This is a portion of my interview with Eric Brocksome from Vsquared Creative. Eric has the soul of a salesman and I have been selling since 2004. The goal of ANY and EVERY business is to be a referral based business. Just sit back and watch the phone blow up. What they don’t tell you, is that takes YEARS of hard, systematic, smart work to make happen.
We talk about his time in the insurance industry and how he helped grow a book of business through building strong trusting relationships. Many of us had to start of cold calling and some people swear that it still works. I tend to think cold calling isn’t the best use of our time. I find it archaic. Eric and I discuss how to start down the path of building an ongoing referral network.
Matt: Good producers are really hard to find. What kind of things do you do to earn business back in your producing days? Because the kind of work that goes into that is the work that people just don’t have installed in them. They’re not willing to make the dials or to shake hands and ask the questions. So what made you a good producer? 07:00
Eric: I mean, let’s face it. Nobody likes a cold call, right. That’s a dying art, nobody likes it.
Matt: You want to work hard to avoid doing the cold calls.
Eric: Sure. What I always say is that if you’re making cold calls you’re doing it wrong. There are so many important things you can do that works so much better. If you have to make cold calls, you either don’t have the qualifications or the training to sell yet or you really just aren’t that effective at building relationships to generate leads. So that’s what I did. We spent 90% of our effort in marketing around relationship selling 07:37 . And to this day I think he still does most of his business by way of referral only. And we really believed that philosophy.
We thought the best business that we can get would come from people who had either already worked with us and used us, or believed in us and knew how solid we were. Or, it was somebody that was acquainted with us that would mention our names, like a real estate agent or a loan officer, or a title officer. 08:00 Somebody that could vouch for our credibility. And the rates would come and go. And we weren’t always the cheapest and weren’t always the most expensive, but the way we would consistently earn business was that they were already warmed up to us so it was a referral.
Matt: Yeah. They wanted to be with Eric or they wanted to be with Ryan. So they essentially buy you.
Eric: So it was all the relationships, for the most part, that gave us the advantage or the leverage to make those new client deals. 08:29
Matt: So what kind of things did you do to build those relationships? These things take time. The other thing about being new is that sometimes you’ve impatient.
Eric: Absolutely and you’re flying by the seat of your pants a lot
Matt: Cause you’ve got to make money, too.
Eric: You have to take what comes to you, that’s hard because sometimes you end up taking clients that aren’t a good fit for your agency. And people will leave for the same reason they come to you, so if you’ve been the least expensive or have built your practice around having the best rates, as soon as those rates change, 09:01 people jump in a raft out of the ship, not wanting to pay the rates. And that’s all they care about: Bottom line and how much it’s gonna cost. So
yeah, I mean, I think what we did was to try to go out and get to know the people that could impact our bottom line. Especially loan officers. We’d take them out golfing and take them out for happy hours. Bringing them treats, buying them lunches. Sending thank you cards was huge.09:31 Any time we got a referral. Any time we got a referral we’d send out a thank you note. We had systems for all of this. We would check it off and keep track of how many times I visited and how many referrals I had sent. So I had to really dial in who I was working with. And if somebody started to fall off I would check in on them to make sure they were okay and happy, and replace them when we lose them. Because sometimes people quit or disappear. 09:57 So we definitely had a system for it and it worked great. We built a 2400-2500 policy agency over the course of about 4 years.
Matt: That’s nice. I think that a thing a lot of people don’t realize is that when you’re building relationships, I believe that there’s a finite number of relationships you can build with people that will absolutely sustain your business. You don’t need 20 people. I mean that sounds great and I’d love to have 20 people sending me business 10:28 but I couldn’t handle it, it’s too much work. So if you can cultivate whatever your number is: 4, 5 or 6 decent relationships that are sending you regular business and you take care of them, then your work is done. But that could take a couple years.
Eric: It takes time to build it up. The trust and the credibility and the authority take time for people to get to know. Sometimes you need social proof. People need to see you doing what they want you to do, and they go ”oh yeah that guy has the credibility and he knows what he’s doing”.11:01 Or ”that girl is smart and she knows her stuff, so I’m gonna work with them”. And you’re right, it does take time.
Matt: You have to do what you say you’re gonna do too.
Eric: Yeah, the follow through is huge.
Links
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