An Insurance Producer's Guide to Building An Online Presence

May I ask you a hard question? Walk with me for a second through your sea of cubicles…

Let’s just say there’s a really great prospect who has finally gotten fed up with the level of service they’re getting from their current agent. After twelve years of doing business with their current broker, they’re ready to make a switch.

How do they find you?

I don’t mean how do they find your agency or office location. I mean how do they find YOU?

Out of all the Farmer’s and State Farm shingles, small local agencies, big brokerage shops and everything in between, how do they find YOU? And how would they know that inside your 15, 75, 220 employee agency is this really great producer that provides preeminent solutions and service for commercial clients, who really understands their business, and is by far the best answer for their needs? After all, though you work for an agency or broker, every insurance producer is their own small business.

So how do they find YOU?

It’s Not 1975 Anymore

If this were 1975, they’d hop in their Cadillac and drive down to Main Street to the white-columned building with the big INSURANCE sign hanging in the window. They might even call up their banker and see if he happens to know anyone.

But let’s be honest, it’s not 1975 anymore and a stroll down Main Street USA isn’t what it used to be. No matter how nice or inviting your state-of-the-art office is, prospects aren’t walking through your front door.

So back to my original question. How would this great prospect find YOU in today’s business environment?

If you’re like 99% of the producers out there, they’d have to know someone who knows you. Maybe it’s a current client, maybe it’s a center of influence, or maybe it’s through the local country club or church. Not only do they have to know someone who knows you, but they have to happen upon asking the person who knows you about insurance. Out of all the people they know, they have to ask the one who knows you. And when they ask, the person they ask has to have the presence of mind to refer you and not the five other insurance agents they know. Do you see how lucky you have to be to get business this way?

But for the typical commercial insurance producer today, this is their main method of referral traffic. You can’t really blame them because it’s the way they’ve been taught by the 55-year-old producer in their office. Build a massive network of people in the community and “get them all thinking about how they can help grow your business.” But don’t they have their own business, careers, families, and million other things to think about besides finding business for you? Plus is this really the primary way people search and research for what they need in today’s world?

If this is your main method of incoming prospects, your business is built for the wrong century and your only method of writing new accounts will be through the painfully methodical, inefficient and salesy way of cold calling. Here’s the hard but honest truth – having a corner office in a pretty building means nothing in the world of business today. No matter what internal political capital it gives you, it doesn’t help you write or grow your business.

In fact, if your primary real estate as an insurance producer is a 400-square-foot corner office with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the river, then you’ll be staring out those same windows at the life and business you dream of while walled into a reality of struggling through the grind of building a business with outdated methods. And somewhere out in the universe beyond your pretty view is a modern producer with less capability but exponentially more visibility, writing accounts in your backyard from 1,000 miles away and creating 20X more opportunity. Simply put, the world will never find you in your office or cubicle.

So how can a producer become visible and easier to find in a world that has developed beyond brick-and-mortar? By opening up a state-of-the-art office whose floor-to-ceiling windows look out to the entire world.

Opening Up Digital Real Estate

“Insurance is a referral business and always will be.” I hate it when I hear this. Yes, referrals are a blessing. But let’s open our business eyes to the world around us. Word-of-mouth referrals are no longer shared through phone calls, long lunches, golf outings and happy hours. Sure, maybe one-off opportunities here and there but not at scale. If you want to grow your business one account every three to six months, then this old school approach will do just fine. But scale is for up for sale and it’s the cheapest it will ever be. While you get your one referral every three-to-six months, the best producers of tomorrow will be getting three to six referrals every month, online. Prospects and clients go to one place and one place only when they need information today – they go to the internet.

 "The most important and valuable real estate for any knowledge expert today, including insurance producers and agencies, is digital real estate."

Like every industry before it, insurance is moving online. The producer who will succeed in the next decade is the producer who has a business built for the next decade. Simply put, you need an online presence.

When I say you need an online presence, I’m not talking about having a LinkedIn or Facebook profile. I’m not even talking about building an online quoting platform and creating a digital-agency like all the insurtech startups raising multi-millions of dollars. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe for simple products like life insurance, personal lines insurance, and small commercial, online platforms aren’t just the future, they are the now. But I also don’t think middle-market clients writing $500K+ checks and buying ten different policies will be doing that all online either. I’m talking about opening up an online office.

The most important, influential and revenue-generating real estate for the insurance producer of the future is digital real estate.

“That’s impossible,” you say. “How do you open an online office if you’re not providing online quotes? And why would anyone care?”

The Great Insurance Land-Grab of the 2020’s

It was the late 1990’s and a little known, or cared about, employee of a small $3M business looked at what was happening around him and made a bold prediction for his time – this emerging thing called the “internet” was a land-grab opportunity. The problem was he was just a young employee with a stupid idea working for his dad’s family business – a small, local liquor store. His crazy idea? To open the liquor store online.

How do you open a brick-and-mortar liquor store online? Who who’d ever want to buy their wine and liquor from some small dad-and-son liquor store across the country in New Jersey when they can just hop in the car and drive down to the corner?

Fast forward five years and the young man, Gary Vaynerchuk, grew his family business from $3MM to $60MM a year by building one of the very first wine e-commerce platforms. You may know him today as GaryVee, one of the world’s most influential and admired thought leaders in the areas of entrepreneurship, advertising, marketing, media, communications, and business building.

If you’re saying under your breath, “yeah well he sells a tangible product not an intangible product like insurance,” then you’ve missed the entire point. There was nothing about GaryVee’s products that differentiated him from the competition (just like I’d love to pull the blindfolds off all insurance producers and tell them the same). Shoot, his business was named “Shoppers Discount Liquors” until he renamed it “Wine Library.”

It was never about having a better product, it was about creating a bigger presence.

It was about becoming visible to millions of more people. GaryVee built a digital presence. He used content, ecommerce, email marketing and search marketing to make himself and his business easy to be found, easy to like and easy to trust. Isn’t that what having prime real estate on Main Street used to be about anyways? Being easy to be found and trusted where and when people needed you?

Where do prospects look for insurance today? The same place you go to look at houses, shop for mortgage rates, credit cards, vacations, cars, etc. – all online. The prime real estate now and into the future is digital real estate. For producers in the commercial insurance industry, the next five years hold within it a monumental land-grab opportunity reminiscent of the internet land-grab of the late 1990’s.

Be Found In The New

Five years ago, it’s estimated that only 8% of small businesses in the entire country didn’t have an online presence. This was five years ago! How many insurance producers do you know own their own digital real estate? I’d say less than .05% of producers I work with are building an online presence. Do you see the opportunity?

The insurance agencies whose online presence consists of a gloomy, outdated, embarrassingly old website are actually worse off than if they didn't have one at all. They give your agency's brand a black eye and hurt your business by turning away prospects in the one place everyone is searching. 

In my work with thousands of insurance producers throughout the country over the last fifteen years, the biggest weakness I’ve found among most is the failure to think and act like a business owner. When I see a producer make the shift in their mentality from being an employee of an agency to a business owner, that’s when I know their career is about to launch. Every producer is a small business owner and YOU, Inc. is your business. You are an entrepreneur and your industry is knowledge and information. You are a knowledge expert.

As a business owner and knowledge expert, growing your business will require finding your voice, expanding your reach, growing your visibility, and establishing your credibility. Knowledge experts like GaryVee, Amy Porterfield and Brendon Burchard would call that building a brand. To me the idea of “building a brand” as a producer carries a “fake” connotation. Your brand is you and it’s most impactful and inspiring when it’s authentic.

I prefer to think of it less as a brand and more as building a presence. A digital headquarters. A central place where people all over the country can find you. If you are a business that wants to be found in the new and be heard in the marketplace, you need a digital office.

The number one question I get from almost every producer I work with involves creative or alternative ways to market themselves, differentiate themselves, and prospect more effectively than cold calling. Their cold calling efforts are inefficient at best. My response is always the same. I respond with a question “Where do you go to look for anything?”

The answer is always one of two places: 1) Google Search or 2) Social Media. Don’t be confused by all the different “social media” platforms today. It’s basically just the modern term for internet. And what do you find on those two avenues? Content. Content. Content. And more content. Knowledge and information shared via different content channels of websites, articles, blogs, white papers, videos, webinars, podcasts, social media posts, etc.

Despite my efforts to convince them, most producers and agencies either don’t listen or don’t know how and just ignore the advice. There is an incredible lack of understanding of the power of great content. It’s human nature to want the magic formula to instant and easy success, but when will we learn there isn’t one? Yet there is this massive opportunity that is unbelievably effective and no one is paying attention to it!

An advisor and investor in one of my other business ventures knows content creation better than anyone else. In 2009 he set out to help people by bringing financial clarity to life’s most challenging financial decisions like getting out of debt, choosing a credit card, obtaining a mortgage, buying a car, etc. He founded a company called NerdWallet. In less than 10 years he built a $60MM business by helping people choose the best financial products for their need. Without selling a single product on their site.

How did NerdWallet win? By creating fantastic content, a lot of it, and giving it all away for free. They built a content and media company and collected fees and commissions from companies whose products they recommended.

Isn’t this exactly what an insurance producer does? Help people choose the best insurance product for their business and collect commissions and fees from companies whose products they recommend?

If you take one thing away from all this entire playbook I pray it’s this: there is a massive digital land-grab opportunity that will dramatically shift the insurance landscape over the next decade. And there will be a few producers and insurance agencies who capitalize on it by building a world class website. Those who do will experience exponential success and build businesses that far exceed the $3-10MM ceilings of the previous generations and leave their competition trying to react and catch up. The producers who begin building their digital empire now will be the leaders and the biggest winners.

This is why our team spent an entire year secretly planning and brainstorming how to help producers with their biggest need – being found in the new marketplace.

“Basically, here’s my overall belief: if you’re a small business, you want to focus on spending your time, money, and effort on creating great content (and a lot of it). It excites me to no end to think about the fact that most small businesses (and even A-list personalities) waste $250,000-500,000 a year on tactics like PR, direct mail, or paid media when they could have just gone all in on organic social content and a small amplification budget to achieve more valuable results.

The biggest thing people don’t understand is that quality content is so important to marketing to anyone under the age of 40 right now. Anyone in that demographic discovers a business for the first time by either: (A) Google searching or (B) finding their content on social media. If you are not crushing it and focusing on the content that you put out on the most important social platforms, you’re going to become mute and obsolete in the modern day of doing business.”

– GaryVee (2017)

Why You Need A Digital Office As An Insurance Producer

Since I launched the ECLIPS Academy at the beginning of 2017 we have served over 6,000 producers from all over the country. That’s more in eight years than our other competing producer training programs have served in their 30+ years of doing business and we haven’t cold-called one producer or created artificial scarcity through territorial exclusivity. All our producers have found us via some online avenue and form of content. Nearly 25% of those we’ve served have found us via one high-performing piece of content.

As a knowledge expert, whether you realize it or not, you are a media and content business that helps inform people how to buy corporate insurance. But without an online presence, you’re reduced to barging your way into their life by some form of a cold-call, selling them all your content and information and knowledge in brief 30-to-60 minute, uncomfortable, salesy, agenda-driven, one-on-one settings. Essentially old school sales approaches that everyone despises. But by building an online presence, you’ll outsell any salesperson every day of the week.

I like to think of it as the difference between going door-to-door or inviting people into your home. When you go door-to-door you’re limiting your time to the one person in front of you at that moment. Worse, you have no idea if you’re going to catch them at home or if they’ll have the time and patience to give you when you do. This is the inefficiency in how most producers work their business today. And honestly, it’s a very selfish approach. Essentially saying “I want you to make time for me because I need to sell something” without giving away any value.

But if you invite people into your home, your digital office, you can host hundreds of people at once. They can come by, spend as much time as they want and leave at a time that’s convenient for them. You can be a more calm, relaxed and authentic host and present your best foot forward by preparing for their arrival versus shooting off the cuff in the moment. And over time, they will have a lot to choose from instead of being limited to your 30-minute door-to-door meeting agenda. The best part is you can give away a lot of value, for free.

The best customer is an informed customer. And if you really are the best option for them, then why not be the transparent, educational and entertaining person who teaches them how to buy insurance? You’ll be informing and equipping an entire crowd of people who will become prospects when they need your service. And because insurance buying is such a demand-driven search, most will already be a prospect when they find you online.

Building an online presence completely changes the nature of your business from selling to creating an experience for your customers. Its benefits are nothing new and quite obvious, yet less than 1% of producers today have invested in it. My hope is to shift your perspective to see yourself as you really are – an entrepreneur and knowledge expert.

8 Things An Online Presence Enables You To Do

1. Build trust. At its foundation, trust is actually what a producer sells. Promises to pay when things go really wrong. Customers buy trust, not just in the product but in the person. A well-built, professional, robust online presence builds trust by communicating longevity, availability, believability, and legitimacy in a relaxed, non-salesy environment. If you build a digital presence that can be trusted it gives you an incredible range of options when it comes to innovating in different areas like moving into different verticals or nichés, selling new products, or creating new partnerships.
2. Get permission. When trust has been established, permission to advise and make an ask is more freely given. Free downloads, webinars, courses, podcasts, and sign-ups give prospects the ability to opt-in to your knowledge. By opting in they are giving you permission to share and help. It’s like responding to an invite to come to your home. Once they walk through the door, they are giving you permission to enter into relationship by expressing interest in your expertise. An invitation that extends to permission to engage with them is a lot more non-threatening and effective way to enter into relationship than interrupting their day and manipulating or begging for a meeting.
3. Inspire change. The most elite producers don’t sell, they inspire change. Customers don’t care about your sales. For them it’s not a sales decision, it’s a change decision. An online presence creates a platform to initiate a conversation that offers prospects perspective and objectivity with a little tension that moves them out of their comfort zone. It enables you to invite them onto a journey of evaluating and debating change by educating them in a way that will hopefully inspire them to embrace it rather than the human tendency to avoid it. After all, for you to get a sale will require them to make a change. The best producers realize they are change agents not insurance agents and inspirational content that can be absorbed on-demand is the best way begin the conversation that challenges the status quo.
4. Create an experience. When you engage with a brand online, you engage in an experience. Whether it’s Amazon, Apple, Nike, Disney or an A-list influencer, they all create an experience. Producers make a huge mistake when they try to convert prospects on the first interaction. And when I say convert, I don’t just mean sell them. I mean trying to convert them into making any commitment like “allowing us to do a free review of your program” or “take a look under the hood” or asking for any information from them in general. But with the old school selling processes, you have to do this at some level to be efficient. The average sales cycle is 18 months as it is. Building an online presence allows you to transition from a quick sale mentality and process to creating an actual experience for prospects that will be both educational and enjoyable.
5. Build credibility. The most effective way for a knowledge expert to showcase their expertise today is online. This is such an easily agreeable and undeniable truth it almost needs not to be mentioned. Except producers aren’t doing it. The few who are, become just another voice in the white noise of LinkedIn-sharers because they haven’t built an online office. They have no strategy or differentiation in their framework and essentially reduce their efforts to sharing articles written by other knowledge experts. If you want to be a thought leader, you have to get your personal knowledge out of your head and into the world. A digital office creates the space needed to differentiate from a crowded marketplace and turn your knowledge into opportunities by building verifiable credibility with your target market.
6. Increase visibility. Before the internet, insurance along with all other services was landlocked and limited to local providers. There was the community bank, the local insurance agent, and the corner store. The key to making your presence known was a recognizable physical office and prime real estate in the White Pages and Yellow Pages. Overcoming the “landlocked” mentality is one of the biggest hurdles I see in my work with producers. One of the biggest differences that separate the top 1% of producers from everyone else is how they build out niches of expertise to write accounts outside of their backyard. When the entire country is your backyard, the pool of opportunity to fish from increases exponentially. But flying all over the country for one-hour relationship building meetings is inefficient and expensive. So how can a prospect get to know you from across the country? Online. Building an online presence helps expand your visibility to those who fit your target market all over the world. It’s how people in California and Alaska and Florida buy their wine from a small liquor store in New Jersey. It’s not about building a brand, it’s about making yourself easy to be found.
7. Scale exponentially. When the world is your backyard, your scale and reach is unlimited. A book of construction accounts or healthcare or real estate that is limited to $1.5MM in a landlocked marketplace can soar to $10MM, $15MM and $60MM quickly. There may only be three of your target accounts in your city looking at making a change in a given quarter, but there could be 300 across the country. Having an online office where they can find you is critical to moving from pitcher to catcher. Spending three hours creating a quality piece of content for your market can live forever online and be repurposed and reused in an infinite number of ways to serve an infinite number of people. Rather than trying to communicate all you know in 60-minute intervals, one person at a time ad infinitum, you can communicate once for everyone, and let them consume it when and for how long they want. The reason the best producers in the world are generating results that seem unbelievable is because they are writing accounts all over the country. They’ve sailed out of the shallows and found blue oceans.
8. Foster long-term relationships. I’ve said it before but it’s worth repeating – the best producers don’t focus on selling products that people need, they build relationships with people who believe what they believe. But how do people know what you believe? You have to find a way to communicate it to them. An online presence allows people to build a relationship with you over time. It allows them to opt-in to your email content, download your whitepapers, watch your webinar, schedule a free consulting call, and read your blogs and thoughts through social mediums. By consuming your content over a long period of time, they get to feel like they know you. The opt-in is huge. Then when they reach out to you or you reach out to them, it’s no longer a cold call. At the very least it’s a warm and welcomed call and at best a long-term relationship has already been established. Even better, all this can be done on a mass scale and not limited to building relationships one at a time. Put out a lot of free content, give away real value, share what you believe and you’ll build long term relationships with people who believe what you believe and finally move past the transactional culture that plagues most producers.

If you are an insurance agency (i.e. producer) that wants to be heard in today’s world, the content you put out into the world will be the biggest factor. If you build an online presence, you’ll outsell any producer every day of the week by creating a superior experience. The digital real estate you acquire will pay dividends and create opportunity for the rest of your career. Welcome to the great land grab of the 2020’s!

So how do you do it?

8 Pillars to Building a World Class Digital Presence

If digital real estate is the real estate of the future, then building a world class online presence is incredibly important if you want to stand out. I believe there are eight foundational pillars to building a powerful online presence.

1. Act like a media company. The first is to change your mindset. Every great thought leader and knowledge expert acts and thinks like a media company, not a salesperson. Customers don’t care about company mission statements or give-back programs. They don’t care about the history of your agency dating back to 1918, the 1956 merger with the agency across town or even the 1999 transition in leadership. They care about the current and now. How can you help them? How can you address their needs and wants? What do they need to know about what’s going on right now? A powerful digital presence acts like a media company that informs, inspires and equips their target market for today and tomorrow.
2. Good intentions and transparency always wins. We learn from the world around us that for something to come to life, it needs a spirit breathed into it. Without breath we are just a pile of dry bones. The same is the true of your digital office. You can build a platform with all the right tools, great content, and beautiful design, but if the spirit behind your efforts is not good, it will not come to life. Now more than ever, customers can see through facades, taking the fifth amendment, false advertising, click bait, and bad intentions. Things that can’t be judged in the court of law can and are judged quickly and pretty accurately in the courtroom of perceived intention. The spirit behind everything you produce and create needs to come from good intentions. Authentic transparency, even if it exposes you to vulnerability, always wins.
3. Create great content. If you’re going to act like a media company, you need to do it well. If your heart is in the right place but your content is not helpful to anyone, then your efforts to build a powerful online presence will be fruitless. Your content should center around what your target market wants and needs. Create helpful, educational and entertaining content. It’s important to be creative here. The content doesn’t have to be limited to insurance either. If you have a golf course program, then things like “The Ten Best Unknown Golf Clubs” can be great pieces. Interviews with some of your clients to gain tips about how to increase memberships, improve the experience of hosting tournaments, or anything else that would interest that market are useful. Again, your goal is to reach your market and build an audience. It’s hard to build an audience if all you’re talking about is insurance policy language. Use passions and interests as a gateway to help business owners in your niches of expertise. The only rule to keep here is to make sure you know what you’re talking about.
4. Have a content strategy. If you’re going to go all in on content, which it’s my opinion that you should, then you need a content strategy. There are many strategies to employ but I’m going to share my five-step strategy for free (I’ve formed this from pulling from other more successful knowledge experts). The way I think about content strategy is through an inverted pyramid. The foundation is found at the top of the pyramid and everything else flows down from there. At the very top of your strategy is your Pillar content. This can be a video, podcast, webinar, speech given, digital course, e-book, whitepaper or even a long blog post. The idea is to create a large, important, and educational piece of content. From there, you can use pieces of the pillar content to repurpose into dozens of micro-content pieces. Micro-content is shorter, easier-to-consume works that showcase some of the best of your pillar content to grab attention and introduce yourself. These can be things like smaller blog posts, articles, tips lists, short video clips, or social media posts. Once you have your pillar content and your micro-content, then step three is to distribute your content across multiple platforms. This is where things like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Medium, YouTube, trade magazines and other things come into play. They are all distribution sources. Step four is then to listen to your audience and document their questions and feedback. What are they asking? What do they need answered? Where are they be challenged or need clarity? The last step is to create follow up content to answer their questions. Here are the five steps again: 
   1. Create pillar content – housed in your digital office
   2. Repurpose into micro content
   3. Distribute micro content through multiple platforms
   4. Listen and document
   5. Create follow up content to answer questions

Before you get overwhelmed by the idea of all the effort it will require to constantly be creating content, let’s move to the next pillar for a simple hack.

5. Document over create. You already house all the pillar content you need to build a world class digital presence. It’s what you’re sharing every day with your prospects and clients. It’s the knowledge and expertise you’re using to write new accounts, build out risk management programs, and create strategies for your clients. The problem is you house it in your head and not online. You don’t need to always be creating and recreating new ideas. You just need to document what you’re already doing. For example, maybe you just built a risk management strategy for one of your largest clients, now you have a playbook or strategy for that type of customer that I’m sure others would love to see. What were the critical mistakes and gaps a competing agent made that helped you pick up a new account? I’m sure your customers would benefit from being made aware of them. These are all opportunities to document what you know, what you’re already doing to help, what you’re learning and turn this knowledge into more opportunity.
6. Show your personality and be authentic. You’ve got to be you. Don’t try to project an image that is not you. If you’re young with less experience, don’t try to talk and act like you have 30 years of experience. If you’re more experienced and older, don’t be awkward and use the language of younger generations in the wrong context or application. Be 100% authentically you. The great thing about this business is every personality can be successful. Your best and most loyal clients will be people who believe what you believe. Give them a chance to get to know you.
7. Prioritize experience over sales. Building a digital presence isn’t about a transaction. You’re not going to sell a middle market client online with a blog post. Don’t even push for that. Every piece of content shouldn’t be salesy. In fact, most of your contact shouldn’t attempt to sell anything. Give away your best stuff for free. If you try to convert on your first interaction or every interaction you won’t convert at all. Let people get to know you and create a great experience. Then when you do connect with them, you’ll be coming from a place of having established trust. But also make it easy for your crowd to connect with you through email, social platforms, or scheduling a call.
8. Have good bones. You can’t have a great body, a great house or a great building without having good bones. We already talked about the importance of having a good spirit to bring your presence to life, but you also need good bones. Bones without the spirit is dead. Spirit without the bones is dead. You need both. The bones are the structure and the framework. To bring your digital presence to life, you need to have a strong structure and platform for your content to live in so you can reach out and touch people.

 What essentials are needed to build a strong structure?

Key Essentials Needed to Create A World Class Digital Platform

Even if you understand the importance of opening up an online office and building a digital presence there is still a major hurdle – the know-how. How do I do it? What do I need? Where do I start? The execution factor of what technology to use, to buy, to implement is very intimidating and prevents most from ever starting.

Having built an entire platform that has served over 6,000 producers, there are some essentials I’ve learned you need to have.

• Website builder. A website is the headquarters. The foundation of the digital office and where the world will find you. You need your own personal website. There are a lot of cheap and easy-to-use D-I-Y website builders like Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace to choose from. I wouldn’t recommended paying an agency who will charge you several thousand dollars to do this. You can build a basic website yourself for less than $20/month without any HTML or coding knowledge needed.
• Blog. Your website should include a blog. A place for you to share your thoughts for free. Blog posts are great because they can be found by Google Search and easily shared on other platforms like Medium, LinkedIn and more.
• Platform to house pillar content. This is where it begins to get more complicated. A strong digital presence doesn’t just produce blog posts. You need other forms of consumable content. To do this you need a platform with the capability to house things like online courses, document downloads, videos, checklists, etc. There are several online platforms that enable this and some advanced packages offered by the website building platforms enable it as well.
• Checkout cart and process. Even if you’re not “selling” anything online you still need a checkout cart and process. A process where people can put in their information such as name, location, company, email, phone number, etc. in exchange for your content. This is how you build your crowd.
• Email marketing software. Email marketing still works. Really, really works. In exchange for your free content, you build your audience by collecting emails. This gives you an avenue to continuously stay in contact with your prospects, share updates, give away value, and ultimately eventually reach out to connect with them. One of the most common questions I get from producers is how do I continue to develop a sales opportunity over a long-period of time after a good first meeting but when there’s no immediate opportunity? Email marketing is best solution for this and extremely effective.
• Funnel builder. One of the things I learned early on in building ECLIPS Academy is the importance of creating a consistently great experience. What content do I want people to see and have access to? When is the best time to deliver that to them? How often should I connect with them? To do this effectively you need a funnel building tool. A strong funnel takes prospects on a journey from an introduction to deeper connection and ultimately inspiring them toward change. Customizable funnels allow you to create a great experience for different types of audiences and prospects.
• CRM. Most insurance CRM’s that agencies and brokerages use today are terrible for producers. They are built for account managers and CYA documentation. A good CRM should be connected to your website, funnels and marketing software to track and record all the touch points and progress of your audience.
• Webinar software. Webinars videos are great ways to see and be seen by your audience around the country when you can’t be in their office. Evergreen webinars, videos that are recorded once but can be run as much as needed, exponentially increase the outcome and usage of your time. Live webinars are great ways for your audience to connect with you in a personal, real-time, virtual office. These are great for relationship building, educating and connecting. Webinar software enables your videos to be housed on your website.
• Automation tools. If you’re going to create a great experience at scale, you need automation tools. Without automation, your customer experience will suffer because it will be reliant on you or another person to manually stay on top of it for every prospect. Automation allows you to create and refine the entire experience that systemizes it at scale to ensure the same great experience for everyone. I often get asked at ECLIPS how many we have on our team. Many are shocked when they find out it’s just me and a couple of part-time assistants. How can we serve over 6,000 producers over 30 months with such a small team? Automation. We spent two years of building to automate the entire customer experience. This frees me up to focus on making personal connection. Technology is beautiful.
• How to connect with you. This is a non-negotiable. If you make it easy to discover how to connect with you via email, social media, phone, scheduling a meeting, then you don’t have to pitch on all your content.
• Distribution channels. Once your digital real estate has been set up with a website, blog, content house, checkout process, email marketing, customer experience funnel, CRM, webinars, automation and how to connect with you, then you need to distribute your content and make yourself known. These are all the social media avenues like LinkedIn, Medium, Instagram, YouTube, etc.

So that’s a lot. Ha. And most of the essentials are offered by separate providers. Don’t be discouraged. Don’t despise small beginnings. Rejoice in the fact that you are building something for the future and just start. Every sequoia tree starts as a seed. GaryVee didn’t start with 18 million followers and 100 videos. He started with an initial piece of content. He built a starter’s website. What he did have was a vision and strategy of the future and that made the difference.

A 20/20 Vision of the 2020 Producer & Beyond

There is a lot of talk within the insurance industry of what the future looks like. Investors, incumbents, insurtech startups argue over which is the model of the future. Will online agencies win? Is the MGA-model best? What about start-up digital brands versus new-old partnerships? Will agents become extinct like travel agents or are they too important to be displaced? Don’t let all the noise paralyze you. While a lot of change is coming for small commercial accounts, life insurance and personal lines, the middle market commercial producer will always play a critical role. There’s too much risk, too much complication, too much spend, too much diversity, and too much expertise needed to put together middle-market commercial insurance programs.

So what will the elite insurance producers of the 2020’s look like? Not much different actually than every elite producer since the 1970’s. They will be widely known, deeply trusted, incredibly knowledgeable, uniquely skilled and uncommonly giving. The characteristics and products will be the same. The difference will be in the power of their presence. The next generation of elite producers will be found in the new. And instead of $3MM books of business, they’ll grow $60MM books by opening the doors and windows of their business to the world.

Personally? My 20/20 vision of the 2020 post-pandemic-and-beyond world class producer is a producer who builds a world class online presence. Invest in yourself. Invest in your future. Build your visibility by opening up digital real estate.

See you in the new,

Scott Bradley | Founder & Creator ECLIPS Academy

P.S. Need help? Building an entire digital presence from scratch is hard. I know because I've done it. That's why the ECLIPS Academy has partnered with KAJABI, the world's #1 knowledge commerce platform, to equip you with everything you need to build your own world-class digital real estate. Together, we've created the first ever all-in-one digital platform for insurance producers and agencies.

It's literally all the technology you will ever need to build your own digital empire. No expensive web design agencies. No IT team needed. No complicated plugins to deal with or tech hurdles to overcome. It's drag-and-drop simple.

The all-in-one digital platform for insurance producers includes:

• Website builder. Design and build a beautiful digital presence.
• Email marketing software. Stay in front of prospects with unlimited marketing emails (goodbye Mailchimp & Constant Contact).
• Sales Funnel Builder. Build personalized funnels for each target market segment.
• CRM. A place to store all your prospect info for up to 25,000 contacts without the expensive Salesforce bill.
• Webinar software. Launch & create your own live or evergreen webinars.
• Automation technology. Build it once, automate your workflows to run your entire marketing on autopilot.
• Checkout cart & form builders. Collect emails, phone numbers, prospect information in exchange for your free or paid content.
• Landing page builder. Unlimited landing pages to A/B test, expand and build your empire as large as you want.
• Blog. A place to share your thoughts, ideas and knowledge to get you found online.
• Online content platform. A hosting solution to house all your digital content, white papers, ebook, videos, etc.
• Member site platform. Restrict access to content strictly for your members and build community forums.
• Mobile app. Capability to make all your content easily accessible through a mobile app.

You don't need to spend thousands of dollars on design agencies, app developers, and 11 different technology software subscriptions with complicated integrations. The dream home for your entire online presence is here.

Here's the best part - it's starts as low as $149/month with our DIY Kit.

Learn more about the all-in-one insurance producer and insurance agency platform builder here.