Today we are excited to announce a few new feature updates to Radius Lead Management + CRM Solution for Insurance Agents and Agencies, Lead Temperature Automation and Lead & Client Status Controls. A number of our Agents and Agencies asked and we listened when it came to giving them more configuration options to set up their Radius Account specific to their Agency needs. These two enhancements are the first in line of a list of items we are going to build out to put even more control over Account users to set up their Radius account as they see fit.
Lead Temperature Auotmation
Previously in Radius when a Lead was added, the temperature could be assigned manually (Hot, Warm, Cool or Cold). While defining Leads with a temperature is very handy when identifying the urgency at which a Lead needs to be worked, having to manually change it from Hot to Warm, Warm, to Cool and Cool to Cold can be time consuming. And we have always said that Radius should be where you spend your least amount of time on a daily basis, you need to be out there writing business, not wasting time in your CRM. Now Radius gives Agents the ability to set up Lead Temperature to change Automatically based upon their specific needs. If you consider a lead only ‘Hot’ for 7 Days, then underneath the Settings tab, configure away.
Example:
Hot = 7 Days
Warm = 14 Days
Cool = 30 Days
Cold = All Others
Lead & Client Status Types
With the Lead Temp Automation, we worked on rolling out Status Types for Leads & Clients that can be fully customized by the Agent for their specific Radius Account. While we built in Default Values, we suggest that you customize your Status Types based upon your specific business needs. Create Status Types such as ‘New, Contacted, Being Worked, Emailed, Called, Left Voicemail,’ for your Leads while creating status types for your Clients of ‘In-Force, Contracted, Application Submitted, Underwriting’. Status Types are displayed in multiple areas within Radius and can be sorted and searched by as well.
We know you will enjoy these updates as we have been using them in our own Radius account over the past few days and have found it them very valuable from a user experience.
By the way, did we mention that you can Send Email Campaigns, Drip Marketing Emails and Autoresponders by Status Type? Nice!
While Square has been around for almost two years, we did run into an Insurance Agent whom was using it to accept payments from his client base. We thought this was a great usage of his time to in the end make money and save money. But let’s first start with Square and why you as an Agent or Agency may want to take a long hard look at implementing Square into business.
Square was found Jack Dorsey whom just happen to be one of the founders in Twitter (dude knows his tech). Square allows small businesses to accept Credit Card Payment via their Moblie Phones at a single transaction fee of 2.75%. Depending on the line of business your write, Square may be of no use to you, but for those whom generally write Property & Causalty, there are some instances where you take payments from Clients. And for those whom accept credits, you know the hassle at which it is to go about setting up a Merchant Account, Payment Gateway (Online), Business Bank Account that accepts Credit Card payments, which none of these you have to experience when using Square. At a minimum, visit the Square website to see if this technology can help your Agency business, at a maximum, if you have been looking for a way to jump into accepting credit cards, Square is the way to dip your toe in the water.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
We are Happy to announce the New Radius Free Plan
Features in The Free Plan:
Import & Manage Leads (Notes, Info, Products, Tasks)
CRM for your Clients (Renewal Dates, Reminders & More).
Track Commissions & Renewals
Reporting Tools
Create & Manage Carriers and Products.
Document Storage
Email Dropbox to
Free is Good, Free Radius is Better.
Spent some time in Canada this summer and was able to use Skype and their Unlimited Plan ($3.99) while hooked up to Hotel WiFi. Calls back to the States where always connected, clear and easy. Calls to Canada within Canada were just as good. For Insurance Agents that do a lot of windshield time, Skype, Google Voice or even now Line 2 is a good tool to have in your pocket (literally). WiFi is pretty abundent these days and for the most part free. Now why do you need Skype, Google Voice or Line 2 you ask, when you have a cell phone. Think of it this way, set up any of these three numbers as your office line or a secondary number to hand prospects or maybe isolate to clients. This way when a call comes in, you are aware of whom is calling and can position your mind set a certain way.
Just downloaded Line 2 and going to start mucking around with it a bit, but so far seems like a good competitor to two well established and recognizable companies
From the Line 2 website (www.line2.com)
With Line2 you get true phone service. Toktumi, Line2′s parent company, is a telecommunications company with years of experience in developing reliable phone systems for businesses and individuals alike. We pass this quality of service, innovation, and commitment to excellence to all Line2 customers. That’s why with each subscription, Line2 customers can:
- Choose your own unique phone number
- Port your existing number to Line2
- Make HD Calls (Line2 to Line2 connections)
- Make calls with your Apple iOS or Android devices
- Receive Voicemail on your phone or by email
- Make phone calls over Wi-Fi, 3G/4G, or Cellular networks
- Make calls using your cellular voice line when needed
- Enjoy powerful features like call waiting, call hold, call transfer, and conferencing
- Use a Virtual Assistant to screen and route your calls (Line2 Pro only)
Here is the Line 2 Comparison Page
If you start to use line to or have an comments on it, let us know.
Just downloaded FastCustomer and will start to play around with it. But what a great idea and tool for Insurance Agents on so many levels. Great tool to tell Clients and Prospects about if they are need to call Carrier Customer Service or maybe Agents can use to call Carrier Agent help lines (but may not be available). Either way in both personal and professional lives, this can be very handy.
Notice in the demo whom is the first company shown? Hint: Anthem
From our friends over at TechCrunch.com (Erik Schonfeld)
“It’s 2011, but most doctor’s offices are still stuck in the 1990s when it comes to patient-facing technology. The receptionist probably has a computer to manage appointments, but typically you still sign in on paper, fill out forms on a clipboard, and your doctor relies on a loosely-bound sheaf of papers to check your medical records. Tom Lee is trying to change that from the ground up with One Medical Group, the venture-backed primary care practice he founded a few years ago where he is CEO…”
The Medical and Insurance industry remind us of the Construction industry 10 years ago, slow to adopt technology. Which is weird in a way as we think of medicine and the practice of it as very state of the art which it is, but the operation side of most medical practices are outdated. The substandard technology for most medical offices is due to either costs or office admins not willing to adapt to change. But as most practices and insurance based business are seeing, if you are not changing you are not growing and their competitors are passing them by.
Email Marketing Software.
Lead Management Software.
CRM Software.
Only Radius.
Just Right for Insurance Agents
Radius Lead Management + CRM built for Insurance Agents and Agencies has just launched our latest feature; Email Marketing. Send Email Campaigns to your Leads & Clients within Radius. No longer do you need a stand alone Email Marketing Software and a stand alone Lead Management + CRM software to market, Radius has both (and more)….Learn more
Send emails to Leads & Clients:
by Coverage Types.
by Carriers.
by Products.
by Tags.
by Lead Temperature.
Features Include:
Creating and Saving HTML Templates.
Target Leads and Clients within your Account.
Spam Compliance ‘Unsubscribe Link’.
Note added to Lead & Client with Date, Time & Template.
Personalization with Content Snippets
Awesome!
American Apparel wins the Awkward Ad placement for the day. No way this dude is allowed within 500FT of a School Zone. How often do you swim at the Tennis Court?
TechCrunch.com Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a health technology company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice and was the founder of Microsoft’s Health business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.
“Historically, in the U.S. Healthcare system, a primary way to differentiate oneself as a healthcare provider has been to have impressive physical assets such as newly built clinics/hospitals/wings and medical equipment. This is logical when the legacy reimbursement model has incentivized activity (procedures, tests, prescriptions) instead of positive health outcomes. Anything that can be done that will create more activity creates more billing opportunities.
However, the DIY Health Reform movement has recognized the flawed fee-for-service reimbursement model has been responsible for healthcare’s hyperinflation. Some of the most interesting healthcare provider startups such as MedLion, National Surgery Network and One Medical Group are using IT rather than expensive equipment/facilities to differentiate themselves and affordably deliver superior health outcomes.
With one third of the workforce being permanent freelancers, contractors, consultants and entrepreneurs, individuals are compelled to directly buy healthcare rather than rely on their employer as they have in the past. The percentage of people directly buying their own healthcare will approach 50% as more employers opt out of providing health benefits as they get priced out (most have already reduced the percentage of the health premium they cover). Thus, consumerism is beginning to pervade healthcare like never before.”
This last paragraph was most interesting as it pertains to Agencies and Agents as with more shoppers means more need for help from Agents. Granted one would think that those selling Group Health would be first in line if an Employer is going to drop coverage from a group perspective and let their employees search out individual. But those Agencies and Agents whom are selling soley Individual Health, there might be an opportunity to grow a book of business.
Read the entire Article at TechCrunch..
