--:-- Ryan Hanley: In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home... Hello everyone, and welcome back to the show. Today we have an absolutely tremendous episode for you. A dynamic conversation about marketing, the insurance industry, and what it means to have a niche with Chris Greene, the Flood Insurance Guru.
--:-- Now, Chris, the things he's done from a content marketing perspective are nothing other than absolutely outstanding. He leverages HubSpot, has fully dived in. He leverages Marcus Sheridan's concept of "They Ask, You Answer" and fully dived in. And really, that's what I appreciate and respect the most about Chris: when he makes a decision to take action in his business or in some other aspect of his life, he goes all in. He focuses on it. He attacks it. And he sees it through.
--:-- There are so many lessons to learn from Chris, not just as a person, but in the way he handles himself in our industry. This is a tremendous conversation that I think you're really going to enjoy. I know I did. Make sure you connect with Chris on LinkedIn, all the socials, all that kind of stuff, because if you're watching what he's doing and taking notes, you're going to get better at marketing your agency. It's just absolutely positively the case.
--:-- With that, I want to give a quick ask to you guys. I put a lot of episodes out. We put an episode out every Thursday. I appreciate you listening. I love you for listening. And I've said that for years. Guys, if you enjoy these shows, just share it with somebody, right? That's really my ask today. Text it to somebody, or if you want to share it on social, whatever. Email an episode to a friend and just say, "Hey, I think there's something here. I think this episode is fun," whether it's this episode or another one.
--:-- Sharing the show means more people find it, more people get into our ecosystem. I get more inbound suggestions for guests. I get more people sending ideas and tips and thoughts in, and I listen to all that stuff. I read all those DMs, and it helps us get more content, more great guests, more great information in front of you guys. So if you're enjoying the show, if you're loving the show, always love a rating and review on iTunes. That helps more people find the show, but really, sharing the show is the thing that's most important. Because when a friend tells another friend that something has value, they often take action on it. And if you find value in this show, I'd love you to share with a friend. That's the whole deal.
--:-- So with that, guys, love you for listening. Let's get on to Chris Greene.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yo, what's up, man? Do you hear me okay?
--:-- Chris Greene: Yeah, you're good. What's going on?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Not much, man. How are you? I just want to start by apologizing for bailing on you twice, two different times. I'm glad we finally connected.
--:-- Chris Greene: I know you got so much going on in the world professionally and personally right now. I appreciate you being good to me about it. For everyone listening at home, we've had this scheduled — this is the third time now — and twice I had to bail. With everything with SIA and whatnot, different meetings pop up. We're doing so much to offload services from Rogue to SIA to kind of free us up to do our thing that sometimes they just have to be done. Either way, I'm glad we're finally getting a chance to chat.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Big news, biggest news in the insurance industry. You had a suit on the other day. That's like one of the big, earth-shaking, universe-shaking things. I tell my friend Jason Katz, I always expect the unexpected. So what's going on in your world, man?
--:-- Chris Greene: I'm spending a lot of time on data right now.
--:-- Chris Greene: Yeah, trying to change the flood insurance world right now through data. It's kind of exciting to get to this point now where we can take that money and actually invest in the business, invest in the technology. So I went and hired a Glovebox developer, and we've got about a year's worth of projects. We just tapped into FEMA's database yesterday. Basically pulled the entire FEMA database into HubSpot.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: When you say working with data, what problem are you trying to solve? What are you trying to do?
--:-- Chris Greene: The problem I'm trying to solve is that — I spoke last week at CIPC — I said insurance is not the problem. Risk is the problem. We don't do a good job of knowing the risk, understanding the risk, and reducing the risk. And we don't show the property owner or the prospect that. So we've got to find a way to do that. That's exactly what we're doing with all these risk analysis companies, pulling things in and actually showing people the same thing that an underwriter is seeing. But how do we change that data? How do we reduce that risk? How do we create long-term rate stability in the market by doing that?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's interesting. So how do you do that? What does that look like?
--:-- Chris Greene: Well, for us... As much as I like technology and marketing, data is not my specialty. I tell people I'm a visionary. I'm just not good at implementing it. And that's where the developers have really helped me. But now I can give a flood score to every property with all these different factors. I can tell you how long it's going to take water to enter your property, where it's going to enter it. How do we change that water from entering the property? What can we do? And literally, based on the data, we have all these different videos, these different steps we can walk people through as part of the video proposal system.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I was talking to — geez, I don't know if it was Carothers or somebody — and we were talking about HubSpot. Obviously we use HubSpot and we have big plans for what we want to do. As we continue to build stuff out, I love the system so much. I don't want to go too nerdy just on HubSpot, but I think what a lot of people don't realize about that particular tool is with their Operations Hub that they've added and the wide-open API portal that they've built, you can essentially take any database or system that is producing, pushing, or pulling data and plug it in. It opens up the world as to what you can actually build and what it can look like.
--:-- So yesterday we finally got version one live. We got the latitude and longitude in our API, and our developers said, "Look, we got the latitude and longitude. There's nothing we can't do now."
--:-- Chris Greene: Google Maps, everything. Pulling pictures into these proposals off of the Google API. Having the longitude and the latitude when you're talking about this property stuff — that's the golden nugget right there.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. That's really interesting. I guess what I'm interested in is a lot of the pushback that I get — I'm interested in where you get this pushback too. People will say, "Hey, I think it's cool that you're interested in all this technology, systems, pushing forward, new ways of doing business. But you can write a lot of insurance just doing it the regular way. What is the improvement percentage? What is the upside potential of going down these paths of leveraging data?" I guess, what is the opportunity cost versus just doing it the way I'm doing it, probably growing a business, probably making money? Why do the extra work? Why figure out these ways to put images and proposals and figure out different... why go through all the effort? What does it get you?
--:-- Chris Greene: For me, what it gets me is — I tell people, "Look, we could charge for this because trust me, we're paying a lot of money for it." But think about the value that we can bring our referral partners. Let's just say a David Carothers goes in and meets with a middle market account. He's one of our referral partners. Now they've got this full flood risk analysis report that completely helps separate them from everyone else. They're able to show that to them on their building. The value that it brings to them — now we've got a referral partner for life.
--:-- That's the value of the technology to us. It's about how we can help our referral partners grow their business. How can we let them look like rock stars? Because at the end of the day, the technology is not about me writing more insurance. It's about us changing insurance. It's about exchanging risk. That's the difference between us and most insurance agents. At the end of the day, it's not about us writing a bunch of insurance. It's about how we create a more stable insurance market.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Is that how you're getting a lot of your business? Referral partners, agents who don't understand flood or need more expertise on flood? Or is it still the inbound content game? Is it a big mix? How's all that working?
--:-- Chris Greene: A lot of it is coming from the agents. But then a realtor emails you at 10 o'clock at night: "Hey, I got this listing. I need to verify the flood zone." "Oh, great. I'll have it back to you in the morning. I'll try to put an offer in." But what if we can solve that problem fairly easy with some technology? That's exactly what we did. We went to FEMA. We were able to order flood zone determinations. It goes directly back to them. They do it instantly. Next morning, it lets us know. It's already sent an email to them with a full risk report. All we're doing is following up with them. We didn't have to do anything. Literally all they did was put an address and email address in, and they got everything they needed.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's pretty cool.
--:-- Chris Greene: It's working as our 24-hour sales rep.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's really cool. These are the kinds of things that I think we're still in the first inning — or maybe the top of the first inning — when it comes to realigning value with an insurance sale. There's the well-understood traditional value proposition, which is particularly relevant in middle market sales. A lot of the stuff that Carothers or Mick Hunt or Charles Speck talk about tends to be geared towards comp or something like that. A lot of it has to do with risk management techniques, managing people and injuries. But there are a ton of additional layers of value that can be offered with education, with resources, with real-time return of information, with self-service automation. There are all these different types and layers of value that are possible that we simply are not even tapping into. In other industries, they are the bar, the barrier for entry. In ours, we're just starting to tap into them, like what you just described — getting a report based on an email and an address.
--:-- And that's the other thing too. Everybody thinks about insurance first. I'm a Carothers teacher, so that's what he taught me. A lot of insurance shouldn't be the first conversation.
--:-- Chris Greene: That's the problem. When their insurance rate goes up, that's the first thing they're thinking. They're mad at you because you led with the insurance. I said, "Well, insurance is really all that we do." Well, maybe that's part of the problem. We're not overall risk advisors.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What is that term? Risk advisor, insurance advisor. It's a tough one for me because it's a tough one for everybody. I think you're right. I would love to think of myself as an advisor for sure, but there's a lot of times where I'm just placing policies. Someone calls and they need a comp policy, and I go to the ZZ, blast it out, get it back to them. "Here's what it is." Off we go. I didn't really advise them. I kind of just took an order and placed it.
--:-- My point is, I think a lot about the cost of our people's time. That is something that I spend a lot of time thinking about. It's one of the reasons I went to HubSpot initially. One of the primary reasons is I wanted to be able to track activity. I wanted to be able to track time — not in a dystopian way where I want to control your every move, but in order to create areas of value. How do I automate something that they're doing a lot of? Where are we wasting time?
--:-- When you look from a profit standpoint at being an order taker, when an order is put in and you process that order and you sell that order and it works that easy, that is the most profitable way to do business. It's why all the insurtechs and all the VCs go after these quick D2C plays. When someone knows exactly what they want, is ready to buy, and all you have to do is execute that order, it is incredibly profitable. So your brain goes, "Wow, that is easy. I should do more of that." Except one, those are relatively rare in our space. And two, those people don't stick around. So I feel like while we all want to be advisors, there's this false incentive to be order takers because it is actually an easier way to do things. We get lost in that. Does that make sense?
--:-- Chris Greene: It does. That's why we use video the way we do. People say, "How do you do all that?" I said, "You can still advise." When someone picks the phone up to call us, usually it's just to give us their credit card information because they've watched 10 of our blogs. They've listened to 10 of our videos through the whole journey. But it's the same thing on streamlining it. Use the video that educated and advised through that funnel and still streamline it. Most people haven't figured out how to do that yet or aren't willing to invest the time to do it. It's going to take a lot of your time, but literally...
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's the same as when a lead comes in. My licensed people don't even touch it. It goes straight to the VA. The VA does it, and then when the VA has it ready, then a licensed person reviews it.
--:-- We're definitely two peas in a pod when it comes to the video stuff. The video content marketing stuff — obviously "They Ask, You Answer" is a set that you should have on your dresser or your end table next to your bed. You should have the Bible and "They Ask, You Answer" and life will be better. The Bible of marketing, whatever you call it.
--:-- I always bust Marcus's chops. I know people who've listened for a long time know he's a good buddy of mine, and I know Chris has become a good buddy of yours. When he first came up with that concept, "They Ask, You Answer," he was interviewed by the New York Times. He has this article that he shows sometimes. It has a picture and it says, "Answering revolutionary marketing concepts: Answering client questions." It was a completely dead serious headline. It's just so funny that the concept of simply answering client questions in video is like this revolutionary idea that our industry refuses. I'm glad. I hope none of you listening ever do what Chris and I do. Please. It's tons of work. Never do it. Don't do it. You're going to be terrible at it. You're all going to be awful. Don't do it because then the two of us can reap more benefits.
--:-- I will tell you this: I'm going to see Marcus in two weeks. I'm on a retreat with him and Donald Miller in Cleveland.
--:-- Chris Greene: Oh, wow. That's going to be fun.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Jeez. That'll be super fun. And I think I'm supposed to be on a retreat with him and David Meerman in October in Massachusetts.
--:-- Chris Greene: Wow. Where in Massachusetts?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I've got to look and see. It's a mastermind group he recently started, a smaller one. Only about 30 to 40 people. We do it twice a year.
--:-- Chris Greene: That's cool.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So going to the next level of video, one of the things I just did was I had a buddy of mine refer me over one of his clients that he was struggling with D&O. I like — I'm not as good as Gordon Coyle at this stuff, who will be on the podcast soon. By the time you hear this one, he'll have already been on, so go back and listen to that episode. But I like liability stuff too, D&O and cyber, and I get into that. He referred it over. What I did was I packaged the account up, put the applications that I knew needed to be together. Then when I submitted it, instead of doing a cover letter or just sending in the apps — if you're just sending in apps, I think that's the most bush-league thing to do today. There's just no way to stand out with how busy underwriters are. You at least need a cover letter. So instead of doing a cover letter, I did a video cover letter.
--:-- When we do a submission in HubSpot, I add the underwriters as contacts. So in the deal card, I have the client as one of the contacts, their company, and then I'll have the underwriters as contacts as well. Every communication with underwriters from all the companies that I'm submitting to are also captured in the activity feed for that deal card. So what I did was, because we use Vidyard...
--:-- Chris Greene: I didn't realize you were using Vidyard.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. I use Vidyard because I wanted the full — we're using the paid version.
--:-- Chris Greene: The free version or paid version?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Paid version. It was definitely a heavy expense, but the analytics that we get back, the forms you can put in the videos — it's just unbelievable. The ROI you can track in HubSpot back to an "About Us" video. I tell somebody, I got a $10,000 revenue video from an "About Us" video. It's a silly video that I put up in November that made $10,000 in 60 days because I put a form in it.
--:-- Chris Greene: Yeah, dude, it's crazy.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The other part too is when we moved — and I'm a huge supporter of Chris Langell and Advisor Evolve and always will be — but when we made the move to HubSpot, I wanted to go fully in. So we moved our website CMS to HubSpot's CMS so that we could track everything. I wanted to know every visitor, what page, what form, time. I wanted the full thing. And to get the full thing, including video, you need to go Vidyard. So now, anybody who fills out a form on our site, I know everything they've done. Every video they watched, how much of it they watched, what buttons they clicked, what pages they went to. I know everything.
--:-- Now, HubSpot's got the whole video thing, but I tell people I'm still a bigger fan of Vidyard because of the number of videos. I just don't think HubSpot's advanced on the video and the forms in it. I'll take analytics all day long.
--:-- Chris Greene: Are you doing the website yourself? That's been my biggest struggle.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I do the website myself. It's hard to find somebody when you get it into HubSpot who can do it the way you want it to do, especially with "They Ask, You Answer" or something like that. Other than using Marcus and them, it's kind of challenging. I'm doing the exact same thing you're doing. I like that stuff. I get into the CMS stuff. I like building out the pages, the forms, the page builders, and all that. I get into it.
--:-- But my point is, I did this submission with a Vidyard video submission, a cover letter. Here's the interesting part — and all my underwriters listening, your ears should perk up. I could see everything. I sent it out individually. I didn't just blast it to all of them, but I sent it to three different places that I thought would be interested in this account. The first place, the guy opens it. He then forwards it to his assistant underwriter, who watches the full video. They immediately respond: "This just got moved to the top of our pile. We'll have a quote back to you by the end of the week." Boom. Two people in the company watched the video. The video was like three minutes long, and in it I'm doing what you would do: "Look, I know this is a first-time D&O policy, but here's why I think this is going to be a really good risk for us and why I think you guys should think about placing."
--:-- Second company watches 15 seconds of it. Never responds. Still haven't heard back from them. Third company I sent it to never watches the video, never opens the email. Because I can track that too. So now I'm like, "Hmm, who do you think is going to get my next submission?" The company that four days later still has not opened the email or watched the video? The company that opened the email, watched 15 seconds of the video, and still hasn't responded? Or the company that watched the full video twice with two separate people and immediately responded? I now know who my real partners are as underwriters. Because again, carriers are only your partners if they're actually your partners, right?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: If they act like partners. So what I'm doing is now I have analytics, not just on my customers, but actually on my underwriters and their engagement with us. And that to me is powerful.
--:-- Chris Greene: So I actually use that with a carrier and I actually put my carriers into automation. So we send them an app and they don't respond. It's following up them automatically every 24 hours. It drives them nuts. My office manager thinks it's hilarious because she's like, you're driving them nuts. And I said, look, we don't have to do it, but we know that they're opening it and they're not responding.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, but the other thing is I do something called risk storytelling. There's a broker somewhere out in Texas that really hates me right now because we just took a $500,000 account from them. I did a risk storytelling video, sent it to the underwriter. Full risk. I go through the flood risk score, I'm pulling up all the different types of flooding, how this property was built, how another property had flooded eight times. And they're like, "Well, somebody else already submitted it, but we're actually backing them out and we're putting you in as the broker because they didn't give us any of that information. They didn't tell us how it was elevated. They didn't tell us the water resistant materials that were being used." So we just took you to the list and we're giving you the account.
--:-- Chris Greene: Yeah, dude. I think you're helping them understand the risk.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. And this is the thing. I've said this on the podcast before, so we're not doing this anymore, but for a very long time I took every appointment that I could get because I think that carriers bend the truth. I was speaking with my good buddy, Dave Iadonza from Dryden Mutual the other day. I used to say carriers lie. He said, "Don't say lie. Lies is a bad word, a mean word. We don't lie, but we bend the truth just like agents." And I said, "That's true." So that being said, I think the carriers oversell what they're willing to write and what their pricing is going to be in geographic spread and all that. And agents overestimate and bend the truth on how much premium they're going to put with them. That's the game.
--:-- Chris Greene: Well, what I'm working towards, and I'm training my team and it's not all there yet, but like to what you said, by doing a better job of presenting an account to an underwriter, I feel like we're being a better partner to them. So we're doing our part. And in exchange, by using HubSpot and Vidyard, I'm actually able to see who's a better partner on their side. Because I can't stand the marketing rep who's like, "Send us more business, send us more business," yet they don't realize that their underwriters bottom-file all our submissions and we don't hear from them for three or four days. And when we do hear from them, it's a one-sentence response. It's like, "This isn't a partnership. This is bullshit." And now I know. These guys want our business. When we send them an email, we send them a video cover letter — I like "risk storytelling," I may steal that — when they get that, they open it, they watch it, they appreciate it. That's a partner.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And none of that. But now they can say, "You know what, Broker A, we're blind to this risk. Broker B, we've got the full picture. That's a broker we feel has done a better job of protecting us. That's a partnership we want." Like I tell people, at the end of the day, it's our job to make sure we reduce the claims for the customer because we don't want to go through that experience, but we're also reducing it for the carrier. It's a win-win.
--:-- Chris Greene: Yeah. And tools like HubSpot, tools like Vidyard give you a true competitive advantage. I think there's a lot of tools that are nice and they definitely help, but they're not really a competitive advantage. I feel like when I submit business on an account that deserves this — a $700 BOP, you just quote it, you write it, whatever. We still will probably do a video proposal to the client, but you don't necessarily talk to an underwriter. I'm talking about something that needs some explanation. This allows you to do a screen grab of a report, or "Here's what I'm thinking," or "Let's walk through their financials. There's a little schmutz here, but this is why I think this is still a good account." You get to have that interaction with them. They can see the look on your face. They can hear your tone of voice. They can hear you're excited about putting this account on the books. That makes all the difference.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And I do agree with you. It forces us to do our job better because you can just send a bullshit submission when it's just an app as an attachment. When you actually have to do a video and pitch it and sell it, you need to believe in what you're selling. For example, I got a $150 million risk right now in Hawaii that gave me a notice three days before renewal. I was like, "There's no way." I sent a video. I got a response back this morning. If I would have sent an app, it would have taken three days. From that video, they can see right away what the risk is. Because let's be honest, an underwriter reading through the app takes time. They don't want to do it. They're human.
--:-- Chris Greene: I will tell you, there's some video we do have a rule too. If someone sends me an email and asks me more than two questions, we actually respond with a Vidyard video. It's out of conversations. First introduction, first person that emails us, we've never met them before, usually something going back to them. Just a simple introduction email from me real quick with Vidyard.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I like that. I'm definitely going to start responding more, doing more. We started doing this underwriter submission cover letter thing, which has been a big success. Certainly a success for the underwriters that open. I just can't stress enough how mind-blowing it is to me. Because I know the carriers that will give us tons of shit about our submissions. And I'm like, "Wait a minute, I can tell you it's been a week and he hasn't even opened that email yet. Don't come at me, man. He hasn't opened the email."
--:-- Chris Greene: The fact that the carriers are willing to almost double your commissions because they see what you're doing with the risks — "We're going to increase your commission because you're doing a better job of protecting the risk. You're not sending us garbage." It is this kind of stuff where I laugh when I look at HubSpot. It's one of our best employees. It's the most expensive thing, but with playbooks now — I don't know if you've gotten into that — we basically built those carrier appetites inside playbooks. It's only been with us two weeks or two years. You go and you type the question, you've got the answer to go with it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: We're implementing that right now. I'm working on one with our head of sales. He put together this thing called "NEADS." It's basically a pre-qualification sequence of questions. I'm in the process of building it out. Hopefully it'll be done by — I would love to say today, but it probably won't be until next week. Basically, this is going to be the questionnaire for when a lead comes in. Our new business coordinators — unlicensed people — they call out and say, "Ask them these five questions," and use a playbook to type the answers right in as they're taking the responses. Then they're trained based on the responses to know whether they move that person from a lead to a suspect, or they refer them out to commercialinsurance.net — who we refer lines of business to that we don't have good markets for today — or we just kill the deal. That simple process keeps our licensed producers from dealing with accounts that don't have a shot at closing. The whole point is filtering. Things like playbooks, dynamic forms, dynamic pages — I've just gotten into that this week with our developer. It's so powerful because of the unique customer experience for every different customer.
--:-- Chris Greene: The idea that you can change the content based on where they're coming from or what pages they've been to. Some of the really cool stuff you can do with merge fields in dynamic thank-you pages, where the thank-you page is being customized so it feels like the page was literally built for that person. You're using their name and different pieces of their information in how you thank them or how you push them to the next step. Because everyone's worried about open rates with Apple and Google's changes. That's why we've generally always stuck to click-the-link things like Vidyard. They click the link. It takes that away. I can still use it based on them clicking that link with a PandaDoc. For example, we built our video proposal with Vidyard and PandaDoc. When I send it through PandaDoc, they open it. It goes from "quote ready" to "quote sent" automatically. When the PandaDoc goes out, customer reviews it, it goes to "quote being reviewed." I don't have to touch it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Do you use a lot — one of the things I've been working on is customer lifecycles and using them to better understand our funnel and where things are. So we have one of the automations — again, I'm way behind, just so everyone's clear where Chris is with his HubSpot buildout and where I am. Two different places. I don't want there to be any comparison. I'm still very early stage. But this is my fourth year too.
--:-- Chris Greene: And this is our fourth month. So that would be the difference.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But one of the things I think is really interesting — we use a fairly standardized customer lifecycle. Subscriber: someone we know of that doesn't know of us. Lead: shown interest. Suspect: meets qualification standards, or what would technically be called "marketing qualified" in normal parlance. Prospect: interested in quote. Then client, evangelist, lost. That customer lifecycle. So you could be a client without being an evangelist. What's cool is that in the pipeline, with different engagements, different pages they hit, you can change where the lifecycle is automatically. So if someone leaves us feedback or uses our referral page and types in a referral, we can move them from client to evangelist automatically. I don't need to rely on my people to think, "Oh, are they a suspect? Are they a prospect?" Not that they're incapable, but I don't want them to have to think about that. As a business owner, I can now look at our customer lifecycle report and know exactly where in the funnel our contacts are, where we may be having obstacles, where there may be issues, our attrition rate. Those simple insights are where you're able to make true improvements in your business. You just don't get that a lot of places. I was able to use it to change our fee schedule. We could see exactly which deals we were losing and why and what the premium point was. It was a big issue: $500 and less is where we're losing because of fees. I said, "That's not that big of a deal, but at least it gives us the data to know." It's the small stuff we're losing, which is okay, but that's why we're losing it. We made a little adjustment there and we stopped losing almost all of it.
--:-- Chris Greene: That's awesome. Putting the learning center on there has been a big thing for us too. But like my office manager says now, "Hey, if it didn't happen in HubSpot, it didn't happen."
--:-- [Ryan Hanley addresses the audience directly]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What's up guys? 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, if you enjoy this podcast — 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 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. But they all check out comments, ratings, reviews. They check out all this information before they come on. So as I reach out to more and more people and want to bring them in and share their stories with you, I need your help. Share the show. Subscribe if you're not subscribed. I'd love for you to leave a comment about the show because I read all the comments. Or if you're on Apple or Spotify, leave a rating review of this show. I love you for listening to this show and I hope you enjoy listening as much as I do creating the show for you. All right, I'm out of here. Peace.
--:-- [Discussion resumes]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So let's get back to the episode. That is our — we're working towards that. We're not there yet. We're moving off of AgencyZoom slowly over to HubSpot. That's not necessarily a knock on AgencyZoom. We just are at a different level. The integration I wanted, especially with doing the deal with SIA and all that kind of stuff and where we're going and where we're headed. AgencyZoom was a great tool for us as a seven, eight person agency operating fairly traditionally. Great tool. I think today, based on the way things are going, I would probably look at Better Agency over AgencyZoom personally. But AgencyZoom is not a bad tool. But man, if you want to take your game to another level, there's just no comparison between the two. The things that you can see, do, and the insights you can have — if you are the type of person, and this is one of the things I've always appreciated about the way you look at the business — regardless of what system you have, you have some sort of insight into what's happening in your agency. One of the major beefs I have with the traditional mentality of our industry is that principals have these thoughts that are really just subjective feelings they get in their brain, and they use those to make decisions. I'm like, "You're not actually basing that on anything legitimately data-driven happening in your business. You're just saying it feels like this happens, so this is what I'm going to do." When you start to see what's possible from touch points, phone calls — you're supposed to make 20 calls a day. You can tell me you made 20 calls, but those 20 calls aren't in HubSpot. You made zero calls. Zero didn't happen in HubSpot didn't happen. It can track the full lifecycle of every touch point. When you get to that level — and it takes work and commitment and you have to keep on your people and culturally develop that — but once you start to get some of those insights, and we're just getting the very early pieces of it, the things you can do are unbelievable.
--:-- Chris Greene: For example, for me, I can see why we weren't closing more business because my licensed person was spending time on things that weren't licensed. I can see that from the conversations in HubSpot. An easy way for me to control that was to not assign those conversations to them, assign them to the VA, or say, "Hey, we need to hire someone else to help you here because I see that you're spending 30% of your day on this." Something else we've been using for a while is something called Mapsly. It maps where every one of our referral partners is across the country, our customers. I matched it up with a flood warning system that we use. So it also tells us where to create content where flooding is happening. I can look at the map and say, "Hey, this month, 40% of our business is Arizona, 30% is in California." So it tells us where to spend our time.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That type of real-time marketing insight — dynamically creating, adjusting, maneuvering content to address the market — that's a level that most people are not interested in. They're just not interested in going that deep, which is fine. You don't need to. But for those that are, the wizard-esque games that you can play are just — I honestly feel like a kid in a candy store. When I get into HubSpot, every meeting that I have in the day that doesn't allow me to build out new systems, processes, or different features in HubSpot, I feel like it's wasted time. Just figuring out this thing I mentioned with the underwriters — this submission video process and getting the feedback of "here's the underwriters that open the emails and watch the videos, and here's the underwriters that don't" — that insight alone allows me to go, "Guys, don't waste your time submitting your business to X, Y, Z carrier or MGA. Send it right to these guys. They appreciate it. They're going to get it back to us. We're going to write the business faster." If that saves five hours a month in total time for the team — just that simple insight — and now I can stack those insights on top of each other. Three hours here, an hour here, five hours here, ten hours here. All that time goes back into selling and helping clients. When we think in terms of that, think about employee morale.
--:-- Chris Greene: A hundred percent. People hate doing mortgage changes. They hate doing a lot of service, especially salespeople. But now what if you can see, "Hey, here's how I can take it out of your hands," or "You're doing it and you shouldn't be." That's one of the things I like about it. It helps me gauge what each one of our team members is doing. Ultimately, it lets you know where you need more help. Where do you need another person? Where do you need a VA? "Hey, we can go get a VA who crushes COIs or is great at handling email inbound service requests and responding to them and triaging them." Right now, we have a position called New Business Coordinator. That's the person who does the pre-qualification of leads to suspects. She is training to get licensed. I am now able to give her and watch — listen to phone calls through RingCentral. I'm able to call-log every call she makes. So I'm getting a feel, before she ever becomes a licensed producer for Rogue Risk, of how she does on the phone. Is she willing to pick up the phone? How does she do with answering questions? How is her documentation? She's building her resume for us as a select producer before she ever becomes the select producer. I can see it all right there. She's doing an awesome job. I can't wait for her to become a producer. I think she's going to crush it. But maybe she wasn't good, right? I would get to see that and either train her or say, "Maybe this isn't the right thing for you."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's why conversation AI — you detect customer behavior based on tone. It helps us teach our team how to use the right tone through the conversation to control the conversation. This level of insight — a lot of people will go, "Ah, I'd rather just go golfing with the person." I think that's wonderful. I think what's happening in our space is that there's a clear delineation developing between those individuals whose thought process is singular individual household income. Through nonprofit events and golf games and asking for referrals, can you build a book of business that provides you with sufficient personal income? Abso-freaking-lutely. You don't have to do any of this shit. None of it. You can use a spreadsheet and have two carriers and make more than enough money to take care of your family. It's going to take time and a lot of work, but you can get there. That's fine. If you're looking to scale your business, to grow your business beyond you, beyond the egocentric kingdom version of your business, you cannot do it today, in my opinion, without starting to dip your toe into the shit we're talking about right now. You just can't. It doesn't mean you can't be successful. You can. It doesn't mean you can't make money. You can. But if you're looking for scale, for legacy, if you're ambitious and you want it to be bigger than just you, you have to start to think about this stuff. You just can't compete if you're not.
--:-- Chris Greene: That's the same thing we're doing with payments right now. We're getting ready to finally finish integration with ePay. It goes straight through deals in HubSpot. We don't have to do anything. Instead of having to go to ePay, fill out the pre-payment page, send it — none of that. Same thing with Accord forms with the developer. We're going to finish up pre-filling Accord forms.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: How are you getting to that? You're using Accord templates and you built it yourself?
--:-- Chris Greene: I built it myself years ago. I just didn't like the way it looked. But now with the API data, it can be up to date and really accurate. It can change instantly if we needed to.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The Accord form thing is such a shame. It's such a shame that Accord can't get out of their own way. What a bureaucratic nightmare Accord is. What they have at their fingertips and how much value they've actually extracted — it's sad. Accord would say, "Oh, look how much money we make and look how big we are." And it's like, yes, except you've probably done 5% of what you would have been capable of if you had ever actually pushed. That being said, we use WonderWrite to produce a lot of our Accords today. They just opened up Zapier Beta, which is cool. We're going to help test that a little bit. I'm hoping that works. I do like Peter and what they're doing at WonderWrite.
--:-- Chris Greene: It's hard. We're going to do a brain share.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's hard. I'm very hopeful for them. I don't want this to be negative in any way, but with third parties, the hard part is you have to assume inevitably they're going to continue to expand services and want to become an AMS or become something else. It's like, we just need one company that offers Accord form integration and creation and mapping easily at a price the industry could afford. They would absolutely frigging dominate. But I feel like everybody goes, "No, we need to build an ecosystem. We need to build this and that." And it's like, if I have to duplicate entry, it's not going to work.
--:-- Chris Greene: "Oh, you need to offer this type of insurance and this type of insurance. And look, it can be nice. Oh yeah, maybe we should offer that. Maybe we should go there." You get distracted so easy. Then what happens? You forget why you got in business to do what you do in the first place.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Chasing shiny objects is difficult. If there was a Chasing Shiny Objects Anonymous 12-step program, I probably would have or should have been in it a long time ago. I'm definitely guilty of that. But I think there's two sides to that coin. There's part of me that says, "Ryan, just stay focused on what you're doing and keep pushing." In general, that's what we do. Or I hire people to do that because I struggle with it. But the other side is that naturally things are going to develop off what you're doing. When we originally started with just flood insurance, we have a flood C company. Now we have a flood mitigation company, a flood consulting company. But it still goes back to our educational vision. It's all still circled around that. It's not going outside of that. These things — people say, "Oh, you start a side business or whatever" — it just naturally happens when you get in a certain field and you're dealing with it.
--:-- Chris Greene: I think that's a great point. The other thing with chasing some shiny objects or always researching or looking into new technology is that if you don't spend some time in that space, you do become stale over time. I'm not saying immediately, but you do start to — if you're not keeping some small portion of your brain looking out into the future at what's coming, at what's going on — it doesn't mean you always take action. I'm going to InsurTech Boston in two weeks. I don't know when this is going to come out, but I can't wait to go there. It's a great event. They do a great job. I'm glad it's back after COVID. You get a chance to just bump into people that have crazy ideas, kind of like you do. It gives your brain a little taste of what's possible. It doesn't mean you need to do it, nor do you need to do it today. But this is possible. Or you talking about some of the shit that you do — I may look at that and go, "I'd love to be able to do that. I can't do it today. But man, that's on my list. I'd like a year from now to be able to do that thing that he's doing." If you don't let your brain go to that space, I feel like you're doing your business a disservice.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You could also bring it back and say, "You know what, I can tweak it just a little bit to improve what I'm currently doing." That's usually my goal. "No, I don't want to go do what they're doing. But maybe something they say triggers in my brain to help me improve our process." Because like I tell people, as fancy as these systems are, at the end of the day it's all about process.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: One of the things I want to do that I'm going to build out eventually is I want to track every company that we quote on an account. I want to track who we quoted, what their response was — quote or decline — and then what the actual quote number was. Because I want there to become a day when I can pull a report that says, say, Amtrust, Hanover, Chubb, Liberty, and Hartford. Let's take those five companies. We quoted those five companies 20 times. Hartford came back with a quote 90% of the time. Chubb was 82% of the time. Down to Liberty that only came back 52% of the time. It's not a knock on Liberty, just as an example. And then, who was the best price? Who declined? Be able to take those analytics and come back and go, "Okay, in the future, when this type of account comes in, don't even quote the other four. Just quote Chubb because they're quoting this type of risk 97% of the time and 90% of those times they are the best price. I'd rather just go right to them." Then you don't have to deal with a decline or the rate not being as good. You can obviously tweak it with coverage packages and that kind of stuff. But being able to get that insight back allows you to shave so much time. I know you're dealing with a singular line of business. I know you have multiple markets. But for us, one of our biggest headaches and biggest time lost is where does the business go? That is an enormous time waste. I'm wasting 80% of my time sending it to 20% of the carriers. How do we do a better job of understanding the appetite?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: We're instantly — that we know right off the bat. When we put something in, even training the system, machine technology to tell us, hey, go to company A, company B, based on what you're putting in.
--:-- Chris Greene: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, to the underwriter not opening the email and watching the video, that underwriter is going to get less submissions from us from now on. And in the next quarterly review with their marketing rep, when they call and go, "Hey, submissions are down," I'm going to go, "Look, I sent you guys 25 emails and this son of a bitch only opened 16 of them. What happened to the other nine? What, is it too good to open those?" You're not doing us any favors. Don't you know what I mean? That kind of stuff — not to screw the carriers, that's not the point. The point is I wish the person would open the emails. That's the point.
--:-- From a people time efficiency standpoint and a quality of work standpoint, my people are feeling less and less like they're just spinning their wheels, which is just a soul killer. Let's be honest too, you deal with the market grip — they've always had the power of "Hey, you didn't do this, you didn't do that." Now something like HubSpot, no wait, we did. And here it is. We get this opportunity to defend what we did.
--:-- Chris Greene: That to me is just like — you know, that's how people HubSpot is better than I think any AMS out there. I walked through for my team how I did this submission of the day. This here added this contact, added the underwriter, made a note, attached these quote forms. It automatically pulls in all the emails. It tracked the call that I made to the person. And here's the video. I showed them all that. And I was like, "What's not in the system? What activity did I do that someone could go back and say, 'Hey, you missed this'? What did I not do? What did I miss?" And they were like, "You got everything."
--:-- And it was easy. It's different, right? HubSpot is different. If you're trained on a traditional AMS, it's definitely a different mental model with the objects and stuff. But once you start to pick it up, it is insane. It's just all there right at your fingertips. And that's what wins at the end of the day — ease of use. Because even when I interview a candidate, HubSpot is part of our interview process. And it usually blows them away about how easy the system is to use. But I said, "Look, it's not that it's necessarily easy to use. It's that I'm only showing you 1% and it's the 1% you're going to use every day."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. Yeah. Dude, it's awesome. So we just blew through 52 minutes and that was crazy. Using the last 10 minutes or so of our conversation here, talk to me a little bit about what's got you the most excited about your business. It doesn't have to be technology. It could be whatever. When you show up in the morning, what right now are you the most excited about?
--:-- Chris Greene: When I show up, it still goes back to this massive risk that comes on my desk and nobody says they can do anything with. And I'm able to instantly pull the data we have, go in, put a full report together, send it to a carrier and get a risk model and a rating model that no one else can get. Because of our educational background. At the end of the day, it still comes back to that for me.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So you love the challenge of the tough account that you get to really dig your teeth into and do the problem solving. I get that.
--:-- Chris Greene: As much as I don't really love selling insurance, I love the risk management. I love walking through — I'm with you — I love the educational side of walking a client through the coverages, why they're important, how they can mitigate them. That problem solving piece is a lot of fun. There's a lot to that. Then I also like how my team will email me and say, "Hey, here's what happened this morning that we need videos on." And then you go crank them out. This afternoon, I'll crank out about eight more. I usually do eight to 10 videos on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So you guys know this is a Friday, so he's off his schedule just to be clear on that.
--:-- Chris Greene: But I am also this afternoon going to be doing — I did a bunch of stuff this morning, I got a few more calls. And then this afternoon, before I get my kids off the bus, I will go crank out. I have six headlines in terms of what I want to attack. I may just add two more and bang out a quick eight.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Dude, you know, we just got monetization status. I'm not going to actually put ads on our videos for Rogue Risk, but the monetization status gives you some extra tracking and whatever. But yeah, thousand plus subscribers. And we did 4,000 total hours of view time in the last 12 months. Last month, last 28 days, we did almost 11,000 views. Which for an insurance YouTube channel — that's why I watch the stuff you do. I've done it twice now, once with the Murray Group, with Rogue, a few other agents. Crowley's doing some good stuff. I just don't see how other agents can see the things that we're doing and not be like, "This is a thing we're going to do. We're going to do this." Of all the things we should be doing, this is it. Look at the success these guys are having. The leads just keep coming. It never ends. Every day we generate two to 300 leads a month from between referral partners and content. We're not out there spending money on ads. Everything's strictly organic. And we have an 80 to 90% close ratio. It is insane. The possibilities. It's just insane. And it boggles my mind.
--:-- Chris Greene: But not only that, the content. I had a meeting with a large curiosity yesterday that's leaving a private flood market and they came to us. We were going to put a blog out with some other carriers that were kind of putting misinformation out there. And I said, you know, we like your content — it's neutral and it's always fact-based. Will you put this piece of information out for us? So I shot a video on it and I got a blog I released last night. They said, "We know that you won't spin it negatively, but you also won't spin it positively. You're going to be completely neutral about it, and that's what we like about your content."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's good. That's good, man. In general, carrier reviews do really well for us from a content perspective. I got a call from four CEOs after I did a best of on private residential and commercial. What's funny is that a lot of agents are like, "Well, my carrier's gonna get mad at me." I'm like, "Mad at you?" Maybe if you're saying a bunch of untrue things about them or you're purposefully trashing them. But if you're giving an honest review — like I did an honest review of maybe Hanover or somebody where I just said, "Hey, they are a little old school in some of the things they do, but the paper's amazing. The claims handling is amazing." It felt very real. I'm not going to sue you for saying something good about them.
--:-- Chris Greene: Yeah.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Why would they be pissed? I'm doing the video to write more business with their carrier. I want people to watch the video and go, "Hey, I saw your video on Hanover. They seem like a great company. Let's do business." That's why you're doing it. So to me, it's just like — what is it that they ask? "You answer." Do exactly what I see. "No, I can't discuss pricing on my website." Look, customers don't want to know how much your insurance is going to cost. They want to know what's determining the price of insurance. That's all they want to know.
--:-- Chris Greene: Dude, that Marcus has made an entire career just in our space with that point. Yes, you cannot say a BOP for a bakery is going to be $1,300. No, you can't say that because you don't know. But what you can say is, "Here's the four main factors. Based on these four factors, your rate is going to go up or down. And here's what they are." And that's what people want to know. And I promise you, that'll be the number one page that people visit on your website.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yes. Yeah. It's wild.
--:-- Chris Greene: Unfortunately, he's trained me really badly. I got to send him an email on this. I made my wife a Mother's Day present. And she's like, "You know, you're not in any of the pictures." I said, "You got to blame that on Marcus. There's that whole thing he trained me. It's not about us. It's about the customers." So he sticks it in my head on everything I do now.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I know a lot of people have questioned the fact that all our videos on the Rogue Risk YouTube channel have me in them. And I'm on the cover image. And it's like, look, as soon as I get someone who is willing to speak to insurance in a way that I believe is authentic and real and caring — I'd like to believe that the way I deliver it is that I actually want people to learn. As soon as I get someone who can do that and do it consistently, I will have them do it. I don't want to be the face. It's the reason it's not the Hanley Agency. I didn't name it Hanley Insurance Services. I named it Rogue Risk because I don't want it to be about me. But I think to a certain extent, the human factor — there's something to it. You run your agency and people get to hear your viewpoints. You're the cultural leader and driver of the business. And if you're out there every day teaching and educating, then it becomes very clear that that is a core principle of your business.
--:-- Chris Greene: Dude, I love answering the phones every now and then. It completely throws people off. "Wait, this is the person from the video?" They're just shocked.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I will tell you this. There's three books I require people to read before they come on board: *They Ask, You Answer* by Marcus, *The Visual Sale* by Tyler, and *Everybody Writes* by Ann Handley. Because you're going to write a blog, you're going to do a video, you're going to share it with a customer, and they're going to build this instant trust because it's actually done by you, not someone else on your team. I had Ann Handley on the podcast — gosh, it was two or three years ago now, probably about two years ago. She's awesome.
--:-- Chris Greene: I've had so much going on. I haven't been able to do too much outreach to people outside of the industry. I used to love bringing people outside the industry in every once in a while. But yeah, she's awesome. And just as quality a person off camera as on camera. I think very highly of her. Very, very good person.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So I've sent out probably 20 copies of *The Visual Sale*. I had one candidate reach back out to me — didn't come work for us — she said, "I closed a $10,000 account today because of that book."
--:-- Chris Greene: Dude, I'm with you.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Hey man, I want to be respectful of your time. We just blew through an hour long conversation. We'll have to have you back on the show again. This is great. People want to see what you're up to, they want to connect with you. Where are the best places to do that?
--:-- Chris Greene: LinkedIn — Chris Greene. Find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Our website: floodinsuranceguru.com. A lot of people are reaching out to us about the learning center — not necessarily learning about flood in the learning center, but they're like, "Hey, how do I build a learning center like that?" Visit my website floodinsuranceguru.com forward slash learning center. Reach out to me. Marcus has shared and actually built it for me, but it's been very beneficial for us. I'd be happy to sit down with anybody and just kind of show them how we built it, the process, all that stuff that really helps you out.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, dude. I appreciate you, the work you do, the way you think about your business. You're definitely someone who's leading the charge on a lot of this stuff. And I'm glad that you were willing to stick with me and finally get this interview done because I always love our conversations and I'm always just trying to keep up with you from a content and marketing standpoint.
--:-- Chris Greene: I will tell you this though — what you did to me, I've actually been doing the Jamie Pierce. I owe him an interview.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Well, dude, thank you so much. We should have done this a long time ago. Thanks, man.
--:-- [Closing music fades in]
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