Insurance Agents & Financial Advisors: How Can You Succeed When So Many Others Fail?

Less than 5% of the people who start in the business remain in the business after 5 years. How do you prevent yourself from being just another count in the statistics for those who failed? Coming into the business you know that for some the potential is huge and life changing, as far as, potential earnings are concerned. Yet this isn’t the case for the average or below average producer. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want to be a top producer, but nearly everyone finds it hard to get there and stay there.

For those who fail out of the business it’s such a dramatic, traumatic, and demoralizing experience they can’t even think about ever trying it again. I come across these folks all the time and their comment is always, “gosh if I had only known you I might have been able to make it”. The people I work with usually say, “I did everything they said to do and it didn’t work”. And they’re right the things you’re being told to do don’t work. You’re being told to do counterproductive things betting on a numbers game trying to be so highly active that you eventually establish a business. It’s a wrong approach, and you pay the price and suffer the consequences.

You are a small business owner, and there are things that work in business and things that don’t; and there’s an order of doing things that increases your likelihood for success. A business cannot survive without customers, and in order to get customers a business must attract them. Please read that sentence and understand there is a big difference between attracting customers and hunting them. To attract customers you must know who you are trying to attract, and what is attractive to them. This knowledge enables you to generate marketing communications that attract customers to you.

There is only so much a business can do for free without going broke. When you’re run around trying to meet with anyone who has a pulse who’s paying for that, and what are you getting in return? You are the one paying and you’re getting about zip in return for all your efforts. Do you see attorneys running around meeting with people offering them a free legal review? Of course you don’t, people don’t place value on your services if you want to give them away to anyone for free.

A business must make the most effective use of their resources to obtain the highest return. It’s just a matter of productivity. Never confuse activity with results and productivity. Business isn’t just a numbers game where you’re betting on the odds. Businesses that follow that philosophy fail. Business definitely involves understanding your numbers and knowing what to track, and getting predictable results from your actions. Business is all about the bottom line. If you want to succeed where so many others have failed the bottom line is you need to understand and follow the same principles that any small business owner would follow and that is: learn how to market yourself in a way that attracts the customers you want, focus on productivity and results not activity, be able to track and measure and predict those results, learn how to sell like a sales professional not like an insurance agent, and exceed customer expectations.