The Insurance Dudes
New to the high-octane world of insurance agency ownership with The Insurance Dudes© ? Looking for answers on how to make it happen?
Hosted by industry veterans Jason Feltman and Craig Pretzinger, this podcast is your no-holds-barred guide to dominating the insurance game. With decades of combined experience and a track record of building some of the most successful agencies in the business, Jason and Craig are here to share their hard-won insights and proven strategies.
You're here just in time for Season 4 of the Insurance Dudes©. Craig and Jason powered through Covid, amassing over $10 million in new annualized auto premium in just a couple years. We were locked down anyway, what else was there to do?
This power team launched the Insurance Dudes© Podcast back in 2018. Learning bits and pieces of the overall blueprint by simultaneously growing their books and audience, the duo set their eyes from solely growing their own agencies, to an intentional and service-driven mission to help other agents avoid all the costly mistakes it took them to get to where they are now.
Each week, The Insurance Dudes© tackle the hot topics and challenges facing insurance agents and agency owners. From lead generation and sales scripts to hiring, training, and everything in between, no topic is off-limits and no punches are pulled.
This isn't your typical dry, technical insurance podcast. Jason and Craig bring a fresh, irreverent approach to the mic, infusing each episode with their signature blend of humor, storytelling, and straight talk.
They'll make you laugh, they'll make you think, and most importantly, they'll give you the tools and inspiration you need to take your insurance business to the next level.
So whether you're a seasoned veteran looking to stay sharp or a hungry newcomer ready to make your mark, The Insurance Dudes© Podcast is your essential listen. Tune in each week for actionable advice, insider stories, and a hefty dose of insurance industry reality.
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Keywords: insurance sales, insurance marketing, insurance leads, insurance agency, sales training, sales strategy, insurance industry, entrepreneurship, p&c leads, p&c telemarketer hiring, p&c telefunnel, insurance telefunnel, insurance agent, insurance agency ownership
The Insurance Dudes
AI Takeover? Will You Be Blockbuster or Netflix?
Welcome back to another exciting episode of The Insurance Dudes! Today, we're diving into a critical conversation on the AI takeover and what this means for your insurance agency. Are you going to be a Blockbuster or a Netflix in the evolving landscape of AI? Join your host, Craig Pretzinger, as he shares a compelling story of an insurance agent grappling with competition from an AI-powered insurance platform. Craig breaks down the transformative power of AI, its impact on jobs, and how it can revolutionize your business if you embrace it. From the historical significance of major tech shifts to practical applications of AI like chatbots and automation, this episode is packed with insights and strategies to ensure your agency thrives in this new AI-driven world. Plus, Craig shares real-world examples and even a cheat sheet to help you get started with ChatGPT. Tune in, get inspired, and make sure you’re on the cutting edge of innovation!
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Craig Pretzinger & Jason Feltman
The Insurance Dudes
The AI takeover. Are you going to be Blockbuster? Are you going to be Netflix? Definitely want to be Netflix, right, all right.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to dive into a quick story here about an insurance agent. I know, let's call him Jason. No, no, let's not call him Jason, let's call her Jasafine. Jasafine has an agency out in Colorado and just closed a big client. His team had a big day, closed somebody that was about six 7,000 in premium. They call back the next week and start talking to the sales agents saying, hey, I know I signed up, but I just came across this AI-powered insurance platform and it promises that I can get better rates based off of how I'm going to drive, not based on how I did drive. So his heart starts to sink, her heart starts to sink, and she may feel a little panicky, right? And the thought is is this the beginning of the end for the agency, right? Well, let me tell you, my friend, I am here by myself, because Mr Jason is not here, which is why I shared the story about Jessafine. The answer is no. Well, the answer actually is probably, or it can be, no. Now is it the beginning of the end for some agents? 100%, 100%, but it doesn't have to be right.
Speaker 1:The key is to embracing AI. Ai is very, very critical. I know that you may have just rolled your eyes If you're anything like my wife, anytime that somebody talks or brings up very key movers of our civilization that have occurred. This is one of them. You can go back to fire, you can go back to the wheel, you can go back to spoken language, you can go back to written language, you can go to the car, the airplane, right, significant things that have made a huge impact and affected our daily life and changed everything.
Speaker 1:The internet. Remember how? I don't know if it. Well, some of you probably don't remember, but I could definitely remember when the internet came out, I was so stoked I mean, I was like holy crap, this is what you know, this is what they've been talking about, this is what we, this is the future right. And there were many people like my folks, my parents, would say, oh, what is that? My grandpa I remember my grandparents like I'm not going on that, what is that? That's stupid, right. And this is like back then, having a computer wasn't as important, right? But the internet put the computers on everybody's desk.
Speaker 1:So what is AI going to do, right? What things are AI going to do? One thing that we know for certain that it's going to cause is job losses. It's going to replace a lot of people. Okay, if you haven't gotten down and dirty into the world of AI, I'm hopeful that I could shed a little light on it for you. But by the end of this, you're going to have some great information on what it is, how to use it and why it's so important. So you got to stick with me on this one.
Speaker 1:But this stat is the one that freaks me out, okay, because it has really far reaching consequences and nobody's immune to it. This will affect every single person in the country. Okay, it's such a big number and it's going to happen so soon that it's kind of scary. Okay, so some of the big thought leaders in the AI world conservatively estimate that 85 million jobs are going to evaporate by 2025. Now, this isn't something I'm making up to shock everybody. This isn't something that you know and it's not something that's secret. This is something that is talked about and they're saying a conservative number. Now, I sure hope that I misheard that, because I could guarantee that insurance agencies aren't going to be immune. But here's the thing this is what I'm certain of is that the agencies that thrive in the new world, that embrace the power of AI and don't fight against it, are going to succeed and are going to thrive. Now, I've been elbows deep for well over a year and we've been using automations and all kinds of things like that in our agencies and for other businesses for years, so making the leap between was more of a finally it's here for me, right, kind of like for NVIDIA.
Speaker 1:If you're not familiar with NVIDIA, it's what's driving, it's the hardware behind everything, right, the AI requires a massive amount of processing power, and so there's these farms filled with NVIDIA processors just to run these things. So what are they running? What is it? Well, it's called an LLM, okay. So if you haven't heard the term LLM, you may find it interesting to know that it stands for not laser lunges metrics. No, it stands for large language model, and I'm sorry you can't land every joke. So what do these tools do? What the heck is an LLM? Where can I find them? Well, think about this. It's the engine. No, it's the brain behind automation, okay, so if you can think back to chatbots, back in, you know, from a year ago, or even from a month ago to when they came out chatbots.
Speaker 1:You go to a website. A little thing pops up. It says hey, I'm Zappy the App Chat, and then you get to pick between five things. The thing that you need is not amongst the list of the five things, so you have to pick the thing that's closest, which isn't even close. Blah, blah, blah. So you have to pick the thing that's closest, which isn't even close, blah, blah, blah. Right, so those were not AI driven, those were just logic and it was hard-coded logic. So what would happen is somebody goes in and just basically programs this thing right, they program the bot to. If it does this, then this, and you only give them this choice. It's a flow chart. So very simple, very annoying to interact with because it had no personality or it has a fake personality. That is the same every time. Okay, so it has no learning skills, has no ability to adapt, has no ability to think on the fly, has no ability to execute anything really beyond those instructions. That's there.
Speaker 1:Okay, so now introduce what's just recently come out. And we're talking over the last year. Okay, so, over the last year. If you got on ChatGPT at the very, very beginning. Then you're more familiar with it and the changes that have happened. But over the last year that you're more familiar with it and the changes that have happened, but over the last year, it's insane how much faster, how much better and how much more knowledgeable and how much more can be done by one of these assistants. Now they call them, right, a chatbot assistant and anybody can make these things. So it's really good.
Speaker 1:Now, this isn't going to when we go. We're not going to go very deep into that. We're going to stay high level on this one. I'm going to do a few episodes here and we'll tear through. So but let's talk about some success stories.
Speaker 1:Okay, I think that before we dive in, we get into the nitty gritty of it. I think it's important just to hear like application right Does, does this apply? And it does. There's a billion use cases, even in your agency, even that don't need to be client facing. So if there's concerns about the C word, not the bad word, well, some people call it bad word, it's not four letters, but that C word is a non-issue, because you can help by installing a lot of things that have nothing to do with the actual inner workings or mechanisms of the agency and aren't necessarily holding any information on the client outside of the system. So I think that's one of the biggest hiccups and issues that carriers have is they consider the data like the personal data of the client. They consider that theirs. So we have to honor that right. If that's the rule, that's the rule. So don't share the data, right. If you buy a lead, I don't know, I think that there's a line there, right, because if I paid for that data, that I own that data, in my opinion. Now, I'm not an attorney, but I am babbling, so we'll move on All right.
Speaker 1:So let's look at these real world examples. I have one agency that I've talked to, and actually many agencies because we've brought this up in our elite group and hand over with the teledudes and just a lot of the agents that we interact and serve have used these for a multitude of different things. But one agency was struggling with high volume of inquiries, so they were a larger agency. I think it was like 15 million, 15 million a premium, and they have a lot of inbound calls, but they were running pretty lean, a lot like me. We're at $12 billion and we've got less sales or less service people than most $12 billion agencies. Because we have a lot of automation in place to pick up that slack, because it's a lot less expensive to handle some of the stuff that could be automated in a way than it is to bring somebody on right. If we're going to bring somebody on for a job that is going to cost me 50K to have that person here, then I better get some kind of return on it. Right Now I could build something for myself, create some automation to replace somebody that would be doing the $50,000 a year.
Speaker 1:And guess what? In addition to that, that person or that entity is never going to call in sick, is never going to cause any drama, is never going to do anything. That I find annoying. Well, no, it probably will say something. Uh, when I've said jokes to it, but for the most part it it will play better than most people Right now. It has to be directed, but again, so do people. So pretty interesting, right? Uh, what happens? So? So in the before they put this thing in place, uh, people were getting voicemails.
Speaker 1:People were not getting calls back. They're getting pretty pissed. That's what he was telling me. So I just said hey, man, why don't you just put something in place that handles the traffic, just to let them know? It doesn't need to even be the voicemail, just something like hey, everybody's on the phone, we'll get back to you ASAP, and then put that reminder somewhere so that somebody knows how to do it? We pretty much set the same thing up over here, so that no calls are run into voicemail, no calls are just disappearing because, depending on your carrier, there could be strange phone systems and strange voicemail systems in the background where nobody knows where they go Just one thing that I've seen happen to me. So that's a possibility.
Speaker 1:And so what does it do? What were the big improvements we got? Our response time is way quicker. Right, I'm not getting complaints. The other agency same thing. I just modeled what they did and he did what I'd asked him. So I guess I modeled what I told him. But what did we do? And he's able to get more Google reviews as a result. He created an automation that asks for Google reviews, sends them directly there, and he used one of our tricks that we've talked about before, which is you could set it up where you have a W landing page and you ask people what they would rate it. If they click a one, two or three, you just send them to the thank you page and say thank you for your thing. Is there anything we could do to make it a four or five or to get you to a five, and we'll try to get some feedback because we definitely want to try to improve scores, and then, if there are four or five, it will kick them over to the Google page where then they're going to leave the real review. So it's just a way to filter and make sure that we don't get people put ones and twos and stuff. In fact I've had people leave great reviews and then put a one because they think one is good. You know, like it's a one through five, it's a one.
Speaker 1:I thought that Google made it pretty clear, but you never know with folks what else. So here's another one. This isn't even with the agency, but with Teledudes and our marketing campaigns there. And since a lot of folks probably listening have probably been served the ads that we do, all these crazy ads with the AI pictures, we had something happen with the content provider or the host of our site and what we did from that was or. I'm sorry, what happened as a result for that, they did something with the code. That wasn't us was. It was on their side, but it killed traffic like all of a sudden. We went from, you know, or we have ads we have 500 to a thousand hits coming in a day to almost non-existent, just organic traffic well, you know, like 100 a day. So we were scrambling, trying to figure out what to do, because we have ads running right, people clicking, no traffic. That's a problem, right. So we actually had.
Speaker 1:I took an assistant, an AI assistant. I gave it all of the code from the webpage, which is probably more than most agents are going to do for stuff, but it's important to understand the depth of what it could do. So I had to analyze the code. It kicked me back a message saying that there were bugs in that code. That was not my code, that was ClickFunnels code. So basically, the site had done something, had wigged out, and what we did was we were able to basically reconstruct the site, put it on a different platform and get it up and running again, and now we have it in there analyzing our stats weekly to tell us what we should change, because it could also look at where people are going on the site, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:So I know I went a little too far in the weeds there, but it's real important to understand that you can put it on things that it understands and it's been trained on. And it's been trained on a lot of things, right Like, it's been trained on basically everything, at least at a high level, and it's going to understand. And if it doesn't understand or it gives you a weird answer, you continue to ask for clarification. Right, I usually ask for clarification even if I get a good answer, because you never know, right Like it could sound pretty convincing with a completely wrong answer, which is really interesting. So that problem solved less than a day, the old way, I mean, we could have been down for weeks, but it increased our conversions To offertheidewscom, which is Internet Lead Secrets. That's the ad right, that's our funnel. So you go to Internet Lead Secrets and we had a 40% increase in purchases on Internet Lead Secrets just by well fixing the code.
Speaker 1:And then it also gave throughout doing a number of split tests. It kept giving us recommendations on which one to go with or which headline to change or which button to change color. So really crazy stuff, really really deep, interesting stuff. So, oh, and even on the back. So, if anybody that has got that before, anybody that's actually gotten Internet Elite Secrets, you know that the second page has a script, or the perfect script, and it analyzed the traffic on that and also improved that which it should be. 100% take rate, because that's a no brainer. But at the end of the day it is what it is and folks are skeptical.
Speaker 1:But yeah, that has been very effective and you can use it for so many things. Right, you could have it help you craft emails. Have it help you craft a copy for websites, have it do anything or anything with writing. But again, you don't ask it to write something for you and then copy and paste or you will not look good. Be very careful, all right. So I have also made for you a cheat sheet, all right. So I gave you a cheat sheet that has information on how to go on, what ChatGPT is where to go. It has some recommendations on what to do. So on that cheat sheet, it's going to tell you to sign up.
Speaker 1:I would highly encourage you to pay the 20 bucks a month. 20 bucks, it's 20 bucks. Pay 20 bucks a month. I don't get anything for doing this. I don't work for ChatGPT, but it has changed my life. Get in there and you're going to be way ahead of most people. Now, remember the title of this episode Blockbuster Netflix. I'm telling you, the blockbusters of the insurance world are not going to have a chat GPT account.
Speaker 1:That is a guarantee. And start small, right, start small, do little projects. But ideally, this is where an agency owner should be working. Right, working in the place that is, generating the tools and resources and information that their team could use or that they could use to train their team or that they could use to drive more traffic to their team. Right, you get leverage as an agent the more that you can automate, the more that you can delegate and the more that you can create and eject. Right, I'm on here creating information to help you, create information to help your team, because that's what I do here.
Speaker 1:Right, I don't go out there and sell policies. I don't go out there and take payments. I mean, I pulled up one day recently and somebody was in the parking lot waiting for an appointment to talk to somebody and they're like oh, are you Craig? I said oh no, I'm just here to you know I don't meet with the clients and, if you like to, fantastic. Just ask yourself if meeting with somebody who has $2,000 in premium with you is worth the $150 for the time that you're spending. Is it worth it? Is it generating more? Right? Yeah, I upsold a mariner's policy, great. So you got an extra $10 a year for the hour and a half that you worked. What if that hour was spent on developing a new, unique mechanism that would drive more traffic to your agency? What if that hour was spent making a video that explained to your team how to do something? Or explained to your customers how to do something? Or building a YouTube channel or something else that's going to make long-term, lasting impact on your agency? And that's where I'm going to leave it.
Speaker 1:We're going to dive into ChatGPT next time, but make sure you go in the show notes, download the cheat sheet, okay, and we will dive in and go deep. Thank you and appreciate you listening. Make sure to. If you do want to check out if you didn't check out the thing I was talking about that we've totally revamped as a result of what? Of the tools that are out there, head over to offertheidudescom. That's offertheidudescom and you can download your copy of Internet Lead Secrets for a very reasonable amount. We put a lot of work into it and it is very helpful, and it's not unfair to ask to be paid for our work. So we appreciate you and we hope we see you soon. Thank you very much.