Maximize face-to-face opportunities to build new partnerships and close more business.
In a third season episode of the great mockumentary sitcom “The Office,” hapless middle manager Michael Scott rails against the ever-increasing encroachment of technology at Dunder Mifflin by exclaiming: “People will never be replaced by machines. In the end, life and business are about human connections. Computers are about trying to murder you in a lake. And to me the choice is easy.”
Although right before this we had seen Michael actually drive into a lake after misinterpreting his GPS’s instructions, you can’t entirely dismiss his point. Technology is fundamentally intertwined with business, but at the end of the day, people want to connect, collaborate and work with other people – not machines. This means you must seize opportunities for personal, face-to-face marketing whenever they arise. Let’s look at some ways of doing so successfully.
Choose the right events
Before you can share information about your agency and engage in face-to-face marketing, you first must identify events that will put you in front of the right people. Thankfully, for those in the title insurance and real estate industries, there is no shortage of possibilities:
Conferences and meetings: Consult your state’s land title association for opportunities. Trade press publications will also frequently advertise professional meetings to their readers.
Real estate association meetings: Realtor associations and boards represent a fantastic opportunity to market yourself to integral players in the real estate space.Finding out about meetings you may want to attend is also relatively easy by searching online.
Online webinars: Both educational and social, digital webinars can expand your professional knowledge and industry circle in one fell swoop.
Chamber of commerce events: Local chambers of commerce provide a supportive environment for businesses and offer resources and tools to help them connect and collaborate.
Know your company’s story
When acting as a personal representative of your agency in a face-to-face setting, you must have your company’s story down pat. More specifically, you must be able to convey your value proposition quickly and clearly.
One way to successfully deliver in these moments is to develop an “elevator pitch” beforehand. Creating easy-to-remember talking points allows you to effortlessly speak to potential customers about how your products and services can improve their lives.
Branded materials
Pulling off successful face-to-face marketing is challenging, but bringing along well-designed marketing materials can make it easier. Let’s look at the following best practices:
Avoid clutter: While you want to include complete and accurate information, avoid overloading your materials. Remember: when participating in an event, people often don’t have time to digest large amounts of textual information.
Include the right info: Highlight your communication information in any materials you bring. You are trying to equip contacts with the means to continue the relationship. Include your email, phone, company name, job title and potentially your social media accounts.
Stay on brand: All marketing materials should be seen as a natural extension of your brand, which means they need to use the right colors, fonts and logos.
Follow up, follow up, follow up
Meeting and pitching someone on your business is not a one-and-done activity. You must also follow up with them. What’s the best way? As we know, some people are hesitant to talk on the phone these days and email is hit or miss. Social media platforms like LinkedIn can be an effective way to follow up. Reaching out on social media can have a personal and real feel, and sites like LinkedIn lend themselves to building organic, long-term connections.
Keep the following in mind:
Be specific and personal: Even if you have a lot of connections to write, take the time to personalize each message.
Brevity is best: People are busy and generally overwhelmed with information. If you want someone to read your LinkedIn note, keep it short and sweet.
Emphasize value: Avoid coming across as overly “salesy,” but be sure to include a value proposition for your message recipient. Give them a reason to want to take the relationship to the next step.
Make meaningful, lasting connections
Personal, face-to-face marketing can yield a high rate of return. Even in our highly digital world, many customers still find connecting person-to-person one of the most impactful forms of communication. By taking these tips to heart, you can grab such opportunities and run with them.
In a varied career split between law enforcement, real estate and title insurance, Tia Hall has been driven by a desire to provide support to her community.
For nearly 25 years, Tia Hall has remained steadfastly committed to her community. From her early career in criminal justice to her current responsibilities at Alliant National, she has long been motivated by helping others. Well-versed in making departments and organizations operate more effectively, Hall’s work at Alliant National is invaluable to its Southeast operations.
Hall’s career path wasn’t a straight line, but rather a winding journey that brought together seemingly disparate fields in a harmonious blend. For well over a decade, Hall served as a criminal justice specialist for Cobb County in Georgia. However, one of Hall’s main responsibilities during these years would prove advantageous to her later career. Hall’s focus in criminal justice often revolved around community outreach and enabling officers to engage more productively with vulnerable populations. “Working within law enforcement is very strenuous work,” Hall said, reflecting on why such work is critical. “You are dealing with a lot of people from different walks of life.”
As fate would have it, Hall would come to interact with a group of people immersed in real estate. “I often interacted with lawyers and others in real estate,” she stated, “especially when I was working on real estate code enforcement.”
While she was forming these connections, Hall was taking other steps that would eventually pave the way toward her joining the title insurance industry. Building from a foundation in criminal justice and psychology, Hall began studying real estate and became a notary public , working as a loan signing and closing agent. Throughout all these professional moves, Hall’s motivation remained the same: “I wanted more community connections.”
In 2022, Hall made the leap into the career she has today, joining the Alliant National team as the Southeast Support Administrator. At Alliant National, Hall works with every department – from HR to continuing education to accounting – to ensure that agents are empowered to execute on behalf of their clients. Calling upon her long history of driving growth, as well as diverse skill sets in administration, resource management, data protection, team building and more, she acts as a one-stop shop for agents and employees throughout the Southeast.
One important aspect of Hall’s day-to-day work is protecting the large quantities of personal information that are part and parcel with the title insurance profession. This is another area where she is well-served by her previous experiences in law enforcement. When working with the Georgia Bureau of Investigations (GBI), for instance, Hall developed an acute appreciation for data protection. “There is a huge paper trail in this work,” she said, emphasizing that the failure to protect such data could quite literally ruin lives.
Now settled into her new career, Hall had several things to say when asked to sum up her experience, as well as the connection between her current responsibilities and yesterday’s roles. For her, helping the community is at the heart of both professions: “I love people. I love communicating. And I love to be a help for those in need.”
However, it’s in title insurance that Hall has found an ideal platform to pursue this passion, even more so than in law enforcement. “This industry is more close-knit,” she said, before noting how new employees can benefit from leveraging the field’s strong sense of community. When asked about what younger or less experienced workers should know, she remarked, “Employees need a strong foundation, as well as support to not get lost.”
For Hall, that communal support was what helped her as she made her initial foray into the business. It is also what continues to fuel her today as she works to deliver results for Alliant National’s agents. “At Alliant National, it is always easy to reach out if you need something. We’re always there for each other.”
With community-minded employees like Tia Hall amongst its ranks, Alliant National’s agents can rest assured that someone will always be there for them too.
In today’s battle for clicks and conversions, personalization is key
By now, pretty much everyone knows how important digital technology is to the modern economy. From streamlining communication to improving product lines, digital makes the business world go around. Yet while digital technology has been a net benefit for companies, it has also raised customer expectations significantly. Today, it is not enough to merely offer the best product or service, you must also use your digital infrastructure to create unique, seamless and personal experiences for your clients. Here are some simple ways you can start doing so today.
Bring in the bots
I’ve previously written about the immense benefits of using chatbots on your website. From a customer service perspective, it just makes sense. In today’s “always-on” economy, you need to support your customers around the clock. Thankfully, chatbots have advanced enough to now answer a variety of user questions, direct visitors around your website or even provide educational or product resources.
Personalize content assets
One benefit of the digital age is that it has never been easier to deliver personalized communications at scale. Take email marketing. There are small, pre-written code snippets that you can insert into your subject lines or body copy that will populate with each email recipient’s personalized information upon delivery. The data shows that this simple action can have a big impact on the overall ROI of your email marketing campaigns, with some studies depicting a bump of nearly 50% in open rates.[i]
Gather feedback
Always leap at a chance to solicit and collect customer feedback. In doing so, you’ll gain valuable insights to improve your processes, operations and service delivery.
This is another area where digital technology can play an invaluable roll. Many standard CMS platforms offer built-in customer contact forms. The drawback is that this method is inherently passive – meaning your customers may take the time and effort to respond but also may not. A more active approach would involve creating a customer feedback survey that you disseminate directly to your customer base. SurveyMonkey or even Google Forms have made it a breeze to accomplish something like this, providing free or low-cost tools to help you connect with your clients and gather valuable opinions.
Create meaningful landing pages
An often-overlooked element of a given marketing or customer journey effort is landing pages, which is unfortunate for a variety of reasons. Not only can a shoddy landing page harm the overall impact of your marketing campaigns, but it wastes a chance to further personalize your client’s experience. While you shouldn’t overload your landing page with extraneous links that distract visitors from the action you want them to take (such as filling out a contact form), including a few other strategic resources targeted to their unique goals and pain points can help you create more valuable experiences.
Personalization and optimization = better business
It’s tempting to put personalization and optimization initiatives on the back burner, especially when you have many other competing priorities. Yet even making small tweaks to your digital ecosystem can go a long way toward developing more powerful connections with your audience and creating modern brand experiences.
Service-based industries live or die by the quality of their customer service. While other industries rely on their products or supply chains, service enterprises primarily differentiate themselves through the experiences they offer. Today’s savviest service-related companies are acutely aware of this. They also know retaining customers is much easier and economical than finding and converting new ones.
Recently, Missy Trubatisky, Alliant National’s Underwriting and Escrow Training Manager, called upon her years of title insurance experience to develop and present a training entitled “Customers for Life.” The presentation offered numerous examples of how title agents can build a superior customer service program and ultimately grow their businesses. Read on for some of the major takeaways.
It’s About Mindset
Perhaps the biggest thing to remember about creating “Customers for Life” and delivering superior customer service is that it is a bigger endeavor than any one action or campaign. Instead, it requires a complete shift in mindset. You must treat every deal like it is the most important of your career. Is this asking for a lot? Maybe. But it’s what your customers expect. And if you are in the services game, why would you want to do anything else? Missy says there are a few easy tricks to start shifting your thinking on this matter.
First, make every situation an opportunity to succeed, not an obligation to fulfill. Next, remember to present yourself professionally – every day and during every closing. Lastly, remember the golden rule, and then go one step further. Treat others not only as you want to be treated, but also as you would want your mother or children treated in the same situation, Missy says.
Opportunity vs. Obligation
You might be thinking: “Sure, it’s easy to talk about changing your mindset. Pulling it off is another thing entirely.” However, Missy says that when you start breaking it down, you quickly realize that it is not quite a Herculean lift. Instead of looking at it as a major undertaking, view customer obligations and opportunities as roughly the same thing.
We all know that working with customers entails at least some obligations. What matters, though, is how you choose to look at it. For instance, agents need to deliver the title commitment – typically within 20 days. Your obligation here is to deliver the commitment before the 21st day. Your opportunity is to deliver it in less than a week. In doing so, you demonstrate superior customer service; you provide the WOW factor. Making an obligation an opportunity isn’t as hard as you might think. It just involves a subtle shift in mindset, she says.
That’s Not Quite All
It would be nice if that was all it took to deliver superior customer service. But there is a bit more to it than that. Displaying ethical behavior, maintaining a sterling reputation, and engaging in effective communication also influences whether you can create customers for life.
How can you display ethical behavior in business? That’s a deep question. There are so many layers to ethical behavior, but for simplicity’s sake, Missy says you can boil it roughly down to integrity and character.
Your character is what others believe they know about the kind of person you are. Your integrity directly impacts how people view your character. It speaks to whether people view you as trustworthy. Trust is the basis of obtaining customers for life, Missy notes. When customers trust that you will do what you say, they will come back repeatedly.
Unsurprisingly, whether people consider your business ethical will determine its overall reputation. It will also dictate its longevity. When you are a service-based business, your reputation is all you have; you must protect it at all costs. This is where accountability comes in. It’s okay to make a mistake. We all do it. What’s important is how you address it. Here’s how you can go about making it right:
First, own the mistake
Second, figure out how to fix the mistake
Third, don’t try to hide it or sweep it under the rug
Lastly, learn from it, and don’t make the same mistake again
The final part of creating customers for life involves prioritizing effective communication with your customers. But before you can do that, you must first listen to their needs, Missy says. That means listening from beginning to end. We’re all guilty of formulating our side of the conversation even while others are formulating theirs. When we do that, we miss out on vital information that we need to know. We fail to understand what is important to our conversation partner.
Conversely, when you understand what is important to another person, you can show that you care about them. This creates the foundations of a trusting and mutually beneficial business relationship.
Alliant National: Committed to Building Customers for Life
Building a reputation for superior customer service takes real work, but when you are caught up in the day-to-day minutiae, it can be difficult to make needed changes. Still, there are numerous steps we all can take to improve our customer service and make our clients feel more appreciated and valued. All that’s required is going back to the basics. Missy emphasizes this when explaining the genesis of her presentation and how Alliant National seeks to help agents create loyal, lifelong customers. “Everyone needs a reminder from time-to-time on good basic customer service skills and the importance of developing those skills,” she said. “It’s critical for Alliant National to present these courses to offer a unique perspective to a vital skill.”
Want to learn more about creating “Customers for Life?” Check out Missy’s full presentation here.
