--:-- Ryan Hanley: In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello everyone and welcome back to the show.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Today's episode is special in that it is the audio version of the Neon launch video. So you get my 10-minute intro followed by Seth, Sid, and then Seth again.
--:-- A lot of people, I think thousands at this point, have watched the YouTube video where Neon did their live launch. But I wanted to share the audio here on the podcast because I think while the video is intoxicating in many ways visually, it's wonderfully done, I really want you to listen to the words. I want you to listen to the concepts and ideas and for a second, take out the fact that this is Neon and be atomic and listen to the concepts.
--:-- Obviously, I'm an enormous believer in Neon. I'm an enormous believer in Seth and Sid and what they're doing. And my path for this agency is to eventually become a Neon agent. That's where we're going. But for now, I want you to just listen to the words. Listen to the concepts, the ideas. Really try to take in what Seth in particular is talking about. What is he trying to teach you, to show you?
--:-- Because I think it sometimes gets lost in what is Neon, what does it do exactly, and we forget that there's so much more to what Seth's trying to build than just a product. It's not about the product as much as the product is the solution to a problem that we as an industry have been facing for a long time. And in many ways, the work that Seth has done has spurred the big guys Applied and Vertafore to make drastic changes in their products. I mean, you've seen just recently them making some changes to try to almost mimic the concepts that Seth is building from scratch in Neon.
--:-- And I think the ideas are very, very important. I think it's important to take it in. And I wanted to share this in an audio-only format so that you didn't get lost in the visuals. You were just able to focus on the words. And I'd love your feedback on it. I'd love to know what you think. I mean, many of you reached out when the video was first launched. But here we are a month or so removed from that and taking it in. I'd love to know what you think, what questions you have. Hit me up anytime you want, Ryan at RyanHanley.com.
--:-- And guys, I just want to tell you this too, and I probably don't say this enough. I certainly don't say it as much as maybe some of the other podcasts, but I absolutely love the fact that you listen to this podcast. I have so much appreciation for your time, and I try to only share with you things that I find to be really valuable. And I know recently I've shared some kind of re-shared some content with you from other interviews that I've done and other places. And this would be something of that format. But I do it only because I think these concepts are valuable. And I want to get them in front of as many people as I can.
--:-- And I just want you guys to have everything you want in whatever aspect of the business you're working in. And it's why I share many of the struggles that I'm having and try to be as open and transparent and vulnerable as I can be. Because I have many of my own demons that I deal with every day that keep me from being everything that I want to be. And if my working through them can somehow help you move forward, then that's the home run for me.
--:-- I'm just as happy for anyone else's success as I am for my own. And maybe that's a failing in how far I can take my own business. But it certainly is something that makes me happy in life. So I just wanted to share that with you. I think that more than ever, we need each other. I think the future is working together. And I believe Seth, Neon, and more importantly, the concepts that Seth and Sid share in this video are important to our growth as an industry. So I hope you enjoy it. Here we go.
--:-- Seth Zaremba: You can't build the agency of yesterday, today. While many would blame advertising or venture-backed startups seeking to disintermediate, or even downward pricing pressure from direct competition, these are all wrong. The answer is broadband, high-speed internet connections and 4G wireless. Speed is the great equalizer. And the enemy is at the gates.
--:-- Despite this, legacy friction in changing insurance providers and a general apathy for our product has allowed agencies to lose so slowly they believe they're winning. We're able to disguise failure in luxury cars and comfortable second homes. How do you tell a guy making $350,000 in personal income he's doing something wrong? You can't. You just have to watch his agency stagnate, decline, and be sold off to the highest bidding venture capital conglomerate.
--:-- We're victims of our own success. We got so good at doing business the traditional way, we took our guard down. We stopped manning the towers and mending the fences. We got fat and lazy on the spoils of battles fought in a past era. And as we excuse away our incremental decline in market share, we left an entire generation of insurance professionals helpless to defend themselves.
--:-- Worse, those we trusted to guide our future lost their incentive to innovate. The bedrock of our political and technological infrastructure was built and incentivized to stay the same. Speed is the incumbent's kryptonite, and in a flailing gasp to regain glory, we were fed traditionalist propaganda. But the message was transparent and flimsy. It didn't match the battle being fought in the trenches every day by young, ambitious, growth-focused agents in hand-to-hand combat with well-funded tech-first competitors.
--:-- So in 2015, we turned to technologists for help. Mark Zuckerberg told us, "Move fast and break things." It was a time to be disrupted, and that's what they did. Disruptor after disruptor explained why we were all wrong, how we didn't understand consumers, and thank God that they were kind enough to come and save our industry from the stupidity in which we had operated it for the last 400 plus years.
--:-- Except disruption wasn't the answer. Like so many before them who entered the insurance industry, they never slowed down long enough to respect and appreciate the gravity of our work. And they too were dashed against the rocks of insurance agency technology adoption. It turns out insurance isn't broken. And once again, the most ambitious among us were left frustrated, frankensteining solutions from an aging disconnected tool set, forced to accept double and triple digit data entry in the name of automation. There had to be a better solution.
--:-- It's true. The insurance industry is not broken. When there's a fire, buildings get rebuilt. When there's an injury, medical bills get paid. We put people's lives back together. Today, in 2020, we're too slow. Consumers drive change and their demands are clear. Make it faster, make it easier, and make it less confusing.
--:-- The French novelist Victor Hugo wrote, "There is only one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come." That idea? The human-optimized agency. An agency run on real-time technology, but driven by human connection and caring. A good start. But there's a missing piece. The third piece to the holy trinity of the insurance consumer experience. It was this piece of the puzzle, this missing piece, that so many brilliant individuals had failed to connect. Who would have thought it would be a former steel fitter that would deliver divinity after so many decades of darkness?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Hanley, you got a sec. I remember like it was yesterday. It took me five minutes. Five minutes into our conversation at a random table in a back hall of Westfield's headquarters after three hours of a marketing workshop, Seth Zaremba explained Neon to me for the first time. It took me five minutes and I stopped him flat. Seth described Neon as only a person who had lived the insurance life could. The holy grail: an independent insurance agency run on technology, driven by humans, fueled by data. I said, "You have to come speak at Elevate." In the timeless words of another great Seth, Seth Godin, this idea virus had to spread.
--:-- Not all tech, not all human, not all data. The future of the insurance industry is made up of three unconditional properties in equal measure: technology, humans, and data. Remove any one of the three and the triangle falls apart. Seth saw this. He believed it, but more, as only a person who had thrived in a world which routinely punched them in the mouth could, he had the guts to build it. Guts.
--:-- It took me five minutes to realize that I would support Seth and Neon to the end. Not because he's my friend, not because I want to be right calling Neon early, and certainly not for any financial gain. No, it took me five minutes because I was too slow to get it in one minute. Neon represents everything that is good about the insurance industry, and Neon will be the bedrock of everything great that is built by our industry in the future.
--:-- Believe in the technology, yes. Believe in Seth and Sid and their entire team, for sure. Believe in data, absolutely. My friends, from the bottom of my heart, for all the love I have for this great industry that has given me a life that I could have never imagined, believe in yourself and put faith in the tools that allow you to do just that. I believe Neon to be such a tool.
--:-- Seth Zaremba: As a scratch agent, I've spent my whole life looking up, being inspired and being exhausted, frankly. I've dreamed of being the agent that customers favor and that my carriers can't live without and that finally breaks the heavy pull of gravity and somehow launches into space. I'm the guy maybe like you that dreams of going to Mars and I've always wanted a jet pack. Yeah, a jet pack. The thing that gives you confidence and freedom in your business, that finally helps you understand what's happening, where you're broken, where you're making money and where you're losing it. The thing that helps you grow. The thing that finally creates scale and allows that place in your head, Mars for me, not to be a dream but a place you can really get to in this industry.
--:-- All the crazy models, the mom-and-pops, the front men rock stars, the techies, the marketers, the agent who gets the first tee at the Carrier Golf Outings with the company CEO. Those people, they all motivate me and they all push me and they should all have their own jet pack. Twenty years in, I've had the pleasure to meet them all and I've watched the legends among them take and leave the court for the last time. To me, these are my heroes. These are my astronauts. It's their footprints on the moon.
--:-- Something happened about 15 years ago. I started to notice that this era of test pilots, these dreamers, they started leaving the scene and selling out one by one. And they weren't being replaced. Our industry space program was starting to have less cowboy test pilots, less true originals, more dudes in suits using hooks and crooks, not seat time on the rockets, to shape our industry's future.
--:-- And what have the suits given us? Clusters and aggregators and private equity finance Goliaths that are to save us, that are to keep us in the... How's that working for you? Because the answer hasn't been more independence and cooperation between agents and carriers, it's been less. And what do we have now? We have to ask permission of the financiers, the overlords, and the tech company giants for everything we do now. And instead of being more indie, we've become less. Our rockets have been grounded. Our pilots have given up. And in many cases, the IA channel has defaulted to the lowest common denominator. Denominators like how big we are. Or worse, the price.
--:-- They told us all, "Don't worry. This is the new way. This is how you get to space. This is what independence should look like. We will be the ones to give you your jetpacks." They won't because they can't. The jetpacks we were promised, they ain't going to make them. Why? Because these people don't dream what we dream. They don't wonder what we wonder, and they sure as heck do not do what we do.
--:-- And if you're still thinking that legacy tech companies care about our independence, you're either naive or you're a fool, and I'll let you decide that. Because as their values grow with every sale, they become more entrenched in their ways, not in ours. Or maybe you're hoping Silicon Valley is dreaming up our jetpacks rather than turning cars into technology and slapping insurance on them like a winter floor mat upgrade. Or perhaps you're still thinking your jetpacks will just evolve out of an insurtech primordial ooze, suddenly struck by just the right amount of innovation or just the right amount of money. I don't know about you, but I don't have a billion years to walk upright.
--:-- Or maybe you think carriers will build half our jetpacks in one room, agents will build the other half in another room, and then we'll meet in a hallway in the middle and snap them together. Yeah, that'll work. Or perhaps worst of all, maybe you've given up on your jetpack and that place that you want to get in your business. Maybe your dreams of Mars are dead. And maybe you've become content barking into cans on a string for the rest of your career. I haven't.
--:-- The jetpacks we need, the jetpacks we want, are not coming through their doors, people. And what is so crazy to me about the suit's grip on our industry being so strong is we can't even as an industry discuss, let alone agree on how to change things. And it's a shame. And it's the reason that a $2 trillion industry has been left to what? To pixie dust and vendors and fat cats? Yeah. That's the trick. It's time for a change.
--:-- And with anything where there is no accord between partners, where space exists between, where doubt lingers between, when trust wanes between, and where agents and carriers are resigned to subcontract our success to others, we will forever be stuck dreaming of Mars and never getting there.
--:-- And I joke, but we stand here as agents and carriers with the dirt beneath our feet in our industry and we watch the car makers, the online vendors, grocery stores, mobile device companies and anyone else you can think of insult us. They mock us. And what are they really saying? They're saying, "We get the jetpacks. We'll make and sell the insurance, thank you very much." They mock us. "You idiots depend on everyone else to do everything for you. We can do it better." Or, "You romantics, keep spinning yarns of the good old days while we add insurance to every sale at checkout." Or, "You call yourselves partners? You can't even figure out who owns the customer." Or, "Your independence is your arrogance."
--:-- And we take it. Like a teenage girl waiting to be asked to the prom, we pine for them to save us. They won't. They won't because they can't. And we take it. Because we're too busy making rock gods out of private equity-backed Goliaths, running up their credit cards. We fly out to Cupertino and sit in their incubators begging for scraps. We sit around at conferences and create celebrity insurance agents, not for solving stuff, but for how many insurance technologies they were lucky enough to tape together. And we huddle around Facebook fires like small divided tribes and complain. And we sit in each other's buildings, and we expect each other to do what we are unwilling to do for ourselves. Enough already.
--:-- We were promised jetpacks, and if you have not figured it out by now, we, agents and carriers, are going to have to build them ourselves. Is the recipe so hard after all? Is the formula so complex? No, in fact, it's quite simple. But doing it together apparently not so much. I mean, think about it. The principles of flight are few: lift, thrust, drag, and weight. And I'm an Indy agent and I work with Indy carriers and I know we can manufacture lift and thrust, but it is getting harder and harder to overcome the drag of download and the weight of legacy technology vendors who keep our rockets grounded.
--:-- My point: it's not a lack of motivation keeping us stuck on Earth. It's the systems and processes we were given and that we've settled for that are killing us. For jetpacks to work, for each of us to take flight whenever and however we want, to truly be in the agents and carriers, we need to start acting like the partners we say we are.
--:-- My name is Seth Zaremba. This is Be Atomic. We're a collective of motivated agents and carriers, and we make jetpacks. And we're sick and tired of being kicked around. We're strapping in. And we're going to Mars.
--:-- Our industry, this honey hole, is built on one thing and one thing only: data and moving it. We're not so good at it these days. For years, our industry has seen data and connectivity as the possession and responsibility of others. Like we weren't capable of doing it, like we couldn't make it or we couldn't move it ourselves. Rather, others would have to deliver it from on high to us as agents and carriers for us to decipher and decode and use as our competitive advantage.
--:-- Think of the waste, carriers. You're spending millions of dollars to sift through unrelated third-party data just so you can better understand and predict what we as agents already know. And data that we could make for you. I mean, what do you want to know? How better to serve the customer? I can tell you that. What agents need and where carriers are struggling? I can tell you that. What products to build, what coverage to improve, or what pricing models that we can sell, or what our customers will value?
--:-- And how about us as agents? What about us? I mean, we sit around like grounded pilots playing cards in the rain, waiting for somebody at Mission Control to know something, to make something, to train someone, to come into our agencies and tell us what to do. I mean, really? Is there a less efficient and more ineffective way for our channel to acquire, configure, disseminate, and use information? I mean, if there is, I'm sure we'll think of it. Heck, we're the industry still relying on two soup cans and a string. We can do better.
--:-- Why couldn't data made and used by partners and connected by 21st century technology be our jetpacks? Because understanding what a customer wants, what agents and carriers can do as partners to satisfy, is the only place we're getting killed. I mean, come on people, we should be brimming with confidence. We have the best people, and we have a proven track record of protecting people's dreams and making money. Not protecting people's dreams or making money. You've seen the IPOs like me. You must be insulted. We're getting our heads kicked in, not on the hard stuff. We're getting killed on the easy stuff. And why? Simply because we're not connected as partners must be. And we're looking at the same customer with two different data sets at best. Or in practice, no data sets at all.
--:-- Be Atomic is in the business of fixing that once and for all. We're already busting our asses doing the hard stuff. Shouldn't we just do the easy stuff while we're at it? But how? How do we as agents and carriers get closer as partners, share connections and insight on the customer? Well, let's connect already. Let's connect our technology. Let's operate in a way that allows ourselves to document performance and to know where and how to fix when we're broke. And here's a crazy one: why not think about the data as an asset? Something both we as partners could use together.
--:-- I mean, imagine the day when agents and carriers both have line of sight on the customer, working together on customer outcomes, helping each other improve in skills that are valued by our customers, lowering the cost of each other's respective operations, and improving the collective margins between us with immediate and strong connections. I guess in short, being world class for our customers. And while we're at it, if I may ask, why don't we apologize to each other for the last time, bury our guns, load up the jetpacks, and head to Mars? That place that we need to get to as partners together this time.
--:-- Be Atomic is the company that does that. And you might say, as some have, that we've reimagined the independent channel, and it looks nothing like the channel that we've left back on Earth. Because if you were starting today as a carrier, would you really start with things like batch processing, outdated reporting? Would you really start with a web portal? Would you still deliver information via telegraph or horse? I mean, come on.
--:-- And what about us as agents? Would you describe yourself as a policy manager? Because I don't. Would you build on and buy technology that doesn't connect? That wasn't made to go together? And is there a universe as an agent where you would not platform your agency so that everyone could connect everything, know everything, and do anything, anytime? I mean, there's no way on Mars you would build either side of a partnership that way if you were starting today.
--:-- The Indie Channel reimagined, the one on Mars, the place I'm going, it would be different. It'd be based in the cloud. It would connect customer, agent, and carrier together in one transaction. Carrier and agency operating systems would most definitely and certainly be connected. Data would be made and collected for a common good, and as partners, we would always seek the interest of, wait for it, customers over our own preferences and conveniences.
--:-- The Indie channel that I imagine, the one I dream of, the one I just described, that is our jetpack. And it's what we've needed and what we will never get if we wait for them. I mean, done right this time, we democratize opportunity, not limit it. We attract diversity, not disenfranchise it. We create transparency and trust, not just trade on it, and we empower our test pilots to innovate and push the envelope. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. We take back our industry. We put our people back in control of the rockets.
--:-- In short, we'd be atomic towards each other and focus on our partnership, on what the customer wants and needs, on livable margins for our agents on the rocket and sustainable profits for our carriers back at mission control. And in doing so, we cement our place as OGs in this industry.
--:-- The Be Atomic business plan is pretty simple. We platform agencies with world-class technology, connecting marketing, sales, customer experience and data. And you just can't do that right now, not really at all, with legacy technology. So we had to build it ourselves. We then anonymize and aggregate that data together to be used as a collective asset. And we use that data to improve agency marketing, agency sales results, operational efficiency, and customer experience with an API connection carriers can access, not just for the data on the customer, the agent, but on the carrier as well. And you can use those APIs to go all the way through the interaction with the customer, making us look wicked awesome for the policyholder.
--:-- I guess you could say we scale technology, data, and real-time access. All the things that we've been starved for together, we help each other stay Indy. If you're an agent and carrier and you have not figured it out at this point, it's us. And it's always been us. I want our people back in charge at Mission Control, not them. And I want our pilots on the rockets, not the suits. And I want my jetpack. And I want you to have yours. And Be Atomic will help you build it for you if you'll help us.
--:-- We call ourselves partners. I'm asking us to prove it this time. So what do I mean? I'm tired of talking through vendors to my partners. I'm tired of asking permission through vendors. I'm tired of living my life based on the problems of industry elites, and I'm tired of losing already. I wanna win. I know we're better than this. You know we're better than this, so how about we just act like it?
--:-- Partnership, connection, data, agents and carriers, smart APIs in the transactions, and information as an asset. Yeah, yeah. You do those three things, I'll do those three things, and I'll meet you on the field. And this time, we fight as partners. We connect our systems, and we start to be world class for our customers. Said more simply, let's be atomic.
--:-- So I had this vision in 2018. I was going to reverse engineer my traditional Main Street insurance agency to a sales and marketing driven 21st century startup organization. We're going to have data on everything that happens within our agency and outside of our agency with our clients. We are going to have ticker tapes, service queues, dashboards everywhere. So everybody knows exactly what is happening all the time. And the system is telling everybody exactly what the most important piece of information they need to know is and what action they need to take right now to be the most effective person they can be within Camargo Insurance. That was the vision. The reality was the technology was not available for insurance agencies at that point in time.
--:-- Sid: When I came into the agency about six years ago, one of the first things I did was to sit down and try and learn how do we manage our customers? How do we build those relationships and really how do we maintain them to provide that world class, that best in class customer experience? And I quickly learned that the current tech setup that we have, and we had our agency management system now for about 25 years, wasn't really doing us any favors in that regard. Did it store files? Yes. Did it help us with our E&O exposure? Sure. Did it track activities? Yep. But that's about where the buck stopped.
--:-- Seth Zaremba: I had the opportunity to purchase my in-law's insurance agency, a great agency on the west side of Cleveland here. Great opportunity. Wanted to stay more local. I was traveling all over the country in my previous role, and I just wanted to be able to be closer home and have something I could build that was my own. So I made the career switch, sat down day one. I had insurance knowledge, but I've never ran an agency, owned an agency, any of those types of things. So I sat down on day one and I just looked at all the technology we had available to us in the office. And I realized I had no idea how I was going to take this agency into the next generation. I was lost.
--:-- Sid: My whole career was very technology oriented. We had a lot of great tools, a lot of great resources we could use to further what we wanted to do and I felt stuck here. Everything that we did was just one more additional technology that we as an agency had to bring in. We had to pay the cost to bring in. We had to learn it. It was one additional piece of technology that we expected our staff to use to understand. And it just became too much.
--:-- When we took a step back and looked, we're running multiple different technology systems, none of which actually talk to one another. And at the end of the day, we're not providing the type of experience that we want to be able to provide to our clients. And we're not providing the type of experience that is going to help us continue to grow within our distribution channel.
--:-- So that's really kind of the path that led us to where it is that we are. And the beauty of what it is that I think we're building here is that, yes, it's extremely powerful, but it's also incredibly simple. The idea of having one common platform that houses every piece of data that's manufactured within our agency and not just houses that data, but actually aggregates it in such a way that we're now able to start deriving insights on that aggregated data that actually helps us provide a better experience, better service to our clients in their moment of need, in their moment of interaction with us, with our agency.
--:-- Seth Zaremba: And while I be atomic, the world is dealing with a new and very difficult problem. Or maybe a set of problems that has to do with the availability, control, and transfer of information at a speed and volume that we just haven't had to deal with up to this point. I want a system that allows me to make decisions based on accurate data. I want to aggregate all of my data with all of my peers' data all over the United States. So all of my agents that are involved in this project, I want to be able to make real-time decisions. I want to be able to look at carriers and say, "Hey, this is where we're struggling with you and this is why your pricing is X, your service time turnaround is X." Right now, we don't have that capability. This is what it's going to allow us to do.
--:-- Sid: Listen, the staff is looking at each other and saying, "Do they know how hard it is to work with that company?" We're going to be able to measure that. Imagine your company reps or your vendors having a meeting with you, and instead of them having the data as to who you are, you have the data as to the relationship that you guys have.
--:-- Seth Zaremba: We're going to agency profits that are 40%. We're going to a place where my people, my team members, fly keyboards less and build relationships with human beings more.
--:-- Sid: The value of being part of this community that all believes in the same thing of agents, independent agents, being able to own and control their data, being able to own and control their features, being able to customize their system the way they want. That is huge. And it's not known. It doesn't exist, right?
--:-- Seth Zaremba: I'd really like to see independent agents realize that they have power in their data. That this fear that exists today about what I should be doing with my data or my agency software stack is replaced by empowerment and a feeling that you're not just the tail of the dog in the ecosystem, but that you're actually a very powerful genesis point for the information that is critical to moving the industry forward.
--:-- Sid: What does it take to become an agency of the future? How much technology do I need to be competitive and relevant? What seat licenses should I buy to improve my customer experience and increase efficiency?
--:-- Sid: Well, I need marketing technology to attract attention online. I need sales technology to keep my people accountable and close those leads. I need service technology to meet my customers where they're at. And I need analytics technology to report on all the other technology that I've got. Marketing technology, sales technology, service technology, analytics technology, marketing, sales, service, analytics, marketing, sales, service, analytics.
--:-- Sid: Guys, this is NEON. NEON is the idea of one. One platform that houses everything an agency needs. I know. I know how tough it is out there trying to duct tape together a Frankenstein tech stack, all these disconnected systems that won't talk to each other, and you feel like the glue stuck in middle just trying to hold it all together on any given day.
--:-- Sid: With that as our bar, this is what you hoped for today. Finally someone came up with the genius idea to just connect all these systems into one. But this connected tech stack, this one platform as amazing as it is, is not what I'm here to talk about today because I'm tired of the tech conversation. It's the conversation that we expect. You probably expected it today because it's the story that we've been told. Hey, tech up to be competitive. Tech up if you want to be relevant. And many of us have. We've answered the call to arms. We've become hoarders of shiny objects.
--:-- Sid: But let me ask you this, this story that we've been told. It's based on what data? Well, two data points to be exact. Did you know lots of people who have bought this seat license improved their customer experience? Data point number one. Did you also know that, hey, lots of people who bought that seat license increased their efficiency? Data point number two. That's it. Alone, we spend tens of thousands of dollars on solutions that are sold to us with these two data points. Together, hundreds of thousands of dollars. And we buy into it. Hook, line, and sinker because of our fear of being left behind, because of our hunches based on anecdotal stories, because of this invisible pressure from above.
--:-- Sid: Well, at Be Atomic, we say it's time to flip the tables. We're done hoping, we're done guessing, we're done blindly trusting. We want to know. How long are things actually taking, thanks to duplicate entry and an endless amount of portals? What does it feel like to be an independent customer? Where are the issues stemming from? Who's responsible for them? What solutions do we actually need to fix them? Their technology doesn't tell us that. Our data does.
--:-- Sid: Let me pause though because when I say data, I don't mean the traditional definition, a static contract, a record of policy information. Data is a living, breathing organism, a reflection of life, a copy of our behaviors. And those behaviors in a business setting define process. Let me give you an example. Behavior one, client calls in and asks you to re-quote their policy. Behavior two, agent updates any information and sends it to the carriers. Behavior three, carriers receive the request, process it, send it back to the agent. Behavior four, agent receives and reviews that quote. Behavior five, agent sends to the client and advises on the next best step. That's the remarket process.
--:-- Sid: And when you think about it, an agency does the same 16, 17, 18 processes over and over and over and over again, day in, day out. Marketing processes, sales processes, service processes, quoting, renewals, certificates, adding and removing drivers, coverage questions. Clients, different team members, different carrier partners, but the same processes. And when these marketing, sales, and service processes are looked at through the lens of the customer, we see experience or lack of experience. And when looked at through the lens of the business, we see efficiency or lack of efficiency.
--:-- Sid: You know what that means? That means that whoever can see and document the entire insurance process, client, agent, carrier partner, agent, client, holds the key, has the leverage, can lead the story to improve both experience and efficiency. And in this channel, the only person, the only entity who can see the entire process is not the customer and it's not the carrier, but it is the agent. And the problem is our agency systems are so focused on creating a record of policies and we're so focused on the next seat license that we should buy that we just brush over documenting that process. Not anymore.
--:-- Sid: Zinc has changed the game. They've been running on a home-built version of Neon for almost two years, collecting heaps of behavioral data on their processes, diving into insurance experience and insurance efficiency. Hey, Neon, show me what Zinc sales guy Josh is doing. Here are all the opportunities that Josh is working on. Which ones are still at the top of the funnel? Which ones he's actually quoting? Which are close to being closed and how many he's won and lost. But I want to know more. See, this is just the outcome. I want to know what behaviors got us here. Because behaviors define outcomes. How did we acquire those opportunities, Neon? Are they a past producer connection? Referrals? Organic web searches? A lead generator? Online ads? Cross-sell opportunities?
--:-- Sid: Now, Zinc, as many of us do, assumed at first that best lead sources meant the ones that send me the most business, the most at-bats. But after looking at the data, they realized they were wrong. What if we could know which lead source was the most efficient, the one with the highest conversion rate? Look at this. We can sort Josh's lead sources by likelihood to close based on historical close rates, historical behavioral data. Here's where he shouldn't be focusing his efforts. Here's where he's having some pretty good luck, but dang, cold call killer. And compare.com leads aren't too shabby for him either. Now remember, this isn't an objective definition of these lead sources. This is telling you where Josh is having success and may be struggling. Is it Josh? Is it the source? Is it the process? Is it the carrier? All questions that we can answer as we dig deeper into the data.
--:-- Sid: Have you ever wondered when you're walking down your hallway, hearing the click clack of keyboards and the ring of phones, or now when you're zooming it up and seeing distracted faces on calls or the camera randomly go dark? What is my team doing? Hey Neon, show me what Zinc's service team is doing right now. 15,000 client requests since they've been on NEON. 15,000 individual experiences, document requests, billing inquiries, quotes, all stacked up neatly for us to look at. This is where payroll's going, processing over 7,000 document requests, adding or removing coverages almost 6,000 times. But again, what we really want to know is efficiency. How long is it taking to get things done?
--:-- Sid: Here are those same requests, those same processes, but instead of quantity, let's look at quality. For example, it takes on average 11 days to quote new business. And I don't mean the time it takes to put the data into a comparative rater. I mean the entire process from start to finish, from when the client asks for it by email, text, or phone, to when it's back in the client's hands and completely resolved. 11 days. Why? Well, 11 days is the outcome. What behavior has got us there? Is it the client? Is it the agent? Is it the carrier? Let's take a look at our partner's responsibility. Which carriers are driving our efficiency down? Even though some of your carrier partners may be paying an extra commission point on the back end, their quoting time is killing you on the front end. And it begs the question, is this relationship really profitable? Is this really the experience that we want to deliver to our prospects? We don't have to guess. We don't have to blindly trust. We know where the inefficiencies and lack of experience in service are that are costing us with every new transaction. We know who's responsible for it and we know how to solve it.
--:-- Sid: Let's take a deeper dive into our customer experience. Hey Neon, show me what Zinc customers are feeling right now. Starting out in 2016 at a beautiful 8.7, taking a dip, making that climb up, another dip, and an even bigger climb, acquired an agency. New customers not too pumped about that, really not pumped, leveling out, climbing back up, working at rebuilding those relationships. Just a little dip again and here that beautiful climb. Crushing it, still going. World pandemic hits. Yes, up, up, up. Can we get a round of applause? The Zinc team has the happiest customers in four years during a world pandemic. Boom.
--:-- Sid: But even so, it's not a perfect 10, right? And I want to know why. Where's the discrepancy? Why is that happening? Where's the lack of experience, the problems? What behaviors got us to not 10? Let's dive in and see a breakout of NPS, Net Promoter Score by team member. Rob, killing it. Seth could do better. James, though, man, having a tough time of it. Why? Well, now we know exactly who to dive into. And when we pull up his comments, we know who to contact and what to say to start to repair that relationship. Now, I know this is reactive and we want to be proactive, but the more data we collect on why these bad experiences happened, the better we can get at tightening up processes to make sure they don't happen again. And the more accurately we can predict warning signs in the future.
--:-- Sid: Let's look at one more data point together. Retention. The holy grail. The ultimate experience number. The one we parade around at conferences. Hey, Neon, show me what Zinc retention looks like. 94%. Amazing. I think we can all go home, right? But that's 6%. That's bugging me. Why'd they leave? What happened? One retention data point doesn't help me. It's again an outcome. I want to see why that's the average. And behaviors determine outcome. So let's look at what behaviors got us to that average. At Zinc, there are three main lines of business. Commercial lines, personal lines, and trucking. Our commercial lines team is pulling our retention up. Personal lines is maintaining dead center. But trucking, ooh, trucking might be pulling our retention down a bit. And if trucking is dragging us down, we need to take a deeper dive into the team members responsible for managing that department, managing that experience. Now we can see where we might be struggling, where we need to focus extra help or extra attention.
--:-- Sid: And at Zinc, they're taking this to an even deeper level. They're asking every client who cancels why they're leaving and documenting that response in the system. So eventually, we'll be able to take an even deeper dive into each team member and see a breakdown of that documentation. It's just proof that we're scraping the surface when it comes to understanding the insurance experience and insurance efficiency. Guys, with NEON, you don't get the distraction of a shiny object. You simply get the truth, the unfiltered truth. Not just what's happening in your agency, but why. Who's responsible and how to solve it.
--:-- Sid: We are breaking cost down to the transaction, the individual behavior. We're measuring and improving margin with teaspoons instead of buckets. Wielding this, we're empowered to uncover the tough conversations that we have to have with our people and partners in order to remove barriers blocking experience and efficiency. Maybe the answer might be technology. Maybe the answer might be better process. Maybe the answer might be better partnership or performance. But it's time that we know.
--:-- Sid: Now, we could have stopped here, but this is a heavy burden to bear alone. And if there's one thing that we know about agents, it's that we're more than willing to share, grow, and learn from each other. It's the craziest thing, right? Competitors collaborating, people outside this industry can't process it. But that's why we flock to Facebook groups and conferences. It's why I personally feel like I am an indie agent matchmaker on insurance Tinder on any given week. And it's what makes us stronger than we could be alone. So why not apply that strength here? Why not share data? Why not share what's working and not working, not anecdotally in a Facebook post, but at scale with minute accuracy? I'm not talking about personally identifiable information, contact info, business names, agency names, team members, but the behaviors.
--:-- Sid: Hey, Neon, show me all agencies. This is where our live Neon agencies are writing business today. How much business and with what partners. And by the way, for those of you carriers listening, yes, we see you. Yes, we're documenting 72 of you right now. Every process, every friction point, every experience you're delivering, no one can hide from the truth. And finally, here's what kind of business we're writing. And this is just the starting point, guys. We're only a few weeks in with our pilots. We've got a few data points, but as these teams use NEON and document behaviors and processes, we are going to have the most amazing, rich understanding of what goes on in the independent channel.
--:-- Sid: Remember that we don't manufacture physical, tangible things and need data to support that manufacturing. We manufacture risk. Our product is literally data. Think about all the sources carriers and vendors are purchasing data from right now. Raters, management systems, third-party data pools, the list goes on. To better understand the independent customer, to better understand the independent agent, and none of it comes close to what we as agencies, the ones that hold the relationship with the customer, can create. Agency data is the gold standard. So what if instead of signing this asset away in a long, overly complex contract for others to benefit from, what if we just owned it, we tended it, we leveraged it?
--:-- Sid: Together, with even just a few hundred agencies on NEON, we'll have thousands of client data points, millions of transactional data points, and hundreds of millions of behavioral data points. You'll be able to compare your retention number against others, compare your conversion rate by acquisition channel against others, answer whether your sales team or service team is in the top 30%, 10%, or 1%. And in the future, as we collect the best in the agent data, together agents will be able to power predictive tools like artificial intelligence and machine learning. But we have to shift our mindsets. Instead of chasing shiny objects, we have to value the gold in our backyard.
--:-- Sid: Again, we could have stopped here. We could have said building one platform to house the tech needs of an agency, that's enough. Building a way for agents to own their data, learn, know what's working and what's not, that's enough. Building a way for agents to share their data and be empowered collectively, that's enough. Building a way for the channel to learn along with them what's working and not working, that's enough. But there's one more piece to this puzzle. One more underground pipe we have to fix together. Connectivity. A better way for agents and carriers to communicate in real time.
--:-- Seth Zaremba: I'm a welder by trade. And you may never have thought about it, what welders do, what we make. We make the stuff you don't typically see, but that everything depends on. Anywhere good engineering needs strength, any distance that needs spanned, any heavy weight that must be carried typically depends on two things, a strong weld and an even better welder. And it seems almost downright logical then, with the amount of engineering needed to once and for all close the distance between agents and carriers to support the heavy load these connections must bear, that it would be left to an industry welder.
--:-- Seth Zaremba: It's that stuff, however, the stuff you don't see, the roads and sewers, as I'm fond of calling them, that we're building. And those connections must be strong and they must be true. It's those connections, connections carriers and agents control, connections carriers and agents manage, connections that make us special, that make agents and carriers better partners, that make us dangerous. I'm talking to the carriers among us now. Sid left off on connectivity. It's time for new and better connections. And I've made it as easy as possible for you to partner with your agents, to use your systems in ways they've never been used before, and to get you some serious ROI on your next hundred million dollar investment.
--:-- Seth Zaremba: B-Atomic is piling those connections right now with six carriers. And I want to talk to you. I want to show you what the future looks like. I want to be your partner. And let's be honest, I need your help. And if you're an agent, this is going to be done by you or to you. And for this to work, I need you too. As much as this takes for carriers, it may take more for you. You have got to run a new way, a better way, but new. Which means as leaders, you're going to have to change. And it's one thing to talk about change, it's another thing to do it. The time has come. What you've wanted is now possible, but you're going to have to be leaders. Take new risks, adopt new practices, manage your people, their preferences, and their comfort. And you and I both know that ain't easy.
--:-- Seth Zaremba: I want to show you what the future looks like. I want to partner with you. And I need your help too. To carriers and agents, the future has fully loaded. Come with us.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Wasn't that absolutely tremendous? I mean, just listening to it again, I just listened to it. It's just awesome. I mean, what Seth and Sid have done and watching them now add agencies every week and as they accumulate data and piece it together. And, you know, Cass has been on the platform for, I think, a couple months now. And he's like data analytics crazy. I mean, the things that he's finding out about his agency and how they operate. And now he's on me every day about podcast stats because, you know, he's so quickly changed his perspective and culture around data and how we put data into use and how you can use it to grow your business. It's just tremendous.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So I just wanted to give another huge shout out to Seth and Sid. And again guys, I hope that you love this podcast. I hope that it brings you tons of value and that you absolutely crush today. That's my one wish. I hope that something in this podcast or something in this show helps you crush today and I hope you go do it. I love you guys. We're out of here.
--:-- [Background chatter and audio artifacts]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Take it. Charlie, that's really good! You go fuck yourself with your fat fucking ass. Charlie, I can't be. Thank you. Do you want to have a few drinks and smoke a joint, Bubbles? Yes. Yes.
--:-- [Unintelligible audio]
--:-- [Advertisement begins]
--:-- Voiceover: Do you want to have a few drinks and smoke a joint, Bubbles? Yes. Close twice as many deals by this time next week. Sound impossible? It's not with the One Call Close System. You'll stop chasing leads and start closing deals in one call. This is the exact method we use to close 1,200 clients in under three years during the pandemic. No fluff, no endless follow-ups, just results fast. Based in behavioral psychology and battle-tested, the One Call Close System eliminates excuses and gets the prospect saying yes more than you ever thought possible. If you're ready to stop losing opportunities and start winning, visit masteroftheclose.com. That's masteroftheclose.com. Do it today.
