--:-- Ryan Hanley: Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today we have an absolutely tremendous episode for you, a conversation with Andrew Darlington, the founder of Veritas Insurance out of eastern Tennessee. I've gotten to know Andrew over the years because of shared interest in tech and CRM. And as we talk about in this conversation a lot, he's been on Salesforce for almost a decade now. And I think I originally met Andrew through Paradiso and some of the events that Paradiso has. And we masterminded a little bit and just have a tremendous amount of respect for Andrew, what he does, how he markets, how he looks at the industry, the kind of very intentional focus that he has on building his agency, growing his agency, and as he talks about it, having a love for his customers, showing love for his clients, what that means and how he's delivering it. So absolutely tremendous episode, you're going to love this episode of the show.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Guys, before we get into the episode itself, I want to talk real quick. I've mentioned a bunch of times. I will stop mentioning it here coming into the future, but I know that I've been hit or miss with episodes of the show coming out, and a lot of that has to do with some big announcements that we have coming out both around Rogue and this show and that needed that time to get some things squared away, to get pointed in the right direction again on a lot of different stuff and tremendously exciting things. Just can't wait to share it with you. Lots of learnings that I think you guys will find valuable. And I want to be much more intentional with the content of this show and delivering value to you guys and really around growing your business, around leadership, development, sales, and particularly getting back into my roots of marketing. Marketing is an enormous part of Rogue, of my life, of my belief structure in terms of business and how much time, energy, and assets we should be allocating towards marketing. I feel like in our space in particular, marketing is incredibly undervalued. As much as we give it a lot of lip service, we don't actually put a lot of effort behind it. And I want to help you guys solve a lot of those problems. So if you're interested in learning more, I'm going to push you towards my website, ryanhanley.com. Right there, you're going to find a box. You can pop your email in. I'm going to be using the email list a lot more often to deliver resources to you guys, deliver episodes, tools, different things that I think you guys can just find value in. I want to get back to providing more value on a consistent basis. And you've been, you know, so many of you have listened to this show for a long time. Many of you might be brand new as well. Either way, we're going to be pushing new episodes out. We're going to be pushing some exclusive content out. We're going to be delivering some resources, some value adds, stuff like that, that I think you will find valuable and interesting. And the only way to get those is going to be to get on the email list. So just head on over to ryanhanley.com. Go to ryanhanley.com and just pop your email in. Hit subscribe. You'll probably get like a confirm this email notification email. You have to do that before I can send you. But guys, just that email list is going to be a place where we're going to deliver value. And I want you to be on that list if you're interested. Otherwise, keep listening to the show, share the show. As always, I have a tremendous amount of appreciation and love for you and the fact that you listen. And I hope that you continue to get value out of this effort because I love doing it. And some of the conversations we have coming up over the next few weeks, I think, are going to be really start to push you forward and give you a path to growing your agency through digital sales and marketing tactics, which is really my expertise. And I want to get back to that. So, all right. I've said the same thing about seven times now. So, ryanhandley.com for the email list. I want to give a big shout out to our longest running and kind of premier partner sponsor, Tarmica, T-A-R-M-I-K-A.com, T-A-R-M-I-K-A, Tarmica. Tarmica has been changing the way that we quote, bind, and issue commercial, particularly small commercial for almost two years, two plus years now. They're an enormous part of our agency, enormous part of both our past, present, and future at Rogue, and just so appreciative of Tarmica, their continued support, and their continued success. Big shout out to Rags, who we have coming up in an episode in a couple weeks. We're going to get an update on what they're doing. So look for that. Guys, I love you for listening to this show. Let's get on to Andrew Darlington. So dude, I'm so happy to have you on the show. We're kind of, so I didn't tell you this before we started, but the last, like I'd say two months or so, I've been very spotty with the podcast for a whole bunch of reasons, many of which will come out in the next couple of weeks. I've been teasing it for a while, but you know, we'll make an official announcement soon. But, but I wanted to take this, that app coming out of this break. And I wanted to really start to focus on give, give the show a bit of a focus. It, it, it tends to be a little all over the place. And I wanted to give it a bit of a focus on, on production, but specifically we'll say digital production, production in a way that we're like the, how are we pretty, you know, we got Crothers, we got Mick Hunt, we got some of these other guys that are just amazing at the kind of, I don't want to say the old school way, because there's a lot of new, new school shit and what they do, but like kind of the standardized I want to talk about producing business. How do we create business? Now I will say as a coastal American, it is my preconceived notion that where you're from, it's like, there's like 15 people there and how the hell do you grow an agency? But you have managed to grow a very successful agency and do it in a, I mean, everybody I know who knows you respects the hell out of you and the way you do business and you've been very successful. So, and obviously I just love our chats in general. So I wanted to bring you on and just learn more about your business and what you're doing and just wrap some insurance for a while.
--:-- Andrew Darlington: Well, all those things are nice, Ryan, But I know what really happened is you've been through the barrel. You've already scraped the bottom of it. Now you have to turn it over and you're taking the crap off the bottom that fell. That's not true. And that was the next one that fell. Oh, my gosh. That's not true at all. I mean, you're one of the pioneers of Salesforce, using Salesforce for insurance. You know, I mean and i don't know the exact number but i mean you and i talked uh when tech canary first came out that was kind of the the first sales force thing and i didn't know how early in the process we were but they put later on a graph of like the timeline of sales force of tech canary i'm like so it started like two months before we got in on it i didn't i I mean, because they didn't say that when we first got in there. I was like, holy cow. So, yeah, so we've been playing in the Salesforce game since 2013, I think, 2012, 2013. It's been a long time. I think probably almost 10 years. It may be a little bit longer, not a little bit shorter, but we were right there at the very beginning. So I kind of jumped in. Hopefully no one on the team sees this because they're going, I told you so. But we jumped in, I mean, at the very beginning, trying to get moving with it. And it's been a challenge. It's been neat. It's been fun. But yeah, it's been interesting with Salesforce. What was the initial, what were you initially looking for that maybe you weren't finding someplace else that taking on a tool like that kind of caught your attention and was worth the effort?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The thing that i mean and you know it and i think everybody is salesforce is is a massive massive system and it can literally do anything that you want it to do including wash your dishes which is great for around here because we have to go outside to the outhouses to get this that's where we still live i mean think i mean the clampets are from where we are from i mean that's that's what you got there but um it allowed you to be able to take anything you wanted to do and pull in anything that was there. I mean, this was before Zaps came out and you could do all those things if you just had a little bit of programming language. And I wasn't an IT person starting out. I love computers. I mean, that's somewhat of my passion, but it allows you to, it allowed us to create everything because before then, I mean, you had old AMS and Vertifor and those types of things. And it was so clunky, you couldn't integrate, you couldn't do any automation and those types of things. And I had a vision a lot, I think like you have, of being able to automate, but make your automation in a real genuine way. Because we all have 24 hours in a day and you want to love on your clients. You want to take care of your clients. You want to make sure there's nothing that makes you feel worse than your client. You sit down and you get the audit back on your client and their payroll is and you still had in there and you never checked with them and you found out they got a huge contract and then they now owe on a workers comp audit and you look like an idiot And I was like, you know what, if we could just send an automated email, hey, Bob, listen, we got your payroll at $200,000. Anything change this last quarter that we need to make a change on that. And just checking in where it's not the spam emails, but just relevant information that you're getting to your client on a timely basis that lets them know you care what you do and make sure that they have the coverage they need. And we're protecting them the way we need to, because that's our promise. Our promise is to protect you. And that's what the thing about Salesforce is it lets you do anything that you want with the system to be able to take care of your clients better than anyone else.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Now, so I think if you're listening, you may or may not know this. I've talked about it a couple of times. We, about two months ago, started the transition off of AgencyZoom over to HubSpot. We still use NowSerts for right now. but, you know, we've been building out HubSpot. And one of the things that I find, I know, I know if you talk to any of the gurus in this space, right, they'll tell you build your process first and then build the technology around your process. And I think that is in general, as a broad stroke, the right thing to do. That being said, I have found that in applying our process into that system and then seeing what the system is capable of, we've actually morphed a little. Like, I guess what I'm saying is, like, the system has dictated a little back into our process. Like, so, like, we apply our process. And then there is some, like, gray area where the system kind of dictates it, too. So like, I guess my question for you is, as you've gotten into Salesforce and seen its capabilities and what's possible, that kind of stuff, has Salesforce helped engineer processes as much as the processes have engineered Salesforce? Have you seen that and found that as you've worked through it?
--:-- Andrew Darlington: Yeah, I mean, great point. I mean, when you have your processes, you write them down on paper and you're going through it. That's what we're trying to do right now is get our processes better. And thanks, Mick, for working with us. Plug for you. We're working on that process because that's what we need to do. We've gone through and praise the Lord, we've always been busy. We've always written a lot of business and business has been coming in. And we're working on that process. And it was neat because we used a tool to graph everything with Mick's help. And as we start, as we're putting that into Salesforce to automate it, we're seeing, oh, you know what? What if we did this at this point in time? And you can make it a lot, even more user-friendly than you thought because you're like, you know what? I mean, going through this process, we're like, okay, so let's do this when it comes up. And then you're like, oh, you know what? Because we have Salesforce, I can actually pull in every bit of data now. And so instead of just having a quick question on there, and that's a yes, no to work through the process, now it's going to show up their policy number, the limits, the vehicles, and it pulls up everything right there. So you really are able to make the process a lot smoother for your team as they go through it. And they're not having to click 84 places. And so that's one of the really cool things that these let you do. And so you're able to actually broaden your process and make it easier as you go through that. So, yeah, I agree 100 percent with you. Your process is going to change a little bit. I think it gets even better once you understand the full scope of the tools that you have in front of you. because in the past you're like, well, if I could get a name and a phone number and account, then that's good. And then we can go into the account and look at stuff. With HubSpot and Salesforce, you don't have to do that. I mean, everything just pulls right in and it's there if you're willing to take the time to do it. Yeah. We just lost you. HubSpot as well is that you can do those incremental things and make it work and you're good.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. I'll give you a little example. So we have an internal customer life cycle that we've developed. It's not wholly unique, a couple of small tweaks, but it's something that we could have never implemented in really any other system. So basically, you start as a subscriber. That means that we know who you are, but you have shown zero interest. Lead is someone who has shown interest. Suspect is someone who has shown interest and fits our high-level qualifications of a market we're interested in and have a market for. Prospect means they're actively searching for a quote. So we're working with them. Customer is customer. Evangelist is essentially a VIP. There's a few triggers. It's not just like VIP status. You know, you send us referrals or whatever. There's something there. And then lost is lost. And at any given time, you can bounce out of there and go all the way back to subscriber if you're not a good fit. Okay. So that's our customer lifecycle. And every contact in our system needs to have a customer lifecycle. Well, what we're able to do is both one, create that customer lifecycle. So, so create that, those things, make that a field that we can track. I can then automate where they, based on where they are in a pipeline, what stage of that lifecycle they are. And then anytime someone can manually change them. And then I can use campaigns to attach to those life cycles based on industry, based on where they are, based on if they work the process or if they've never worked the process. And ultimately, what I can do is then build reports. And this is the part that I find the most interesting about these tools like Salesforce and HubSpot is I then have a very specific report that tracks where all those people are in that funnel at any given time. So I know where are they entering? Where are they falling out? Who's gone all the way through? What's happening? And this is the insights that you get out of it is we were having an issue with lead to suspect. Now, and the reason for that is we get a very broad spectrum of leads. So broad spectrum in terms of industry from a wide range of geographic areas. So knowing if we had a market, so suspect means we have a market that will fit that client or that prospect. all of a sudden I saw, I saw the, the, the lead to suspect, the leads were just stacking up and they weren't becoming suspects. And I went to my team and I was like, what's happening. And they're like, it's taking us forever to figure out if we actually have a market for this particular thing, because you know, a liquor store in Tennessee, great liquor store in California, maybe not so great, right. Completely different market. It might be E and S or whatever. I'm just making that up. But so that then, had us meet. I had to go back into the woodshed, figure out what the hell was happening, build a new tool. And now we have a form that we call our new business questionnaire. And anytime a lead comes in, we then call out with one of our unlicensed people and they walk through this new business questionnaire. And then that's what validates lead to suspect. So now the producer is getting more information in a validated suspect when they get it. So the producer's not messing around with unqualified leads and we're, you know, we're able to kind of triage stuff. So it's like, those are the kinds of things that like that system allowed us to not only build the process, but see where the errors were coming from now. So we've got some we've got a dashboard. This is errors. Every Monday it pops up and we can see an error. If someone put in a new account and didn't put a referral source in there, it errors. We have that on report. If they forgot to put in the commission amount that aired out, if they did did new business instead of rewrite, it errors out. So we can keep up with all those things that come through to protect and make sure what we've got going on is right. And we're not losing data because that's the other thing that you get into. Unless you have good, solid data, it's worthless because it's junk in, junk out or diamonds in, diamonds out.
--:-- Andrew Darlington: Yeah and if you're keeping those good days so yeah i mean it's when folks in the office like hey can we do a report on this the answer is yeah we can do a report on that is what do you want and and it is cool what you can do and what you can break out and then the automation that you can do with that i mean you can segment everyone however you want to and then send whatever you need to, to those people based on anything. I mean, the last time, I mean, if you haven't talked to someone in three months, it automatically sends them a text say, Hey, I just want to check in with you. So yeah, it's, you and I are nerds and we enjoy those types of things, but it's, it lets you think outside the box.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I want to be respectful of your time and we start a little late. So hopefully I can hold you over for like five more minutes. I, I wanted to ask you like, so, so obviously being someone who, who has a feel, who's used a lot of new technology, thinks about this, who likes computers and likes computers being part of our business. What is there one, is there anything? And if so, what, like coming down the pipe or that's happening now, anything new that's happening from a technological or digital space that, that like gets you a little excited that you're like man I can't wait for this to hit or or I'm watching this project or I'm watching this company and I think it could be a real game changer is there anything like that for you you uh you unmute on me again and you're familiar with that as well I think that's a game changer I mean say that one more time you unmute on me there sorry Donna. Yeah. I mean, I think that's, that's the game changer right there. I mean, there's going to be more later on, but the ability for an agency like me and you to be able to take, and for those of you, you've had, you've had the folks from Donna on here. Go back and listen to that podcast that Ryan did. I mean, it's the stuff that they do is amazing. And just for a small agency to be able to use that is a game changer. And I mean, I'll say this, I mean, I know HubSpot has their own AI built in, Salesforce has their own AI built in. And those, that's the thing is to be able to have the power of a massive AI system inside of a small agency where you can take your phone calls, run them through AI, take all of your emails and texts and run it through AI to be able to understand that are these people leaving are they coming that's that I think is a game changer because you're able to compete with anybody at that point in time because you're getting that data being able to come in I think that's I'm excited about being able to have that and just I mean can you imagine Ryan they're taking the the voice inflection in a phone call and telling you how it works. I mean, if you pull in some of the stuff inside Salesforce, it shows you during the phone call, their voice inflection, and it can highlight if they're happy or mad during the phone call. And you can see that. I mean, that's next level stuff. And that way, I mean, you can even drill it down to if they like one CSR better than the other and shift them to the CSR they like better. I mean, talk about, and what I've always come back to is loving on your clients. We want to do what our clients want, and we want to take care of them. They trust us, Luke. And if we can do things like that that are going to help out our client and make them feel more comfortable with us and make them have a better experience, that's what we want.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I want to be respectful of your time and we start a little late. So hopefully I can hold you over for like five more minutes. I, I wanted to ask you like, so, so obviously being someone who, who has a feel, who's used a lot of new technology, thinks about this, who likes computers and likes computers being part of our business. What is there one, is there anything? And if so, what, like coming down the pipe or that's happening now, anything new that's happening from a technological or digital space that, that like gets you a little excited that you're like man I can't wait for this to hit or or I'm watching this project or I'm watching this company and I think it could be a real game changer is there anything like that for you you uh you unmute on me again and you're familiar with that as well I think that's a game changer I mean say that one more time you unmute on me there sorry Donna. Yeah. I mean, I think that's, that's the game changer right there. I mean, there's going to be more later on, but the ability for an agency like me and you to be able to take, and for those of you, you've had, you've had the folks from Donna on here. Go back and listen to that podcast that Ryan did. I mean, it's the stuff that they do is amazing. And just for a small agency to be able to use that is a game changer. And I mean, I'll say this, I mean, I know HubSpot has their own AI built in, Salesforce has their own AI built in. And those, that's the thing is to be able to have the power of a massive AI system inside of a small agency where you can take your phone calls, run them through AI, take all of your emails and texts and run it through AI to be able to understand that are these people leaving are they coming that's that I think is a game changer because you're able to compete with anybody at that point in time because you're getting that data being able to come in I think that's I'm excited about being able to have that and just I mean can you imagine Ryan they're taking the the voice inflection in a phone call and telling you how it works. I mean, if you pull in some of the stuff inside Salesforce, it shows you during the phone call, their voice inflection, and it can highlight if they're happy or mad during the phone call. And you can see that. I mean, that's next level stuff. And that way, I mean, you can even drill it down to if they like one CSR better than the other and shift them to the CSR they like better. I mean, talk about, and what I've always come back to is loving on your clients. We want to do what our clients want, and we want to take care of them. They trust us, Luke. And if we can do things like that that are going to help out our client and make them feel more comfortable with us and make them have a better experience, that's what we want.
--:-- Andrew Darlington: Yeah. I mean, I think the thing for me is, and I guess this is what I hope people take away from this, is we have to, I think, whatever system we use, whether it's an Epic AMS 360, it's an Agency Zoom Better Agency, or you're going even further to a Salesforce HubSpot or whatever, to me, it's not just having the system, which is cool, or really just the reports. It's are we as a company, as an agency, looking at the data and the way that it's coming in and actually thinking about how we can use that to make improvements in our experience and what we do. That to me is shocking. People will say, Ryan, why do you need this? Why do you need that? It's like, because I would not have figured out that I needed a new business questionnaire between my lead and suspect life cycles. If I wasn't going back into the data and looking and going, why is that number so big and that number so small? Well, you know, this is happening. Okay, let's figure out how to solve that problem. Like if the system can't get you the data, that's problem number one. If you, but if you're not actually taking what you get and spending some time with it, and that's what's so cool about Don is it helps you automate that process of finding the insights so you can make the tweaks. That's where the magic happens, in my opinion. That's why the investment in these systems is worthwhile. And you can get a lot of this from a better agency, agency Zoom. So again, I think the takeaway should not be what system you should be in from this, but rather can you use what you get out of your system to actually make changes and improvements in your process to, as you say, Andrew, love on your customer. I absolutely love that.
--:-- Andrew Darlington: Well, and that's what you, I mean, you can't do what I've done a lot and that's not ever get it done. And that's what I'm guilty of. Oh, we can get this, we can get this, but never truly get it done. If you're in that cycle, use one of the ones that's prebuilt. That's nice and get it done. Yeah. Using half of something is better than all of nothing. Yes. And so use that and use it and do it to love your clients better. And if you'll do that, you're going to be successful. Do know going in that HubSpot Salesforce, it's an investment of time. It's an investment of learning. And you're going to pull out your hair. Your team's going to be irritated with you. But if you can get it done right, like you said, Ron, that data that you've got is invaluable and you've been able to turn that data into gold. And that's what it allows you to do. It's not for the faint of heart and it's not for the folks that aren't gonna put money down for it and put time to make it work. If you want that and you're willing to make it work, you can have anything that your heart desires when it comes to those two systems. But if you want something that's a plug and play and ready to go, those other ones are off the charts amazing. Yeah, agreed. Dude, I wanna be respectful of your time. I appreciate you so much. Thanks for coming on the show. You were not a barrel flipped over, scraping the bottom, having it fall out. We could have talked for another hour, but we did too much bullshit. And when we should have been podcasting at the beginning of our block of time, but we just, that's, that's fine. That's, that's you and me time, which I love too. So thank you. Appreciate you. If someone just wants to check out your agency, you're on LinkedIn, where, where, where can they get at you? Where can they just check out what you're doing?
--:-- Andrew Darlington: um veritasrm.com veritas risk management veritasrm.com linkedin and i think it's linkedin a darlington and uh yeah you if you put in a new darlington on there pretty easy to find me i am a first generation american uh so there's not a lot of darlingtons that i'm related to in the united states and there's not a lot of andrew darlingtons around here so uh pretty easy to find all right buddy hey appreciate you as always be good we're out here peace 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.
