RHS 169 - The Keynote That Explains It All

Ryan Hanley: Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today we have an absolutely tremendous episode for you. It is a special episode. It is the audio version of a recording of a recent keynote that I did at the One City World Tour, which is an event held by the insurance guys, my boys Bradley Flowers and Scott Howell, and also the entire team over at Glovebox, Andy Matheson, Ryan Matheson, all the crew over there. Absolutely tremendous event, tons of movers and shakers, tons of people with an open mind looking to do amazing things, a couple hundred people there.

Ryan Hanley: If you want to watch this episode, go over to Finding Peak. Go to FindingPeak.com. That's my peak performance kind of blog that I put together where I'm writing free articles every Friday and then every Tuesday I'm doing articles, specifically videos, articles, resources, specifically breaking down the things that I'm learning at Rogue Risk and sharing them with you. Every Tuesday you get something like what we came out with, like sharing the video recording of this talk. But you can listen to the audio right here because you are a subscriber to this podcast, which means that I love you.

Ryan Hanley: If you do enjoy this episode, I hope you share it. I hope you leave us a rating and review. That just helps us find more insurance professionals, more people interested in this content. I would love it if you took a second, if you're driving or doing something, I know you always can't, but you jump over to Finding Peak. If you're interested in that content, subscribe. I'm putting a lot of effort in there as we try to share what we're learning at Rogue Risk and how you build a mindset, build a body, build habits and routines that allow you to operate in a peak performance state, and then actually share what we're doing from a tactical standpoint in the insurance industry to help you get where you want to be. It's lots of fun.

Ryan Hanley: One thing I will say, guys, this episode is not safe for work. This is me doing a keynote, and when I do keynotes, oftentimes I curse. So if that makes you uncomfortable in any way, shape, or form, please know that this is not a safe for work episode of the show. Although most of the episodes are not safe for work, so you probably know that by now.

Ryan Hanley: Before we get there, though, big shout out to Tivly, T-I-V-L-Y. Used to be known as CommercialInsurance.net. They are the largest provider of warm, qualified commercial insurance leads to independent insurance agencies. They basically take a phone call and they survey someone. If that survey meets what you're interested in, they warm pass that call to you live. So, you know, "Hi, Mr. Agent. I'm from Tivly. I have a five-person manufacturer with $750,000 in revenue. Is this something that you want?" "Yes, I would love it." And then they connect you with that business owner.

Ryan Hanley: We love Tivly. Tivly has been a huge part of our growth strategy and we continue to become more and more embedded into Tivly and partnering deeper with them. I highly recommend if you're looking to create a foundational stream of qualified leads that consistently comes in every week, every month that you can count on, that are going to be good clients, Tivly is the place to go. We've been a client of theirs for going on two years now and I have no intentions of stopping. Love Tivly. Love that they decided to be a partner of this show and sponsor it. Love sharing companies like Tivly with you.

Ryan Hanley: With that, we're going to get on to my keynote titled "How to Close 89% of Inbound Leads." Sounds familiar. It's a topic I've been unpacking slowly in different venues. This is the keynote. Guys, if you like this keynote and you have an event and you want me to bring it to your event, just reach out to me, [email protected]. That's [email protected]. All right, with that, let's get on to this episode.

[Audience applause]

Chris Langilly: Thank you. Guys, what's up? I'm Chris Langilly, according to Ryan Hanley, or Linguini, as I was called in high school. Great seeing you guys. Great event. Thank you, guys. I'm the chief cook and bottle washer at Advisor Evolve. We build really cool websites for independent insurance agents. Yes, sir. Thank you. Appreciate you guys. We also handle digital marketing services as well. SEO, pay-per-click, retargeting, landing page creation, basically full funnel digital advertising, similar to what the big guys do on a scale down level for independent agents. Anybody's interested, I have a QR code over there.

Chris Langilly: I don't want to talk too much about myself. I'd rather talk about this guy who really needs no introduction. Funny story, Bradley asked me to bring him up on stage. He messaged me last week, "Can you bring Ryan up on stage?" I was in the middle of replying back to emails and I'm thinking, like, piggyback? How am I going to lift this dude up on stage? I don't understand. I drag him off stage.

Chris Langilly: But no, Ryan's one of my good friends in the industry. In 2014, 2015, I was an agency owner. I created a blog on my website. Blogging all the time, created some good content, started getting a lot of traction, was really proud of myself. And somebody said, "Oh yeah, check out Ryan Hanley." So I go to his website, Content Warfare. And I'm like, son of a bitch. This dude had a podcast, blog articles. He was five years ahead of me. And we became good friends.

Chris Langilly: Ryan, in my opinion, is one of the true OGs in our space. Been on the independent side, been on the corporate side, back on the independent side. I think everybody in the room at some point in their journey in this industry has either stolen ideas from him without giving credit, or maybe rightfully giving him credit. I know I've borrowed an idea or two from him. So without further ado, please welcome my close friend, Mr. Ryan Hanley.

[Audience applause]

Ryan Hanley: Do you mind bringing that over there? All right, guys, it's a pleasure to be here. I'm not going to stand up on stage. I'm going to come down there, but I just want to set some ground rules real quick. This is meant to be a conversation. I hope that you guys have questions. I hope that you'll raise your hand. I hope you'll shout out at me, especially if you disagree. I'm going to share with you my experience, and I hope that you will question me where things don't make sense to you. That's how we have the best conversation. I'm not going to use slides, so you just have to look at me for the rest of the time.

Ryan Hanley: In 2006, I was at a Christmas party at my then-girlfriend, now ex-wife's house. Her father pulled me out of the Christmas party, tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Hey, will you come into my office?" He sat me down in one of those old school offices that is so uncomfortable that nothing actually gets done there, but all you rich people have it in your house anyways. You just need to waste the square footage, so you put this really uncomfortable office that looks nice in there.

Ryan Hanley: So I'm sitting there in high leatherback chairs, and this is like out of a freaking mafia movie. He kind of makes me an offer that I can't refuse. I think ultimately he didn't want his daughter to be married to a bum and he wanted to keep his eyes on me. So he essentially said, "Hey, I know you're not really doing anything with your life right now. I want you to come sell insurance for me." Since at the time, I thought marrying his daughter was a good idea, I said yes to that offer. That's essentially how my insurance career began.

Ryan Hanley: I was a boots on the ground, ground and pound guy. I was putting 50,000 miles on my car, driving strip mall to strip mall, dropping off business cards. Why we would ever think that that would work, I have no idea. You walk in, you start at the end of the strip mall, you look at the sign, and you go, "My name's Ryan, I'm the best Chinese food insurance guy in Albany." Then you walk out, walk into the next one, and go, "I'm the best Subway sub shop insurance guy in Albany." You just do that over and over again.

Ryan Hanley: Now it seems silly, but at the time I'd be in the parking lot of my car with Metallica, trying to get jacked up to go drop my business card off. It's just insane to think about today. It took me a lot of work to cold call. I hated it. I would have a physical reaction to it. After all that time, all I really learned was not how to prospect, but I learned all the best places to take a dump in Albany when you're on the road. You're out there for eight hours, sometimes nature calls. Anyone who's ever done it knows. Your buddies will call you, "Oh man, that Dunkin' over on Main Street, that's a good one. Always clean."

Ryan Hanley: At night, we would do personal lines cold calling. Daytime was for commercial lines prospecting. At night, we did personal lines prospecting. What that looked like was cold calls. My father-in-law, I think because he hated me and probably still does, literally put a phone book on my desk and said, "There's your prospecting list." It's bananas thinking about that today. Maybe some of you are still doing it, and God bless you. But I would just call people, "Hey, I know you weren't expecting my call," blah blah blah. I hated it, and frankly, I was really terrible at it.

Ryan Hanley: Eighteen months into that work, he called me into his office and basically fired me. I did what any guy would do. I got down on my knees like a little... "Please, for the love of God, don't fire me. I got to go home to your daughter." I don't know if you've ever been almost fired by an in-law, but it's a humbling experience. I said, "I'll do anything. I'll change. I'll work harder. I'll hit my numbers. I promise." He thankfully said okay, but I knew something had to change.

Ryan Hanley: The way business had always been done, although a perfectly fine way to do business, for me it did not work. We were just talking about it over there in the room with Scott and Justin. Some of us can cold call, some of us can't. I couldn't. I knew that. So something had to change.

Ryan Hanley: At that time, the internet still really wasn't a thing. Some of you are pretty young. There was a time when the internet wasn't really a big deal. People still believed you couldn't do business on the internet. Hopefully none of us here believe that today, or at least we're going to change that by the end of my talk.

Ryan Hanley: I started researching online. There were people like Chris had said, people online who were writing articles. LinkedIn was kind of a thing a little bit, and Twitter. I had this moment, and I don't want to call it brilliance, but I have been accused of that, where I just said, "Holy shit. I'm two years into this and I barely understand this product I'm selling. How the hell do the people that we sell insurance to know anything about this? I'm licensed. I think about this every day. I talk about it every day, and I can still barely explain underinsured motorist coverage. How do the people who purchase our product actually know?"

Ryan Hanley: So what I started doing around 2008, 2009 was I started writing blog articles answering common questions about our industry. Today that is a standard practice. In 2008, I was literally ostracized by the industry for doing this. There would be people out in the crowd when I would do talks who would yell, "Not in my town. Not here. They don't use the internet in Connecticut. It's not a real thing." I would get heckled for this talk that I'm giving you. By the way, this talk I've given over 350 times. The best part is I'm going to give you every secret I have, and I know none of you motherfuckers are going to do anything with this information. So that's why I love doing this.

Ryan Hanley: I start writing these articles. One little caveat was my father-in-law and my brother-in-law at the time would not allow me to do it on their website, so I did it on my own, ryanhanley.com, which now has the podcast or whatever. At the time when it was started, I branded myself the Albany Insurance Professional and I wrote these articles. For six months, nothing happened. At the nine-month mark, we started a little bit of traction. I could see in Google Analytics a little bit.

Ryan Hanley: At nine months, a woman called me and it changed the course of my career. Her name was Virginia, and she was from a town called Clifton Park. Clifton Park is 25 minutes north of where our agency was in Guilderland. I share that piece of information only so you know this wasn't someone who drove by our office all the time. She didn't know us from any other business in the area. She never even came to our town. She found me online.

Ryan Hanley: The phone rang. "Ryan, someone's calling for you." "Hi, my name is Virginia. You don't know me. I've been reading your blog for a few months," which means she's crazy. "And I want you to do my insurance." I said, "Oh, you want a quote." She goes, "No, no, no. I don't want a quote. I'm going to send you what I have. I want you to take a look and then just send me what I need. I'll just, whatever you tell me to buy, I'll just buy it." That's exactly what I did.

Ryan Hanley: Here's the weird part. Some of you will remember this. I had to physically mail her accord forms, which she signed, put a check in a paper clip back in another envelope, and mail it back to me so that I could process it. That tells you how business was done even as short a time ago as 2008-2009.

Ryan Hanley: Here's the key. She was already sold. Guys, this is the power of inbound and content marketing. Of putting your message out there. All the other bullshit I'm going to talk about today. The power is that people already trust you. They've done their own research. They've taken the time, whether it's at 7pm, 9pm, noon, whenever. They've decided you are the person before they ever talk to you. Most of them, like you guys, they think I'm short. All of you say, "Oh, you're taller than I thought." These are people who couldn't pick you out of a lineup, but they trust you because they've heard you talk on a video or a podcast, or they've read something that you wrote, or the way you interact and share in social media, or through an email, or however you are creating your content and putting it out in the world.

Ryan Hanley: There is no right or wrong answer. Whatever tactics work for you in your market, I want to be clear about that. Although I'm happy to share any questions you have on my feelings on particular topics. The idea here is if we do this work and we do it right...

[Ryan pauses, notices someone in the audience]

Ryan Hanley: Yeah, go ahead, man. Sit right there. I had this really good bit and you guys weren't there, so you weren't part of it.

Ryan Hanley: The whole point is to be already sold. That's what we want. That's the whole goal. When we create content, I think of every blog post, every video I do. Every single one is a salesperson working for me 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Ryan Hanley: How many agency owners are in the room? Agency owners. How awful are producers? They're just the worst. They bitch about stuff. They constantly need days off. They want their commission split updated. "Oh, I didn't get paid for this." It's terrible. That's only half a joke.

Ryan Hanley: Our content, our videos, our articles, whatever we create and put out online is a producer. Our website is a producer working for us 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That is how I want you to think about it. It is a revenue generating mechanism. I do not create all the videos that I create because I like to waste my time sharing information about insurance online. I don't. There are plenty of other things that I would rather spend my time doing. But I do it because people who have a need search online for things, and I want them to find me and none of you.

Ryan Hanley: Honestly, I hope we're clear that while I'm going to give you everything that I have, I want to dominate all of you all the time. I hope that you are sitting there thinking the same thing. We are friendly competitors. James and I have talked about this before. I operate in states that he operates in. I create content. I would give him everything that I do, every tactic. I'll do the same for all of you. But we are friendly competitors. You have to want to grow and sell. That's what this work is about. This content work is about growing our business. If you do not want to grow, do not do this. It is a pain in the ass. It is a lot of thought. It is time. There are other ways to maintain where your business is. But what I'm going to share with you is how you grow your business.

Ryan Hanley: To me, today, there is no better way to create a foundation of consistent revenue in your agency than creating content. And then there are some tactics you can use that actually will help you scale. The way I look at content and the inbound leads that we get in particular, so much of the work I do is not about referrals, it's not about outbound cold calling. It is about generating inbound warm leads to the agency. I think of that as our baseline. If I'm doing my job right, then I know every day I'm getting 10, 15, 20 leads in the door. I can then track what our conversion ratio is on there. I know and can count on that coming in every single day. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. That's what we're trying to do here.

Ryan Hanley: I told you I was creating on RyanHanley.com and I was getting some calls. More Virginias. More people like Virginia are calling. We had a sales meeting every Monday morning. Every Monday morning, you would talk about the business you got and where it came from. I kept saying, "My website. My website." How many of you agency principals out there would be super happy if one of your producers kept going, "Yeah, I got it from my website," and not your agency's website? We're a little ego-driven. I get that. I've been known to have an ego once in a while. I wouldn't love that.

Ryan Hanley: What James said was it was their fault. That's true. They were very nice about it. They came to me and said, "Hey, we know you're doing this for your website. Would you do it for the agency's website?" I said, "Fine." There was kind of a weird disconnect in brand between why do I have this RyanHanley.com brand, but I really work for another agency. So I was okay with it. We redid the whole website. Nice, clean WordPress website. It was nice, built for conversion, all that was great. Then we got to the economics, and that's where everything fell apart. They wanted me to do all the work and take none of the leads. Staff went on strike.

Ryan Hanley: I do have one slide that I wish I had brought. It basically shows we launched a new website in April of 2011, and you see a little bump where we email our clients, and then just this flat line that goes across like this. 72 hits a week to our contact us page and our homepage. Why those two pages? We only had seven pages on the website, but only two of them were getting traffic. Why our contact us page and our homepage? I know you're not going to answer because I've done this 350 times.

Ryan Hanley: The reason for that was that those were people who already knew us. They were just trying to figure out how to get a hold of us. What did we just talk about a few minutes ago? Our website is a new business revenue generating tool that works for us 24 hours a day, seven days a week. How useful or optimized is that tool if only people who already know us and already pay us are the only ones coming to our site? If we're not creating content, Google, the internet gods, they're not going to send any new people. If you are not creating today and you went and looked at your traffic, it would be this nice, neat, flat death line where only people who already know you are contacting you. Every dollar you spend on your website, which if you have a website it should be through Chris, he's the best, every dollar you spend on that website is wasted. Every dollar, 150 bucks a month, it's wasted if you're not creating, because only people who already know you are using it. The goal of the internet, of our online properties, of our website, of our blog, of our YouTube, of all of our social channels, the goal is to grow our business. It's to attract people and have them call us.

Ryan Hanley: That's what RyanHanley.com looks like now. It's the podcast page. You can go to roguerisk.com, whoever did that, and you can see that thing now. So we have this death line, this flat line going across. Finally, management and staff came together. We had a little negotiation. I said, "Hey, since I'm going to be doing all the work, just give me my standard commission split on the leads that come in. I'll write them just like I did if I were going out and getting referrals or whatever." They agreed.

Ryan Hanley: My brain sometimes works in odd ways. I had this image flash in my head. How many people know the movie Pulp Fiction? What's the one lesson that you take from Pulp Fiction? Do not snort heroin. There's a lot of cool things you can shove up your nose. Heroin should not be one of them. That's what I take from that movie. If you guys remember, there's a scene where Uma Thurman, who unfortunately didn't learn that lesson, she snorts heroin, she's dying on the ground right here, and John Travolta's character takes this adrenaline needle and jabs it in her heart and she comes bursting back to life. That's what I wanted to do with our website. That's how my brain is put together. I am not shitting you when I say that is the image that came to my head. I needed this thing that had this flat death line to come bursting back to life.

Ryan Hanley: So what I did was, in the month of December 2011, every customer, client, prospect, every human that I bumped into, I said, "If you could have one question answered about insurance, what would it be? Just one. No question is too silly, too stupid, too big, too large. Just tell me what it was." I got 137 questions. Some of them were a little nutsy, like "How do you insure a spaceship?" I threw those ones out. I pared it down to a list of 100 that seemingly were in our sweet spot. Starting on January 2nd of 2012, I started answering those questions every day via video in two minutes or less.

Ryan Hanley: I did it with a five megapixel non-HD camera at a time when uploading a two-minute video to YouTube took about five hours. You had to be like, "I'm using the computer for the afternoon. Don't touch it." If my wife came over and fucked with the computer, you could mess the whole download up. Today it's uploaded just like that. That's not the way the internet worked back then.

Ryan Hanley: Every day, two minutes or less. I would stand in my office and hold my phone up. They're still all online. "Hey, my name is Ryan Hanley. I work with The Murray Group Insurance Services. Today we're going to answer the question, 'What is underinsured motorist coverage?'" And I barf out the answer. That was it.

Ryan Hanley: What's amazing, and again, I should have brought this slide. I was a little hungover this morning, so I didn't. I also knew half the people were going to leave because I'm not really the draw I used to be.

[Audience laughter]

Ryan Hanley: You thought that was funny, huh?

Ryan Hanley: What you see is starting on January 2nd of 2012, the Google Analytics shoots up like this. It literally goes to the moon. Why? Because what is Google's purpose? What are all these things, all the LinkedIn, Google, Bing, if you're a weirdo and you use that? I still sometimes see Yahoo search come through on my analytics. I don't want people that use Yahoo search as my clients. That is a weird thing.

Ryan Hanley: The purpose of all of these is they need you to stay in their ecosystem so they can serve you ads. What I was doing was literally feeding Google exactly what they needed. I was giving them answers to commonly asked insurance questions, which kept people coming back to Google. So what did they do? They just rewarded me with more and more traffic.

Ryan Hanley: During that time period of 100 days, the accounts that came in, we made $100,000 in revenue at The Murray Group Insurance Services. It was like $97,000 and whatever. From those 100 videos during a 100-day period, the leads that were associated with those videos when they came in, we made $100,000 in 2012. That's found revenue. Two minutes or less.

Ryan Hanley: It technically took me 22 minutes to post a video. Two minutes to record, upload. I was making a joke about the five hours to upload a video, but it did take like 20-ish minutes. Once it was uploaded, I put a title, simple description with a link and our phone number, and bam, it would go up. It wasn't sophisticated. It's not how I would necessarily do it today. I would go probably richer and deeper with the content. But at the time, that's what I did. It took me about 22 minutes a day, and for 100 days, we made $100,000 in revenue. That is why I do what I do.

Ryan Hanley: The beauty of it, after eight years at The Murray Group, this just continued. The month that I was fired at The Murray Group, we generated 96 inbound leads on $100 in total spending. These videos, they're working 24 hours a day. This just kept growing. We just kept getting more and more leads. I could take a month off. It didn't matter. They're working for me. That's the beauty of creating content.

Ryan Hanley: I get fired from The Murray Group, and I go work for TrustedChoice.com. I launched the Agency Nation platform, which was a lot of fun. Some of you I know from that time period. We met during that time period, which was one of the most fun times in my life. I got to meet all of you. I lived eight years in a bubble in that grinding world, and I got to understand at my core what it means to be a traditional agent, the power, why the insurance industry is not broken, all the things that we talk about. I'm blessed to have learned that.

Ryan Hanley: Then I got the opposite experience. I got to come out and talk to all of you and learn your problems are a little different. Some of them are the same. Some things you do differently. I got this really deep breath and understanding of what our industry is and how amazing it is that we get to literally choose our own destiny. There are not very many professions where you can build anything that you want. That's the beauty and the challenge of our space. You can literally turn this business into anything that you want it to be.

Ryan Hanley: You can go after... I have one producer in my agency. She wants her niche when she's ready. She hasn't graduated to have a niche yet. That's a different topic for a different time. When she does, she wants it to be adult toy stores. One, I think that's amazing because sex is awesome. Two, what's really interesting about it is when you dig into the niche, it's actually a really interesting niche. There's 3,700 of them nationally. Most of them are absolutely crapped on by their agents because no one, us uptight conservative types, don't really want anyone to know that we're insuring an adult toy store because God forbid we get freaky in the sack. So no one owns it. There's no programs available. There's like four carriers that write it. When you actually break it down as a niche, it's a pretty wonderful niche.

Ryan Hanley: So she could literally build her business on adult toy stores. And I think it's amazing that she can do that. It's not the business I want to write personally, you know, whatever. But I think it's amazing that she has that ability and we all have that, okay. So I learned that lesson at TrustedChoice.com and Agency Nation and then ultimately was fired from that business as well. I am difficult to work with and don't do well as an employee. So if any of you are thinking about hiring me, just be careful. You will get exactly what you think you're gonna get.

Ryan Hanley: Then I went and worked for Bold Penguin for a time, which taught me all the mentality of the people that hate us, right? I'm not saying the people at Bold Penguin hate us, but they are cut from their method. It was "we're humans," you know? They're in that ecosystem where the humans are the problem. Humans are the problem. And that was interesting. It wasn't a great fit. I was basically fired from there too.

Ryan Hanley: Essentially what happened was I had a family member get sick, terminally ill unfortunately, and I couldn't travel. Bold Penguin was a three-week-a-month travel job. When I told them I couldn't travel anymore because of my family member, they essentially said, "You have to travel or you can't work here." I don't want to cut them in a bad mold. It just didn't work. So I became a CEO of a fitness franchise because Albany is not a bastion of insurance opportunities and the Murray Group would not have me back. I did that for nine months and learned some more lessons. Mostly I got fired from there too. And that happened at this motherfucker.

Ryan Hanley: I started there. I had worked out at this gym for like five years. I loved the workout and I knew the owner. When he heard that I was looking for another opportunity, he said, "Hey, I'm a gym guy. You're a business guy." Which, the joke was on him. I don't really know shit about business. So he said, "You're a business guy, why don't you come be the CEO and I do the gym stuff?" I said that sounds great. In nine months, I doubled the membership from about 2,100 members to 4,000 members. At 8:36 a.m. on a Monday, I'm in Lululemon because the best part about being the CEO of a fitness franchise is you literally wear workout gear all day. Part of your job is you have to work out, which for me was cool. I'm sitting there chilling, and he walks in. I can see him walk into the office, except he's in a suit with his attorney. I was like, "Something's wrong." And what was wrong was they fired me.

Ryan Hanley: As I'm walking out from there to my truck, I decided that it was time to take all these amazing conversations with all the people that I knew in this industry, all the experiences I had, and put them into something that could actually be mine. That was where Rogue Risk came from. The very first thing that I wrote down when I was thinking about Rogue Risk was this concept that you may or may not have heard me talk about: human optimized.

Ryan Hanley: When I say human optimized, what I mean is humans are the most important part of our business, but we often allocate them improperly. If you have humans producing certificates of insurance, you're wasting time and money. When I see someone in my agency, I track what they do. Not because I want to be a drill sergeant, but because I want to find efficiencies and places where we can add value and remove the humans from the places that they do not add value. Our customers do not think a billing change is a value add for us. When they call us with a billing change, we're not adding value to their life. That's the barrier for entry. When a human does a billing change in your agency, all I see is the expense meter spinning. They're spending time on a task that the customer doesn't give a shit who does it. They just need to give you a new credit card. They don't care if it's a system, if it's an app, if they text message. They just need it done.

Ryan Hanley: When I think human optimized, what I want to do is build an agency where the humans are injected in the moments where they add the most value, which is in every moment that builds trust. Because our entire business is trust.

[Ryan pauses for a brief aside to the audience]

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. I hope you enjoy listening as much as I do creating the show for you. All right. I'm out of here. Peace. Let's get back to the episode.

Ryan Hanley: Everything that I've learned about going online... I think the common misconception that people have about most of my work is that I'm trying to remove the humans or I'm trying to bypass trust. Everything that I have learned marketing our business online is that trust is the whole business. It's the whole business. You create the content to build the trust. That's why you do it. That's the whole purpose. If you're willing to watch me talk about insurance on YouTube, one, I still think all these people are weirdos. Two, you, whether you know it or not, are slowly starting to believe what I believe. You're starting to think the way that I think. Even though I am a terrible insurance agent, there are hundreds of thousands of people online that think I know what I'm talking about. That's amazing to me. They trust me now. You can't mess with that trust. You actually have to deliver on what you say you're gonna do, which obviously I do as often as we possibly can. But my point is they are building trust with you, and that's the whole game. That's what human optimized is about. I don't want to waste my people's time doing things that don't build trust because the entire game is trust.

Ryan Hanley: The way that I thought about this in my head is, let's say you have a 20-minute block of time with someone. Someone calls and you're gonna spend 20 minutes on the phone with them. The traditional way of doing business is that your CSAs, customer success associates, CSRs, traditionally they're gonna spend about five minutes on the phone with that person and then rush them off the phone because they know it's gonna take 15 minutes for them to actually do the task that person asked them to do. My goal with Rogue Risk was to flip that on its head. I wanted them to be able to spend 15 minutes on the phone with that person building trust, talking to them, cross-selling, asking for referrals, digging into coverage issues, the things that we're really good at that we all talk about wanting to do all day. And then making it so they only had to spend five minutes doing the processing.

Ryan Hanley: My belief was if I could do that in a digital manner, I could hit the holy grail: massive inbound new business growth accompanied with standard independent insurance agency level retention. When you go digital, you're gonna find that it is very difficult to break the mid-40s for retention. Most of the digital businesses that are primarily digital, these big-box shops, they can't break 40% retention. Geico has been in the 40s for 20 years. That's why they have to spend so much on advertising. They can't break the 40s for retention. When we look at all this new business production that they have, they're just feeding us. One of our largest sources of business is Next Insurance. People go there upfront, they see the ads, the ads are amazing, they see how easy it is to buy insurance, they buy insurance, then they have a question, can't get a hold of anybody, hate it, leave, and find us online.

Ryan Hanley: We'll talk a little bit more about how to get business, but getting business in the door is the easy part. Keeping the business is the hard part. That was what I wanted to be different about Rogue. We were going to both generate massive amounts of business, but by optimizing our humans, by creating this human optimized business, even though you were brought in digitally, you would still feel connected to our agency. The reason you guys all probably have 85 to 95 percent retention rates is because people believe in you or they believe in your people. They know that if something really shitty happens, there's a human they can call, and that's why they stay.

Ryan Hanley: When we generate business online, there's a little bit of a disconnect. You've watched my video, sure, you trust me, you're willing to get a quote, but if we never take that next step and actually get connected somehow, I'm not going to stay. I'm going to leave at the next best opportunity. By optimizing our humans, by giving them the tools, the resources, the time, the experience to spend that moment... and it could just be one moment. You don't constantly have to be on the phone. I think that's a very big misconception, that you have to constantly be touching people. I don't think you need that. You just need one moment. Think about whoever it is that you love in your life. You didn't need 30 moments to love them. You had one moment, and you fucking knew. Then hopefully there was a bunch of good ones. Sometimes that's not always the case. I learned that 17 years later. But my point is you just need one good moment with them and they will stick. But if your people don't have the time or the ability to have that moment, then they're not going to stick around.

Ryan Hanley: So we got that whole concept? All right. Being that I'm not very clever or smart, I literally just re-racked the same game plan with Rogue Risk that I did with the Murray Group. I started Rogue Risk March 9th of 2020. The zombie apocalypse hit upstate New York seven days later. Our wonderful Governor Mario Cuomo shut the state down. I'm glad we feel the same about him. When I say wonderful, I actually mean the opposite of that. I think that's being facetious.

Ryan Hanley: My initial target market was to be a killing commercial guy. I was gonna take this human optimized model and I was gonna use David's wonderful program, Killing Commercial, which is one of the best sales training programs and agency building programs that exists. Not just giving a shout out to David because I like him. It is amazing. But during COVID, it was really hard to get people on the phone. So I just did what I did at the Murray Group. I just started creating videos in my basement. We now have 450 videos. We did 135,000 views last year on our YouTube channel. Two years in. So it's never too late to start. This shit works no matter where you are, no matter what niche you have. I don't care if you're dealing with high net worth personal lines, dynamite manufacturers, or adult toy store owners. Humans go on the internet to figure out answers to their problems. If you create the content and answer the questions, then they're going to find you.

Ryan Hanley: Bradley, what time are we done, man?

[Audience member responds indistinctly]

Ryan Hanley: 15? Can I have 20? That's 130? Perfect.

Ryan Hanley: Here's what's going to happen. None of you are going to actually do this, but let's say you do, again for the thought experiment. Let's say you do start creating content and answering the commonly asked questions of the people that you want to do business with. Your phone is going to start to ring. Here's the mistake I do not want you to make. You cannot treat inbound leads like referrals. This is a big, big mistake that a lot of us make. I made this mistake for a long time. I don't want you to think that somehow I knew this was the case. This is 17 years of dealing with digital marketing and inbound leads. When I was at Trusted Choice, one of the things that they did was when a phone call went through that system, we would record the phone call. I listened to a lot of you answer inbound leads and you are terrible at it. We would play them while we were getting drunk after work. They're hilarious. Some of the shit that we say to people when they call. Because we treat them like they're referrals. They're not.

Ryan Hanley: Inbound leads, they may trust you a little bit. They watched your videos, read your content. They may trust you a little bit, but the trust is the beginnings of trust. It's the early bits of trust. It's not a referral. I tell you to go over and see my man over here about insurance. When you make that call, you're kind of already there. You're like, "Eh, I trust Ryan. I'm going to call Heath." You're kind of already there. You can be casual. You can filter him, whatever. If he just watched a video of Heath online and he calls, he's still trying to figure out if you're actually the person that he saw online. We cannot treat them the same way that we treat referrals. Can't do it.

Ryan Hanley: I think the title of this was like "How I Closed 89% of Inbound Leads" or whatever. That number... I'm gonna give a shout out to the Better Agency guys. They didn't own the tool when I first started using it, but we use Neoteric Agent for video proposals. I think video proposals are the super secret master power of selling in the digital age. I love video proposals. I'm gonna explain exactly how I do that. When I say that we closed 89% of the leads that came in, what I am telling you is that 89% of the time when I sent what is now Better Proposals, formerly Neoteric Proposals, when I would send one of those to customers, nine out of every ten would close. Nine out of every ten.

Ryan Hanley: Let's talk about how we get there. Sorry, I know you're not supposed to look at your watch, but I do a lot of things that you're not supposed to do too, so I hope you guys will just abide that. Technically, my speaking style is like an F minus, but I don't care. And you guys seem to be sticking around, so we're going to keep going. Except for her.

[Audience laughter]

Ryan Hanley: The timing on that couldn't have been better. Holy shit.

Ryan Hanley: Here's how you do it. The key to closing inbound leads is setting expectations. Properly setting expectations throughout the process. That is probably not the super sexy answer that you were looking for, but I am telling you, we don't do it as an industry. I have listened to thousands—thousands is a lot, that's an exaggeration—at least hundreds of phone calls when it was with Trusted Choice of people taking inbound leads. What we don't do is set expectations. Because when you set an expectation and you hit it, what gets built? Trust. We're manufacturing trust. That's what we're doing.

Ryan Hanley: If I go to Taylor and I say, "Hey man, I'm going to see you at 1 o'clock. We're going to go get a beer. We're going to be there." And I show up at 1:30. "Fucking Hanley. God, I can't trust this guy. He tells me he's going to be someplace. He doesn't show up. What the hell?" And then I bring my girlfriend with me. And you're like, "God, I didn't expect her to be there. And I gotta small talk." Fucking what? But let's say I go, "Dude, let's go get a beer at 1 o'clock." And I show up and I already got a beer waiting for you. You sit down and there's a beer and I'm sitting there. You're like, "Oh, oh. Next time he tells me something, I'm actually gonna ask for something more expensive next time. I know he's buying." You built that trust.

Ryan Hanley: You set expectations and then you hit those expectations. They can be little tiny expectations. But as long as you do that throughout the buying process, you are building trust so that when you send them the video proposal, they can just buy from you. They're so caught up in how much they love you and trust you and know that if you're actually going to take the time to put a video proposal together and pitch them insurance, who else would do that? Why would I choose anybody else? I'd be an idiot. The psychology is that I've built all this trust with you. I can't not pick you now. Every single time you've set an expectation, you've hit it. I now just assume that whatever you send to me is the absolute best insurance policy for me. Again, you can't abuse that. With great power comes great responsibility. But that is how we do it.

Ryan Hanley: What does that look like? First, when an inbound lead calls, there is one question that I want you to ask them: "Hi, how can I help?" And shut up. That's all I want you to say. There's some Chris Voss shit in here, open-ended questions. Just let them talk. They'll tell you everything. "Hey man, I went to Next. It was super easy. I love the coverage. I love the price, but I can't get anybody on the phone." They're telling you exactly what you need to do. They're literally going to give you the game plan. This is sales 101. But instead, what we do is, "Oh, you want a workers' comp policy? What's your address? What's your phone number? What's the best phone number?" We get right into information gathering. You can't do that with an inbound lead because what it says is you don't give a fuck about me. You just want my business.

Ryan Hanley: We think we're being super helpful. We're not doing it with bad intentions. We think we're being helpful. We think, "I want to get through this. I want to get this person's info. I want to get this account. I want to take my wife out to Sizzler. You gotta make that paper." But what happens is you're starting to deplete that trust. Think of it like a video game. You get to max trust, you win the video game. You're starting to deplete that because you went right into business. Nope. "How can I help?" Shut up. They will literally just barf their problems on you. And if they don't, they probably aren't a good lead for you. That's what I've found. If they are super like, "I don't want to give you info," they're starting to play games. That's a really good filter to say, "Hey, I'm probably not the best person," and then send them to your competitor. I don't know that to be an absolute truth, but I have found that if someone does not immediately start barfing what is wrong on you when you ask them "How can I help?", they're probably not ready to buy or they're not a good lead. That's the initial filter that I use.

Ryan Hanley: Once I get all that information, now I get to my expectation setting. You said that being able to call someone is really important. Okay, great. I'm going to give you a dedicated account manager. Do you want me to bring her on the phone? They always say no. No. Okay. But her name is Melissa, and you can call her whenever you need. Or, "Hey, I have this carrier, Hartford." And I just make all this shit up, by the way. "I have this carrier, Hartford, and I think they're going to fit what you're doing really well. If I can get you into the Hartford program, I'm going to be super excited. Have you heard of the Hartford?" "Maybe I've heard of them." "Okay, great. I am going to send you an email as soon as we're done talking. I'm going to send you an email just about the Hartford. And then you'll know. This is a carrier I think you should be with."

Ryan Hanley: I don't give a fuck if they read it. But I'm going to send them that email because now they know when I say I'm going to do something, I do it. I literally have it on a template in my Gmail. I always use the Hartford. I don't even give a shit if it's a dynamite manufacturer. I send them that just so that they know that when I say I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it.

Ryan Hanley: We do some expectation setting. Once we get to the point where I think they're legitimate, they seem like they're willing to do business with us, this is how we set up the video proposal. This is the key. We're building trust, building trust, building trust. Little expectation setting, hitting, we're delivering on things that we say we're going to deliver on. I say to them, "Here's what happens next." It's a key phrase. "Here's what happens next." I want them to know exactly what's going to happen because I'm about to blow their minds.

Ryan Hanley: How I do that is I say, "Now that I have all the information I need, I'm gonna go out and do my job. I think the Hartford is gonna be right for you, but it might be somebody else. Here's what's gonna happen. Once I know where your insurance can go, you're gonna get a video proposal from me. It's gonna have three parts. The top part is gonna be in the body of the email, and that's gonna have just general high-level stuff. There is going to be a video. I would really like it if you watch that video because what it's going to do is explain that policy to you, exactly why I chose that company, why I chose that coverage. I'm gonna break it all down for you. And then I'm gonna attach the company proposal."

Ryan Hanley: Never do your own proposal for small business. If you're doing middle market, proposals are great. For small business, never use your own proposal. Always use the company's proposal. Here's why. We all think company proposals are complete garbage. They look ugly. The information is in weird spots. It's like a faux pas. You're kind of frowned upon in our space if you use company proposals. Aaron knows, he makes fun of me for it all the time. I use the company proposal because what I say is, "Taylor, I'm gonna attach the proposal from the company to the email. The reason I do that is because I want you to have all the information that I have before we talk again."

Ryan Hanley: I use cars. I hate buying cars because I don't know what to deal with. I always feel like they have more information than me. They're always hiding shit. I hate that. So what I do in my business is I'm going to give you everything I have so that the next time we get on the phone together, we can have a productive conversation. That person feels like I just gave them the inside baseball. They don't know that company proposals are shit and people give them out all the time. They think they just got the behind-the-curtain look. They feel like I just threw that curtain open, and now they're seeing everything. I'm not hiding anything from them. Quite literally, the company proposal is what we use. That's how we know how much they're paying. We print it out of their stupid system. By giving it to them, what we're saying is, "I don't hide anything." We have a massive amount of trust for people that we believe don't hide shit from them. I may not agree with you, but if I know that you're completely authentic and transparent with me, I'm going to at least trust you.

Ryan Hanley: We could have completely different opinions, but if I know that when you talk to me, you tell me exactly what you think, the way you think it, I'm going to trust you. And that's all we want.

Ryan Hanley: So by giving them this simple three-part video proposal, which does everything that we would do in person, I, one, do not have to try to schedule an appointment with them, which is the worst—no ghosting. Two, I am giving them everything they need to know to make that decision. Three, I have pulled the curtain on the insurance buying process and shown them absolutely every piece of information that I have from that customer.

Ryan Hanley: What happens is I never have to schedule a follow-up. Almost never. About 60% of the time, they'll watch the video. They'll watch it between three and five times. They'll forward it to somebody. Most of the time, they watch it 7 to 11 p.m. Majority of the time, they're being watched 7 to 11 p.m. Then I'll get a simple email response that says, "This looks good, let's do it." Never have to speak to them again. And I hate talking to people, so it's amazing for me. I'm also not a good salesman, so that was another opportunity for me to get up.

Ryan Hanley: So what I have done is everything that we do over the course of two, three, four meetings—you got to get back on the phone, answer more questions. I don't want to do any of that shit. I want to give them every piece of information I have and allow them to digest it on their time, at their pace, when they're ready, share it with whoever they want, and then just tell me when they're ready to buy from me.

Ryan Hanley: Yes, yes, I use Loom. I use Loom. So yes, yes, very good question. The question was about the video proposal. So I use Loom, and it does a little circle. Then I'll pull the company proposal that I'm also going to attach. I'll pull it up on the screen. I'll just talk through it. And I always tell them, whatever carrier, "I am so freaking excited that I was able to get you into this program." Every time, you know, man, I am so glad that I got you into the Hartford. This is awesome. Their pricing is amazing. You're gonna love this. This doesn't happen every day, but man, when I can put somebody with Hartford, I feel good about it.

Ryan Hanley: And you guys, you can see right here, you need for your certificate, you told me you need a million dollars in liability. You can see right here, 1 million, 2 million. That's great. And I never explain all the packages in a BOP or all the other coverages. Right, it's just I show them the liability, I show them the property. Any like add-ons, you know if there's like a site, like a little cyber schmoogie or something you pop in there for a little extra commish, you put that in there. I'll explain those big things. And then I go, "And then there's just like a whole bunch of coverages at the bottom that you can look through. I'm not gonna explain them all. You probably won't use them. But I'll tell you, if you do have a really bad day, these are things you don't normally think about. If you have any questions, let me know. And it doesn't matter if you want to change them anyways, because you can't." And that's how I explain it.

Ryan Hanley: Most of the time, the proposals are done. Unless there's like multiple policies, I'm done within five minutes. And I try to kind of—the number that I shoot for, I try to keep the video to five minutes or less, the video proposal.

Ryan Hanley: So when you think about scaling your business, you're creating this content, you're putting it out into the world, and it's working for you all day long. Right? People are filling out forms. They're calling you, texting, emailing, whatever your call to action is. They're coming in all day. Boom, boom, boom, boom. A lot of them come in at night. A lot of people watch videos and fill out our forms at night. When I go to sleep, a lot of times we wake up, five, six, five, six leads have come in that night.

Ryan Hanley: Right, so then those come in at night and they're coming in all the time. And if we're then—and this is my opinion—if we're then selling the traditional way by trying to get them on the phone, or God forbid to video—I can't stand Loom meetings. I hate that. Oh my god. So you're trying to schedule this. Who wants to pull time out of their day? You know, whatever. We gather the info as quickly as we can and we pop out a video proposal and move on to the next one.

Ryan Hanley: So yes, no, you're good. Yeah. So depending on—the question was, "Do I have a template of information gathering that I send them?" So first, for standard stuff, like Main Street stuff, we do it. If it's something a little more complicated, we just get on the phone. So I still think this is a phone business. I do think you're gonna need one phone call. So what we track as a metric, aspirational metric, is one call closes. Right? That doesn't mean one call, closed, bound, issued on that call. It means it only took one phone call to close that business. Okay? The minute you have to go to a second phone call, your conversion rate drops because now they're busy, there you know, you know when they're gonna make time, you know all this kind of stuff.

Ryan Hanley: So I try to—I've tried to set it up again, going to the human optimized thing, where we're gathering as much as we can on the front. For certain class of business, we will send them a survey. But I'll tell you, people don't really like those that much. We do get a lot of pushback on the, "I'm calling you to help me, why are you making me fill out all this shit?" So we kind of backed off that a little bit. So we're doing all this digital capture, then we're trying to do one call to gather the info we need. And if we properly set expectations and next steps during that call, then the video proposal closes them and we never have to speak to them again. For sales, obviously. For service and stuff, we will.

Ryan Hanley: Okay, yes, I pay for it. Yeah. So the cool thing about—and I'm not trying to sell Better Agents or whatever—but the cool thing about Neoteric Agent or Better Proposals now is that it embeds it. So it doesn't take them to the Loom page. It embeds it right in the thing. And I found that people don't really care either. They're so blown away. Half the time, I'll get, "Let's do it, this sounds great, and I've never seen anything like this before." So people really—again, if you set the expectations up front of what they're going to get, and then they get it, they're like, "I don't need to talk to them. He just explained exactly why."

Ryan Hanley: Okay, I've got two minutes. Any more questions? Yes.

Audience Member: Do all of your agents do it or do you just do the video?

Ryan Hanley: The ones that actually sell do it. The ones that don't tell me they can do it a different way for a while, and then I fire them. Yes?

Audience Member: How did you turn 15 minutes of processing into five?

Ryan Hanley: How did I turn 15 minutes of processing into five? So we use a combination of self-service, automation tools, and low-cost virtual assistants. And then we have basically a scaled process considering our licensed Americans being our most expensive, client portal through NextGen being the least expensive. We kind of try to scale that as much as possible. I will say I'm still not to that ratio yet, if I'm being completely candid. That is still aspirational at this point. But we're using kind of that scaled service model with the licensed American being the last resort. That has seemingly got us a lot closer. I'm not great with VAs. I'm still working on getting better with them. Just personally, I don't... I'm getting better with that. But I do think a combination of that and escalating depending on what the actual service needed is how you get there.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah. Any other questions? No? Good? Okay. Go Bills. I love all of you. Thank you. Thank you.

[Audience applause]

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