Instead bringing up the weather or latest article in the Albany Business Review to break the silence, a fairly pragmatic accountant I’ve known for about a year looks at me and says, “What motivates you to get up and write insurance everyday?”
The problem, as I see it, is NOT in you, but rather in the perpetuation of Insurance as a Commodity constantly broadcast at you by direct writers.
Taking my insurance business from the mean streets of Albany, NY and expanding to the Social Web started as an experiment.
Whether you realize it or not, many of your potential clients are Googling you. In case you don’t know, that means they are searching your name on the Internet to find out who you are within your industry and the more professionally placed content they find when Googling you, the better.
Are you being commoditized? In his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman writes, “a commodity is any good, service or process that can be produced by any number of firms, and the only distinguishing feature between these firms is who can do it the cheapest.
Three weeks ago I was asked by small business marketing Rockstar, John Jantsch, creator of the Duct Tape Marketing website, author of the New York Times Bestselling Duct Tape Marketing: The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide (Amazon Link) and all-around fantastic small business resource (kissing a little butt here) to review his newest book
Copywriters are kind of like you—they are sales professionals. But instead of specializing in insurance and financial planning, they specialize in written persuasion.
How many sales people begin their careers with reasonable product knowledge but little or no training in what this man calls “effective cold calling technique”?
Two recent revelations helped me see how destructive call reluctance is to a promising career, to producers that are negatively impacted in their efforts to help people with their financial needs.
No matter what kind of business you’re thinking of starting, before you get serious, you need to do market research.
