The Five Set Sales

 

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Host: Tim Martin
Guest: Moe Sullivan
Episode 3: The Five Set Sales – Tim Martin & Moe Sullivan
February 28, 2014

Welcome to Success is Voluntary, a podcast devoted to helping you become the salesperson you were always meant to be, where it’s all about helping you learn the techniques and tools that will enable you to win in the increasingly competitive world of voluntary benefits. Welcome your host, a guy who has hired and trained over 2,000 voluntary benefit salespeople in his career, Tim Martin. Success is Voluntary, selling voluntary benefits.

Tim Martin: Yes, my name is Tim Martin, and you are listening to episode three of Success is Voluntary. You know what, over the last 16 years, what I’ve noticed is a lot of agents get way deep in the weeds at the wrong point in the sales process. What I’m trying to say is that there are five distinct sales that we have to make along the way, and new agents especially (even veterans sometimes) get them mixed up. That’s what we’re going to talk about today with Moe Sullivan, my co-host here. We’re going to talk about the five set sales and why it’s important to make each one at a time. Welcome, Moe.

Moe Sullivan: Hey, Tim. How you doing, today?

Tim: Man, I am fantastic. This is why we live in Arizona…this day. Anyway, Moe, what I’ve noticed over the last 16 years (you’ve probably seen this too) is that, especially new agents, they get off track. They worry about the wrong thing at the wrong time. They’re trying to make a sale that they can’t make. What I mean by this is, for instance, when they’re trying to set an appointment, they try and sell the company or they try and sell the product at the counter.

Moe: Well, yeah, what they do is they try and skip steps in a process. As we talked about, there is a process for a sale. There’s also a process for voluntary benefits. Each step becomes its own sale.

Tim: You bet, and what I did a long time ago is I identified and broke them down into five set sales, so let’s talk about the theory about it.

Theory

Tim: All right, so the theory behind this is this: Each sale is its own separate sale. If we remember that we break them apart, then we don’t get selling the wrong point, so let’s run through them real quick. I think it will make a little more sense to the listeners. Here are the five sales. The first sale we have to make is …

1. Set an appointment. We have to get the business owner to agree to meet with us in the first place because what we do, Moe, it can’t be sold at the counter. Would you agree with that?

Moe: No, it can’t be sold at the counter. You need some specific, set-aside time for it, where you can talk about it, hopefully, uninterrupted but definitely with undivided attention with the decision maker.

Tim: You bet, and that’s good news for us. It really is because if we could sell what we do over the counter, that means we could probably sell it over the phone or sell it with a flyer, and if we could do that, then we wouldn’t be necessary.

Moe: That’s true.

Tim: Yeah, the carriers, what they would do is they would just hire a big call center somewhere in Nebraska where they don’t have an accent, and they would sell it all over the phone and pay them $8 an hour and…

Moe: Eight bucks an hour, plus a little bit of a bonus when they make a sale.

Tim: You bet. It reminds me of Jim Rohn. Probably one of his most famous quotes of all time is, “Don’t wish it was easier. Wish you were better.”

Moe: That’s it. That way we don’t turn into a bunch of USAA car insurance guys.

Tim: Nothing wrong with those guys, but they take inbound calls, right?

Moe: Right.

Tim: They already have a customer that’s ostensibly ready to buy by the time that they get them on the phone.

Moe: Right.

Tim: You bet, so really, that’s the first sale, and we’ll get into these in a little bit of detail today. Obviously, over the next several weeks, we’ll flesh out each one, not necessarily right in order, but we’ll come back to them as we go through. This is kind of a foundational podcast to kind of set this up, so we have to set an appointment. We have to get that undivided attention. The next sale we have to make, then, would be…

2. Getting the employer to agree to move forward. They have to agree that this is a value to them and to their company and that it’s worth their doing.

Moe: Right and so basically, as I’ve heard you say before, just because there’s no reason for an employer to say no, that’s not enough reason for them to say yes.

Tim: Yeah, that’s a good point. Man, I’m a smart guy. I said that?

Moe: I’m sure you stole it from somebody else just like I steal all my ideas.

Tim: Actually, I think that’s my idea, but no, it is; it’s a good point, and I really believe that. In this industry, there is absolutely no reason for a business owner to say no to what we do. Typically, it doesn’t cost them anything. It saves them some tax dollars. They look like a hero to their employees. They attract and retain better employees…all those things, but just because there is no reason to say no doesn’t mean that’s a compelling reason to say yes, and so we have to sit down with them and convince them that it’s in their best interest.

Moe: Right and we do that using the sales process, asking the questions, so we find out what reasons would be most important to the employer or help them understand what reasons should be important to them.

Tim: Yesterday, I went to a doctor. This is my second time I’ve seen her, and I love her. My previous doctor would barely listen to me. I’m not even sure he knew what color my eyes were because the whole time I was in there, he sat and looked at his computer and typed in my symptoms and would write me a prescription. I’d walk out and had zero…zero…relationship with him, zero chance to really connect with him.

It’s the same thing here. We can’t just go in and just show up and throw up, right? We have to ask a bunch of questions. We have to find out what is important to them, and then we can make a diagnosis and a prescription.

Moe: Yeah, we can make the diagnosis, and then, of course, follow up with the ultimate thing that you need to do with every sale: actually ask them for the business.

Tim: Ask for the business. You know, we, Moe and I, are both big believers in a sales process called Action Selling by Duane Sparks, and it talks a lot about commitment objective. When we walk in to meet with that business owner, like I said, we have to convince them that it’s in his best interest or her best interest to move forward. What is our one and only commitment objective? Because that’s going to set sale three. What is our one and only commitment objective when we meet with that business owner?

Moe: The only reason we’re there is to get that business owner to say, “Yes, we can sit down and talk to his employees and that a business owner will payroll deduct.

Tim: You bet, so payroll deduct is obviously important, but the real critical thing is we have to be able to get in front of those employees. Now, a lot of carriers and a lot of people in this industry call that working conditions. I like that, but I don’t think it’s quite descriptive enough, so a long time ago, I started calling it…

3. Access and control. I think it really drives home what those working conditions mean, so let me define access and control for you real quick. Access is the ability to educate 100 percent of the employees about our services and programs, 100 percent. Do we always get that? No. Perfect access, though, would mean 100 percent of the employees, whether it’s 8, 80, or 800, actually had an opportunity to be educated about the different programs and services we provide for that company.

Control is a controlled follow-up environment where every employee has to make a positive election. Now positive election is a nice way of saying they have either to sign up or sign off, yes or no, thumbs up, thumbs down. They have to make a decision one way or the other, and it’s critical. When we unpack access and control in a future podcast, I think you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about and why it is so critical. Without access and control, we really don’t have a group.

Moe: Well, you don’t because nobody wants to talk to you until they talk to you, so when you’re talking about insurance, even if it’s a great product, like what we sell, people don’t like to talk about it. Once they find out what we do, their eyes open up, and sometimes, when you sit down with the individual and you describe what you do, they’ll look at you and say, “I’d be stupid not to get this.”

Tim: Absolutely. They say that all the time, or they thank you for “making them sit down.” You didn’t make them sit down. Their employer made them sit down with you. Right? That’s what perfect access and control would be. Boy, it is the thing that really will get an agent in trouble.

Well, not in trouble-trouble, but let’s say you have 80 employees, and you show up, and you’re all excited. Maybe, like me, you promised your wife, because of this 80-man group, that you’re going to be able to buy her a new refrigerator that weekend. I did this. I had an 80-life group. I had promised my wife. I know you never do this, Moe.

Moe: No, I try not to promise my wife anything.

Tim: Yeah, well, I know you never do this specifically, where you go, “Okay, 80 employees… If I only get 60 percent of them to enroll, that’s 48, and if I make this much in commission per employee…,” and you start to count your commission check before it actually happens. Have you ever done that? Maybe it’s just me.

Moe: You know, I never do that, except every time.

Tim: Except every time, that’s right.

Moe: Well, you just look at it: 80 employees times 500 if I get to educate them all. “Oh, shoot, that’s a lot of money.”

Tim: Yeah, absolutely, and not that we’re doing this strictly for the money. Obviously, we keep the money, but we do. It does tend to do that. I think that’s not just insurance agents. I think that’s all salespeople. We do that.

Moe: Well, that’s the part of it. You say we don’t do this for the money. Truly, if you’re in this business for the right reason, it’s because it helps people. Money is a bonus, but if you’re in it to help people, the money is a very nice bonus.

Tim: It is, and it will flow, so maybe you’ve promised your wife, like I did, that you were going to buy her a new refrigerator, and you show up, and there are eight people or ten people in that meeting. That’s incredibly deflating to your whole psyche. It doesn’t do wonders with your wife; I’ll promise you that (or your sweetie, your significant other). It drives their attitude down, and it can be a challenge.

In fact, this is the way I see it: If there are five sales, and access and control is sale number three, if you’re counting on your hand, if you started on your thumb or your pinky, it doesn’t matter. When you get to three, you end up on the same finger. Right? That finger will get you in trouble on the freeway, and it will get you in trouble here. If you don’t get good at getting access and control, you’re not going to be in this business very long.

Moe: No, you won’t. You’ll actually get a little distraught, and you might feel like you’re herding cats.

Tim: That’s right, so that’s all we’re going to unpack for today. We might come back and give you a couple of tips on that today, obviously, but I promise, in a future episode, we’ll really unpack that and get deep into it. We’ve gone through the first three sales. Now we have to talk about the fourth sale, which is…

4. The employee themselves. We have to convince that employee that it is in their best interest to go ahead and sign up. When the employee says yes to us, that’s the one that makes us the money, right?

Moe: Right. That’s what makes the money, and of course, what we’re looking for with the employee, our commitment objective is to get them to enroll in products that they need.

Tim: That they need. I don’t think there’s a carrier out there that pays for the group authorization, the paperwork to set up payroll deduction.

Moe: No. Nobody pays for just a bunch of paperwork, unless, of course, it has an application with it.

Tim: If it has an application, then your chances of getting paid go up dramatically.

Moe: Dramatically.

Tim: Without those applications, you don’t get squat, right? This is the one that actually pays the bills, if you will. Everything else we do is to get to this point, and I know that some of our listeners, they don’t do a lot of enrollment. They don’t sit down and meet with the employees one-on-one. Some of them, they meet with every employee that they’ve ever enrolled.

I’m not going to get into which is right and which is wrong because they both are very valid business models. Let me put it this way: It’s perfectly okay to outsource enrollment. I don’t have a single problem with that, but Chrysler and GM and Ford, they outsource a lot of things, don’t they?

Moe: They outsource probably about 60 percent of their production.

Tim: Why do they do that?

Moe: Because it just makes financial sense.

Tim: Right. Those smaller companies that they contract with can probably do it better, more efficiently, and less expensively, probably, than Ford could do it on their own.

Moe: Right, so what you’re saying is if you’re going to outsource, say, an enrollment, you want to make sure that someone can do it better, more efficiently, and on a more cost-effective basis than you can do.

Tim: You bet, and if they can’t, then you’d better be doing it, and I see this all the time in this industry. An agent works so hard to get that business owner to say yes, and they get everything set up. They get access and control, and then they send in a mediocre enroller.

Moe: Here’s what you need to look at on that: This is a sale, and some people will say that these products sell themselves, but as we talked about before, that’s a bold-faced lie. Now if you educate people properly, they will want to buy our products, but they have to be educated properly, and it’s using the sales process to do that.

Tim: You mean if I just show up and read the brochure that people aren’t that interested?

Moe: Yeah. If you just set up, showed up, and said, “Hey, this is an accident plan. It pays you if you get hurt. It costs you $5 a week. You want to buy it?” would you buy that?

Tim: Probably not.

Moe: But if I came up to you and said, “We have this program. It’s going to pay you if you get hurt because three things happen if you get sick or hurt. First, you have to pay the doctor. Secondly, bills still keep rolling at you at home, and thirdly, you might not be able to work as hard, and if you can’t work, where does the money come from? In your opinion, do you feel that would be a benefit to you?”

Tim: Yeah, absolutely. See, that’s exactly what we’re talking about here, especially if you’ve built a little rapport with that person upfront. You found out some of their needs. You found out, maybe, they’re saving money to buy a house, or they just bought a new truck, and you find out a little bit about them, and then you can tie that back in. Again, I see a lot of enrollers who just go in, and they might as well just be reading brochures.

Moe: Or just taking orders.

Tim: Or being order takers, yeah, absolutely. You know, you have to know your product. You have to become an expert in your product, but just because you’re an expert in your product doesn’t mean that you’re going to make a sale. You have to be able to tie that product knowledge. You have to be able to tie all those things back to the customer’s need.

That’s what sale four is all about: discovering what is in the best interest of that customer, asking a lot of great questions, building rapport, and then showing them how your product or service can meet that need. Then, oh, yeah, we have to ask them to buy. Now we’ve done all this, and we’ve made a little money. Life is good, and so I want to run right back out and start cold calling again, right?

Moe: Why not? Isn’t it a great way to make a living?

Tim: It is a great way to make a living, but there’s a better way to make a living, and that is…

5. Go through a referral process. I’ve discovered over the last 16 or 17 years in this business that most agents are not great at asking for referrals, and I’m being generous when I say, “Not great.” Most of them are horrible at it.

Moe: Most of them just don’t do it on a consistent basis.

Tim: Why do you think that is?

Moe: There are several different reasons for it. Sometimes we just don’t think about it because we don’t understand the power of it.

Tim: Okay.

Moe: Sometimes we’re afraid to ask for the referral for several different reasons. Either we’ve had bad success with it in the past, or we don’t feel like we’ve earned the right to ask for the referral. Other reasons are sometimes we don’t like giving referrals, so why would we ask someone else for a referral?

Tim: Seems to me that all those reasons really boil down to we don’t have a process. We don’t have a tried-and-true process. You said that maybe we’ve had bad success. If we had a tried-and-true process, guess what. That means we’re going to get success.

Moe: Tim, we say that this is a sale, asking for a referral. Right?

Tim: It is.

Moe: We do have a process, don’t we?

Tim: We do.

Moe: Which means that you need to build a little rapport. Sell yourself first. Ask a few questions. Give them a reason why they should give you a referral. Then ask for it.

Tim: You bet, and then confirm the sale.

Moe: Then confirm the sale afterwards. Thank them. Tell them you’re going to go see the people. Oh, by the way, a great question that you can ask… If I go out there and ask you, “Hey, do you know anybody who needs our products?” you’re probably going to draw a blank, right?

Tim: Yeah. Yeah.

Moe: But if I come to you with a list of businesses that I want to do business with, as a primer for you, is that going to get your mind flowing a little bit?

Tim: Sure.

Moe: Then maybe some types of businesses that I want to do business with; you can tell me whom you use. Would that help you out?

Tim: That would help me out dramatically. If you say, “Do you know anybody?” people can sometimes come up with three or four people, but if you say, “Do you know anybody from your church who drives a van?” all of a sudden, five or six names, just faces just show up instantly.

There are some great books on this, and again, we’re not going to get deep into the weeds on any one of these sales today, but I promise we will in future episodes. Let’s recap here real quick. We have setting the appointment. That’s sale number one. I would say that’s probably the hardest sale. Why do you think that’s the hardest sale, Moe?

Moe: Because they don’t know us, and we actually have to build rapport in a very quick fashion.

Tim: Yeah, and on top of that, there is a lot of clutter in that sale, isn’t there? They don’t know us, so that’s just one facet. Is anybody else calling on that business owner for their time?

Moe: Probably at least 10 other salespeople that day, if not 100 other salespeople that day.

Tim: The 100 might be a little exaggerating, but yeah, absolutely, they’re constantly getting inundated. When I owned my Domino’s Pizza stores, I had 22 people calling on me on a regular, consistent basis just to sell me advertising.

Moe: It was the same 22 people?

Tim: It was. I mean, there were additional people that would fly in and out of my store. Literally, I went back, and I went through my little card case the other day. I counted 22 different cards from different companies. You know, I didn’t even keep their card unless they were in there several times, and I was really seriously considering doing business with them, so 22.

That doesn’t include people wanting to sell me a different brand of pepperoni or somebody wanting to sell me cleaning supplies or a new phone system or insurance or any of those other things, other salespeople. I owned two stores, two little Domino’s Pizza stores, and I had 22 people calling on me.

You know that little magazine that you get in the mail that has the picture of the kids playing on the swings with the fall colors, or in the spring, they have some…? You know what I’m talking about with all the coupons inside of it?

Moe: Yeah, I know which one you’re talking about.

Tim: Yeah. Somebody sells that, and they called on me, okay? You know the Yellow Pages ads? What are those again? Doorstops? I mean you know that big book that you use to keep your door open.

Moe: Oh, the one that goes right into the recycling bin?

Tim: Yeah, that one. Yeah. Yeah. Back when I owned my Domino’s Pizza stores, that was a very critical advertising piece for us. There were four phone books in my community. All those people called on me. It’s crazy. You have all these people calling on you, so you have to be able to cut through the clutter.

Moe: Hey, Tim, I have a question for you on that. You said back when you had your Domino’s Pizza stores (this was before the Internet was a big craze)…

Tim: Or existed.

Moe: …that the phone book was a very critical piece to your business, right?

Tim: It was.

Moe: You knew it was critical to your business.

Tim: Sure.

Moe: Did you pick up the phone and call the phone book or did you have to wait until a salesperson came in to sell it to you?

Tim: That’s funny. No, you’re dead right. Some salesperson came to me. When I took over the stores (because I bought existing stores), we did have a Yellow Pages ad in there, but it was very anemic, but I did not proactively go out and boost it up. Dex was the first people to call on me. I don’t even know if it was called Dex back then, but whatever it was called before it was called Dex.

Some of you are young listening to this. You’re like, “What the hell is Dex?” At any rate, they called on me and showed me a strategy to put in a much better ad, and it was very expensive, but we actually were able to track our ROI on it, and it was very worth it at that time, so…

Moe: So the salesman did you a service?

Tim: He absolutely did me a service. He didn’t sell me something I didn’t need or want. He showed me a way that I could build my business and help me justify it, and that’s a whole other podcast. We’re going to talk about that people buy based upon emotion and they back it up based upon logic, so he did a great job of both getting me emotionally involved and painting a picture of what my business could look like and asking me what I wanted my business to look like, got me very emotionally involved, and then showed me a way that I could justify the price I was paying for that.

Moe: If you knew that was critical for your business and you wanted to do it anyway and weren’t seeking it out, question: The programs that we offer individuals, are those critical for people and critical for businesses?

Tim: You bet.

Moe: Do people know it exists?

Tim: Not really, and a lot of people don’t even know we exist.

Moe: If you’re not even seeking out something that you know exists, how many people are going to seek us out?

Tim: That would be zero.

Moe: How big of a service do we provide for these businesses just by walking in the door and saying hello?

Tim: It’s huge. It’s huge, and we’re kind of getting off our format here because now you’re getting me inspired. What are you doing, Moe? We’re still in theory. At any rate, let’s move through this really quickly. Let me recap, and we’ll get into some practices and some inspiration. So selling the appointment is the hardest sale. Hands down, the hardest sale we have to make. That’s where all the rejection happens.

Getting the business owner to say yes and move forward with us, it takes some skill. It does take some practice, but honestly, it should be a no-brainer if we do it the right way. If we do all the steps right, the natural reaction is yes. I know it’s a sales process, but the way I like to describe it is I say, “It’s a guided conversation that ends in a logical conclusion.”

Moe: The other thing I want to remind people is keep this simple. I tell you, if all you did was show up to a business owner and keep it a simple process, at least 30 percent of them will say yes.

Tim: Sure. I absolutely believe that. We’re going to go and get the appointment, get the business owner to say yes, make sure we get access and control. We already talked about why that is so critical. We have to have that access and control, or we really don’t have a group. Back to that example of 80 people and only 8 showing up, the good news is those 8 people are going to buy everything you have.

Moe: Yes, they are.

Tim: They are because they went out of their way to go to a meeting they didn’t have to go to, obviously, because 72 people didn’t. They are interested. In fact, it is good news they all want it, but the bad news is one of the reasons they might be interested is because they may not be eligible. They may have some health issues that might not come out. We have access and control. The next thing we do is obviously make the employee sale, and then fifth one is referrals. When we get those referrals, all of a sudden, it makes sale one so much easier.

Moe: Because we borrow some influence.

Tim: We borrow influence. Moe has been reading. Yeah, that’s right out of Bob Burg’s book Endless Referrals. We’re going to borrow somebody else’s influence. Great. Let’s get into a little bit of practical things and what we can do.

Practice

Tim: All right, so practice. I think we’re going to attack this kind of non-linearly. Is that a word, linearly? We’re not necessarily going to go in order. How about that?

Moe: That’s fine.

Tim: I think we were on a little bit of a roll here on the appointment, so I do want to talk about some ways to cut through the clutter, because it really is clutter. We already said that the business owner is getting called on by salespeople all the time. Are they busy?

Moe: Always or they should be; otherwise, they’re going out of business.

Tim: Sure, and most of the time it’s legitimate. I’ve had business owners, however, who have spent 10 minutes at the counter telling me why they were too busy to give me 15 minutes in their office.

Moe: Have you ever gone 20 minutes at the counter trying to get the 15-minute appointment?

Tim: I think I probably have. Sure. They’re legitimately busy. They’re being called on by a bunch of other salespeople. How thrilled are they with the insurance industry as a whole right now?

Moe: You know, one time, I was actually trying to figure this out with business owners, how many different lines of insurance they need, and most of the insurance they need they have to have. They don’t even want to have it, but they have to have it. I stopped counting when I got to 11 lines of insurance that a business owner needs, 11 different types of insurance that a business owner has to have.

Tim: Wow, 11. I can come up with six or seven right in my head, so I believe you. That’s crazy. You’re right. We have to cut through the clutter. They’re already not real thrilled with insurance. They’re getting inundated by salespeople. There are a myriad of other reasons, especially with the economy having done what it did over the last few years. A lot of them are running leaner than they’ve ever run.

When they say they’re busy, they really are. They have a cutting torch in their hand. You know, at Frank’s Welding, Frank is under a truck with a cutting torch in his hand. Then on top of that, oftentimes, one of our challenges is just finding the business owner in their business, right?

Moe: Right.

Tim: They’re out submitting a bid or they’re playing golf with their brother-in-law or whatever. We have to even find them in the business, so here’s what I found. I used to track this very, very carefully when I was a trainer for one of the carriers.

If we’re calling on small businesses and we’re doing a good job…we have effective scripting (and we’ll talk more about that in a future episode, as well) and we know exactly who we’re looking for (we know Frank is the owner of Frank’s Welding; we know he has 15 employees), we know all that going in…we have about a one in four chance if he is in the building.

If he is in the building we have about one in four chance of getting him to the counter. Now does that mean that we got thrown out three out of four times, that they said, “Go away. Never come back”?

Moe: No. That usually means that they give you a line, like, “He’s in a meeting. He’s unavailable right now,” where you just couldn’t get past the gatekeeper.

Tim: Sure and some of those are legitimate. I would say that probably at least one-third of those are truly legitimate. He is with a customer. He is under the truck with a cutting torch in his hand and can’t be bothered. The other two-thirds are we just haven’t built enough rapport with that gatekeeper to get them to go get Frank for us.

Moe: Well, and you actually just brought it around to what I was thinking is the most important part about trying to get this appointment. Whether you’re making it cold, you’re going in to see someone that you know; it all comes down to building that relationship, building that rapport. The better you get at building rapport and getting these people to “buy” you quickly, the easier it gets for you to set that appointment.

As we talked about with Action Selling, there’s a process to sale. The first thing that anybody buys is the salesperson, so they won’t give you that appointment unless they buy you first. That’s the most important thing that you have to do when you go set that appointment.

Tim: You have to get that gatekeeper, the receptionist, whoever it is, to give you the time of day to get you in front of Frank.

Moe: When Frank comes out, you have to get Frank to want to give you the time of day. They need to buy into you.

Tim: You bet, which is a great segue. I said one in four. That’s 25 percent, right? When he is in the building, 25 percent of the time we get him to the counter. Again, I tracked this very, very carefully with new agents, and I’m talking about hundreds of agents…hundreds of agents…going out for a minimum of six hours in a day.

It wasn’t like they went out and made three calls and we tracked that. We’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of agents over the course of time. They had to go out for a minimum of 6 hours, go out cold calling on small businesses, so again, we found out that 25 percent of the time, if they were in the building, we could get them to the counter.

Then it gets interesting. I think that’s interesting enough, but then it gets really interesting. What we found is, again, with effective scripting and some role-playing…these are brand-new agents, Moe; this is not somebody who has been in this business 10 years…once we got Frank to the counter, we could get an appointment 60 percent of the time.

Now that sounds really cool, but here is the challenge. Here is where it boils down to all the rejection: 60 percent of 25 percent is 15 percent. That means if we walk through 100 doors, even as a new agent, but we’ve been working on our craft, we’ve been working on effective scripting then doing the role-play (we’ve paid the price), 15 percent. That feels like abject failure, doesn’t it?

Moe: If we’re programmed that way.

Tim: If we’re programmed that way, but most people are.

Moe: Which most people are. We’ve been told that you need to do it perfect. You need to get 100 percent on your test. If you don’t get 100 percent, you did something wrong. You have to be perfect. In this business, you don’t.

Tim: Yeah, and thank God people have to be perfect in other professions. I want my airline pilot to land perfectly every time, every single time. A record of 15 percent good landings is not acceptable for an airline pilot.

Moe: No.

Tim: No. If you’re working in Detroit on an assembly line for Chrysler and you only get your lug nut on that bolt 15 percent of the time, how long are you going to have a job?

Moe: Not long.

Tim: Not long. Right?

Moe: After probably your second failure, you might be kicked out.

Tim: You bet. They’re going to give you a little bit of a chance to learn the craft, but they expect you to be almost perfect. Now here’s the great thing: We don’t expect that out of our sports stars.

Moe: No. In fact, there are two businesses in this world, where you can do your job 30 percent of the time, be a superstar, and make a lot of money. Can you guess which two professions those are?

Tim: I’m going to say sports and sales. Right?

Moe: More importantly, baseball and sales.

Tim: Baseball and sales.

Moe: Baseball and sales. You follow baseball, don’t you?

Tim: I do. I’m a season ticket holder for the Arizona Diamondbacks, you bet.

Moe: Who is your favorite batter?

Tim: Ever? Ever? My favorite batter of all time, honestly, is Edgar Martinez. He was a designated hitter for the Seattle Mariners. You don’t see designated hitters in the Hall of Fame very often, or ever.

Moe: Right.

Tim: I think he deserves to be there.

Moe: Edgar Martinez, you said?

Tim: Mm-hmm.

Moe: Seattle Mariners.

Tim: You bet.

Moe: What was his batting average?

Tim: Lifetime, about .330.

Moe: So .330, so he was a pretty good batter, right?

Tim: He was a great batter.

Moe: I think the best batting average I ever saw was like a .340 or a .350 once.

Tim: For a career?

Moe: For a career.

Tim: Yeah.

Moe: When he got up to bat, when he was playing, did they call him up and say, “Now batting, Edgar Martinez, abject failure 7 out of 10 times”?

Tim: Yes. “Now batting, designated hitter, Edgar Martinez,” and then they read off his batting average for the year so far.

Moe: The same thing goes with sales. He did his job 30 percent of the time.

Tim: Correct.

Moe: He got paid a lot of money for that, didn’t he?

Tim: He did. He was very well paid by the…

Moe: His sole job was just to hit.

Tim: Just to hit.

Moe: He did it 30 percent of the time. Same thing in sales. Now the nice part is, if you do your job 20 percent of the time in sales, you’ll make a lot of money.

Tim: You can still make a great living. You bet. I think that should be encouraging to people. You’ve got to remember that it’s not personal. That’s probably the biggest thing for me. Moe. You’ve known me a long time. You know how I’m wired. I want people to like me. I want people, when I call them, to see my number come up in their cell phone and be excited to talk to me, and so it’s kind of a weird thing to be in sales and to have that kind of personality because the challenge is you might be afraid to ask for the sale.

Moe: Yeah, because you don’t want to offend somebody.

Tim: Right. Well, if they say no, they’re saying no to me. See, that’s the way I’m wired. If they say no, they must not like me, and we have to get over that. You have to. If you’re in this business, you have to get over two things. You have to get over the fact that when they say no, they’re not saying no to you. They’re saying no to the process, the product, or your service. They may not even really even understand it. Most of the time, quite honestly, they don’t. They’re saying no to what they think the product or service is.

Again, when we’re talking to that business owner and trying to get them to give us an appointment, they think two things. They think it’s going to cost them something, and they think they’re going to have to change something. That’s another big part of that clutter we have to cut through because it doesn’t cost them anything, and they don’t have to change anything. Not really. They don’t have to change their current benefits structure to offer voluntary benefits. They just have to make a payroll deduction available for us.

Moe: Yeah.

Tim: We have to help you get through that. That’s one of the reasons that I’m very, very, very, very excited about this process. We’re going to help you do that. Do you think it’s important to know what you’re going to say before you go in, Moe?

Moe: Well, you have to. That’s going to give you the confidence. If you take some time, practice your “scripts.”

Tim: Ooh, I don’t like the word scripts.

Moe: Okay. If you…

Tim: I’m just teasing. I’m just teasing. There are a lot of people in this industry who get all hung up on the word scripts.

Moe: Well, and you shouldn’t. What it is is if you see a script that’s been developed, and I will say that scripts have been developed, 99.99 percent of the time, these are words, phrases. This is a practice that works. It has been tried, trued. It has happened in the field. It has been used in the field. It has been tested over and over again, and they’ve already gone through it and known what to say, what not to say, figured out what worked, what didn’t work, and put the best of the best there.

Tim: You bet. If you don’t like the word scripts, try this: phraseology that’s been proven to work.

Moe: Right or let’s think about it this way: Do you have a favorite actor?

Tim: Well, I do, but I don’t want to tell you.

Moe: Well, no, no, no, not that one.

Tim: Because I have a little bit of a man crush on him.

Moe: Oh, tell me who it is.

Tim: I’m not saying, so at any rate…

Moe: Okay, well, I’ll ask the audience this. If you have a favorite actor, think of who it is, and think of some of the best movies that they’ve ever put on.

Tim: Sure.

Moe: Do you think they just winged it, or might they have had a script?

Tim: I’m pretty sure they just improvised all those lines.

Moe: Oh, yeah, every last one of them in. No, they were given a script, and they didn’t just read the script over once and then walk up on stage or walk in front of the camera and deliver the script flawlessly. I bet you they had to practice it over and over and over and over again. What they ended up having to do was, first of all, they memorized it, then they internalized it, and then they personalized it.

Tim: You bet. It’s actually a little bit deeper than that. Moe, you know about me, but what a lot of the people here don’t know about me probably is that I’ve been in a lot of plays, a little bit of a thespian. One of my great directors sat down and helped me really understand this process, where he would talk about going through line by line. We would take literally every single line in that script, and we would tear it apart.

We would look at the intent behind that line. We would make choices about it. Did we want to emphasize the first part of it or the last part of it? Were we going to deliver it at a rapid pace, or did we want to slow it down and draw it out? What kind of emotion were we trying to portray? That was every single sentence in that line, every word.

We would mark up the script with red, yellow, green, and blue pencils. You would make notes on it, and you would try it all these different ways. He called it “making choices.” He would say, “I like what you’re doing there, Tim, but I don’t think that’s the strongest choice,” and so as we look at scripting, that’s really what we have to do. We have to look and find the strongest choice. We have to remember…What is the intent? What is the intent behind that line?

If you don’t like the actual words, you do have a little flexibility here. It’s not like Hollywood, where you have to deliver that line verbatim, but you need to understand what the intent was, because I promise you there is not a line in a script (at least in a good script, one that has been tested and proven) that is a throwaway line.

Moe: Right.

Tim: It’s there for a reason. What is that reason? You have to think about it, and if you don’t know, ask your manager. Ask another agent. Sit down with them, and find out, “What do you think that reason was?” For instance, one of my favorite things is, when I walk in, when I ask for an appointment, when I ask for Frank, I say, “Is he in?”

Why do I say that? Well, it gives her an answer: yes or no. If she says no, there is really not a lot I need to do anymore, right? If she says yes, that gives me to the green light to ask the next question, instead of just walking in and saying, “Hey, I’m here to schedule an appointment with Frank. Could you go see if he could greet me?” Well, how stupid do you feel when she says, “Oh, he’s not even in”?

Moe: Or how much of a salesperson do you sound like?

Tim: You sound exactly like a salesperson.

Moe: What if you could change that up and you knew Frank’s name, and you say, “Hey, is Frank in?”

Tim: Yeah.

Moe: “Hey, is Frank here?”

Tim: Yeah.

Moe: What do you sound like? “Hey, is Frank here?”

Tim: You sound like a customer now.

Moe: Or a friend.

Tim: Or a friend, and she doesn’t know.

Moe: She doesn’t know.

Tim: Yeah, absolutely. She has no idea, so her defenses go down a little bit.

Moe: Hey, Tim, what if you don’t know the name of the decision maker; is there a way that you can easily get that? Do you mind if I share my way?

Tim: Why don’t you go ahead and share yours. I know how I would do it, but…

Moe: Well, what you want to do is you want to soften up the tone when you go in. First of all, are you going to ask Frank for a lot of his time, right now?

Tim: Of course not.

Moe: What you want to do is you kind of want to introduce yourself, right?

Tim: Sure.

Moe: If you were to walk into the gatekeeper and say, “Hey, if I wanted to introduce myself to the owner or person in charge of benefits, who would that be?”

Tim: That’s great.

Moe: Because what I want to do is, first of all, find out whom I need to talk to, right?

Tim: Right.

Moe: I’m not asking to meet them right now. I’m just asking to introduce myself.

Tim: Who they would be. Yeah, if I wanted to, who would that be?

Moe: Right.

Tim: Very, very soft. Very soft. Sure. Okay, so absolutely, we have to get over the word scripts. You have to get over it.

Moe: Right. At the same time, when you’re practicing for the scripts, do you want to continue to practice and practice and practice and practice and practice until you get it perfect, or is it okay to try a little live fire?

Tim: I’m pretty sure when you talk to the military, they do a lot of dry fire and drills upfront, but there comes a point where the only way you’re going to learn how to shoot is by shooting.

Moe: Right. When you start to shoot the first time, even though you’ve practiced it over and over again, are you going to be perfect?

Tim: In fact, no, you’re probably going to be bad.

Moe: Right. In fact, the only way you truly perfect, and you never really perfect this art, by the way… The only way you truly get better at it is by doing it live, and it is okay to make a mistake.

Tim: Yeah. Yes, it is. I’ve seen a lot of agents who they wait until they think they know everything before they get started, and you can’t do that. I said, earlier, you have to know your product. You have to know your services. You have to become an expert, but I said become an expert. I didn’t say you have to be an expert to get started here in this business.

You have to get going. I see a lot of people who are getting ready to get ready to get ready, and if you are sorting the business cards you’ve collected alphabetically by industry type at 10:00, you are fooling yourself.

Moe: Well, you’re talking 10:00 in the morning, not 10:00 at night.

Tim: Yes, 10:00 in the morning. If you want to do it at 10:00 at night, that’s fine. If you’re doing it at 10:00 in the morning, you are fooling yourself. You are mistaking activity for results. You’re mistaking busywork for something that’s actually going to drive your business forward.

Moe: Or you’re intentionally avoiding the work that you need to do.

Tim: Yeah, I think it may be subconsciously, but for most people, I don’t think they really are doing that consciously, but the subconscious is a big thing here. One of my heroes in this business (his name is Les Heinsen), he says everything you do in your day is either goal achieving or stress relieving. Stress relieving he defines as things where people can’t tell you no.

Sorting your business cards, stress relieving. Nobody is going to tell you no. Calling on that place where you’ve stopped in 33 times, and they always are really nice to you, but you’re not getting anywhere with, that’s really stress relieving. You know they’re going to be nice to you, and they’re not going to throw you out. They’re not going to be rude to you, so you stop by there in the guise of followup. There comes a time where you need to fish or cut bait there. Building a database, putting together packets, all those things, nobody tells you no when you’re doing those things. Those are all stress relieving.

Moe: What you’re saying is building packets or building a database during what we call “green time,” which we’ll get into when we talk about time management, but during your prime selling time is the same as going to see a movie, isn’t it?

Tim: Yeah. In fact, it’s worse. Here’s why: because you mentally think you’re working. I would much rather somebody go see a movie in the middle of the afternoon than build packets in the middle of the afternoon because if they’re in the movie, they know that they’re slacking off, and sometimes that’s necessary.

I’m not advocating every agent that listens to this goes to a movie this afternoon. That’s not what I’m saying, but there comes a time where you have to recharge. There is a reason they call it re creation, right? You have to recharge. So I’m not giving you permission just to slack off. What I am saying, though, is be aware of when you are slacking off.

Moe: Make it intentional.

Tim: Make it intentional. Make it intentional.

Moe: Hey, Tim, you talked about people making mistakes in sales. One of the biggest mistakes that I have seen new salespeople do, especially if they’re wired like you are, where they want people to like them, is they accept a lot of noes. They don’t think they’re noes.

Tim: Okay. Like what?

Moe: Well, let’s put it this way: In my career, I have learned that anything less than a definitive yes is a no.

Tim: That’s good. That’s really good.

Moe: If someone says, “I want to think about it,” what does that really mean?

Tim: No.

Moe: Yeah. If someone says, “Hey, let me go ahead and talk to my people.”

Tim: No.

Moe: “Hey, you know, I’m actually busy right now. Call me in a couple of weeks.”

Tim: No.

Moe: Yeah. Anything less than a yes…

Tim: Is a no.

Moe: …is a no. You need to wire your brain this way. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time to do it when you’re new to sales, but get to realize that. When you’re going to set the appointment, if they don’t give you a date and time to enroll them or to meet with the decision maker; if the decision maker, when you meet with him, doesn’t give you a date and time to meet with their people; when you ask for access and control, if they don’t give you 100 percent access and control; when you sit down with an employee and they don’t sign up for a product, even if they say, “I need to talk it over with my spouse.”

Tim: No.

Moe: Right. “I need to pray about it.”

Tim: No.

Moe: Okay. When you ask for a referral, if they say, “Hey, you know what? I’ll tell you what. I’ll get that list back to you.”

Tim: No.

Moe: “Anything less than a yes…” If you don’t get that in your mind, you’re going to walk away from a lot of business. What you have to figure out in your mind for you: are you, as the salesperson, okay with that no?

Tim: That’s a good point, because there are times where you’re going to have to be okay with it. I mean, there are times where you don’t want to frustrate the person. You don’t want to destroy a relationship, but again, over 16 years, I have seen most people walk away way too early.

Moe: Right.

Tim: They take the first no.

Moe: Right. They take the first or the second no. Have you ever heard the statistics on how many noes a person has to say before they’re ready to say yes?

Tim: I think it’s like seven or eight, isn’t it?

Moe: It’s a little lower than that. They have to say no at least five or six times before they’re ready to say yes.

Tim: Five or six times they have to say no to you.

Moe: Now if someone says no, that’s an objection, isn’t it?

Tim: It is.

Moe: It may be a condition, but it’s an objection. How do we handle objections?

Tim: Ask more questions.

Moe: Ask more questions.

Tim: Well, let’s talk about that for a second. I mean, we are in theory, so let’s talk, just for a second, about the difference, because a lot of people in sales don’t really get this. I’ve noticed this. They think that there is one thing, and it’s called an objection. There are three. There are three very distinct things that can happen other than a yes. Okay? Yes is what we want, obviously.

Moe: Always.

Tim: Always, but there are three other things that could happen. The first one is a stall. A stall is when the business owner says… It’s basically them trying to get rid of you and put you off (maybe not even consciously but subconsciously) hoping you’ll never come back. You ask for the appointment, and they say, “Oh, I’m really busy. Call me in two weeks.”

Moe: Ninety percent of those, of your first objections that you get, are the stalls.

Tim: They really are. You have built no rapport, you have built no value proposition, no reason for them to tell you yes, to give you that appointment, to buy that product, or give you access and control of their employees. You haven’t built enough rapport. You haven’t built enough need in their mind for them to say yes to you. They don’t want to say no, because that’s rude. You’re standing right there in front of them. That’s why I like to do this in person as opposed to on the phone.

Moe: They want to be liked, and they don’t want to offend.

Tim: Yeah. I know a little bit about that. Right? We just said that. They don’t want to be rude, so they put you off subconsciously (maybe consciously) hoping you won’t come back. You know, “Man, you caught me on a bad day. Why don’t you check in with me next week?” That’s a stall.

An objection is really, to me, is a buying sign. If I get an objection, I can close on that objection, and we’ll do a whole podcast on this. This is one of my favorite subjects. Whatever their objection is is the biggest reason they need to move forward. “I can’t afford this.” “That’s exactly why you need it. If you can’t afford having $6 a week taken out of your paycheck, how are you going to afford to pay your bills if you miss work for 2 months?”

That’s just one little example, and we’ll go through a bunch of them and ways to turn that around, but really, that’s a buying sign. A true objection means, “I really want to tell you yes, but I’m a little nervous. I need a little more information. I need to feel a little better. I need to know I can trust you a little bit more before I can go ahead and say yes.”

I love objections. When I first started, I hated objections. I would get an objection, and it was like, “Beep! Beep! Beep! Danger, Will Robinson! Danger, Will Robinson! Going down in flames!” I would get all nervous. I would get red. I know you find that hard to believe, that my face would get red. I would get all red. Today, today, when I hear an objection, I get excited because I know I can turn that and close it.

Moe: When you first started in this business, you were nervous and feeling like you were in danger a lot.

Tim: A lot.

Moe: Now you get excited a lot.

Tim: I do.

Moe: Because you always get objections when you’re selling, don’t you?

Tim: You’re always going to get an objection, you bet. We talked stall. We talked objection. The last one is a condition. Conditions, you can’t solve, and you have to ask enough question to find out…Is it really an objection, or is it really a condition? A condition could be… Just a real quick example (like I said, we’re going to get deep into this subject on another podcast) is the business owner saying, “Moe, I’d love to do this. I think this is great for my employees. I’m not sure I’m going to be in business two weeks from now, two months from now.”

Moe: Yeah, you really can’t solve that. Or how about you’re walking in to get an appointment, and the business owner is in Hawaii?

Tim: Yeah. Not much you can do there, right? It’s a condition. It’s not an objection. It’s not a stall. It’s a condition, but oftentimes, I really believe this, even the salespeople who don’t really understand what the difference between the three are, they get a stall or they get an objection, and they think it’s a condition. They instantly jump it to condition, and they play it in their head as it is true. “I can’t afford this.” “Oh, okay.” Or, “I’m really busy.” “Oh, okay.”

Moe: Or “I can’t afford this,” and, “I really don’t want to pressure this person, so okay.”

Tim: Okay. Yep. They take it as a condition when it really was just an objection or a stall, so that works in all five of these sales, honestly. That’s very true in all five of those. All right, my favorite one, “Can you send me an email?” “No.”

Moe: “No.”

Tim: That’s a no.

Moe: It’s too easy to hit Delete.

Tim: It is really easy. It probably got caught in their spam folder in the first place.

Moe: In fact, I use that as the way to handle that one. “Hey, can you send me an email?” “You know, I would love to, but it’s just too easy to hit Delete on that,” or “Hey, can you leave me some brochures?” “You know what? I’m actually firing my brochures because they’re not closing enough sales.”

Tim: “I’m firing my brochures.” That’s funny. That’s funny. One last thing on this, and we’ll kind of wrap up, go into a couple of inspirational stories on this and close down with that. When you do find an objection or a stall and you can’t get around it, and you have to come back… Maybe it’s setting an appointment. They literally are too busy.

They’re right in the middle of a big project. The deadline is this afternoon, and they just found out some of the stuff that they need to meet that deadline didn’t come in on the supply truck last night. That’s a condition. They’re pushing you off…whatever.

When you call back or you go back (I see agents do this all the time; it cracks me up), do not remind them what they used to get rid of you in the first place. I see agents do this all the time. “Hey, we talked a couple of weeks ago, and you were really busy. You said to give you a call this week.” “Uh… I’m still busy.”

Moe: Tim, I set a lot of appointments, and I’ve made that mistake over and over again.

Tim: We do it all the time. Let’s get into a couple of inspirational stories on this. I think you’ll really enjoy them.

Inspiration

Tim: Okay, so here’s a funny story, and maybe it’s not that inspirational. I think it is. I got a call. This is from a referral. I got a call from a lady, and she said, “Hey, Tim, my husband works at XYZ company.” She gives me the name of the company, a company I just opened with about 55 employees. Nice little company, right? That’s a nice company.

She said, “I’ve always wanted your type of coverage.” She was the HR director for a 300-life company, a 300 life-company. She said, “I always thought that we should probably have something like that for our employees, but I didn’t know carriers would work with companies as small as ours,” 300 employees.

She said, “When I found out you’re working with my husband’s company…” He was just a laborer there, basically. He was an HVAC guy for that company. She said, “I figured if you’ll work with a 55-life company, you certainly would work with a 300-life company.” Here’s the inspiration on that: Why didn’t I ask him when I met with him, “Where does your wife work?”

Moe: So you’re saying if you would’ve asked for a referral, is it possible that maybe there are some folks out there who want the service but just don’t know?

Tim: Just don’t know. They don’t know where to go. They don’t know who to talk to.

Moe: They’re not bold enough to call you.

Tim: She is the HR director. She has a lot of power in that company. She could easily have done it. Did her broker bring us in? No. Did she go out of her way? Eventually. On referrals, you have to open your mouth. I call it the three-foot rule. If you get within three feet of me, you know, first, what a good client looks like for me; secondly, of course, what I do; and thirdly, I’m looking for good clients.

If you get within three feet of me, you know that because I found (biblical wisdom here), “You have not because you ask not.” Your chances of getting what you want go up dramatically if you’ll just ask. My friend, Mike Mueller, says, “They go up at least 1,000 percent if you just ask.”

Moe: If you just ask, and ask often.

Tim: Ask often. Another quick story on this I hope will kind of drive the point home on how this all works on access and control. I had an opportunity to go back and revive a very nice school district, about 800 employees. We had been in there for a long time, like 25-30 years. We had been in this school district for 25-30 years.

About 10 years before I went back into it, they had made the decision that they were no longer going to allow “outside vendors” in to meet with their employees at a mandatory meeting, and they did that through a collective bargaining agreement, the teachers union, the janitors union, the certified and classified unions, the school bus driver union. They all work together.

They made these bylaws that said if it was a mandatory meeting that employees had to attend that there could be no outside vendors. It didn’t matter whether that was Sprint… I was like, “Well, we’re one of your benefits providers,” and they didn’t see us that way. That’s often the case. Honestly, it shouldn’t be, but a lot places, especially if you, as an agent, haven’t done a good job of building that value, becoming a trusted advisor, they just see you as a vendor.

Moe: Well, I have to look at that, Tim, and we talked about stalls, objections, and conditions. That sounds like a pretty darn good condition.

Tim: It is a good condition. There wasn’t anything we could do to overcome it other than change the mind of the people in charge that we weren’t a vendor, that we were part of their benefits package, right? I don’t know where I got this idea, but sometimes just weird stuff comes to me.

I’m meeting with the superintendent. He’s explaining that. He is a brand-new superintendent of the school. I’m meeting with him. He is all about it. He thinks this is a great idea, gets the HR person to come into the meeting, steps in, and she says, “Oh, yeah, we can’t do this because we have this collective bargaining agreement.” On the fly, I said, “Well, could we do this? Could we have a voluntary meeting?”

Oh, by the way, this voluntary meeting was going to be held at the district office after school. After teaching all day, they have lesson plans still to write, they have papers to grade, they have their own kids to deal with, how many of them do you think are going to go out of their way to go to the district office to go to a voluntary meeting for voluntary benefits?

Moe: If you get 1 or 2 percent, you’re very lucky.

Tim: You bet. I think we ended up with 15 people at the meeting, and I think 5 of them were district employees from the district office. We probably got about 10 teachers and/or certified, classified people to come, which I thought was great, but here’s why we got 10: I personally invited 5 of them because they were the head of their union or they were high up in their union.

I had two from the teachers union, one from the classified union, the school bus driver union person, and somebody else. We had five people from union representation there, and I made my presentation. At the very end I put out a little checklist, a little check sheet, to gather their basic information, and I put three boxes on the end of it. This is theory and inspiration.

The first checkbox was, “I found this meeting very valuable. I think this coverage is something that I personally want, and I think we should make it available to all of our employees.” They already had it, but I put this way. The second checkbox said, “I found this meeting valuable. I may not personally need this type of coverage, but I think we should make it available to all of our employees.” Then the third box said, “I didn’t find this valuable. I don’t want this coverage, and I don’t think we should make it available.” Do you know nobody checked the third box?

Moe: I don’t know if you, politically, should ever check that third box.

Tim: Right. There you are. They have constituents. They are representatives for their people. I think 8 out of 10 checked the first box, and 2 of them checked the second box. Then while they were all still there, I had gathered them up, and I said, “Well, guys, these are the results. Would it be okay if I went back to Dr. So-and-so (the superintendent) and showed him these results and ask him if we could come to a mandatory meeting, come to your in-service days?” To a person, they all said yes.

When we went back to meet with the superintendent, I explained it to him. He brought in the HR director. The HR director said, “Well, if the head of the union says it is okay, how can we tell him no?” We got an opportunity. We ended up educating about 600 of them out of the 800 employees, because there are always people who don’t come to mandatory meetings. They’re on vacation. They’re sick. They’re staying, watching kids in detention, whatever.

Moe: Had a family emergency.

Tim: Had a family emergency, all those kinds of things, right. Yeah. Sometimes you have to work around it and get back to that access and control. You have to find creative ways to gain that access and control, and so that’s where we’re at.

Well, Moe, I really believe that’s it for this week. If you haven’t had a chance, guys, to get onto www.successisvoluntary.com/, we have some great blog posts up there. Subscribe to the newsletter. Every Saturday I’m going to be sending out kind of a recap of the blog posts I have put out that week and a little bit of new content, as well. Until next week, we appreciate it. Thanks a lot. Have a great week.

Moe: Have a great week, folks.

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