Brandon Spivey said something on the podcast this week that most producers will skim right past.
He told me the stretch where he drifted away from the process cost him a fortune. Not because he stopped working. Because he kept working just as hard, only in the wrong direction.
“I would be north of a $2 million book,” he said. Sit with that for a second. A guy who built a $1.35 million book in five years believes he left more than half a million in book on the table. He did not lose it to a sharper competitor.
He lost it to himself.
That is the part of his story worth a whole article, because it is the part the podcast could only touch. Brandon learned the Wedge. He got good at it. And then, more than once, he slid right back into the old way of doing things: transactional selling. He even has a word for it. He calls it drifting.
“I tend to drift,” he said, “and then I’ll come back home to mama.” Mama, in this case, was Cynthia, his Wedge coach.
The reframe: drift does not look like laziness
We tell a comfortable story in this business about why producers backslide. We call it a discipline problem. A hunger problem. Somebody took their foot off the gas. None of that described Brandon. Brandon was grinding. He told me he used to spend ten to twelve hours preparing for a single meeting. That is not a man coasting.
So here is the reframe. The drift was not Brandon doing less. It was Brandon doing all of it on the wrong road. And that is the thing nobody warns you about transactional selling. It does not feel like quitting. It feels like hustle.
Why the old you keeps showing up
Why does a producer who has already learned a better way keep sliding back to the worse one? One word. Gravity.
The transactional approach is downhill, and downhill is easy. It asks nothing of your nerve. You pull a quote, you build a coverage comparison, you sharpen your pencil, and you wait. Nobody has to lose for you to win. You never have to sit across from a buyer, claim you are the better choice, and then defend it.
The Wedge asks the exact opposite. It admits the uncomfortable truth that there is an incumbent who has to lose for you to win, and that means you have to know cold what makes you the upgrade. That takes nerve. And nerve is expensive. So the minute you get tired, or busy, or you want a deal a little too badly, your brain reaches for the path that costs the least emotional energy. That path is almost always the producer you used to be.
For Brandon, the old self was a State Farm personal lines guy. Transactional was his first language. The Wedge was a second language he had to learn. And here is the rule with learned things: they decay under load. Stress, fatigue, a shiny new program, a prospect you are hungry for. Any of it can knock you back into your mother tongue before you notice you have moved.
Effort is a liar
The cruelest part of transactional selling is that it pays you just enough to keep you believing in it. Brandon still wrote business during his drift. Of course he did. If the wrong road produced nothing, you would abandon it inside a week. Instead it hands you a few deals, usually won on price, and that small reward quietly keeps you parked on the road that is capping your book.
That is why effort is such a dangerous signal. You feel busy, so you feel like you are winning. Meanwhile your average account size sits flat and your renewals do the heavy lifting. Brandon put the real cost bluntly. If you are not making enough on a deal for it to make sense, you are going backwards, and you are stealing from your family. Every hour poured into a transactional deal is an hour stolen from the deals that would actually move your life.
Boldness is the opposite of drift
There is a reason the transactional producer can never be truly bold. Deep down, he knows he is interchangeable. Anybody can bring a price. Brandon said the boldest he ever felt came from a different place entirely: knowing the buyer needed him. The things you do that the incumbent does not do are exactly where the buyer is being underserved and does not even know it. When you can name those things, when you have defined your proactive services and can put a dollar figure on each one, you stop hoping to win and start knowing they need you.
Listen to how that sounded in a real meeting. A buyer looked Brandon dead in the eye and asked, “How do I know you’re going to do everything you say you’re going to do?” The transactional version of Brandon would have flinched and dropped his price.
Instead he said, “Winning your account right now is not going to change the way my family eats. You said this is what you wanted. If you want it done, let’s do it. If not, I’ll get up and walk away. I’ve got four or five hours into this deal.” The buyer said, “You tell me where to sign.” Brandon went on to save that client $120,000 in the first year, and the buyer still tells the story when he introduces Brandon to other owners.
You cannot fake that. It only shows up when you have done the work the Wedge way, not the transactional way.
How to catch yourself drifting
Because drift wears the costume of hard work, you cannot feel it happening. You have to check for it on purpose. Three questions.
First, look at your last five wins. How many did you win because the buyer clearly understood you were the upgrade, and how many came down to price or a coverage gap? If price keeps showing up, you are drifting.
Second, take your single biggest open opportunity right now. Can you name the three to five proactive services you will deliver, and can you attach a dollar figure to each? Brandon ran that exact exercise across his top ten accounts and came back with an average of $85,000 in quantified value per account. If you are reaching or guessing, the old you is driving.
Third, and this is the tell, are you working harder than ever while your average account size stays flat? Effort up, account quality flat. That is the fingerprint of transactional drift.
And here is the part that matters most. The fix is not more willpower. Brandon could not out-discipline his own drift, and neither can you, because the drift feels like productivity the entire time it is robbing you. What pulled him back was never grit. It was Cynthia. An outside force. A coach, a sales leader, a sales meeting where somebody makes you defend why you are better before you ever walk into the room. You need a tripwire that lives outside your own head.
Do not try to white-knuckle your way back
Brandon’s drift cost him a year and, by his own math, north of a half-million in book. The terrifying part is that he never felt it happening, because it felt like effort the whole way down.
If you suspect the producer you used to be has quietly taken the wheel of your pipeline again, do not try to grind your way out of it alone. Put a structure around yourself that makes drifting impossible to hide. That is the entire point of a system. If you want to see what that structure looks like for your agency, book a call with our team. Find out where you are drifting before it costs you another year you cannot get back.
