of you who are looking at perfection, perfection for me is just another form of procrastination that you're saying, you're just delaying the inevitable because you don't feel like you're ready. When most of us, if not the most successful people in this business and even in other businesses, a lot of times they were not even close to perfect. They just sold things and figured it out on the back end. Michael Jordan, he took thousands and thousands of thousands, thousands, millions of shots. And for the first part of his career, they were imperfect shots. If you look at his uh jump shot from college to when he was prime Michael Jordan, it looked different. And that's because he practiced all the time and he mastered until he had the perfect one. And for those of you who aren't practicing this stuff, you can't improve what you're not doing. A lot of times, the things that you can do to increase your business or grow your business are things you're not doing now. So you have to learn it and then do the reps and required to improve it. And for the other half of the population, you are probably doing the right things in your business right now. You're just not nearly doing enough volume in that thing. So if that's if that's making phone calls, if you're someone who's like, I make 50 phone calls a week, yeah, the people who are doing this at a high level, when I was doing phone calls at a high level, I was making 100 to 200 phone calls a day to schedule appointments so I can feed myself that this week and the next week. That's what volume takes, and that's what the reps take. But I learned during, you know, during about close to two years of doing that, you learn how to be good over the phone. You learn how to schedule appointments, you learn how to sell when you do it at that high a volume. But most business owners are gonna overthink this process and never come close to that volume. So those they'll never learn to execute because they don't have the reps to be able to put in to do so. So stop trying to stop trying to polish everything and just start going at it. Imp imperfection at the beginning will create perfection in the back end because you will learn how to do this over and over again. So when it comes to even like making content, like just stop trying to polish the content, just start publishing. And if you look at my LinkedIn when I first started doing content, I mean, it's not great, still even, I mean, like there's still a lot of uh room for improvement on everything that I do from a from a social media standpoint. Absolutely. But at the very beginning, it was not as good as where it is today. It has gone eons above. And that's just because we just started posting a bunch and seeing what worked and then started fixing things on the back end. Imperfect marketing will beat no marketing. People knowing about you and not knowing about you, it's better for people to know about you than not know about you. Imperfect calls are better than no calls. At the very beginning, I said I was doing 100 and 200 phone calls potentially a day. At the very beginning, I would hang up mid-call on prospects because I was so, so nervous that I would just hang up. I'd forget what I had to say, I'd forget the script. Like, so I would just hang up. But over time, each call got easier and easier and easier the more I made. And for those of you who were being that position, hang up mid-phone call because you got so nervous, forgot the script, or you thought you just weren't good at it and stopped. That's the difference. Like that's the difference between a 200-plus app a year producer and someone writing 30 apps is that imperfect scripts versus no scripts. I am a huge fan of scripts, and I I say that because you can't measure yourself unless you measure the script. And what I mean by that is if you do not have one, you are gonna wing every single phone call, you are gonna wing every single appointment. Having something where you can go back and watch the tape to listen to yourself, get better, and adjust the script from there, and then you can, if you're really good and you want to grow an agency, you can then take that script, modify it a little bit because no one can sell as good as you, and then give it to agents below so they can then use that script to get better on as well. So, but again, that script day one is not gonna be perfect. You have to work through that. So, as far as other examples, if you're posting videos, your lighting doesn't need to be perfect. I don't have perfect lighting here. To make the call, you don't need to be fully prepared. To send the email, the font doesn't have to be perfect, the wording doesn't have to be perfect, it's gotta be grammatically correct, obviously. If you're building funnels or anything like that, if you're trying to market and do fun things online, like just put it out there because it's better than not putting it out there. Done is better than perfect almost every single day of the week and twice on Sundays. Because people knowing more about you, if every single person in the world knew about you, your business would probably be bigger than it is today. It's almost like guaranteed, if every single person in the world knew about your business, it would probably be bigger than it is today. So marketing and getting the phone calls out, being at the events, networking, marketing your butt off will only be a net positive for you in the business for the most part, unless you're just like, you know, doing something illegal and ethical, you will be in a better position just because you started to do it. Your market will tell you what they like and they don't like and tell you to adjust. And that's when

Your Online Presence Shapes Trust

SPEAKER_01 9:55

you have to adjust. Number two is if it's online, it must be true. The perception of you online is reality. People will judge you before they meet you. And that's actually a good thing because you want to attract the people who don't understand you and you want to attract the people who do understand you. Don't try to be liked by everybody because it doesn't work. There are plenty of people that probably look at my content online or maybe have met me in person, saw me speak at an event, and they're like, Yeah, I just don't vibe with you. I don't understand, I don't like what you say, I don't agree with how you view the world. And that's okay because ultimately that's what it is. They just don't agree how you view the world, and that's fine. But at the same time, you will attract people to you, and that is what we want because marketing will either push or pull people. What you say in meetings will either push or pull people. How you market yourself, that is the whole game. And we shouldn't be afraid to put out a message, to put out marketing, to say something in meetings in the fear of people not liking us, because there's a percentage of that room that will like it and want to gravitate towards you. And that's when business starts ramping up. The internet is your reputation, and that either could be a good thing or a bad thing. And I'll explain. I could, I've been in the business development side and the growth side for, you know, going on since 2020. It's 2026 right now. And I just met with a business owner this past week that's been doing Medicare since COVID, and he lives about 20 minutes down the road from me. And I've been online, we have lists, we've done marketing, we've sent out mailers, we've done online stuff, and he's been doing Medicare for six years, and he lives 20 minutes down the road from me, and I never knew he existed because I can't find the gentleman online anywhere. Again, being online, being being online could uh not being online could be a good thing potentially because if you do have profiles, LinkedIn, Facebook, you have them and they're just look like they're run by serial killers and they've they haven't seen a post since COVID, like they just might not think you're active anymore. So honestly, it's probably better you're not online if you're not going to post anything. But if you do have profiles, it's not good enough to just have them anymore. They have to be active, otherwise, it will hurt you in the long run. Okay. You want to have some sort of presence uh online because if someone Googles you and finds nothing, you do not exist. If they if they define you do not exist, and two, if you have something on there and there's there's no content in there, they're just not gonna think you're active. That's that's sloppy profiles, which they may think is they may be just sloppy service and you're just not gonna help them because you're not really in the business. Maybe you're a part-timer. Your online presence controls the narrative. You don't want it to control you. Because ultimately, a lot of agents I see out there, like when it comes to websites, when it comes to LinkedIn profiles, when it comes to Facebooks, like I immediately, the moment I see it, it gives me I have about five to ten seconds and I get a good gauge of whether this person is probably an active agent or a part-timer, or they just don't care. Either way, it's not really a good thing. Unless there's a ton of content that's engaging and they post stuff regularly, like that's a good thing. The other two scenarios, it only hurts you. Building a strong digital footprint is the way of the world now. It's having a strong Google business profile, it's having a strong website, it's having strong social consistency. Honestly, a professional headshot, like you'd think that's like something a status quo now. You don't see it a lot. You see people like back shots on, you know, when they're sitting at weddings and stuff. It's crazy. My headshot on LinkedIn, I took with my cell phone on a kitchen table. And it looks, I mean, my picture, it looks a lot better than a lot of them out there. But being active online will create, and this is the biggest point, being online will create implied credibility. If you're posting content, you are giving value to the world, you're giving education to the world, that'll imply that you are a credible resource in the community. And everything else, anyone else who is not doing that, have ghost profiles or no profiles at all, they will not find you or they will not think you are credible. If you do not tell your story, the market definitely will. And it more likely will not be in your favor. So when a Medicare client or an insurance, if someone's looking for life insurance annuities, when they research you, they want reassurance because if they see something clean, they see something uh some instant trust. If they see confusing or empty stuff, they will be they'll that'll create doubt in the consumer. Be intentional with that presence because if you are intentional about it and you are inconsistent and you post things that are of value to people, that'll create trust, that will create credibility, which ultimately is the two things you

Reviews Are Your Championship Rings

SPEAKER_01 14:16

need to sell. Number three, reviews are now the gold standard. I don't care where you're at, whether it's Yelp, whether it's Google Business Profile, it's proof that you can do the work and proof that you can help the avatar that you're going after. Just like no one can doubt, Medicare, uh, I'm sorry, uh, Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player of all time because of all the MVPs, defensive players, uh, defensive players of the year and championships. We correlate. That's why a lot of people don't think LeBron's like the best player in the world because he doesn't have as many championships as Michael Jordan, because championships equals proof of greatness. Now, in the insurance business, like we don't have, you know, you know, I mean, some you know, carriers might give out awards or you might get some sort of award through some other ancillary company, but the reviews are our championships because the amount of reviews we have that are positive correlates to the consumer who's looking at you like I'm Patty, I'm John, I'm Jan. They all said they had great experiences with them and they look like they are in my situation. I trust that this agency can help me get to where I want to go. Those are your championship rings because people trust strangers more than they trust salespeople. Salespeople are viewed as very low status. But if their friend Nancy or they see someone online that has really good things to say about you, that instills more trust than a salesperson calling you trying to schedule an appointment about how they can help you. It's the easier way to generate referrals within the business. If you have that strong presence, you have testimonials, you have stronger views that customers and prospects can see. Every piece of content that gives social proof that you can do this, that's something your competitors definitely can't refute. Unless you're someone trying to make up Google reviews or make up testimonials like that. That's that's that's just fraudulent, and you'll probably that'll probably catch up to you in the back end. But all those reviews, everything on there, only gonna prove that you are better than your competitors because they don't have that. There is no proof that exists out there in the marketplace to show that they can do the job, but there's hundreds of reviews that you have proving that you can do the job. Reviews will equ will let you dominate the market because that'll give you the everyone, the exponential amount of proof that you can do this. Make the review process and onboarding and offwarding process really easy. If you're especially going to do this, there are a lot of agents that find out that they're like, oh, I got my Google review link and my email signature. Like that's how I get reviews. Like this needs to be pushed in front of people. Like you can't, it's like waiting for referrals to call you, like just waiting for the phone to ring to like for you to increase your business. Like, yeah, you may get some here and there, but unless you're pushing that Google review in someone's face, they're not gonna do it, more than likely. Unless you like, they thought you were just like the best thing since sliced bread and they actively seek you out. And that's where a lot of I see reviews online. It's like they have like four or five, but they've been business for like four or five years. It's like, yeah, because you probably ran into those four or five people who are just obsessed with you, who just like actively sought you out. So you want to ask immediately, make it super simple to sign up and provide maybe a prompt as how you want them to review. If you even get a video testimony, like, man, that's good. That'll make you go nuclear when it comes to social proof, because then you see like active someone who's a real customer saying those really positive things about you and your business, and you will look even better in their eyes. Okay. Number four, so that's like that was number three.

Be Useful Relevant And Consistent

SPEAKER_01 17:35

Number four is make sure everything you put out is useful, relevant, and consistent because you want to show up when it matters. Michael Jordan, in the biggest moments of his entire career, because he came prepared, because he delivered every time when the game was online, he had the ball and took the shot, he didn't have to think about it. He was just he was just there. It was just like a second nature thing. And he was always the best when the br when the lights were shining the brightest because he took that shot every single time. Even when the defense was right and he was feeling hot, he took the or he didn't feel cold, he took the shot regardless. And you, as a business owner, need to be doing the same. You need to be creating content, you need to have those seasonal miners to your customers. You need to be understanding when those Medicare deadlines, so your Medicare deadlines are, so your customers know when they have to make a decision. You have to inform them about annual changes, you need to be there for your community, and your audience needs to know this consistently because your audience rewards the people who show up when they have the problem. And to get to get even more like I guess tactical on this, a lot of businesses try to time the market. So on a time horizon of, you know, let's say two or three or years, there's gonna be moments where the business can be good if you time it absolutely perfect. And they think they can just time that out when that time comes. But ultimately, if you were just in the business consistently doing all these things all the time, you will time all the big time, uh all the big shots when things are gonna spike, when a plan exits and people need your help, you can help them. When there's a when there's a company that lays off a bunch of employees and they need to get the new benefits on the group side, they need to get life insurance, right? If you are always in the business, you will never miss those moments. But if you try to time the business, you'll more likely miss. So when you're not posting content continuously, you're not making continuous phone calls, you're not continually in the community, you're not continuously networking, you're not continuously running seminars, you're just kind of sporadically doing it, the odds of you hitting those big moments are less likely than if you just consistently do it over a long period of time. And when you're marketing, making sure everything you have is useful, relevant is especially for us who help agents on the marketing side. I tell every agent that when you use us as a marketing company, we will make sure that the content that we put out, we custom one, customize it to you, and uh two, we make sure it's useful. And three, we make sure it's relevant. And we can promise that to every agent that uses us that we help grow. But that fourth piece, the consistency piece, we do not have your wallet, we do not have your work ethic. So when it comes to you trying to grow your business, we can help with those relevant and usefulness, but the consistency piece is on you. But the consistency piece is the reason why

Pick Two Channels And Commit

SPEAKER_01 20:28

you grow. I put out a post in our group today that said there was there's really only like three things that I think from from like if you're getting really breaking down everything very simply, there's really three things that you have to do to like grow in this space is find one or two marketing strategies. If you're brand new, find one or two marketing strategies that excite you, that are your strengths, and that you know uh other agents are doing that can can produce good business. And or if you're if you're already an existing agent, audit all of your sales and find where your one or two most sales are coming from as far as a marketing strategy. Find those one or two things and do them. Number two is do them for 12 months straight, every day, every month, every week. Do them for 12 months straight. Number three is don't stop because what I think we tend to do, and even I'm guilty of this, is because I'm not standing here on a pedestal trying to talk down, is we get bored when we get used to it. So when we start doing the same things over and over again, it becomes very taxing because it's taking energy out of us now, because it's not like lighting us up when we first did it, but it's still producing us good business. But sometimes we just want to jerk the wheel and change things just because we're getting bored. But ultimately, if you continue to do one or two things every single day, every single week, every single month, and do that for 12 months and don't get bored, you will beat 99% of people. Because ultimately, if you do that, the three things you have three things that grow a business is finding new customers, selling them more, and retaining them after that. But what really has to start is being consistent with what you're doing, becoming that local presence, not a uh Local educator, not a salesperson. Being memorable and being memorable equals referrals, right? That's what we want to do. So being useful is being remembered. Being relevant is being respected. And being consistent is equals trusted. There's no consumer out in the market today that if they were to buy a product today and they couldn't find you tomorrow, or maybe you were the business shut down on the weekends because X, Y, and Z reason, Walmart, Amazon, they would not be as big as they did as if they were they went on vacation, they shut their doors or they closed down, or you know, we don't do deliveries on Monday or Tuesday because we're going on uh we're going uh we have an appointment of going on vacation, right? We want to make sure that we're always there, we're always present for our customer and able to be found, able to be contacted, and that they can find us easily. If they cannot find us easily, especially in modern day, they will find somewhere else to go. I can almost guarantee you. There is a small window of opportunity that we have when a client wants to opt in, whether that's via ad, whether that's coming to a seminar, whether that's you know getting a phone call, there's a small window where they feel like if we can for us, if we contact them in this small window, the lives of us making the sale or getting the client becomes extremely likely. The moment they get out of that window, your life becomes extremely difficult. That's why it's important to be consistent and timely. So those are my four

Share The Show To Help It Grow

SPEAKER_01 23:25

tips. Again, this podcast is literally meant to take like strategy out in the real part of this world, things that we have done ourselves, and try to break it down simply enough for to give you strategy to help you grow your business. This whole channel, we do not run a single paid ad. You do not hear us have any promotions or ads that come in the middle of this that just kind of interrupt the program. Because we want to we want this to be a promotional podcast from you. What I mean by that is again, we're not gonna run ads. The only way this podcast is gonna grow if you find value in it and you share with another insurance business owner, a friend, share it in an email, send it to somebody, because we're trying to teach people like you how to go from unknown to unstoppable. Um, and if today's episode helped you in any way, maybe shift a mindset, spark an idea, maybe something in your business, you can share it, leave a review, send it to maybe a teammate. Don't share it to a competitor. Maybe you don't want to do that. But I appreciate you taking the time to listen. Keep following along as we help more insurance business owners rise above the noise in this industry. And we will see you on the next episode. Thank you again for listening. My name is Mike Sorensen, and we'll see you on the next episode.

SPEAKER_00 24:34

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.