Money In Media: How 3 People Found It

CHICAGO -- It’s all about the leads, right? Well, not so right, according to people with significant sales experience.

It’s all about getting the practice right, staking out your unique proposition and then pulling in the leads. Some people are staking their claim in media. That’s the subject of the panel discussion Making Money in Media on Thursday afternoon at the InsuranceNewsNet Super Conference.

The panelists will be discussing digital media, radio and TV.

Digital Media

In terms of leads, how does 30,000 a month sound? That’s how many Jeff Root’s DigitalBGA is getting. Root, based in Austin, Texas, was struggling in 2006 to get traction as a new life insurance agent in the usual ways. That meant hitting the phones with old leads and trying to set up meetings.

“So, out of college, I was at Northwestern Mutual selling face-to-face,” Root said. “But, I was simply a kid right out of college trying to sell financial planning.”

After that soul-crushing start, he turned to the newest venue, the digital realm and social media – a gutsy move just two years after Facebook was founded in a Harvard dorm room. He started blogging and getting links to his specialized articles and started getting web traffic bit by bit.
“I started getting hundreds of leads a month within a couple years, and then that doesn’t scale very quickly,” he said. “So, I learned paid ads — Google AdWords and things like that.”

The clicks go either to a simplified page with a form or straight to a form, leaving little distraction to sidetrack a prospect.

Soon, Facebook ads pumped even more acceleration to pull in thousands of leads per month.

Now his agency shares leads with 100 agencies nationally, along with employing six producers in-house.

Root and his affiliated agents do all their business by phone once they get the lead. Learning how to convert is another new skill he developed. It is not as simple as dialing the number and taking an order. The process takes enormous patience and persistence.

The agency places about 1,000 policies a month.

TV

It takes a long time and lots of local air time to break into the big time in TV as a subject matter expert. Unless you are Kimberly Foss, CEO of Empyrion Wealth Management of Roseville, Calif., with offices in New York City.

She had done an article for a financial association publication, which was seen and picked up by The Associated Press. That in turn was seen by a booker for ABC’s Good Morning America.

That’s right – Foss’ first big break was on the national stage.

“People die to get on GMA,” Foss said. “That was really my baptism by fire. I had to do my own hair, my own makeup. And I had to do my own interview. I had no coaching, nothing. It was just kind of all raw me.”

But Foss knew her stuff. She had been a financial advisor since she graduated college and was in her 40s when she got the GMA call. Foss knew she could handle whatever question they threw at her. That’s one of the keys for success – knowing the subject thoroughly.

Flexibility is another requirement. When TV news producers need someone, they need that person now. Not next week, not tomorrow -- now. Not only was Foss Jane-on-the-spot, she even built a studio in her office to make it even easier for news producers to book her in a hurry.

And book her they do. She is often on Fox Business and CNBC, along with local news affiliates.

Success on TV does not necessarily translate directly into dollars into the agency, although she did get some clients pretty quickly.

“I did a piece on annuities on CNBC, and I had a lady call me from Florida and, literally, within three hours, sent me over all of her assets and everything and had me look at it all, and she’s been a client ever since,” Foss said. “And I've never met her.”

She equated the TV credibility in the range of being an author. Although, when she did write her own book, Wealthy By Design: A Five-Step Plan For Financial Security, her business really took off.

Foss found the best way being a TV celebrity brings in business is in partnership with other media. For example, a TV appearance might get people to the website where they can find the book, which turns a visitor into a prospect. Or a social media post can lead to a blog article, which draws someone to a video on the website and eventually as a lead.

Her agency has ramped up to serving 75 clients with $250 million in assets under management.

Radio

Pete D’Arruda is all about connecting media to get traction with prospects, even though he is primarily known through radio.

He has written eight books, each ramping up his business a bit more. But radio was the life-saver for D’Arruda. He had been in the insurance and financial services business for nearly 10 years, still struggling to get people to his lunch and dinner seminars.

“I got tired of being just another guy doing seminars and another guy supplying food, basically,” D’Arruda said. “So, I had to figure out a way to get better credibility and get more well-known and have people wait in line -- instead of me begging them to come see me.”

He can even say when the breaking point was. He was leading a seminar attended by six people when a birthday party broke out among the attendees.

“They brought a birthday cake out and celebrated someone’s birthday right in front of me,” D’Arruda said. “I thought that was the ultimate show of disrespect. Now, I have nothing against seminars, and I know a lot of guys are doing them well. But I found I couldn’t get authority paying for food.”

At that point, D’Arruda was working in a solo practice writing about $3 million in business per year, just about ready to give up. After that disastrous seminar, he took a chance on radio.

“I went to the station the very next day after I got back from that disaster and told them I wanted to do a show,” D’Arruda said. “And the station had never done a show for anybody, so we had to negotiate. They had to figure out how much they would charge for what’s called block time, which is an hour of time on the radio. So, they gave me a 5 in the morning time spot. So it was very, very early -- 5 in the morning.”

But it was a good time slot to make mistakes and learn. Business started building but painfully slowly at first.

“It took me a couple years,” D’Arruda said. “I had people telling me they heard me on the radio, but I wasn’t getting the business I thought I should be getting.”

He realized he simply was not asking for the business. He was not telling people to call his office if they had questions or needs.

“I started building some custom design calls to action with the benefits, advantages, and features altogether,” D’Arruda said. “And ever since I started doing that, it’s just skyrocketed.”

Now his agency has 12 people working for the sales side and a marketing company for shows that he produces for himself and for other advisors that he coaches for radio success. And, as he said, insurance and financial sales are booming.

"I supply leads for my two advisors in the office," he said. "We wrote $80 million right here in Raleigh, and it’s not a big area."

He is now looking for two more advisors to handle all the leads he gets from radio and referrals. But the biggest change that he experienced from his radio gig was deeper than that.

"People no longer have to ask who I am," he said. "They ask how they can get in to see me. And that’s been the biggest transformation I've seen."

Steven A. Morelli is editor-in-chief for InsuranceNewsNet. He has more than 25 years of experience as a reporter and editor for newspapers, magazines and insurance periodicals. He was also vice president of communications for an insurance agents’ association. Steve can be reached at [email protected].

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