Seriously. I’m no Karl Rove or David Plouffe, but I can say with confidence that asking for votes is a winning campaign strategy.

Ok, candidates must also give voters reasons to vote for them, but there’s an important point at which the candidate has to stop giving reasons, ask directly for votes and then hope for the best.

The same holds for insurance agents. Do you want the sale? Make sure your prospect knows it and tell him or her explicitly. It usually makes for a nice closing statement: I would love to provide you with insurance, please let me know if you have any questions or concerns, etc., etc.

By stating your own wishes, you add an important layer to your prospect’s thought process: When it comes time to buy a policy, he or she will compare prices, name brands, coverages, etc. But that person will also do a quick calculation: Which agent asked for my business? Which agent wants me?

In a world of infinite choices, most of them indistinguishable from each other, many consumers just want a reason, however small, to pick one or the other. That way they can move on. Ask for their business and you give them a reason.

Somewhere in the transition from adolescence to adulthood we lose the instinct to make things simple: we forget to make plain our desires.

To be sure, you won’t always get what you ask for. But you’ll increase your odds greatly if the world knows what you want.

In short, the future of the blog looks pretty bright.

While the focus—daily sales and marketing tips—will remain, we’ll soon be sporting a new design, blogging platform (Wordpress) and hosting provider. Those last two things probably don’t excite you, but we’re pretty stoked. So keep checking in … we hope (fingers crossed) to roll it out next week.

In the process of preparing for the transition, I’ve been combing through posts of yore, back when Megan Mahan ably helmed the Agent Blog. I recommend poking through the archives—there’s good stuff in there! And maybe it's just me, but I think we made some pretty memorable videos.

Since it’s Friday, I’ll leave you with something to get you into the weekend mood. Something … provocative:

CLICK HERE

Have a great weekend.

2. Keep it short. Try out this analogy: Prospects are like paper bags. Your pitch is water. Pour too much into the bag, it will break and the contents will end up in a puddle on the floor.

3. Emphasize substance over style. Too much polish can arouse suspicion and cynicism. Convey your key points clearly and with confidence, and don’t worry if your delivery doesn’t have the smooth baritone of your local used car dealer (in fact, rejoice that it doesn’t). Be yourself.

4. Tailor your delivery to each prospect. Each prospect is unique, with a varying financial situation, as well unique motivations and buying patterns. They have different levels of insurance savvy. Some want to buy a policy quickly, while others want to take their time. Since there are no generic prospects, there should be no generic sales presentations.

5. Keep it conversational. People retain information more easily when it’s presented in conversation than if it’s given through a one-way lecture. It’s also easier to forge a real relationship with someone when you talk like regular person.

The irony, of course, is that the financial crisis is itself partly the result of people tensing up and moving toward the safe, tried and true.

As an agent you may have, aware or not, become a little bit more guarded, little bit more short-sighted in your thinking, a little more tense. Indeed, you may have lost a bit of the carefree attitude that you had when times were bullish. Perhaps your former inclination to play at work may now be out of the question in these serious times. By play I mean explore possibilities from a standpoint of abundance, as opposed to scarcity.

The problem—one of the problems—is that tension, fear and seriousness are antithetical to creativity and innovation. And innovation and creativity are what you need to thrive, no matter what line of work you’re in.

This post was inspired by this presentation at last year’s TED conference. Check it out and be inspired.

Contrast that with how most businesses operate: they figure if they see you at the door (or hear you on the other end of the line), you’re already sold, no extra effort on their part required. The customer came to me, the misguided thinking goes, now it’s just time to efficiently take their order and shoo them away to make room for the next guy.

Back to Starbucks. For one thing, you can usually count on a greeting when you walk in the door, not just when you approach the cashier. When you leave, coffee in hand, you often get a parting thank you. It’s fast-food expediency minus fast food indifference.

In essence, Starbucks treats their customers like perennial prospects—people who aren’t sold once, but rather, must perpetually be sold, day after day, morning after morning. It’s the mentality that acknowledges that customers are indeed a scarce resource.

Indeed, the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America (PCI) has already issued a white paper that frets about the next four years under President Obama and a resurgent Democratic Party:

At the federal level, yesterday's elections produced big victories across the board for the Democratic Party, which will have complete control of the federal government for the first time since 1994. These results will create new and sizable challenges for the insurance industry and for the business community in general … PCI anticipates that it will be far more difficult to stop several possible anti-industry moves in 2009.

Those anti-industry moves might include:

• Adding windstorm coverage to the National Flood Insurance Program
• Creating a federal natural catastrophe backstop
• Banning the use of credit based insurance scores

Obama’s health care plan is far from socialized medicine—private insurers play a front-and-center role—and it is not the revolution that McCain promised (his plan would’ve effectively severed the employer-health insurance link). But, if passed, it would bring about significant changes to the industry, many of which are not welcome.

For example, dragging the health care industry into the digital realm, one of Obama’s primary goals, will not happen without major investments (aka costs) and bumps along the way.

But insurers aren’t the only players in the health care system who will see some changes. An improved incentive structure will have payment to Medicare and Medicaid doctors based on the health outcomes of their patients rather than the treatments they provide. This cost-reducing initiative is great news for everyone—well, except doctors.

It’s likely that a McCain presidency would’ve been a boon for insurers—likely but not a sure thing. While we'll never know, I suspect the Teddy Roosevelt-style reformer in McCain certainly could’ve thrown the industry for a few loops.

The typical barker: Host as shill, interrupting passersby with "Try our steak!" "Drink specials!" "Happy hour!"

The typical attractor: Hosts as figure head, calmly standing next to a good looking menu and a restaurant with pleasing décor and atmosphere.

You can guess which restaurants were packed.

“Barking as a customer acquisition strategy is a relative affair, whether spamming bloggers with press releases, peppering a neighborhood with door hangers , dressing up a mascot to stand on a street corner, or pimping a new website on Twitter,” says Huba. “Real marketing is designing elements into a business that will get the attention of customers so you don't have to yell.”

It’s a fresh take on what Seth Godin has been saying for years: being remarkable means never having to engage in marketing.

So I thought it would be a good time to review how people shop for insurance. Or at least review the statistics available. But before I dive into the stats, let me contrast the stats with my very individual experience.

Now for the stats: 15% of the time spent on the internet is for financial information and 12% is on shopping. In 2007, 32 Million people requested auto quotes via the internet. And the stats also show that people don’t go directly to a website, they use the search engines. In a Yahoo survey, 75% of the respondents turned to search engines because they didn’t remember or try to remember a web address. And 59% of those discovered new brands for what they were shopping for. Which means, succinctly, Google is giving your competition great visibility. By the way, if you search on auto insurance, you will get about 33 million ‘hits’ on Google. That’s a lot of competition.

But the stats still show that we might research insurance online but we typically buy directly from wonderful, supportive, sympathetic and patient agents like yourself. According to comScore – 2008, over 80% of the people buying auto insurance finished the transaction directly with a live agent. And the major reason was because, like me, “I like having a real person who I can visit with or call.” Just like the ones helping me with my own purchase. But they’ll l start on-line. 50% of those people buying insurance from an agent used the web for initial research. In auto insurance it is up to a whopping 86%.

Is the era of cold calling finally over? (For the record, by cold calling I mean calling someone on the phone. Regions of the country define it as going door to door.)

If so, what replaces it? Email? Flyers? Free pumpkins? Messages written in sidewalk chalk? Internet leads?

Or can the proper strategery generate positive results?

Vote below. And then post any thoughts. Go!

* A 2007 Jupiter Research study revealed that 72 percent of auto insurance buyers used the internet to help them purchase a policy.

So I enjoyed the recent series in the Insurance Journal about credit-based insurance scoring. Written by Lawrence S. Powell, Ph.D., who is also the author of the blog RiskProf, the collection of five articles amounts to a painstaking defense of insurers’ use of credit history as an underwriting tool, a controversial practice to say the least.

If you don’t have the time, patience and/or taste for wonkish articles, this paragraph will give you the gist:

Insurance scoring is an example of a beneficial tool used in ratemaking that is often misunderstood. Insurance scores are relatively powerful and accurate predictors of losses, even when controlling for other factors known to be correlated with losses. When insurers use insurance scores to improve the accuracy of predicted losses, it benefits individuals and society. It increases the equity or fairness in insurance pricing outcomes because, on average, premiums are closely related to consumers' risk of loss. Insurance scoring also adds value to insurance transactions. It reduces the overall cost of providing insurance because insurance scores are accurate and inexpensive rating variables.

Read the series

That is exactly what Bruce Bodaken, chief executive of Blue Shield of California, told the LA Times recently. In an article published today, the LA Times explains why a mandate has the support of the likes of Bodaken:

The rationale of universal coverage, the norm in other industrialized countries, is that costs are manageable when everyone is covered because the risk pool includes the young and healthy to offset the older and sick.

The social toll of this system is well documented and doesn’t need to be restated here; heartbreaking stories abound.

Another problem with this setup is that the insured end up suffering too: when an uninsured person goes to the ER—the most expensive way to visit the hospital—the cost is passed on to the insured in the form of high overall health care costs and higher taxes.

A universal mandate would turn that de facto subsidy into an actual one—wherein the healthy and wealthy, with the help of the federal government, subsidize the sick and poor. For the currently healthy and wealthy, that may sound like a bad deal, but it isn’t when you consider that if everyone had access to routine and preventative care, there would eventually be fewer and fewer expensive trips to the emergency room, and thus fewer unpaid medical bills to pass on.

Executives like Bodaken now see the importance of mandates, and it’s easy to see why. With popular calls for reform reaching a crescendo—and with people of all ideological stripes considering greater government intervention—insurers are scrambling to be part of the solution, lest they find themselves, um, declined.

Keep your dial tuned to www.insuremeblog.com/agent to see the official unveiling.

Have a happy weekend, folks!

While the ubiquitous coffee chain has proven to be as vulnerable as other businesses to the economic downturn, there is still a lot we can learn about the company that started out small yet went on to inspire this Onion headline: New Starbucks Opens In Rest Room Of Existing Starbucks.

Starbucks grew to its behemoth size for a lot reasons, but one reason that stands above the rest is this: they offered things that were typically available only to the wealthy—fancy coffee, good lighting, attentive service—and gave them to everyone. They gave Joe Sixpack the Plummer an espresso shot of luxury (literally and figuratively).

A couple weeks ago, I blogged about the ‘nice premium,’ the extra amount people are willing to pay for excellent service. Turns out, people are willing to pay a lot. The opportunity for you, since offering excellent service costs you next to nothing, is to offer it for free—and to everyone. That’s essentially what Starbucks does: they treat everyone who walks in with an attentiveness that’s usually only reserved for the guy or gal in the corner office.

And that’s one of the reasons people love Starbucks. So I’ll close with a rhetorical question:

Were you as friendly to your last lead as your Starbucks barista was to you this morning?

• Have a blog and/or Facebook or MySpace page
• Send text messages to their friends (and parents)
• Send instant messages to their friends
• Watch videos on YouTube
• Download music files (both legally and illegally)
• Do not have a land line
• Take photos with their phones and post them on sites like Flickr , Picasa and (of course) Facebook
• Communicate with their parents via email

Hat tip: Brazen Careerist for the Gen Y test