--:-- Ryan Hanley: Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today we have a tremendous episode for you, a conversation with Christos Provostalis, a former guest services manager at Walt Disney, turned into one of the best customer experience speakers that I have seen maybe ever in my career.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I first heard Christos at Paradiso's Mastermind in Utah. It was a phenomenal presentation, a phenomenal conversation. The way that he approaches customer experience made me rethink some of the things that we do at Rogue Risk, made me rethink some of the things I do with this podcast and how I deliver anything to the marketplace.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I took a ton of notes after Christos' presentation out in Utah. I spent probably an hour with him afterwards just talking to him about what he does. I think Christos is a tremendous guy. He's got a wonderful story. He's got a lot of value to bring to us and it is such a pleasure to have him on the show.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Before we get there, I want to give you guys a big shout out. Appreciate you. This podcast is now on its own. We are no longer part of the Agency Intelligence feed. If you know someone who was listening through that feed, they now have to subscribe directly to the Ryan Hanley Show feed. If you're not subscribed and you're listening to this somewhere and not seeing it in your podcast player, that's the reason. You were probably listening through the AI feed and you now need to resubscribe to the Ryan Hanley Show feed directly. I know that's a weird thing, but when you leave a network, this is just what has to happen.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Appreciate you for subscribing. Appreciate you for listening. If you love what you hear, we don't run ads. I don't run ads for the show. I do that on purpose. I want this show to grow through organic word of mouth. I want it to grow through delivering value to you and you wanting others to hear it. I don't want anyone to ever be able to take away this podcast from me and from you by running ads and canceling it. It's going to grow on its own and it's going to be its own living, breathing thing. That creates sustainability and longevity in the work.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: With all that being said, I love you for listening to this show. Let's get on to Christos. My man, Christos, what's up, buddy? How are you?
--:-- Christos Provostalis: I'm very well, how are you? Nice to see you.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, you as well. How's everything? I see you're making the rounds, man. You're making it happen. You're doing all the things.
--:-- Christos Provostalis: In your industry, I'm doing all the... running the circuit, I guess.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Is that fun? You having a good time?
--:-- Christos Provostalis: Yeah, man. Just nice people I get to meet. I was with Mr. Merrill and his son, Brett, for a couple days. They had me there. Just good people. I learned just as much as they learned from me. I learned from them. Just nice, man.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You're talking at Insurance Soup, yes?
--:-- Christos Provostalis: I'm actually emceeing Insurance Soup. I'm sure I will be able to drop some nuggets, but I'm not doing any presentation or anything.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Oh, nice, man. My mom and I will be there.
--:-- Christos Provostalis: Oh, very fun. That'll be great. I'm looking forward to it. Insurance Soup is a group that I have not spent a lot of time in or with. It'll be a new group of agents that I haven't spent a lot of time with, so I'm excited for it. There's kind of people that run in certain loops and those loops tend to stay together just out of human nature. I love when you can find a new pocket of agents or people in our industry that you haven't talked to before, maybe aren't as familiar with you or your work. That's always a fun thing. I'm definitely looking forward to that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Excellent. That'd be really cool. Nice, man.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: For everyone listening at home, I heard you first at Paradiso's Mastermind thing in Utah. I'm sitting in the back. I don't know if it's my ADHD or what, but I can't be right in the group. I always have something else going on. Frankly, and please don't take this personally, a lot of times I find other speakers to be really boring. So I'm kind of half listening. All of a sudden, you said something. I was like, "Oh, I really liked the way you put that together." I was like, "Oh, wow. That's a really engaging story." Then all of a sudden, you had 100% of my attention. I was like, "Geez, this guy is really good." I really liked your style. It was very authentic and real. The storytelling was great, and then very tactical, practical takeaways. Absolutely wonderful.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: We connected after, and the rest of the conference is going on, but Crystal and I are just in the back wrapping. I was like, "Dude, how much did you get paid to do this?" He told me. I was like, "You need to triple that number for your time. You're way too good and your story has way too much power in what you're delivering for that." Mostly because I just think you have an incredible message.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I know people are starting to get familiar with you in the industry, and as you continue to grow, you'll interact with even more groups. I'd love to start with the 50-cent tour on a little bit of your backstory and what your thing is that you are bringing to the market.
--:-- Christos Provostalis: I was a former guest service manager for the Walt Disney Company for years. I had the pleasure of working at their flagship resort, the Grand Floridian Resort and Spa. I learned a lot working for the company through their internal education arm, but I also learned a lot from my executives at my resort. They had to be really on top of their things every day. We were serving a governor coming in with their family, the COO of Intel, the First Lady of Mexico, Tina Fey. Every day, someone. We really had to be on top of what we were doing. I learned how to think when it came to customer experience. That's what I learned.
--:-- Christos Provostalis: My family and I own a restaurant, going on our 30th year now. Everything I learned, I took to our family business when I rejoined. My brother owns and operates the restaurant. I was able to join him for a few years, and then I had a successful exit at the end of 2021. That's when I was really cranking. I've been speaking for a few years, but a couple of years ago, I was speaking just in Connecticut. Last year was New England. This year has become across the country.
--:-- Christos Provostalis: I teach people what human connection really is and how do you really connect, whether it's your customer, your employee, your family member. I get really deep. The class is really deep. We talk a lot about emotion, what emotion really is. I thought I knew what it was, and then I realized I didn't know what it really meant. We talk about perception, how people see things and how people understand things. Then I talk about self-awareness. A lot of people are just not self-aware. They're not aware of how they come across. Some do, some don't. We have to figure that piece out first before you learn how to be able to serve and take care of clients. That's what the class is about. I basically teach you all the things that I learned working for the company and things I learned along the way in my hospitality journey.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Guys, if you're looking to improve your customer experience, Christos is a no-brainer to bring in. I'm not going to bury the lead on why he's here today. I would like to jump into some of the three topics that you just brought up. This is where I want to spend most of my time.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: One of the things I asked you during your presentation, mostly because I can't help myself when I have a thought, I really struggle with not expressing it. You were talking about emotion, leadership, and self-awareness. I struggle with this concept of how much of yourself do you accept versus how much of yourself do you change? You read about self-love and you have to love who you are. I believe that to be wholly true. At the same time, I think that sometimes that's used as an excuse for "I'm just this way and you have to deal with it."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I struggle with how much of myself... I tend to be very lean forward. I have pretty hardcore ADHD. I talk fast. I think fast. I push. I'm competitive. That's a big part of who I am. But those aren't always effective leadership skills or strategies. The question I posed to you was essentially, "Is it okay to be an asshole?" I got a ton of feedback on that, a 360-degree range of questions about my question. That made me think it was interesting. I think it plays into customer experience. Is this just who we are and deal with it? Or is it, "Hey, I'm going to love myself because it's who I am today and I'm going to build." How do I know which pieces to build upon and change? Take it where you will. That's kind of where I wanted to start.
--:-- Christos Provostalis: I remember when you asked that. I was like, "What's this question?" When it comes to self-awareness, we all have a little bit of self-awareness. Some people that are self-aware, just like you said, actually know they're an asshole and they know that they come across like that. That's on them. If you're okay with that, with yourself, with your business, with your customers, and you continue to grow and flourish and your employees are happy and everything is positive in every way, who is to say you need to change?
--:-- Christos Provostalis: Are you asking for feedback from your closest people? Not a lot of us do. You could ask for feedback from someone you hardly know because you're going to probably get the answer that you actually want. But when you ask it from the people that are close around you, your right-hand person at work, your partner, your parent, your closest relative, that's when you get the real feedback.
--:-- Christos Provostalis: Do you change? That's an answer only you answer. Do you want to? Is there a benefit to it? Is there not a benefit to it? Do you enjoy the way you are? Is it a detriment to your personal life and professional life? Is it not? Do you scale it back to be assertive instead of aggressive? I would love to be able to give you an answer like, "Oh yeah, you have to," or "You don't." That all depends on all those things I mentioned.
--:-- Christos Provostalis: I have met some people that don't know how they come across. When you let them know, they usually thank you and say, "Thank you. I didn't know that." Some people are like, "Oh no, I know I'm that way." I'm like, "Okay, if it doesn't bother you to be that, at least you know that's the way you come across." I know I didn't give you a straight answer because there isn't a straight answer.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: There probably isn't an answer. The conversation is so important though. So much of us want to be a thing and it is almost impossible to feel 100% that thing. We're always striving for it, especially people who are trying to improve. It's very hard to know, even when you've had a certain amount of success being a certain way, which pieces you can continue to improve on and which pieces are part of the building blocks that got you there.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think especially for leaders and individuals in the insurance industry, my brothers and sisters in arms, they were successful for a long time doing business a certain way. For most of them, the world has changed during their tenure. By change, I mean faster communications, things like social media. If you were kind of a hard ass or didn't really have much of a personality but you were a really good insurance agent 15 years ago, that didn't matter. People came to you because you were a really good insurance agent. Today, we live in a more touchy-feely world. One social media post can change people's perspective. We have to cultivate that image to a certain extent. That's a very challenging thing for people.
--:-- Christos Provostalis: It is. They have to know how they come across and they have to know they could be great at a certain thing. When I work with some leaders and their staff, I'll say, "Some of these people have such a high IQ and are so intellectual, but they have a very, very low EQ. They're probably meant to work on the computer in the corner of the room and not talk to anybody, at least your customer. Maybe you can have someone else be the frontline person with your client, because this person is so intellectual and so great at what they actually do, but they come across in a way with no malice." You tend to see this a lot with super high IQ people. They lack certain social skills and they lack being able to pick up on social cues on themselves and on other people. Those people are very important in the workforce, but they're just not meant to be able to speak to the consumer.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Self-awareness is a very difficult thing. It's especially difficult when you're interacting with someone who you give feedback to or ask for feedback from, and they don't accept it. You're like, "Look, I know you see yourself as X, but you're coming off in the world as Y." And they're just like, "Nah." That's a very difficult thing to work with, especially with team members or someone you're trying to mentor. It is such a roadblock when people are unwilling to see themselves for how the world sees them. I think it's okay to have a good, strong self-view, but if that view is not based in reality, you're going to continue to run into roadblocks over and over again. It really impacts your ability to connect to people because you're expressing in a way that is disconnected from what they're seeing. There's always a disconnect in that communication and the human connection piece.
--:-- Christos Provostalis: 100%. Yeah.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: If I was a good podcaster, I would have framed that as a question instead of a statement. Okay, let's talk about what emotion is. In my own life, I talk, think, and express emotions. I'm a very expressive human being. Emotions have been something I've struggled with. I'm interested in what emotions are. You even said in your intro that emotions were not what you thought they were. I'd love to know both what they are and how that differs from what you originally thought they were.
--:-- Christos Provostalis: I didn't know that they were so powerful. Emotions control the quality of your life, whether you know it, don't know it, accept it, or don't accept it. They're really powerful. Just over a hundred years ago, Dale Carnegie, one of the most famous self-development authors of our time, said, "Understand when dealing with human beings, you're not dealing with creatures of logic. You're dealing with creatures of emotion." There is no decision that we make in our life without the input of emotion. If you think you're making an actual logical decision, that means you'd have to be listing a never-ending list of variables and coming up with a logical conclusion. As human beings, we're taught to add emotional input in there. Whether you say it's your gut feeling or you did your research, every single decision has emotion put into it.
--:-- Christos Provostalis: I say this in the class: the receptors in our brain that are responsible for the intake of alcohol and narcotics are the same receptors in our brain where all of our emotions lie. The same way you act when you're emotional is the same way you act when you're intoxicated. You say or do something that maybe 12 to 24 hours later you regret. They're very, very powerful.
--:-- [Ryan Hanley interjects with a mid-roll message]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Sorry to take you away from the episode, but as you know, we do not run ads on this show. In exchange for that, I need your help. If you're loving this episode, whether you're watching on YouTube or listening on your favorite podcast platform, I would love for you to subscribe, share, comment if you're on YouTube, leave a rating and review if you're on Spotify or Apple iTunes. This helps the show grow. It helps me bring more guests in. We have a tremendous lineup of people coming in, men and women who've done incredible things, sharing their stories around peak performance, leadership, growth, sales—the things that are going to help you grow as a person and grow your business. They all check out comments, ratings, and reviews before they come on. As I reach out to more people and want to bring them in, I need your help. Share the show, subscribe if you're not subscribed, and leave a comment. I read all the comments. If you're on Apple or Spotify, leave a rating and review. I love you for listening to this show and I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoy creating the show for you. All right, I'm out of here. Peace. Let's get back to the episode.
--:-- Christos Provostalis: The people that have a lot of emotion in their life have a disproportionate amount of chaos in their life because emotion and chaos actually go hand in hand. I also learned that large companies like Disney sell emotion. They don't actually sell a product or service necessarily. Large companies sell emotions. You have to know and understand them. The emotion that Disney sells is happiness. You have to know and understand what your company sells in order for you to sell it. When you figure that out, your job is to evoke the emotion that you want your client to feel. That's my little take on emotions, what they are and what they aren't.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This was the part of your presentation when I was like, "Every single insurance agent, every single insurance organization, every single company needs to hear this." This is what pushed me over the edge when I was listening to you. This was something that I had never really wrapped my head around in the way that you package it. Obviously I don't want you to tell the whole thing because I want people to pay you to come do workshops. But this idea that you sell emotion—when you hear it, you're like, "Yeah, that makes logical sense," but we don't do that. We're like, "We sell insurance and it's protection and here's the price and you need these products." Or "I sell t-shirts and I got all the different colors."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This idea of figuring out what emotion your product or service evokes, and then figuring out how to position your product in a way that it actually does that—it feels like absolutely what you have to do. It feels wholly right, intrinsically, before you really dive into it. But it also feels very complicated. If I'm sitting here and I'm like, "Wow, what emotion does my product sell?" There's a lot of insurance agents listening, and a lot of people that don't sell insurance listen too. When they're first sitting down and first starting to wrap their head around this concept—because to me, this is the meat and potatoes, the really good stuff—what do you start thinking? Where do you start with that idea? How can you start to get a sense for what the emotions are that your product actually evokes?
--:-- Christos Provostalis: The name of my class is called "What Do You Sell?" That came from a meeting when an executive came into my business unit at Disney when I was working there and asked me, "Christos, what do you sell?" I was a restaurant guest service manager. I just pointed to the menu and started going off the list. He said, "Christos, I can read the menu. What do we sell as a company?" I was like, "Oh, this is not going to go well." I said, "We sell theme park tickets. We sell hotel rooms. We sell merchandise." He goes, "It's not what we sell." He went through his whole thing. At the end, he said, "Chris, let's understand we sell an emotion, but you have to know and understand what we sell in order for you to sell it. You thought we sold flatbread pizzas and theme park tickets. That's where your mindset is. We sell an emotion. We sell the most desired human emotion there is. We sell the emotion of happiness." When you know and understand what you sell, your job is to evoke the emotion you want your client to feel.
--:-- Christos Provostalis: When I work with realtors and lenders, let's say a bank. As a lender, I go, "Do you sell money? Or do you sell a sense of creating wealth?" You ever talk to your customer and say, "I just want to let you know, buying a house is one of the three biggest things we do in life. You are able to afford to buy one. In 20 to 30 years, when your loan is paid off, you're either going to have an asset that really appreciated and you'll be able to keep, or you'll be able to pass it on to your family and help them create their wealth." That's what you sell. You don't sell money. Every bank sells money. When you have that one-minute, simple, genuine conversation, that's what you sell.
--:-- Christos Provostalis: In your field, insurance is boring. I have so many insurance policies with my family's restaurant and me personally. Even when I talk to my insurance agent, I love them, that's why I'm still with them. But their job is not to sell me insurance. Their job is to sell me, in my opinion, safety and security. I need to hear from them, "Listen, it's your job at your family's restaurant to sell as much food as possible. It's our job to make sure that nothing happens to any of your assets. And if they do, you make sure that you're covered. That's my job to do." That's how you sell safety and security, not by going through the whole policy and saying, "You should probably get this coverage." Let them know that you're emotionally invested in them. When people are emotionally invested in you, they become less critical and less objectively observant about you. When I know that my insurance agent is so into making sure I'm protected and I feel that, I'm never switching. I feel safety and security. I can't feel the insurance policy. That's not what you sell.
--:-- Christos Provostalis: Some companies don't know what they sell. I've sat down with a couple of CEOs after I did the class and they said to me, "I thought we sold this. You just made me realize that we don't sell that. We need to change the way we think. We sell this." I go, "Your product is probably going to tend to evoke an emotion that you want your client to feel. So you selling your product evokes some type of emotion. Tap into that emotion to get that from your customer."
--:-- Christos Provostalis: There's some insurance agencies and lenders that might just sell money. That's their thing. Some of them might sell a sense of accomplishment. Some of them might say, "Hey, listen, not too many people can afford to buy a house. You should be really proud of yourself." Maybe that's what they sell. Every company, even within the industry, is different. They just have to know and understand what they sell.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I wrote down when I was listening to you in that moment, and this is something I'm working into my business every day now. I still have to bang the team over the head with it over and over. I tell stories. We're working on it in our messaging. I've used protection, security, all those kinds of things. I think those are good words. But the word that I wrote down when I was listening to you in Utah, and it kind of changed my viewpoint on insurance—and I've been doing this for 17 years, so that's saying a lot, and I think it speaks to the quality of your message—I wrote down the word "sustainability."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The reason I wrote down that word was when I was thinking about insurance, I was like, "What is protection anymore?" When I think about protection, I think like a shield, a bodyguard out in front of the business. If the flood is coming, Moses parting the water, this house stays. I was like, "We don't sell that." If the flood comes, the house is gone. If the fire happens, the building's gone. I'm not a firefighter. Firefighters protect. We don't really protect. We don't really sell safety, maybe a little bit. You can do risk management stuff on commercial lines. You can help people make their business a little safer. But again, safety is kind of an illusion. The universe is going to do what it does. You can be a little safer, but it's on the business owner to have a safe business.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So what do we do? When you have the worst day, we make sure you sustain. We make sure that you get your business back. We make sure that you get that thing back that you had. I'm not going to be there throwing buckets of water on your business when it's on fire. But what I am going to do is make sure that an insurance company with a check that is appropriate shows up and hands it to you and says, "Rebuild." You're still in the game. It's an extra life. If this were a video game, you'd go, "Cha-ching, I got another life. It's back."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Here it is. Like you thought you were done, but it's not game over yet. You had the right insurance, so now you have to keep playing the game. And look, sustainability is a tough word. I don't love it from a marketing perspective. People don't necessarily think that way. I have to think of maybe a better, easier way of describing what I just described to you. Although sustainability is the actual word that I think of. It's tough to market the word sustainability. However, that concept has really changed the way that I think about insurance, and really the way that I've started to position it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I started talking about it like we're the foundation upon which you grow your business. We help you sustain. You can't branch out and put an addition on your business unless you have insurance, unless you know if something shitty happens, you're going to get the thing back. You can't reach, or otherwise you're going without a net. That's fine if you want to play that game, but you are rolling the dice there, and that's a whole different thing. So we don't protect, we don't provide safety necessarily. I think we do in an ethereal sense, but not in a real sense. There's no security. I'm not an alarm company. But what we do do is we help you sustain. We help you get through your worst times.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: New Orleans exists because of the insurance industry, regardless of what mainstream media writes about it. The only reason New Orleans exists today is because of the insurance industry. The only way that city was put back together was because of insurance money. And we helped that community sustain. Not me personally, but the industry as a whole. That was an entirely different mindset shift that I had listening to this thing that you did in Utah.
--:-- Christos Provostalis: Okay, so I guess you say sustainability. Yeah, I understand what you're saying. In a sense, you're making sure that they're going to be okay. You're making sure that they are safe in a way, meaning if that happens, you'll be back. This is not your last day. So in whatever way you phrase it, or whatever verbiage you use, you have to let them know that this is not the end. You have to know in whatever way you express that and show that.
--:-- Christos Provostalis: All of us communicate in a different way. You have a different communication style than I do. And you also will communicate differently to each of your clients, depending on how they receive it and how you view them and what relationship you have with them. They need to understand in your industry, because they don't want to think about insurance. That's the last thing I want to think about. I want to think about growing my business constantly. It's the only thing I want to grow. I don't want to deal with them. I've built a relationship with my insurance agent where I'm like, you do what you need to do when you send me the email. I'm not into it. I don't understand it well. Just make sure I'm very well protected from every single angle.
--:-- Christos Provostalis: Have you had anyone push back on this idea? Have you had anybody after you break this concept down of what we sell, and have them go, "Nah, that's not it"? Have you had anybody push back, or have you converted them? When people hear this, do they start to think of their own buying decisions and their own buying habits, and they kind of put themselves in that place? Or have you had anyone question this concept?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: No one's really pushed back on it. There are some people that have asked questions. I've asked them. Some of them at some point, the question would be like, "Well, how did you come up with this conclusion?" And I said, "Oh wow, you're wearing a Rolex watch." And they're like, "Yeah." And I was like, "I have a watch on that's about $20." And I go, "Why did you buy that?" And they're like, "Well, I told myself at the 10-year mark, if I still had my business and if I hit a milestone, I needed to buy this for me. I wanted to buy this." So I said, "How do you feel?" He goes, "I feel very accomplished." And I go, "Well, Rolex sells status and success. That's what they sell. And you bought right into it." And they looked at me and they go, "Oh shit." And I go, "Because it's how it makes you feel."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So I said, whatever way, if you're wearing a $10 t-shirt and all of your t-shirts have Superman on it for some reason, there's a reason that you wear that because it makes you feel a certain way. I've had some people that are new into the workforce that just didn't get the concept. They didn't really question it, but they're like, "I just graduated college. My boss told me we had to be here. We understand it, but we haven't experienced enough life to be able to." I've never had anybody that said... Well, I've had someone say to me before in the middle of my class, kind of like a Ryan moment, say, "It's kind of easy to make people happy at Walt Disney World though. Don't you have other examples?"
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And I had to think about that, because I'm like, is it easy to make people happy at Walt Disney World? The expectations are this high, and I can't pull Mickey and Minnie out of my pockets. So that's why I started using examples from our family business of what we did to create such an amazing little business that has revenues exceeding over a million dollars in a 1200 square foot space. I had to give real life examples of things we did that made them go, "Oh, okay." And I said, it's not necessarily what you do for companies. I can't stress this enough. It's not necessarily the product or service that you sell. It almost has nothing to do with it. It's how you make your customer feel during and after the transaction. How do they feel about you?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Our pizzeria was in this pizza contest in our state. One of the most popular news channels ran a pizza contest with brackets, like college basketball. It was 800 pizzerias nominated. Then we were at 64, 32, 16, 8, 4. We ended up third. And it had to do with taste, with people voting. Now, do we have the best pizza in Connecticut? I don't know. It's actually a subjective question. People were sending us texts and emails, customers and family members and acquaintances across the country, like, "We're voting for you. We're voting for you." So what do we sell at a restaurant? Why did that happen? It didn't happen because we have the best pizza. It almost has nothing to do with it. It's how we make people feel when they come in. We want to make sure that they feel like they're part of our family. I can tell you this: I'm not a part of their family. Our customers are a huge part of mine. A huge part of mine. Because we can't do the things we do in our life without them. And I make them understand that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You think about Harley Davidson, right? You're a badass, you're a free spirit. You brought up the example of Rolex: you're accomplished, you're successful. Bentley for cars. Go to everyone's favorite guy to hate, Andrew Tate, and his popularizing Bugattis. What that means to be some elite a-hole kind of thing, but a status symbol at the same time. All these things, everything.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I spent a lot of time thinking about this. You're a hard guy to get on the podcast, Christos. Very in-demand man. No, I'm kidding. We just haven't hooked up yet. But I've been waiting for this because your presentation was very meaningful to me. I've spent a lot of time thinking about these concepts because I was like, you could almost start a business based on the feeling you want to create for people and then back into the product. You could say, "I want people to feel patriotism. I'm going to start a t-shirt company." "I want people to feel unique and special. I'm going to start a whatever." It literally doesn't matter. You could start a beaded bracelet company that has some sort of slogan on it that makes people say, "Hey, this is the tribe that I'm with." It doesn't matter. You can back into all of it if you understand what you're doing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I hadn't wrapped my head around that concept of it quite literally being the emotion first and the product second. I think it does end up happening the other way most often. Someone creates a product and they figure out how to create emotion around it. But you don't need the product to start the business. You need the emotion that you want them to feel. And then the product really could be whatever, a derivative of the emotion.
--:-- Christos Provostalis: 100%. 100%. I use the example of Nike. Their slogan is "Just Do It." I was asked at Disney from my executive, "What does Nike sell?" And I go, "Sneakers." He said, "That's not what they sell." He said, "What's their slogan?" I said, "Just Do It." He goes, "They sell motivation and inspiration. That's the only thing they sell." I said, "How do you feel when you put those on? When you ever see a commercial during the Olympics made by Nike, you're on the verge of tears. It shows someone that had some type of hardship that was able to pass the finish line, that was able to do that." He said, "That's what they sell. Why are they a leader?" And I was like, "Okay." And that's when he said, "Large companies, real large companies, focus on emotions."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You think about that movie that just came out about Michael Jordan and Nike, "Air" or whatever it is. What a great movie. The whole thing was awesome. And you think about it, people wanted to fly. So they bought Jordans. That's what you did. You thought that if you put Jordans on and you jumped up into the air, you were Michael Jordan. That's what you thought. You thought you could dunk. You thought you could do all the things that he could do just by having those sneakers on. Sure, they were a status symbol too, to a certain extent. They showed that you had taste. But man, it didn't matter how cool you thought you were when you had them on. What you really thought was, "I can dunk. I can jump." You wanted to be able to do the iconic flying from the foul line. You're picturing yourself with the shoes on in the air as if you're Michael Jordan. I don't care if you're a basketball fan or not, you couldn't help yourself when you put those things on. It just was it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Man, I think that you're so dialed in. I think in the insurance industry, the obligatory nature of some of the products allows us to get away with not doing this. I don't mean that in any way other than I think that we've been able to skirt by in some regards with some of these thought experiments and concepts because some of the products are mandatory. People just have to have them. So it doesn't feel like you're selling emotion. But you look at the best salesmen and women that you come across, especially in insurance, they don't even talk about the product. They literally don't even talk about the product. You can have X-mod tools and three comparison charts. I have this process that I take my sales team through, and I've shared a little bit around, and I call it our one-call close process. We don't even talk about price. Literally, you don't mention price in the entire process.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: People are like, "Well, people price shop online." I'm like, "No, they're not price shopping." How many individuals in the world go, "You know what I'm going to do today, Christos? I'm going to call five insurance agents today and see what's going on." That is the last thing in the world that anyone actually wants to do. They're searching for trust. They're searching for someone that feels like they're going to deliver. They're searching for whatever that emotional connection is that they particularly are looking for in that relationship. But so much of our industry just defaults to product and price. Product and price. Product and price.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So okay, say I'm a product and pricer, and my board of directors mandates that I install the "What Do You Sell" method, but I'm a product and pricer. How do you start to dig in to change my mentality, to start to see the world from your view? Assuming that there is a problem, I'm not just killing my numbers and hitting a thousand percent growth every month. I need to change, I have to improve, but I've been a product and pricer for 30 years. How do you start to dig in and break that shell and get them to understand this process?
--:-- Christos Provostalis: Getting to, in terms of like teams or like the end consumer?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. This business unit leader needs to improve, and it's been mandated on them that they come to your class. They got to turn production around, and they got to think differently. They've been told, "This method over here is the method that's going to get us there." Being a product and pricer, it's not getting it done. How do you start to change their mentality? What are some of the core concepts that start to crack that product and price mentality and get them thinking emotions first?
--:-- Christos Provostalis: First of all, they have to be open to it. They have to be open-minded. I could tell you how, when you meet a closed-minded person, because they don't stop talking and they don't let you talk at all. They're closed-minded and uncoachable. So before I even do this class for companies, when a company will hire me, I will actually ask them. At the end of the day, my job is to make sure that the company, the leader, and everyone really gets a lot out of it. But I ask a lot of pointed questions. I ask, "How long has your employees been there? How long have they been doing this? Have they been doing this for 30 years? Are they uncoachable? Are they closed-minded?" And I said, "Because if they are, I'm sorry, but you're going to pay me for no reason. So I'm not for you."
--:-- Christos Provostalis: Let me tell you how much companies appreciate that. I said, "Because I don't want to just come and talk for 90 minutes. What is it going to do?" And some of them say, "I need to give you a call back." And some of them will call me back a month, two months later, and be like, "You made me realize that we needed to actually change some people here. Because if we're going to be bringing in education and constantly feeding our salespeople and giving them their tools, they have to be open to it and they have to be open to learning." So they've actually changed people around, put people in places, and then they'll end up bringing me in. So when I'm coming in, I'm already going to be in a space where people are excited to hear me, excited to learn a new way of thinking on a deeper level. At the end of the day, I don't want to waste the company's money on me when it's not going to work.
--:-- Christos Provostalis: For anyone that's listening, if you're a speaker, if you do things like that, be so honest with the company that hires you. It's going to come back to you tenfold. I promise you. And they'll tell all their friends. So I think that's the biggest thing: just be open-minded to wanting to learn a different way. Because if you're stuck on price and you're stuck on product, there's nothing that I'm going to tell you that's going to change that. You have to be open to wanting to receive that information.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What part of this conversation have we not discussed yet? What are you sitting there going, "Man, we beat up this part, but there's a whole section of this that we haven't got to yet"? Is there anything we haven't touched on?
--:-- Christos Provostalis: I think the whole class has to do with how we connect. I deal with a lot of salespeople that are really good at sales. Some of them are assertive, some of them are aggressive, but some of them are really good listeners. I don't provide you with scripts like, "Oh, if someone says this, this is your response." That's not what I do. I just teach you a different way to think. One thing that I bring up in my class is when you're having a conversation with your client and they're talking, listening is one thing, but there's something called the law of similarity. People tend to want to do business or build a relationship with someone they like, someone that they have commonalities with. I'm not talking crazy commonalities.
--:-- Christos Provostalis: While they're talking, at the end when they're done, you say, "Oh wow, your son goes to karate. My son goes to karate. Oh, you guys go to this school. My son just graduated from that school." When all of a sudden you have commonalities, a bond starts to form, whether you know it or don't know it. And you take that and you build from that. People really want to work with other people that they have some similar interests or characteristics or behaviors with. So that's the only piece that I like to talk about a little bit in terms of sales: not just listen, listening is great and not interrupting, but also being like, "Oh wow, we have this in common." That makes your customer realize, "Oh wow, they're a human being on top of selling me whatever product or service they're doing." So I think it's really important to understand the law of similarity.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Absolutely. And I think your lesson around choosing who to work with is very important as well. You can create this emotion-driven product and all these things, but if you're marketing or trying to shove someone who doesn't appreciate that emotion or isn't looking for that particular emotion down that funnel, they're not going to be interested. They're not going to want it because it's not what they actually want. I think a lot of times we try to round peg a square hole and then we push back on the process.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I used to say, especially with marketing, you get out what you put back. If you put out price shoppers, if you put out price shopping content into the world, you get price shoppers back. If you put out a certain type of emotion into the world, you get a certain type of emotion back. We have to be very cognizant of what we're putting out into the world because that is exactly what we get back. The world and individuals are going to mirror what we put out. If you're not getting the type of customer you want, it is most likely because you are not putting out into the world what the type of customer you want wants.
--:-- Christos Provostalis: 100%. Because like you said, you put out price tools and price tools and price tools, guess what you're going to get? Price shoppers. You put out just facts and figures, "Hey everybody, just want to let you know, make sure during a storm you do this, this, and this," useful information. What type of value are you adding to their life? You're going to get those type of people. They'll be like, "You know what, I understand your price is this opposed to that, but you're constantly educating me, you're constantly giving me information. I feel a lot more safe with you." And if you even end up being a little bit more expensive, it's so much worth it because you put out what you want to receive. And just anything in the world. I think it's tremendous.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Hey man, I've loved our conversation. I think that what you're doing is absolutely wonderful. I hope that more people in the insurance industry will reach out to you. If they want to do that, if they've listened to this and they're like, "Geez, I got to get one of these workshops in," or "I'm an event planner and I'd love to have you speak," what is the best place to connect with you?
--:-- Christos Provostalis: They could just go right on my website. It's Christospeaks.com. C-H-R-I-S-T-O-S-S-P-E-A-K-S.com. Or they could just call me at 860-428-9314. I'm about three months out booked, but I'm reserving things right now for January, February, March of next year.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's awesome, dude. I think that, like I said, I love the work you're doing. I love the message. I think it's vitally important to the insurance industry and all industries. If you're trying to better the way you speak to your customers and the way you interact with them, I think bringing Christos in is an absolute must, guys. I appreciate the hell out of you. And I wish you nothing but the best, my friend. Thank you very much.
--:-- Christos Provostalis: Thank you so much for having me. This was really, really nice. Thank you.
--:-- [End of interview. Promotional segment begins.]
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