SPEAKER_01 0:00

Craig, have you ever spent a ton of money on leads and marketing and stuff and then it just falls apart and like No, never. It works perfect. You usually had a terrible experience, didn't you?

SPEAKER_00 0:09

No fat, no light, no fun, for God, dance or instructions. Did it's been it's been a fun little stretch here.

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Yeah. The year, I would say since the towards the end of last year, it's been crazy with leads and phone systems and trying to get the sales that used to be so easy. Right. Well, to compare with now, yes. A lot, a lot easier. And it just and it's been a roller coaster. Like you think things are starting to work again, but they're falling apart. There's been weeks of like, oh my gosh. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

Like, is is are is this the end? I mean, quite possibly. No. It's been it's been really tough, man. I'm not gonna lie.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

The lead, the remember that the beginning of the year, the lead companies had that big audit.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:07

Well, that this affected every single lead company.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Right. And this is after we already had the whole scare of it was gonna be the one-to-one, which that would have been just a freaking nightmare, right? Yep. And then towards the luckily went away.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

Yeah. And then towards the end of last year, we had the new iOS changes that does the screening. There's the new Android changes that it does the phone call screening as well. Have you seen it on the iPhone?

SPEAKER_00 1:34

Like what it looks like. Yeah, it's wild, dude. I saw my wife showed me.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

So there's been a lot of pivoting, a lot of scares, a lot of changes. Is thing are are things going to be able to be the same way that they were? Are we ever going to be able to sell like we used to?

SPEAKER_00 1:52

There's a lot of question marks.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

Yeah. Let's dive into this mailbag. Let's dive into this mailbag. So let's just talk about what the big problem is here. It's a lot of things. Yeah. We we need we need to get these sales. Like right. I mean, everybody's goals are extremely high.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

Right. And our commissions are extremely low.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

Yes. So things are tighter than they used to be, but like things are not tighter on just commissions, but they're tighter on the way we're acquiring business, the what is becoming more expensive. So what do we do?

SPEAKER_00 2:25

Right. Assuming that we uh, you know, you have some amount of quotes that have to be done per month to hit some goal, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:33

Which is a lot. In order to really do anything in this business, you have to do a lot of quotes. Yeah. Hundreds, if not thousands, right? A month. So how can you drive that the best way? I mean, historically, for over the last seven, eight years, it's been, you know, buy the internet leads, put it in telemarketers, telemarketers transfer them. And that's been the best cost per sale. And I mean, still, I it still is, but now there's been some challenges. Yeah. So what are people trying to do? Well, what are they trying to do?

SPEAKER_01 3:02

Yeah. What what are agents trying to do right now?

SPEAKER_00 3:04

Try to get business the same way. Right. Well, but the challenge, I think, has been has been what's going on with this, with, with contact rates, right? Right.

SPEAKER_01 3:15

But agents are buying leads, right? Because because we're seeing this, they're changing things rapidly. So within all of all of these hurdles and stuff, what we're, you know, agents can be a little, how should we say, a little emotional, a little trigger happy. So they're they're cutting off leads, they're buying other leads, they're trying different systems, they're firing some people, they're hiring other people. Right. And so what that creates is chaos. Yeah. You know, like if you're not doing something consistently, you can't track and measure it, like we talked about before. You can't track and measure it and know like what levers to pull. You're not looking at data for levers to pull because you're doing these huge reactionary things, right? Yeah. Like we know that we know that our agents, in order to sell, they they have to be on the phone. And we know that there's not enough walk-ins, at least here.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

I mean, dude, there's not enough walk-ins anywhere. Unless you had a line out that literally, literally, a line out the door. What about Christopher Walkins?

SPEAKER_01 4:20

There's only one of him. Anyways, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:22

So Do you know how uncomfortable this watch?

SPEAKER_01 4:27

So we know that they have to talk on the phone because they're not, there's not enough people coming into the agency to make enough sales to make the numbers that we need to make. So the only way to sell a policy is to talk to somebody on the phone. So that's a fact, right? So the most expensive person in the agency, even more than marketing, is the employee. Like on the balance sheet, they are very, very excited. That's a fixed cost, right? So a lot of agents think like, you know, hire a new person. Well, we all know it takes a long time to ramp somebody up. We also know that, I mean, I don't care if they bring in, you know, their deck sheets and all this craziness, which could you imagine if somebody did that at McDonald's? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. As long as you bring in 10 people a week to buy her hamburgers, you can work here. Anyways, I digress. The the best thing that you can do for that person that's costing four or five grand a month in your agency is making sure that they're busy talking to people. That's what their skill is, right? Right.

SPEAKER_00 5:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

And and if they're not talking to people and they're not making commission, are they looking for another job? Yes. A hundred percent. So we we have this.

SPEAKER_00 5:35

There's not even a doubt. There's no question.

SPEAKER_01 5:37

Yeah. So people are doing things like cutting out their callers, cutting out the leads, and their agents are are not making the sales that they want and not getting the commissions that they want.

SPEAKER_00 5:48

This is this is it's like you have the race car and it's making a noise and it's not driving as fast. And you say, I'm gonna pull the gas and I'm gonna pull the oil. Then let's see what happens. Thing blows up, right? Like, I mean, it's been somewhat emotional around here because of some issues with a phone company and contact rate as a result and some screwy business with phone numbers. And it it became as as much as I know from the last eight years of doing this, you know, that it is some, it's it's some number and you don't pull the plug, right? Like the one thing is no matter how much you're freaking out, you don't pull the plug. Because if you pull the plug, then it's it's that's it. I mean, there's no coming back. So it's been difficult to say, you know, I mean, my my ops guy was like, should we cut the leads? Should we like, no, we don't change anything. We can't change anything. We have to identify which lever it is that's screwed up, right? Because if we start pulling all the levers down, there's no way to troubleshoot. Don't pull the gas and the oil and the friggin' air filter off because now what uh uh what does that tell us? I have no idea now what's wrong with the damn car, right? So, so it was it was the phone lines, right? It's it's it's contact rate. Before we get into this, yeah, sorry.

SPEAKER_01 7:07

Let's let's you and I haven't had this conversation in a while. That's why we wanted to have it on here, is that we've identified most of the problems within the sales system that out of all of these huge hurdles that have happened over the last six months, and we're gonna go through each one individually because the answer is definitely not pullback, right? Right. Okay. I jumped the gun. So one of the things that you identified recently was your sales were going down. So let's talk about the whole what what is the funnel? You have leads. Right. Right. Then you have callers on those leads that uses a phone system. They usually have a lot of phone numbers because you want to make outbound dials with them. And right now, what's what's happened with the Android and iOS means that you might not be getting through as much. Right. So, like one of the things with that is like don't say it's Sam from the whatever agency, right? When it says like name of caller. Just say Sam. That's it. And then leave it at that. With what company? Don't say anything. Okay, that's tip number one. But like you make it the outbound dials. So you have to have a lot of phone numbers and you gotta you gotta get them through to getting them on the line. And a lot of times people think that it might be the caller, right? Like the caller sucks. Yeah. But now we have Android iOS, but you also have the phone numbers and contact rates. See, your callers can't get those leads over to your sales team if they can't get the contacts on the phone. So what's another piece that it could be? It's the phone numbers, right? And then once they transfer them over, okay, next step, next step, right? But for you, you had that issue. Boom. We don't have that many transfers right now. And so what happened?

SPEAKER_00 8:53

So uh it's it now, it's dig in. Okay, well, I mean, I I had to go in and try to learn as much as possible about freaking phone numbers and how this works and why what gets marked spam likely and what what doesn't, because I wasn't getting good answers from a place I was talking to, right, that supplied the numbers. So really, really fascinating information, you know, about how these things work. And it doesn't work the same as it has been, right? We for how long would we do, we'd say, okay, we're gonna arrest our numbers for a week and then we're gonna flip them to the other ones, or we just gonna delete all the numbers and buy a whole bunch of new ones, right? That doesn't work anymore. Like you there's there's equity in the numbers and you got to hold on to them, which which seems crazy, you know. But I mean, sh at my new my new one, I have six hundred, I bought six hundred numbers. That is the most ridiculous amount of numbers I've hundred, right? But there's ten telemarketers. So we need that many. If because this is the other thing that that's so nuts is is how few dials you really must make off of each line. And I don't know if I should talk about that yet. Should I?

SPEAKER_01 10:04

Well, yeah, I want you to talk about like what you realize and all the different pieces of it, because I don't think some people realize like that they have to buy numbers. You dude, you can't have your team with a low, low, low, low, low contact rate making all these dials, getting a 5%, 3% contact rate.

SPEAKER_00 10:27

It's like, dude, you're never, you're you're never gonna like it it's fascinating. You look at your numbers that like how many outbounds went. And if you have some of your phone lines are making 200 dials and you're all stoked because you got a 20% contact rate, guess what? You if you made 200 dials off of one line, tomorrow you are not gonna have a 20% contact rate. Tomorrow you're gonna have a 3% contact rate. I mean, that's because if it's not marked, it will be like like how easy is it to mark somebody a spam now, right? Right. Like if you don't see the number and they blow you up, they push one button. That's it. It's easier to to put somebody on the spam list than it is to order food from DoorDash. Right. I mean, it's just done. And you get two or three of them, the numbers burned. And then if you get rid of the number and you buy a new number, guess what? Guess what's interesting about the new number?

SPEAKER_01 11:23

I would love to know what's interesting about the new number.

SPEAKER_00 11:25

Well, this is really fascinating. The reason why that doesn't work anymore is because there's two, there's not enough numbers. And so when you buy a number right now, today, because you want to replace that other number, well, guess where that number came from? Where did it come from? It came from somebody else who is still practicing the old way and they just dumped their number because it was marked. That is wild. Yeah, it is wild.

SPEAKER_01 11:50

So, what what tool did you use to find out this whole thing?

SPEAKER_00 11:54

I mean, I did a lot of reading and then I built something.

SPEAKER_01 11:57

Okay. Keep going.

SPEAKER_00 11:58

I mean, it what what's critical is is looking up and seeing how many, like you got to know how many dials are being put on your numbers, and you have to know whether it's marked or not, right? And another critical thing is like is knowing what your number is saying when somebody sees it. I bet people would be surprised if they were to put their number in something, like the thing I build, you could go do it for free for 10 numbers or five numbers or something. But like you go, you go in there and put your numbers and it tells you what your numbers say when the person gets it. Can you imagine my surprise when my phone number says lawyer's office? No.

SPEAKER_01 12:40

Does somebody want to answer a lawyer's phone call?

SPEAKER_00 12:42

Another, I don't know, 10 or 20 lines said political, political. And it's like, I just bought this. I like, what are you talking about? Right. So the whole thing is a giant mess because it takes too long for them to change it over, people are getting rid of it. So, like, that's number like a huge thing is maintaining them long enough and and taking care of the numbers so that they actually will say your name on it, right? Unless you want to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on brand on uh what's it called? Uh custom branding or something that you can get a high uh. But I mean, not worth it, I don't think.

SPEAKER_01 13:17

For so a couple solutions. If you want to register your numbers, I think we have all the carriers in the school group. Schoolagent uh school.com backslash agent elite. Agent elite. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:30

And um, and there's a couple more too. I should throw them in there because yeah, there's a direct for Verizon. Verizon's the toughest one because it takes I think it's in there.

SPEAKER_01 13:39

I know. They they've got 30 days now. 30 days.

SPEAKER_00 13:43

So, like, I mean, I got 600 because I just did the math. What we used to, we used to say, I mean, dude, I mean, at one point we were making 200 dials on a number and it was no problem. Right. And now we're at I I cap it at 25, or I try to. I mean, it's it's difficult with these phone systems for it to even follow that, right? But it's really important to keep an eye on that because what I found and was so surprising was on one system, it's supposed to only be making 15, 20, 25 dials, but it's making thousands of dials off one number. So that you gotta just gotta be careful and watch it, right? Because if it if it's doing that, it's not only is it gonna get flagged, but now that it's flagged, there's other issues, right? Like, I mean, there's there's risk with people reporting it to whatever, and even though it's legitimate, it's like you're guilty until proven innocent, right? Because it's, I mean, the FCC's gonna come and they're gonna say, Hey, what are you doing over here? And it's very expensive. So, like having this done the right way is critical. Right. Yeah, and that's my number. I've tried to keep it below 25. That's why I bought uh 600 numbers, right? And I didn't get the protector thing or whatever it's called because it's five bucks a line, and to me, that's not worth it. It's it's it's more important to just watch it and watch the numbers and watch the contact rate, right? Because you have to anyway. And so yeah, it's pretty much talk about line shield real quick if they want to go to line shield. Line shield uh.com. Or no, lineshield.theidudes.com. Just put your number in there.

SPEAKER_01 15:19

Did you put that in the did you put that in the uh school group?

SPEAKER_00 15:22

I did not. I mean it's it's relatively new, you know.

SPEAKER_01 15:26

Why don't you just make people like just wonder where it's at? I just maybe they'll find out.

SPEAKER_00 15:30

Well, I mean, you know We'll put it in the school group.

SPEAKER_01 15:33

Yeah, you can do that.

SPEAKER_00 15:35

Yeah. Emily, put that in the school group.

SPEAKER_01 15:37

But no, that's it's awesome because you can find out for free.

SPEAKER_00 15:41

Um Yeah, I mean it's not like we're trying to do a killing off of it. I I mean there's a cost to pull in the numbers.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

But you can run a free audit and just see what your numbers if they're under somebody else's name, you could get in trouble.

unknown 15:54

Right?

SPEAKER_00 15:54

Yeah, which is in big trouble. Like big trouble. I'm I mean, again, you probably can prove that you're not trying to commit fraud and and pretend you're a lawyer or whatever it is, right? However, if you know, who knows? I mean, it still isn't correct. Yeah. And I mean, I just want to do it right because we're making a lot of dials and and we're calling real leads that we bought. And I don't want the hassle of dealing with some kind of BS, you know, that's gonna come through. So the best way to do it is do it the way it has you gotta play the game the way the the rules have been written now. And that's the minimum number of dials possible because you know, an extra two bucks for a phone line is a lot less than ten million dollars in fines.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

Yep, 100%. So I just put it in our school group and uh I'm gonna pin it. Mindshield.theidudes.com. Yeah. I'm gonna pin it to the feed. So if you're in there, it's at the top.

SPEAKER_00 16:52

Yeah. I mean and if there's any, you know, that's a new thing that I put together. So I I we'll see if it if there's any issue or doesn't or breaks, you know, just give us a holler.

SPEAKER_01 17:03

But the idea is that this should help because this is a big issue right now.

SPEAKER_00 17:07

Yeah, I mean, I'm using I put my numbers in there every but it pulls it every week and I look at them all, all 600 and how red they are.

SPEAKER_01 17:14

Yeah. So you gotta let the park the numbers sometimes, turn them off, turn on other numbers. But you gotta be uh putting this on on your radar so that your team's not just making dials and getting zero Yeah, well, I mean think about this, right?

SPEAKER_00 17:33

The the contact rate, what we just said is or what Jason just said is like the it's the top of the funnel. It's the most important because if it doesn't matter how good your salesperson is if they don't have anybody to talk to.

SPEAKER_01 17:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:45

And so if if they're getting if let's say you have a 10% contact rate, right? Which some days it that would be great, and other days you have a really good one and it and and it's not great. But let's say it's 10. Well, if you can be at 20%, you're getting double the contact set, right? Which is significant. I mean, that will result in double the sales down the pipeline. So you gotta, you really have to manage the contact rate. It's critical.

SPEAKER_01 18:12

Right. And and with AI and everything that's out right now that that's making things more difficult. We're talking about all these things that are making things more difficult. The last thing we need to do is be hiring more employees. The idea is how do we get our agents to make three times the amount of sales so you can have three times less agents doing three times the results so that they're getting paid by the carrier, not by you. You're paying them the same amount, but because they're making three times the sales, the carrier is paying you more commission, which you pass on to the agents, they get more commission, right? So it's like we got to be thinking about these things. As we're growing and as the world's changing, you know, the cost of employment is getting way more expensive. It's like double from 10 years ago here in California or 20. Yeah, whatever. I don't know. But but the point is this like with those costs and the margins being shrunk, uh the only thing to do is start giving your agents more tools, leads, but like phone numbers that will help turn those leads into um into sales. And then the other thing is callers. Dude, that's why we started Teledudes, and this is a shame, shameless plug. It caught Teledudes costs a third of what an agent costs, but you can triple the agent's results with Teledudes, right? Like you put a caller on the leads, sometimes a couple callers, but like just depending on how your agency is. But like, dude, what's cheaper? Getting two agents doing crappy sales, right? Right. And then they both want to leave your agency because your agency sucks because they're not getting enough money, right? Right. Or one agent with a caller that is a third of the price. Now your agent's doing double to three times the amount, depending on how many leads that you're get buying. And now that agent is getting paid a lot more in commission, which you're not paying them, the carrier is. Yeah. They're happier. They're gonna stay, they're gonna see that you're buying the tools and doing the things that's making them successful. Right. Right. And so, like, I'll be honest, like the like our dialing team is the most rock solid in the sense where, dude, we still have callers that we've had for years and years and years, way longer than agents.

SPEAKER_00 20:33

Seven years. Yeah. It's freaking crazy. Like, I can't believe that they do that. Like, I've had my my team, the the ones on mine who were not happy with me yesterday, you know, but like they they've been, I mean, Jasmine, she's been with me for since the beginning, so 2019, seven years. That's crazy. That's crazy. Yeah. I mean, every night for and I don't think she's ever been sick, like called it sick one time in seven years. And they love it. They love what they do.

SPEAKER_01 21:00

Well, I mean, they work hard, right? Yeah, they work hard. They really appreciate it. And if it's not but but the point is this yeah when you have systems like in your office that are this rock solid around you, you have, you know, you're you got the phone system working, you got the um the leads, you have callers. Dude, dropping somebody in the system, you don't need like a rock star. You don't need to find that one agent, that unicorn that can sell whatever. You just need to find somebody willing to follow the process, plop them in, and they're successful.

SPEAKER_00 21:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:32

Really successful, right? Yeah. So you build the machine that produces a result instead of having to find the unicorn person that gets the result. Even then, dude, if you don't feed that rock star person really well, dude, they are gone.

SPEAKER_00 21:48

Well, yeah, I think that a lot of the assessments that are out there kind of miss on that because it's it's trying to identify the closer. It's like, yeah, that's good, but what you need is the steady act. Activity person because the closer doesn't want to make 10 quotes a day, right? I mean, if they do, then yeah, you have a rock star. But the typical closer just wants to close and they're gonna take your leads. Well, who was your, you know, you uh you probably can't talk about it, but what if Jason's really good closers would cherry pick, right? On the lead. Like he he knew ahead of time in his head whether it was a good one or a bad one. And so he would dump it because this one isn't as good. So I'm just gonna move to the hang up on them. He'd hang up on them. Isn't that crazy? I mean, just move on to the next one. But like, think about the cost of that. Like, all of a sudden it was crazy. His sale may have a twice the cost per sale because it's he's requiring twice as many leads. Because he knows which are the good ones.

SPEAKER_01 22:51

So terrible.

SPEAKER_00 22:52

Yeah. It's just it's interesting. Yeah. I mean, the key and it and again, it's like this isn't some like it's I mean, I guess it is a plug, but it's not a it's not a plug insofar as that everybody has to do this. If you do, people came to us. That's that's why this company exists.

SPEAKER_01 23:08

Yeah, and if you don't use us, use another company. Yeah, I don't really care. To get them the call, but just make sure they're also no, we've done over 135 million dials and we use uh like the processes on the back end for everything from the scripting to everything else has just been dialed in for no pun intended for seven years. Now we're starting to use some AI to identify closing and all the different areas of the funnel that we can that we can maximize. And if you're using AI in your agency, look at it like this AI is not gonna replace people, it's going to enhance people. That's the hope. Well, that's that's what it does do. Like, I mean, if you're using AI, you can get like the results that we're our our our our teleteam is getting is just fantastic because of what we're doing on the back end with some of these tools, and you know, so it's like unbelievable. But that wouldn't, you know, you you still here's the thing you still have to have a person talking to somebody else to close a an insurance sale, and it's not easy. Like if it was easy to just close somebody, then it's like, oh yeah, maybe AI will take over the insurance sales soon.

SPEAKER_00 24:20

Right.

SPEAKER_01 24:21

You know, but like, dude, anybody that's selling anything right now, any auto policy, any home policy, it's a conversation and it's like a lot of follow-ups too. Like, good luck.

SPEAKER_00 24:33

It's uh, I mean, you gotta get them on the phone.

SPEAKER_01 24:35

Yeah. And the TCPA laws and everything. I mean, good luck.

SPEAKER_00 24:39

Yeah. I mean, I don't know what the what are these articles in here? Like, this was the thing is writing all these articles was like was a learning experience about all this stuff because it was like, hey, I gotta figure this shit out, you know, because we gotta get a hold of people. And so I I mean, I like learning, I like reading. And I mean, this is a little more technical than I prefer, but it was good stuff. Good stuff, you know? Good stuff. So there's a lot of aggregated information on here too. You know, just go there, you can learn about it, and you know, about dialers, about the banded call rates. That's another thing. Like, like because of the AI that they're using at the regulatory level and the carriers and Haya and whoever the hell's monitoring all these calls, like they they can instantly recognize patterns, right? And insurance is one of the very few industries that doesn't have a lobbying organization on behalf of the agents for this, right? To to make it where, hey, listen, we make a lot of calls, it's the only way, blah, blah, blah. Well, there's nobody saying anything on our behalf. So as a result, I mean, we got to figure it out, right? You gotta because because you can't make less dials, right? That's part of the math. Like if you want a hundred contacts, then you need to make a thousand dials. That's just the way it is. So if I need to make a thousand dials, well, that's a lot of dials that are coming out of out of you know, however many numbers. And if it's 25 to stay under under the radar where you're not going to get flagged, then shoot, you know, you gotta have a lot of numbers. Well, if I have a lot of numbers, then what? Right? So there's a lot of moving parts that it's really important to understand. But like the whole, I mean, it used to seem like such a pain in the butt to to buy numbers and then delete, you know, dump them and do that whole thing, but boy, those are the good old days. Yeah. Because now you gotta hold on to them and you're just like, I mean, you know, I look at I have it up. I'm like, I'm looking at it. There's some that are at 18%, there's some that are at 2%. And it's like, great. So you gotta take all those ones that are at 2% and move them. So it's like this talk about spinning plates.

SPEAKER_01 26:48

Yeah, yeah. If you want somebody to manage all that stuff for you.

SPEAKER_00 26:52

But the AI sees the pattern, right? Like that's the problem, is the AI sees the pattern of the way that we dial, the way that I mean the way that you must dial in order to in order to get a hold of people at the volume that's required. And it's the same as scam traffic. And I don't know, it's something like it's in the billions, and it might be in the t I think it's in the tens or the hundreds of billions of dials every day that go out to a US number. So crazy. I mean, it's insane, right? So, I mean, that's the saving grace, I think, that that tells us that there's likely not gonna allow AI dialing. Because if you allow AI dialing, then it's instantaneous calling to everywhere, right? So you can't have every every person is able to push a button to call every person instantaneously at the same time. Like that just wouldn't make any sense. And the bad actors are gonna do that anyway. Yeah, I mean, my phone gets blown up. That's why I don't use I mean, my rigger's been off for two years. It was only stressful for a week. Well, I think that's a mail bag, my friend. Yeah, you gotta be fired.