Love In Business

I’m going to come out of the gates swinging on this one…

YOU are your greatest competitive differentiation!

It’s not your proprietary six step sales process. (Everybody has one. If you don’t, feel free to use the one we offer up in Roll the Hard Six.)  

It’s not your carrier relationships. (Sorry to break it to you but all your competitors have the same senior level relationships with the same carriers. But at least your momma still thinks your special).

It’s not the name of the agency you rep. (Your client could really care less.)

It’s not your resources. (You probably rarely, if ever, even use them.)

It’s not your 95% client retention ratio. (Which by the way is industry standard.)

It’s not the size of your global, national, regional or local agency. (I could sell for or against any size agency.)

It’s not even your people. (The workforce is teaming with talented individuals at every agency.)

Let me encourage you a bit. YOU, producer, are your greatest differentiator. This should give you a sense of freedom. Your level of success is not restricted by any of the above mentioned, it is entirely controlled by you.

It should also give you a sense of accountability and urgency. You alone are responsible for your continual personal and professional growth, so that you can continually better serve your clients. An empty cup has nothing to pour out.

For some producers, who don’t feel smart enough, old enough, young enough, qualified enough, gregarious enough, tall enough, attractive enough, charismatic enough or well-connected enough, this may actually cause a little anxiety and fear. I talk to producers every day who want to lean on their agency name, their resources or some other factor because they don’t feel they have “enough.”

Can I release you from that scarcity mindset for minute? Stop comparing yourself to everyone else. The clients who buy from you would never buy from that gregarious, charismatic producer down the hall from you. And that’s completely fine. Contrary to popular belief and all those personality tests agencies are dependent on today, EVERY personality type can be successful in this business.

The world’s most elite producers don’t build a book of business with clients who need what they're selling, but a book with clients who believe what that producer believes. The only way to find other people with a shared belief about business, professional service relationships, and life in general, is to be your most authentic self.

Love Has a Place in Business

So before we move forward, let’s define something first. It’s not just a general “you” that is the differentiator. Meaning you can’t just show up in your client’s office and expect them to give you the business based on some abstract combination of your background, personality, charisma and charm. It’s far more specific.

Here’s another left hook for you.

How well you love your prospects, customers and associates is how you’ll be remembered.  That’s right I said it. Your capacity to communicate love and compassion to your clients will be the greatest single differentiator from all your competition. That’s your “you.” People remember very little of what you said, or what you did for them, but they never forget how you made them feel.

The Four Questions Your Clients Are Really Asking

Historically, men have dominated the commercial insurance landscape, particularly sales, and still do today for the most part. Not surprisingly, male-oriented ideas and priorities – particularly dispassionate logical, rational problem-solving perspectives – have dominated the industry.

I’ll prove it to you. When is the last time the topic of love and compassion was brought up in your sales meetings? Yet how many of those same meetings are filled new ideas on products, coverage solutions, door openers, closing ideas, etc.?

Conversely, compassionate love is generally perceived to be a female trait and perspective, and, if seen in men, is often viewed as a “weakness.”

Yet people are attracted to people who make them feel alive, feel seen, feel valued. This is why love and compassion are the strongest forces of connection on the planet. Real love, perfect love, is empowering, liberating and releasing. It’s also expulsive…more on that in a moment.

Underneath all the technical and detailed questions about your experience, your agency, your knowledge of insurance, and your capabilities, every one of your prospects and clients are unconsciously asking four deeper questions in every interaction with you:

1.     Do you see me?

2.     Do you care that I’m here?

3.     Am I good enough for you, or do I need to be better in some way?

4.     Can I tell by the way you’re looking at me that I’m special to you?

Wow right?! Pause and think about those four questions for a minute. They land with weight. This explains why dogs are considered man’s best friend. They undoubtedly and entirely answer all four questions by their response every time you walk in the room. As the saying goes, people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Radical love and compassion answer all four of these questions with clarity and confidence.

But love does something else as well…

Love Eliminates Fear

One of the greatest roadblocks in every sales process is anxiety. And I’m not talking about sales anxiety. Sales anxiety is a real thing and I’ve never met a producer who doesn’t struggle with it. Anxiety is the fruit produced by the tree of fear. Fear assumes punishment or pain. But sales anxiety isn’t the only anxiety present in the sales process. Nor is it the most difficult to overcome either.

What is?

Change anxiety.

Your prospects struggle with a greater and more powerful from of anxiety than you do – the anxiety that comes with thinking about and effecting change.

This is a real thing. Why? Because they have fears too.

• What if I lose something valuable by making a change?
• What if I make the wrong decision and it reflects poorly on me?
• What if I’m embarrassed by my choice?
• What if I’m criticized by making a change?
• What if making a change results in a lot of extra work for me?

Your prospects will never tell you that the reason they aren’t changing is because of fear. Most likely they don't even recognize it themselves. Instead it’s a myriad of crazy excuses that seemingly come out of nowhere. The next time you hear an excuse from a prospect that doesn’t make sense, know the real root is most likely anxiety. Change anxiety is real, and it’s greater than your sales anxiety.

But have you ever thought about what is at the center of anxiety? The letter “I”. As in me, myself and “I”. This personalizes things a little bit more. While your prospect is a “business or organization,” the buyers and decision makers are real people. Individual people with fears, failures, dreams and goals.

The only force in the world strong enough to eliminate fear and anxiety in your prospect is love. Love, well employed, is the most powerful antidote to fear. Love expels fear. If the “I” at your prospect’s business feels loved and cared for by you, their anxiety to make a change will diminish.

But be careful here, fear can very easily masquerade itself as love and as a result control us just as much as any a force or law. The evidence of fear masquerading as love is found in selective love, controlling love, conditional love, protected love, manipulative love, and coercive love. These types of love aren’t really love at all and their effects do the opposite of real love, they heighten anxiety.

Real love keeps its promises, is fully engaged, completely vulnerable, always present, is not insecure, selfish or controlling, but gives of itself wholly and sacrificially.

So how can you love and communicate your love to your clients better?

1. Communicate how much you love them by the quality of your presence.

Charisma is just connection. Those who have it don’t have some mystical trait or “it factor”, they’ve just mastered the art of human connection. Real connection is not about the quantity of time you spend with someone or what you do with them. Real connection is fully determinate on the quality of your presence.

We live in a distracted world. Literally the world is at our finger tips. We have more computational power in our smartphones today than the entire U.S. Government did in the 1980’s.

If that’s not distracting enough, our own insecurities and tendencies to attach our conversations to anxiety over future outcomes or get stuck in the past, all tempt us to give less than our best presence to our prospects and clients.

Your presence matters, but the quality of your presence matters more. That extra second of eye contact, high five or hug matters.

You can affirm for them how special they are just by the way you look at them. That you not only see them, but substantiating in their minds that you’re glad they’re there, and reassuring them they are enough. All these subtle but transformative messages are most powerfully delivered without words through our body language, eye contact and facial expression. #EliminateRBF

The quality of your presence will communicate to them if your interest in them is communal in nature, or simply transactional.

2. Communicate how much you love them by the resoluteness of your follow through.

Do what you say you will do. While this sounds pretty elementary, I’m amazed by how many producers fail to keep their promises. For a prospect and client to really build trust, they need to know for certain that you will always come through with what you tell them you will do.

If you are going to call at a certain time, call at that time. If you’re going to have their proposal to them by a certain date, don’t call the day of and say it will be another week.

Keeping your promises goes deeper than service level commitments too, it goes into sales commitments. So many producers over-promise and under-deliver. If you promise a superior program at a better price, you better deliver. If you communicate that you and your team are the most knowledgeable experts in their industry, invest in your own growth to ensure that is the case. Every small promise kept builds momentum and trust as you lead up to the decision point.

If you have followed through with everything you promised during the sales process, the prospect has less reason to doubt the bigger promises you're making as they journey through the anxiety and uneasiness of a transition.

If you are selling them on the fact that you will get them superior results, you better develop yourself to a level where you know you can deliver superior results. You are the ultimate accountability factor, and are accountable to them for being the very best technical, tactical, and strategic insurance resource they could have.

This is why we believe the greatest investment you can make in your business, is an investment in yourself.

3. Communicate how much you love them by the sacrificial nature of your service.

Nothing is more memorable and impactful than when someone sacrifices something valuable to them on your behalf. If you’ve ever had a friend or family member go out of their way to be there for you in your time of need, you can attest to the lasting impact it made on you.

This carries over from life to business as well. As a producer, this could take a lot of different forms. It might be giving away the business by giving out your best solutions for free without asking for the business. It might be dropping everything you have going on at the most inconvenient time to be there in a crisis moment for the client. It might be taking the bullet or blame for a mistake made by an individual at your prospect or client’s business who dropped the ball. It might even be reducing your commission on an account to help your client in a down year.

The level of sacrifice you’re willing to go to for your clients will determine the level of influence and impact you have on them. Nothing will communicate love and care to your clients more than you giving away your personal rights, time, money, business, or other resources at a cost to you, without asking for or getting anything in return.

This is how love is proven. This is how love is made known to its recipient. The moments where a personal sacrifice is made.

Love Overwhelms Change Anxiety

Your long-term success in this business will be dependent on your customers. If you love them well, you will keep them. If you don’t, you will lose them.

Love overwhelms and penetrates the walls built by anxiety, demolishing all fear, and paving the way for transparent and vulnerable relationships.

You’re not in the business of selling a product, you’re selling promises. Your clients won’t be able to “test” those promises until a later date. At its core, insurance is rooted in a covenant of love. This is a business of love and labor.

Through the quality of your presence, the resoluteness of your follow through, and your sacrificial service you’ll deliver an experience your clients and prospects will love. And they’ll love you for it.

Love is not a business, but it has its place in business. It should be the cornerstone to everything you do.

With love,

Scott Bradley