How Can Insurance Agencies Survive and Thrive in a Soft Market?

Scott Howell (0:01)

What do you feel like insurance agents need to do in terms of branding themselves, their agencies, the carriers they represent?

Bradley Flowers (0:08)

When you are marketing something you're not in control of, you're not in control.

Scott Howell (0:13)

The very last thing I do, I get agreement from them, and then I end the call with making damn sure whatever I say I'm going to do gets done.

Bradley Flowers (0:25)

How many hours did your team spend last week on policy reviews, quote comparisons, lost run extractions, now multiply that by what your producers cost per hour. That's the number that out market eliminates. The reason that I love Ascend is they're the only vendor focused on helping agents automate all of their manual finances and accounting practices, which is really the boring stuff, but that's really where the rubber meets the road in terms of profitability to your agency.

Scott Howell (0:51)

We're going to write business with carriers that make it easy for us to write business with.

Bradley Flowers (0:57)

If the conditions have to be right for you to succeed, your success is conditional. It's not real success.

Scott Howell (1:03)

Play like champions, man. Here we go.

Insurance agents from around the world, welcome to The Insurance Guys Podcast. My name is Scott Howell, your fearless host and leader, Insurance Agency owner and insurance evangelist for I Protect Insurance and Financial Services, based out of Huntsville, Alabama. Before we get started on today's episode, please help me welcome, he is a 6'3 sophomore from Mobile, Alabama. Parade first team all-American rivals, five-star recruit, he is a fantastic insurance agent and a great American. Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together and welcome the incomparable Mr. Bradley Flowers. How are you Bradley?

Bradley Flowers (1:47)

Man, I'm fantastic. What about you?

Scott Howell (1:49)

Bradley, I'm going to tell you what my latest pet peeve is. Are you ready for this? My latest pet peeve, territory sales managers for carriers who call to introduce themselves to me because they're the newest, latest, greatest territory sales manager. And by the way, this is actually two pet peeves rolled up into one. So what really pisses me off is when I'm talking to them and I say the word territory manager and they correct me to say, I'm not a territory manager, I'm a sales manager or they'll say some other way of saying sales territory manager because every carrier has like a little different nuance to that title, but it's all the same title. But here comes the one that really pisses me off. You're the brand spanking new territory sales manager for a carrier that I Protect Insurance represents. And guys, I've tried to teach you this over the past, I don't know how many years we've been doing this podcast, nine years. I'm going to say it again. I'm going to keep saying it to one day somebody that's listening to this. Here's what I'm about to say. Shorter is always better. Whether it's a website, an email address, I've had employees literally try to fight me about this because they want their weird spelled name to be as long as it possibly can be at iprotectinsurance.com.

I had a sales manager slash territory manager reach out to me last week and their name was like sheree.turner-williams at blankcarrier.com.

Can we shorten that just a little bit? Could we shorten it to just like our first name?

Could we, does Patricia, could we shorten Patricia to Pat, maybe? Maybe? I mean, do we have to have Patricia-Stevens.robertson-at-carrier-dot?

I don't get it, Bradley. I don't understand why people don't understand shorter is always better. I'm sorry. I just had to get on my, I had to get on my pulpit about that. That absolutely owns me. And let me tell you who the worst at this is in the world are banks.

Clint Orr (4:37)

Yeah.

Scott Howell (4:38)

Banks love some long hyphen dot at dot eva slash bank.com. Why?

Clint Orr (4:49)

Why?

Bradley Flowers (4:50)

And then they send you the email and it's the secure thing that you have to unzip. Oh my God.

Scott Howell (4:55)

I thought that absolutely owns me when I have to create a password to read your secure message that says we're not open.

Bradley Flowers (5:09)

Not only is that a huge security threat in and of itself, the fact you're having to do that, but then you go through all of that and it says, okay, thanks.

Scott Howell (5:18)

Yeah. Just a reminder, we're not open on Labor Day.

Bradley Flowers (5:22)

My biggest pet peeve is the unsolicited calendar invite for a meeting and we did not talk about what time we were meeting ahead of time.