​The Power of The Permission to Believe.
 
When you are following up on a Lead, it's very tempting to assume it is a Lay Down Sale.  After all, the person filled out a form online, or was phone verified or even Warm Transferred to you.  But the prospect still needs to know they will benefit by spending the time with you.
 
If for example you are getting auto insurance Leads, just get Leads with people you know you can help and start the conversation with that.  "The reason I reached out to you is I see you are with XYZ company and for whatever reason they charge a lot more in (their state) for the same coverage than my companies do, so I know I can save you money.  Most of my clients can even get better coverage and save money both."
 
Compare that to what 99% of Auto insurance agents say which is some variation of “I see that you filled out a form online, I’d like to verify all of your information, so I can give you a quote.”  I’m not saying that won’t work a percentage of the time, or that it is really a horrible opening, these people did fill out a form online after all.  But if they are past the moment when they were concerned about what their auto insurance cost and are now distracted by something else, it doesn’t give them a great reason to believe it is a good use of their time to go through the quote process.
 
I call it The Permission to Believe.  Give them The Permission to Believe that if they go through your sales process they will come out better off than they were before.

“I want to be able to make my son breakfast in the morning.”

I was sitting across the table at a local Starbucks while a young insurance agent shared his hopes and dreams, his challenges and his struggles.  He was working very hard, working long hours, doing everything his boss told him to do and it seemed like it was paying off; he was the number two agent in the office after just six months.

But he was working long hours, was constantly tired and despite being the number two agent in the office, he wasn’t bringing home enough money to pay all the bills and his wife had to keep working a job she hated instead of spending her time raising their young family.

When I see someone working hard, really hard, and not making enough money in an industry where others are able to make a good six figure income it sets off some red flags for me.  Something was wrong.  Not with him, he was sharp young fellow and working hard.  He read books on sales, he really put in the effort, both in his education and his work ethic.  But his efforts weren’t paying off for him financially as well as it was for other people.

So we dove down into his specific situation.  The biggest points were that he was cold calling to get customers, making sales face to face, and he was a captive agent.  Now sometimes a captive agent can be in a really good position if the company has great name recognition and provides their agents with Leads and what I call “The Magic Sticker” on the window.  If you have that Magic Sticker from a company with great Brand Recognition, you can get a lot of business just from that.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case for him.

Cold calling just isn’t a great use of an agent’s time, when good, targeted Leads are available at a reasonable price.  He was spending a lot of time and emotional energy generating his own Leads.

Making sales face to face can be great, but it can also be time consuming and when you are aiming a lot of sales by doing your own cold calling to generate your Leads AND selling face to face, it doesn’t leave a lot of time for your family.

His contract was for half of the percentage that it should have been.  The math is pretty easy, if you make half the percentage then you make half the money for the same amount of work.

To make matters worse, the company that he was captive with was declining 50% of his sales.  Or rather they would have if he had submitted them, because that company didn’t offer a Guaranteed Issue option.

So he was doing all of the work for his marketing and making one fourth of what another agent would make with the same activities, let alone the time invested.

By now you are probably expecting me to say that he bought my Leads, and everything was sunshine and rainbows and we rode off into the sunset together, but this isn’t my story.  He did try my Text Verified Leads and he liked the quality and made sales, but he was offered an amazing once in a lifetime opportunity with another Lead company and he went with that, and it paid off for him. 

He got better contracts that paid twice as much, he got guaranteed Issue options and closed a lot higher percentage plus he started getting 40 leads a day all of which enabled him to take home FOUR TIMES as much money in less time, with less effort and much less stress.
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As Amazing Once In A Lifetime Opportunities often do, his ended after less than a year.  But now he has the tools in place.  Maybe he will start buying my Leads again and I hope that he does.  But I am confident that he will succeed either way, because he has the contracts, the tools, the personal drive and most importantly the knowledge that he has done it before and he knows he can do it again.

Why aren’t my digital ads performing?

You may have restricted your ads to only going to people in your market area.  You may have targeted websites about certain subjects.  You didn’t pay a flat rate per month, you only paid when your ads were delivered, and you got a great price.  Your ads were crafted after hours of intense effort.  And yet, the campaign bombed.  What happened?

The short answer may be, robots don’t care about what you are selling.

There are four main challenges with getting good results from your digital advertising.  One is the websites themselves.  Many websites don’t have the good content that makes you look good by being advertised on the site.  Many websites are pushing up their visitor count by buying cheap traffic, and cheap typically means low quality.  For a website owner trying to sell exposures on his site, those 29,000 “Visitors” a day from popup ads and additional tab openings, etc. are just as valuable a commodity as the 1,000 visitors a day he gets from Facebook.  It’s entirely possible that 29 times out of 30, your lovingly crafted ad was never seen.  And those visitors from Facebook and other legitimate websites?  If they clicked on the “You won’t believe what happened next!” ads, they probably aren’t that interested in what you are selling.  But at least they were real humans, right?  That bad news is, that might be the good news.

The really bad news?  The humans might not be humans either.  When a computer gets infected by malware that opens a virtual browser and goes to the website, it looks real.  But no one is seeing your wonderful ad but a malware bot.  Luckily the infected computers are in the minority, but they don’t go to work in the morning or sleep at night so they may make up the majority of the “high quality” website traffic that your ad goes to.

The third problem?  Most people, even when they are humans and are really looking at your ad, aren’t prospects for your service.  They just aren’t.  They might lack the money or not be a good prospect for any number of reasons.
The fourth problem?  If that beautiful ad that doesn’t communicate who you are, have a benefit statement, and call to action it probably isn’t getting the job done.  You may only have a fraction of a second to get to their attention.  Use it wisely.
You may be depressed at this point, but you CAN get good results!    

1.  Start with good ads.  There are design steps to triple your results or better.
2.  Exclude websites with poor results, there are over 80 million websites in the USA but there are only about a million sites worth spending your advertising dollars on.   That's about half of the sites that will cheerfully accept your marketing dollars.
3.  Target the specific people that are prospects.  Not just someone on a website about cameras, but someone that can afford to buy a camera.  An ad on a website for business content is one thing, an ad delivered to someone at a specific type, size and location of business is better.
4.  Balance the delivery of your ads among the people or businesses you are targeting.  Don’t let a small number of people or malware bots suck up your display budget.

 
Digital ads work.  You just need the right ads to be seen by the right people.  Robots are awesome, but they don't buy stuff.