Ep#479 Driving Growth in the Benefits Industry with Marketing: A Conversation with Kevin Trokey and Wendy Keneipp

Speaker 1: 0:00

The benefits. Industry can be a strange and wonderful place. One of the wonderful things is that you can learn lessons that can help to drive your growth. What are those lessons and who knows about them? We'll find out on this episode of Shift Shapers. To help us answer that question, we've invited my friends Kevin Trokey and Wendy Kniep from Q4 Intelligence, who have captured their lessons in a terrific book called the Salesperson's Guide to Growing a Business. I commend it to everybody. Go pick up a copy, because there's lots of good stuff in here. There's too much to talk about even in a podcast. Welcome guys. Thank you, david. Appreciate being here Since I mentioned Q4I. What's the origin story? How did you guys get together? How did Q4I happen?

Speaker 4: 1:09

Well, wendy and I, before we started we were both on the agency side ourselves.

Speaker 4: 1:14

So we were working with Wendy with an independent agency up in Bellingham, washington, and me here in St Louis. Our agencies both belonged to another networking group. There was an event that was taking place in Seattle and they foolishly allowed me to get up on stage and do a presentation. The group that we were both part of was multi-lines, but it really focused more on the property and casualty side than it did the benefits. So my presentation was about building a benefits practice inside a multi-lines agency and Wendy was in a leadership position in her agency and some of what I shared that day actually resonated with her and her team and we just kind of established a connection of trading ideas and strategies and solutions back and forth. It was maybe a year or two later. Wendy had exited the agency, started her own business, a creative meeting space, and I had told her that I was toying with the idea of leaving the agency and starting a group like this and she says well, you are not doing that without me.

Speaker 3: 2:24

It's pretty much a direct quote.

Speaker 4: 2:26

Awesome. There may have been some more colorful language, but I don't know what gets edited out of the podcast, so I cleaned it up a bit.

Speaker 1: 2:34

We are not subject to anybody's rules. It's my podcast. You all can say whatever you want. All right, so let's start by. I think a good place to start is to talk about moving from being accidental to being intentional. It's something that you talk about in the book. What does that mean? How do you do that? How does that help?

Speaker 3: 2:54

Well, I think when you start a business, it's very easy to just, you know you wander into it.

Speaker 3: 3:02

You wander into business ownership very often, and it's particularly common in this industry, because people start out as really good salespeople and you know, then you start thinking, well, wait a minute, if I'm so good at this, why am I not the one who's keeping all the revenues?

Speaker 3: 3:17

Why am I, you know, sharing it and only getting a portion of it? So you know people will leave and go on and start their own agencies and being a really good salesperson does not make you a good business owner. And you know they're very different skill sets and they're very different sets of knowledge, so they're kind of act, they're accidental at that point. And how do you make that transition from being that accidental business owner into being very intentional about thinking about all aspects of your business and that is exactly the point of the book and breaking it down into those four pillars that you have. You have to think about the marketing, you have to think about the sales, you have to think about the service and you have to think about your leadership. So it's that path that's going to take you into intentional business ownership.

Speaker 4: 4:03

Yeah, and David, if I can add to that there. We could go on with examples of accidental versus intentional within the industry all day long, but I think one that really stands out is the way a typical book of business gets built. When it's done accidentally. You know the sales people that Wendy talked about. They go out and kind of have this mindset any new account is a good one, and one of the first things we do with the producer and agency when we work with them is a book of business analysis, and I mean it's a simple exercise. We have enlist all of their clients, from the largest revenue to the smallest, and then we do some segmentation and that's where you see the negative impact of the accidental approach. Just for sake of round numbers, let's assume a book of business has a hundred clients. When we look at the smallest, 50. What do you think the total revenue that comes from that bottom half of a book of business is, on average?

Speaker 4: 4:59

20% or less seven, I mean of all the times we've done that, I think we've only seen double digits hit two or three times. When you get to the bottom 25%, it's 2%. When you look at the top five, it's 30%. The next 15 after that is 35%, and the numbers are so consistent and it is that is the financial impact of running your business. Accidentally move to intentional and you go and you start replicating those clients at the top and you start avoiding the ones at the bottom. That alone becomes a game changer.

Speaker 1: 5:33

Do you also find that that 7% is responsible for a disproportionate share of the service?

Speaker 4: 5:39

Absolutely, because they're the smallest clients, they don't have internal HR, they don't have the knowledge, they don't have the resources. They they depend on it to win. And not just that the discrepancy in the balance of the book but what is really damaging is, in most instances, the agencies are actually losing money to hold on to those accounts. And you just think of the crazy fourth quarter that everybody went through and everybody just work you said we could use language work their asses off to hold on to accounts that are costing money, right.

Speaker 1: 6:13

Yeah, it's insane and that intentionality is really important and you know I'm a story brand certified guide, as you guys know, and so that's one of the things we do. I know you work with story brand as well, with your folks. One of the things that it helps do is it helps you become intentional, because it forces you to figure out, okay, who is the client I want to sell to and what exactly is their problem, and that brings an awful lot of clarity. Now I know that all of these pillars are built on what you guys call your Q4 growth platform. Can you give us a little taste of kind of what that is?

Speaker 4: 6:49

Yeah, what do you want to take them?

Speaker 3: 6:51

So the growth platform is looking at those four areas that I mentioned. It's the marketing, sales, service and leadership. So what are those? Those foundational areas of the business that you need to intentionally pay attention to and put structure around them and bring your team into it. So it shouldn't just be the business owner who is having to think about this, but get everybody involved and having ownership of these different areas. So what we do is we break down our curriculum, we break down our coaching into those four areas and we have particular things that we want everybody to be able to, to understand about them and to achieve in each of the areas. And you know, a book of business analysis is going to be one of the first things that we do right out of the gate.

Speaker 1: 7:36

Now I, because marketing is so dear to my heart. It made my shriveled little salesman's heart glad that you start with marketing in the book. Yeah, I know why I start with marketing with clients when I was doing my consulting work in that area. Why do you tell your folks that that's where it's got to start?

Speaker 3: 7:53

Because that's the first impression that anybody has of you. The first thing they're going to do whether you are cold calling them or whether they hear about you from some other source or referral and introduction they're going to go out and they're going to look you up and they, as soon as they put your name, even if it's into a search engine, your LinkedIn profile is going to come to the top. Your website is going to come to the top. So those are critical pieces that you have to have organized and really dialed in.

Speaker 4: 8:20

And that is. I won't even. I don't know if Achilles heel is the right way to describe it, but it's just a missing element for this industry, especially agencies. And somebody was asking me why is it that agencies have such a challenge with effective marketing? And there's a lot of things that go into it. Most don't have the bandwidth, they don't have the patients, they don't have all of these things that they go into it. But as much as anything, because they have not been intentional about running the business as their own, as we've described in the past. All too often they're almost like a franchise, or for the carriers, or just a distribution for the carriers, and they have lived off of the back of the marketing efforts of the agency.

Speaker 4: 9:04

And because Everybody goes out and competes in such a traditional manner of you know, they show up at renewal, they, you know talk about how long they've been in business. The carriers, they represent the gold status, the platinum status, the capabilities presentations. They give away promises of better service. Everybody has the same message. It's just whoever's going to win is usually whoever happened to tell it the best version of it that day. And they don't take the time to really go back to Storybrand to really understand who is their hero and what is their role and how do they help guide it and how can they verbalize and show that they empathize and understand the plight of their clients. And so we just have to hit that right out of the gate that if you want to stand out, you have to stand out from the very first message. Your brand starts with the very first exposure that anybody has to your idea, whether it's a post on LinkedIn, whether it's a blog, whether it's a visit to your website and everything else follows.

Speaker 1: 10:04

I'm sorry when do you go ahead.

Speaker 3: 10:07

It's setting up your marketing is setting up the conversation for your sales team, so you need those two things to be in alignment. So, while we look at the sales process as really being the foundational thing that an agency has to have super dialed in and be very consistent with that across the board, the marketing message needs to correlate to the sales process and people have to be prepared that, when they experience your marketing, that they are being set up for the proper conversation that they're going to have with the sales team.

Speaker 1: 10:41

To your point, kevin. I once told a friend of mine who wanted to work with me that their website was terrible and they said, okay, well, part of it. I said I don't know, I've never seen it, but I can tell you what's on it. And they said, okay. And I said it talks about all those things you just mentioned, what carriers they represent, whether they're gold or platinum or tinfoil or whatever their status is, and all that stuff. And he said, well, that stuff's important. I said, well, it should be, but it shouldn't be on your website. Even your mom doesn't care about that stuff.

Speaker 4: 11:10

That's absolutely right. That's absolutely right. And to Wendy's point, you know you think of one step further. Yes, marketing sets up the sales process, but the sales process sets up the client experience. And I mean, you know, you recognize, you know better than we do, david. When somebody wants to improve their marketing, that's the first thing they do is they go and they pretty up the website, they put lipstick, they put a new coat of lipstick on the pig.

Speaker 4: 11:33

You know, and you can't do it if, if, if, your true differentiator is about the client experience you deliver. That's what you have to start off focusing on. What is the client experience that we're committed to delivering? How do our clients benefit because they work with us instead of somebody else? Well, once you have that client experience defined, now you can make sure that your sales process is going to go through and set the expectation, define what that client experience needs to look like and that particular situation, so that it's properly set up. And now that you have your sales process to Wendy's point, now you can have effective marketing, because you're talking about something that sets up a sales process that leads to a client experience that means something to the buyer.

Speaker 3: 12:15

Yeah. So getting to a you know, a fresh new website, it's not a quick process because you have to go through all of those other things and you have to back your way into what is that message, to be able to put the website together. And people find it very frustrating. And when we start marketing engagements, we start with the foundation of the messaging, because nothing else matters.

Speaker 1: 12:38

No, and how often do you find that folks have used like 8000 times too many words? Oh, my gosh.

Speaker 3: 12:45

So so much. You know, like attention span is shrinking and we need to have less copy, and that's what you know, that's what we work on with people and it's like, okay, here's, you know, here's the copy block space that you get, and that's what we have to work with.

Speaker 1: 13:01

Yeah, if you can't. If you can't do it in, you know, storybrand calls it a one liner, which sometimes is two lines. But what is Forrester? The last research I saw, if it's, if it's web based messaging, you have fewer than 20 seconds to grab somebody's attention and show them that you understand and can solve the problem. They have Right, or they're off to the next website.

Speaker 3: 13:23

Yeah, the website cannot be about you. It has to be about them. And what are they going to get as a result of working with you? How are you going to make them look good?

Speaker 1: 13:34

Yeah, what we've told people is and I'll bet you find the same thing is take all that stuff that you think is important, put it a little corporate brochure, snail mail it to the client with a handwritten note a week before the appointment. It says something like when we meet, I want to focus on you, but I thought you'd like to learn a little bit about us.

Speaker 3: 13:53

Yeah, there you go.

Speaker 1: 13:55

It's very hard for folks to do, though, because for a lot of people, this is such an ego driven business. Yeah, how do you get folks past that?

Speaker 4: 14:03

Well, you have to hold up the mirror and show how ridiculous the messaging can be and how lazy we as an industry are when it comes to marketing Most websites. You go on, you click here and get a free quote. I mean, really, do you think that there's anything special in quoting? Or we're the fourth largest in the greatest metro area. We've been in business 37 years, and what do those things mean? And you know, we'll point out all the time if those, if taken, that position means anything that you've because I've been in business 37 years you should consider doing business. Then doesn't it seem logical that if you can find somebody that's been in business 38 years, that's a better option? Or if you promote yourself as the fourth largest in the market, what you've told them, if there's any value to that, that there's three better options? Of course, those don't mean anything, but you have to point out, of Ridiculousness though, how ridiculous it is and how little to nothing it means to a prospect to somebody coming to your website.

Speaker 1: 15:05

And, point of fact, it may actually turn people off. If I see somebody who's been in business for 38 years, I go well, that's really nice. But I wonder if they're using the most recent techniques. I wonder if they if they've updated stuff or they're just lather rinsing and repeating what they did 37 years ago.

Speaker 4: 15:19

Right, so how many times in this industry do they say all brokers are alike, all brokers are the same, and you know, all most websites do is reinforce that idea.

Speaker 1: 15:32

Yeah, sadly, that's true. That's absolutely true. But the first question you get when you're helping somebody build a marketing plan is how do I differentiate myself? Right, well, you've just undifferentiated yourself, so congrats, yeah.

Speaker 3: 15:45

Yeah, and it's work. It's just, you know there's all of that hard work that you have to put into thinking about who are you as an organization and how do you want to help others, and that's the foundation for being able to put any message together. So if you're not willing to do the time to figure out your message, you're going to look like everybody else.

Speaker 1: 16:11

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Speaker 1: 16:47

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Speaker 3: 17:45

I really like this question. This has been on my mind a lot lately With technology. Oh man, it's just been such an interesting to watch the landscape change over the years and technology was something that was such a struggle. I mean, I think about being in my agency back in the day and we introduced a complete online system and this was in the early 2000s and it was just like groundbreaking at the time.

Speaker 3: 18:16

And how many agencies we have run across over the years that still managed everything on spreadsheets, and people who, even when I say manage on spreadsheets, what I really mean is they're just using it as a Word document and they're not actually using Excel for the purpose that it was designed, which is calculations and automating and reporting. So I believe that everybody needs to really embrace technology and they need to think about how it's going to improve the operations of their organization and they need to recognize that it's difficult, it's not an easy transition to move into new types of technology, but that doesn't make that doesn't provide an excuse to not do it, and you have to look at where your inefficiencies are and figure out what are the technology pieces that you can bring in to improve those efficiencies.

Speaker 4: 19:17

I think the industry needs a more realistic approach as to what technology can actually do. You know we go out and you have to get over this. Technology is almost never the solution that automates the solution, and we're not an industry that as a whole, necessarily, is technically savvy. And I think because there's such limitations to technical ability, so often we go off on this quixotic pursuit of the perfect solution. And the perfect solution really doesn't exist, and if it's perfect, things change so fast it's going to be a momentary blip in time that it was perfect. You need to find one that is workable, that does the basic functions of whatever it is you're looking for, and that you believe in the people behind it to keep it current and relevant.

Speaker 3: 20:05

And you know, if the leader is not 100% behind this and believing in it and putting forth the money and also the time to make it happen, it's never going to work, because people truly do what the leader does. And if the leader dismisses the point of the technology, so is the rest of the team. So you might have a sales team of 5 or 10 or 15 people and have no access to data, have no idea who's in the pipeline and how much revenue you're talking about and whether they are moving ahead or whether they're stagnant, and in my mind, as a business owner, that's just unacceptable.

Speaker 1: 20:43

Yeah, it's an unusual leader. We find this a lot with CRMs and people using them. Salespeople hate CRMs.

Speaker 3: 20:50

Right.

Speaker 1: 20:51

But it's an unusual leader.

Speaker 3: 20:53

It's because it's been bad technology.

Speaker 1: 20:55

Yeah, well, you don't have to use the CRM, but you can't work here and not use the CRM. Yeah, you're 100% right. If it doesn't come from the top down, it doesn't happen. And yet it doesn't. And a lot of people who use the title leader have just distanced themselves from the day to day and don't really kind of get that, or have forgotten it from when they started breaking into the business. I want to move into another area. One of the things that you say in the book, especially in the sales pillar, is that creating opportunities is not scary or hard. What do you mean by that?

Speaker 4: 21:32

We say all the time that selling is a difficult and scary job and prospecting quite often is the most difficult, scariest part of that difficult and scary job. But we make it way scarier and way more difficult than it needs to be. We talk to producers all the time, david, who struggle putting opportunities in the pipeline, and the first place we go is to ask them well, how often are you going to your existing clients and asking for referrals, asking for introductions? And all too often the answer is we don't. We know we should, but we don't. And even when they do, then they're not getting the results and they're making it harder than they need to be. And the greatest opportunity a producer can put in the pipeline is a referral or introduction from an existing client who knows and has experienced the value. And we need to get over this head trash that we have, that it's scary to go ask somebody that you help on a daily basis to give you a little bit of help in return. You've proven yourself to them and you know and after your, after the listeners, have read our book.

Speaker 4: 22:39

Another book that we recommend quite often is called the Go-Giver. It's absolutely, it's a brilliant book and if you have any head trash of thinking that asking your clients for a referral and introduction is scary or might damage the relationship. Go-giver will give you a will, reframe that whole conversation and help you understand that not only will it not damage it, it will make the relationship stronger. At human nature, we like to do good things for people who have done good things for us, and when you get to that mindset and you believe in the value you deliver and you believe that if somebody chooses to work with us, they're going to be more successful because of it. I'm not going to go so far as to say that it completely makes it easy and simple, but it's a way easier lift to put opportunities in the pipeline once you really appreciate that of your own value.

Speaker 3: 23:31

You know, and I think also what's really important to understand is that you know, as Kevin pointed out, that the prospecting part can be scary, and I totally get that. I think that the selling part of it should really be thought of in a completely different way and when you get into the selling conversations, you should be educating people. That's the point of it. You should be listening, you should be understanding what is going on in their organization and what their needs are, and finding out what the you know, what those needs and what those opportunities are, and genuinely bringing them the solutions that you have that can help them address those needs and opportunities. And we look at that as educating. And we have a client who said that what you're doing is you're educating to the point of decision, and I think that's just a brilliant way of thinking about it and if you're doing your job right, they get to the end of that education process and they're like well, of course I need to work with you, yeah.

Speaker 4: 24:31

Yeah, and I think that the industry needs to stop thinking about the products themselves and focus on the problems they solve. That's Wendy's point You're educating around it, you're solving problems. And when you stop and you think about it, nobody cares about the products you sell until they know they have a problem that makes those products necessary. And when you lead the conversation focused on I don't know if you have the problem or not. Maybe you do, maybe you don't. A lot of employers do so. Let's figure out whether you do or not. And then the conversation leads back to the product. It's the same solution, it's the same product, but the conversation that leads to it. It's a quantum leap of difference between the two.

Speaker 1: 25:14

Yeah, absolutely, and most listeners probably don't know this. You guys do, but other than friends like you, folks that I invite on the podcast for the last we're in our eighth year of doing the podcast and for the last six years every guest has come from referrals. That's actually all we charge for being on the podcast is a minimum of three referrals to folks you think are doing really interesting stuff, and people love being asked and, more to the point, the people who are nominated love it as well, because now they know they've made an impact on the person who nominated them. So it's a win, win, win, win.

Speaker 3: 25:51

It's a nice little field of circle.

Speaker 1: 25:53

It is, it is, and we don't get enough of that, so I'll take it any time of the day or night that I can get it. A couple of other things before we wrap up here. One of the things that I know you talk about a lot is leadership, and it may not be something that people automatically think about in a sales environment. What is leadership in our area of mean, and why is it important to being able to be successful in sales?

Speaker 4: 26:20

I think any leadership is important at all levels, and leadership, as we primarily look at it, is not about a title, it's about influence, and that's really what we need to to lean into is the ability to influence, and, you know, any role within an organization is going to be better off when it's filled with a leader, when it's somebody who has influence and can share an opinion and and ideas with others.

Speaker 4: 26:48

That's primarily where we need to come from, but there's also there, there are structural things about being a leader that are important too, about, you know, setting goals, having an annual plan in place, monitoring your team, creating accountability.

Speaker 4: 27:04

Those are all things that that our industry struggles with because, as Wendy mentioned earlier, so many agencies the genesis they were selling for somebody else decided to go out on their own, maybe, brought an account manager with them, continued selling enough, hired a second account manager, maybe another producer, and they wake up one day they say, holy crap, I've built a business and I'm not entirely sure how to run it. They know how to sell, they know how to service, but the one piece that they they really struggle is just the foundational pieces of being a leader and you know, we, we leaders are admonished all the time to lead by example, and if you're self-reflective enough, you'll you'll ask the question, mind leading by example, and we say everybody leads by example. The question you really need to ask is where does the example I'm setting lead to? And you know, going back to to that intentional behavior, whether it's around leadership or around sales or marketing or service, there's just foundational building blocks that have been proven and, and you know, it doesn't require an advanced degree to be that effective leader.

Speaker 3: 28:11

But if you really want your organization and the people within it to to reach potential, it's not it's not an optional behavior and we're just in a different era of the type of environments that people want for for work. You know we went through a very cold period where businesses you know there were cold veils, you know the corporate veils, and there were walls around everything. And you know you would go to, you know you'd see company brochures back in the day and then you got to the point of being able to see the websites and there was nobody on there. Maybe they would show the CEO, maybe you know a couple of c-suite execs, but that would be it and there was no human connection to it. And people have just, you know, broken that apart and they they don't want that anymore. They want connection. They don't want to have connection in their personal life and then have a cold situation. They're coming into for work. They want personal connection there as well.

Speaker 3: 29:12

So it is, it's the leader's job at this point to create that kind of environment. So, going back to the intentionality and thinking, you know what kind of an environment are you going to create? Are you going to to create an environment that is pleasant enough for everybody to work in, where you have people come in and they just kind of clock in and clock out and you find yourself with transactional employees? Or are you going to have people come into the environment and really be excited about being there because they like their co-workers and they like the things that they get to work on and they really feel passionate about the mission of the business and what they're doing? It's just it. It falls to the leader to decide if they're going to create that type of environment or not.

Speaker 1: 29:57

Yeah, to Kevin's early experience. You know it's the difference between doing what most of us do in the benefits side, or even on the life or disability side, and what you do on the PC side is the difference between being transactional and being relational. I mean, this is pretty much always been a relationship business and I think it always will be. That's how the podcast started. Folks were worried. I was doing a talk and folks were worried about the navigators who were coming on from ACA and, oh my god, they're going to take my business, they're going to eat my children. It's going to be terrible. And I just said you need to check up from the neck up. The government can't have what you have, which is relationships.

Speaker 4: 30:37

I will challenge a little bit of that. And it is absolutely a relationship. I mean, relationships are always strong and they're meaningful, but it's no longer enough just to have a social relationship with, with somebody in this industry. And and what we say is, it's not nearly as much a relationship business as much as it is an advice and results business. And you know, everybody says, we'll know it's a relationship because you know, we hear the mantra all the time all things being equal.

Speaker 4: 31:03

People do business with those they know, like and trust and you think, okay, well, that reinforces this idea of being in relation. But I said, there's the key phrase in there is all things being equal and it's up to you to not let things be equal. Going back to your marketing, going back to your sales process, going back to your client experience, if you can articulate and demonstrate how you're not equal, that you deliver superior results, you're going to be winning opportunities that otherwise were lost to the relationship. As the tiebreaker, yeah, you, you always have to deliver yeah, and it's just a different type of relationship.

Speaker 3: 31:39

It's just a different take on what that relationship is.

Speaker 1: 31:43

You might want to go hang out with them and play golf, but they might not be a good relationship for helping you drive your business forward and the need for referrals, and all the things that we've talked about and all the things that are in your book, the salesperson's guide to growing a business. Wendy kevin, always great to talk with friends, but even better to have a serious discussion about what people can do to help grow their business.

Speaker 2: 32:05

Thanks for sharing your expertise with the audience thank you for allowing us shout out to the crew at grand river agency for their awesome post-production. This shift shapers podcast is copyrighted content and may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express written permission of shipchaper solutions llc. Copyright 2024.