Training for Greatness with Harry Hoopis

Harry Hoopis created one of the largest and most successful financial services firms in Chicago. After decades breaking records for sales and agency growth, his company’s mandatory retirement age forced him to step down. He turned to his passion for training, which had been such an important driver in his success, and founded Hoopis Performance Network to help insurance and financial professionals reach their true potential.

Hoopis is CEO of HPN, which boasts over 100,000 learners in its system. He always has recognized the importance of continuous learning, having provided self-improvement opportunities to staff during his highly successful career at Northwestern Mutual and later growing that experience into HPN. He partnered with LIMRA to produce the sales effectiveness program “Trustworthy Selling,” which has enriched the skill sets of more than 30,000 advisors.

He is the author of the best-selling book The Road to the Bountiful Life. Hoopis prizes the art of listening and lives by his Ten Rules of Life. He believes in working hard, and he recognizes the advantages that recent changes, such as virtual client visits, bring to the industry. He recently was presented with the life insurance industry’s highest honor, the John Newton Russell Memorial Award, in recognition of his contributions to the profession.

Most important, he believes in building trust with a client. “When trust is at the highest point, that’s when the sale is made,” he said. “You don’t have to ask for it. They’ll ask you, ‘Who do I make this check out to?’”

In this interview with Publisher Paul Feldman, Hoopis discusses his lengthy career and his thoughts on developing advisors to the fullest.

Paul Feldman: You have had such an illustrious journey through the insurance industry. How did you get into the business?

Harry Hoopis: I’m celebrating 51 years in the business. It’s kind of a funny story. I was studying accounting at the University of Rhode Island, and because I had dropped the class, I had to take it in summer school. I gave up my construction job, which was paying $4.25 an hour. I needed something to fill in around summer school class. So, I went down to the placement office, and when I walked in, there was a big sign on the wall. I can still see it. It said: “Sell life insurance part-time, $75 a week guaranteed. Northwestern Mutual Life.”

I’d never heard of Northwestern Mutual, never thought about selling insurance, but I thought $75 a week was just what I needed to help me scrape up $2,500 for the next year’s tuition. I took the interview and got started in the business in 1968. That’s how it all began. That program was experimental, and eventually it became Northwestern Mutual’s internship program, which today is a very highly successful program.

Feldman: How did your career develop when you started with Northwestern Mutual? You started part time. Tell me what happened next.

Hoopis: I sold life insurance my entire senior year in school and decided that I would not go into accounting, but instead would pursue a career in life insurance. I graduated in June and went full time. I qualified for the Million Dollar Round Table that year and was really enjoying things. I got into management rather quickly as what we now call a college unit director. I recruited people to do what I was doing in my senior year.

I did that for a few years and then became a district manager in the southern part of Rhode Island. Eventually, in 1974, I was invited to go to the home office and get into a management development program. That eventually led me to being appointed as general agent in Chicago in 1977. I operated the agency there for 35 years. I was the youngest general agent appointment in the company’s history. And when I was done, I was the longest serving in company history for that reason. It was a good run. I retired at the mandatory age of 65 in June 2012.

Feldman: When you were building up the agency, how did you build up a successful team? How did you bring in new people and keep the ones that you had motivated?

Hoopis: That’s an interesting process. As I look back over those 35 years, I realized that I had perhaps five or six different teams. We had a good management system. I liked to get young people involved in management as early as I could. Over that period of 35 years, I believe we appointed nine general agents from my office to take over in other cities for Northwestern Mutual.

What you learn in that process is that each time you lose a person, the team is reshaped. The process of bringing people into the management system was organized. We did it with small groups of young people who came to classes once a month to talk about recruiting, coaching and training in general. We always had a steady flow.

In the early days, the thing that changed our agency more than anything else was that I created the position of recruiter. Up to that point, they never had a person dedicated to recruiting. The recruiter was always the manager. You kept your eyes open, found somebody and talked them into the business. But I had an idea that we could grow more quickly if I had somebody who was dedicated to sourcing names and running the process. There was a very talented woman on our team, and I suggested that she might take on this newly created role of recruiter, which she did.

Our recruiting went from 17 people in 1983 — which was a good number in our company at that time — to 35 in 1984. And then we recruited 34 in 1985. And then we recruited another 30 or 35 in 1986. All of a sudden, I found myself with approximately 100 new people in less than three years in the business. And they were everywhere. They were working in closets — we didn’t have any room for them. From that group, I was able to cull perhaps 20 really good people who wanted to be in management. So then we had the multiplier that we needed. And that momentum carried us forever. It literally carried us until the day I retired.

Feldman: How do you think recruitment has changed over the years?

Hoopis: It’s always evolving. I often hear that you can’t find good people anymore. I object to that notion. There are many very talented people in the marketplace. You just have to work harder to find them. There are many who really do want to make an important impact in the work they do.

Having the ability to get them engaged in the business is critically important. How has it changed? It’s still a very difficult task. I talk a lot about the importance of having a better selection of people in our business. As a new manager way back in 1977, I was dedicated to only bringing people into my organization who showed a propensity to succeed in sales. I tried to find the 20% of the population who have the ability to sell. I think the mistake that our industry has made over and over again is trying to get people to sell who have no talent to do so.
It takes a lot more work to find those people who can sell. We used psychometric profiling to help us find the right people.

Feldman: Tell me more about psychometric profiling and its importance in recruiting new agents.

Hoopis: Profiling is available even for people who are independent. What I loved about psychometric profiling — whether it would be LIMRA’s Career Profile or the Self Management Group’s POP (Predictor of Potential) test — was that people tell you about themselves. And we should listen to that.

You know, if you take one of these profiles and it says this person probably can be successful in a sales career, you need to believe that.

In one test, for example, they ask, “What do you think people think of you? Do they see you as outgoing? Do they see you as a hard worker?” Well, as you answer that question, you really express your own preference. When they boil that down and they put it through the algorithms and it comes out and it says, “Yeah, we recommend this person for the business,” or worse, “We don’t,” you had better listen to that recommendation.

You need to believe it because with both the LIMRA and Self Management Group profiles as examples, they prove this out. You can see what the retention and productivity is for someone who has the right profile versus someone who doesn’t fit the profile. The way things have changed today, it is even more important to have strict selection standards when you consider the amount of time and money that we put into a new advisor coming in the business. We’re going to spend $20,000 or $30,000 in the first year or so to get them launched, and yet we don’t want to spend a relatively small amount on a profile to be sure we’re launching the right person.

That’s how you end up with better retention. Average industry retention? Let’s be generous and call it 15%, four-year retention. My organization ran at 30% or 35%, four-year retention. We had very high productivity and a good retention rate, which equals a successful operation. That would work for anyone.

Today, we’re seeing agents and advisors recruited who never even get face to face. They’re in Zoom meetings. It’s incredible. At the height of the pandemic, of course, nobody was going face to face. The big change today — which I think is a big bonus — is that it has never been easier to keep the number of appointments that people need to succeed.

There were three benchmarks for me, which I call the “SEA Change” (Selection, Education and Activity). One is better selection. The second is higher and better education, which I think is what drove me to create the Hoopis Performance Network. And the third was higher activity. Let’s call it the three-legged stool. If you did all three of those things, you couldn’t help but succeed.

In terms of activity, I’ve never seen an agent reach the Million Dollar Round Table by doing 40 appointments a month. But I do subscribe to the idea that you can do this if you see 60 people a month. I used to say, if you see 60 people face to face. Now with Zoom and this new world that we live in, I see agents keeping 70 and 80 appointments a month. And they never touch the steering wheel of their car. They’re saving all that time. And if they’re good, they turn that saved time into productive time.

Clients — particularly existing clients — have become comfortable with this idea.

Feldman: For a new agent coming into the business, getting in front of 60 to 80 people in a month, as you recommend, is a tall task. What are some strategies to accomplish that?

Hoopis: We used to say 60 appointments kept is the job, not the goal. Whether you’re going to recruit young people or older people, we must teach them what constitutes work in our business. So, what is work? Getting 60 to 80 referrals. Work is keeping 60 appointments in a month. You work 15 days or 20 days in a month. If you have to, you work 25 days. But you’re going to keep 60 appointments. That’s how you build success.

Feldman: You know, we used to do all of this face to face. We had to do it that way. Now technology and the internet make it so easy to learn and work remotely.

Hoopis: Yes, it’s remarkable. If you look for the silver lining in the COVID-19 cloud, if you will, it accelerated e-learning at least by five, if not 10, years. I was a big supporter of being face to face in the training room. I couldn’t imagine that you would do it any other way. But today, everyone’s delivering it via a Zoom-type meeting.

Feldman: What are the most important things in your training that every agent and advisor should look at today?

Hoopis: There are several things that never change. First, we must work with referred lead prospecting. We always say cold calling is God’s punishment for not prospecting. We’re in a less trusting world today. The sales effectiveness training HPN and LIMRA did in a joint venture is called “Trustworthy Selling.”

The very first thing is learning how to establish trust. The four facets of trust in financial services are benevolence, integrity, dependability and competency. Competency is considered table stakes. In other words, you are knowledgeable until you prove otherwise. But what we teach in Trustworthy Selling is how you build rapport with people. How do you create that sense of benevolence and integrity, and that follow-through in dependable behavior? That’s a very important piece.

Once you have that foundation, that leads to your business development, which for us is prospecting. The best thing you can do is to spend your time working with people who have been referred to you by those you have done business with. In the Hoopis University, we have 70 or 80 videos just about prospecting.

It might seem trite, but the next most important piece is listening skills. They are extremely important skills for a person in sales. I’m in so many sales situations where I watch somebody just talking and talking — and not listening. It’s amazing. I always taught my people that the first thing you should ask someone is: “Why did you agree to see me today?” They have something on their mind when they agree to see you. Having listening skills leads to better fact-finding. If you work with people you are referred to, and you do a good job fact-finding, the close is automatic.

Tension is high when we first meet someone. Our trust is at the lowest point. When you apply the proper skills, you gradually see the tension drop and trust goes up. When that person’s tension is at its lowest point, and their trust is at the highest point, that’s when the sale is made. You don’t have to ask for it. They’ll ask you: “Who do I make this check out to?” We teach these things because saying the right things the right way makes all the difference.

So now it’s 12 years later, and 30,000 advisors have gone through Trustworthy Selling. And guess what we found? The average improvement in productivity in the 12 months following the program is 25% to 30%. We’re teaching people how to express what’s in their heart. They can get so caught up in sales language that they forget to be real.

Feldman: You started HPN when you retired from Northwestern Mutual. Tell me more about that.

Hoopis: At Northwestern Mutual, we put a very high emphasis on education. Going back to 1985, when we recruited new agents, I put a program in place we called the “class program.” It was curriculum linking agents to systems for success. I charged them a modest tuition. When they took the Chartered Life Underwriter exam and passed the test, Northwestern Mutual reimbursed them.

I would use that money to bring in people to teach prospecting. I would bring in someone to teach etiquette to new agents. I believed that it was important that if I’m sitting down and having lunch with a good prospect, I should know which fork to use and which side the bread dish is on. We literally would set up tables in our conference room, and we’d serve a plated lunch. We’d have someone standing there explaining everything that was going on. This was the kind of training.

We taught memory training. We taught product training. We taught speed reading. I would do anything that I could do to help the person develop personally, professionally and financially. Our mission was to help agents grow — to create an environment where agents continue to grow personally, professionally and financially.

That led to the creation of the Hoopis University within the agency. Around 2007, I came across a learning management system that was designed to be used by a lay person. In other words, I could take video of a person speaking in my agency, and I could put the video up on this learning management system so that other people could watch it repeatedly.

We did invest in that LMS, and before you know it, we had 50, 75, 100 programs in there. Then some of my colleagues at Northwestern Mutual said, “Hey, can we use that?” I said, “Well, sure.” I said, “But you know, it’s going to cost me, so I have to charge you.” So we started charging a small fee.

I would go to my industry groups, and they would say, “Hey, can we get access?” Before you know it, we had a business going. My associate Joey Davenport [now president of the Hoopis Performance Network] was running Hoopis University. When I retired, we took it and made our move to full time. Today, we’re in about 70 companies. We’re in almost 30 countries, four continents, and we have more than 100,000 learners in our system. We have about 3,000 active videos in the Hoopis Performance Network University. That’s how we got into the business. It was an evolution. If you had asked me in 2000 if I would I be doing this today, I wouldn’t have had any idea that this would happen.

It really points out the tremendous need for training — for giving advisors what they need. Our experts are Million Dollar Round Table producers. Our consultants are the Tom Hegnas, Bill Cates and Joe Jordans of the world. Those are the people who understand and speak our language, and that’s what makes us unique.

We’ve seen e-learning grow very rapidly in the industry. E-learning is here to stay.

Paul Feldman started the website InsuranceNewsNet in 1999, followed by InsuranceNewsNet Magazine in 2008. Paul was a third-generation insurance agent before venturing into the media business. Paul won the 2012 Integrated Marketing Award (IMA) for Lead Gen Initiative for his Truth about Agent Recruiting video and was the runner-up for IMA's Marketer of the Year, a competition that includes consumer and B2B publishing companies. Find out more about Paul at www.paulfeldman.com.