Education Sessions

General Session - Dave "The Shef" Sheffield
In your program, Blabvertising: The Art of Word-of-Mouth Advertising, you will discover the following:
- How to stand in a sea of "sameness"
- How to Build and grow solid relationships by changing this one word
- The 3 mistakes most agencies make when hiring (and how to avoid them)
- How to embrace change, not fight it
- How to keep going when you are ready to give up!

Visit The Shef's site at www.TheShef.com for more information.

Train Your Brain for Success - Robb Zbierski
Your brain is the single biggest driver of your energy, your focus, and the results you get in every area of life.  Your career, your finances, your physical health, your relationships- all of them are constantly created and influenced by your thinking. Unfortunately, your brain didn’t come with an owner’s manual...until now.

In Train Your Brain For Success, you will learn to harness the incredible creative capacity of your mind and achieve your personal best - professionally, financially and personally.

Through that process, we will cover:
- The ways in which your brain literally creates your experience - and your results. Every day, we’re creating our lives with our mind - and it’s enlightening to see how
- Your brain’s extremely UNhelpful “default settings” - We now know that all of us have brains that come “pre-programmed” with some really strong patterns that will actually hold you back - keep you stuck in place - if not understood and dealt with.
- How to overcome these default settings, and put you in charge of your brain and your results. The good news is that there are simple and effective strategies for making your brain work FOR you instead of AGAINST you. So we’ll wrap up our session by providing a game plan for ongoing improvement.

Based on Roger Seip’s bestselling book, Train Your Brain For Success is extremely interactive, incredibly eye-opening, and a lot of fun! Participants will definitely gain insights that will make them more effective immediately, and come away with a plan for making that improvement last.

Selling Has Nothing to do with Selling- Richard Farrell
The information economy has neutralized the traditional value proposition of sales people. Sellers used to have a monopoly on information- obviously no longer. Sellers are struggling to remain relevant. Customers don't value their insight as they used to and this is resulting in challenges differentiating themselves from the competition, price pressure, breaking into new accounts and simply getting a prospect to meet them. Learn new ideas to sell in this environment. Learn how to position your offering based on how you solve problems as opposed to how you provide solutions. Learn how to better qualify opportunities and differentiate yourself from your competition based on your questions not your self-serving, selling points. Know that if you don't change you will continue to be unique just like everyone else.

Top Research Based Marketing Processes to Produce in an Insurance Agency- Dr. Billy Williams
Want to know what the top producing agencies in the country are doing to write their amazing numbers? This workshop will reveal the processes, the technology, and the conversations that are working around the country.

Research is based on the tracking and sales reports of the Williams Family Agency Investment Group partner agencies, (40 + agencies, that combined, produce over 500 Million annually in new and renewal premium) and the anecdotal reporting of the member agencies of Inspire a Nation Business Mentoring (100’s of member agencies).

The workshop looks at all aspects of marketing in an agency including: Referrals, Email, Social Media, Text Messaging, and more. This workshop will influence the way you operate an insurance agency for the rest of your career.

Business Ethics - Stan Knudson
The purpose of this training session is to review the financial and personal impact of business ethics.  We will cover examples of what ethical business practices are and how they affect personal and business situations.  Also we will review the repercussions of ethical and non-ethical behaviors.

Speakers

Richard Farrell
Richard P. Farrell is President of Tangent Knowledge Systems, a Chicago sales training company. He is the unofficial record holder for the number of B2B association speaking engagements (manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, professional services, manufacturers representatives, service providers). His in-depth knowledge of the sales challenges of small to midsize companies (commoditization, price pressure, new market opportunities, transactional selling, poor sales accountability, unqualified sales pipelines, ineffective new business generation, long selling cycles and increasing cost of sales) is unparalleled.
 
He will debunk the time-honored beliefs and strategies that organizations hold so dearly and expose the obscene cost of sales that they blindly operate under. Content is nontraditional, contrary and designed to be a wake up call for all organizations on how to sell, strategize and position their companies to meet the harsh realities of the information economy, and the challenging economic climate of today's marketplace. 
 
Delivery is fluff-free, content rich, "PowerPointless," fast-paced and extremely interactive (gets out and engages the audience for questions, answers, examples and role-playing). The delivery style is authentic, self-deprecating, entertaining and real world with a problem solution orientation. Audience participants should be prepared to be respectfully challenged and to think outside the box.

Stan Knudson
Stan Knudson has been a licensed insurance producer for 15 years and a continuing education instructor for 10+ years. He is currently with Safelite AutoGlass as their Area Sales Manager and has been with the company for over 11 years.

Stan is an Associate member of the Will County Independent Agents Association and a Past Board Member of Will County NAIFA. He resides in Morris Illinois with his wife of 15 years, Jennifer and their two daughters, Emma and Elise.

Dave "The Shef" Sheffield
Dave "The Shef" Sheffield is an expert is sales and motivation, and is a highly sought after international keynote speaker. He has helped thousands of insurance and financial professionals experience explosive increase in their business by discovering their Recipes for Success in Sales, Leadership, and Motivation. His high-energy interactive live programs and his five books have impacted the lives of more than 559,000 people from 58 different countries.

Dr. Billy Williams
Forever the consummate over-achiever, Billy R. Williams, Ph.D. is the president of the Williams Family Agency Investment Group Inc., a group of 40+ general insurance agencies around the country that currently produce over $500 Million in new and renewal insurance premium annually. He is also the founder and president of Inspire a Nation Business Mentoring Services, an insurance agent coaching and mentoring company with 100’s of member agencies. His clients represent many fortune 500 insurance companies including: MetLife, Travelers, Allstate, AIG, Farmers, Mutual of Omaha, Berkshire Hathaway, Nationwide, State Farm, American Family, Horace Mann, CNA, and many more.

Robb Zbierski
Robb Zbierski is a Trainer with Freedom Personal Development. He has trained business professionals, from all walks of life, on personal development skills that make a difference in both their professional and personal lives. Working with companies across a broad spectrum of industries, he helps clients develop professional skills and positive mindsets that let them discover their potential and maximize their results.

Zbierski's purpose is to inject excitement into everything he does. This purpose provides him the means to guide others (and himself) to become more effective in what they do while enjoying every minute of doing it.

With a history of success in Product Management, Sales and Marketing roles within the Outdoor, Bicycle and Fitness (aka “Passion-Pursuit”) industries, Zbierski was notorious for bringing fun to the forefront while also encouraging people to embrace their passion and energy to get the job done. A dynamic and engaging speaker, he makes every effort to connect with the audience to help them understand what can be accomplished with the right attitude and work ethic.