Insurance Sales: I Know Just What You Need

How many times have you met with a prospect, heard what they said, and then offered a solution only to be told “no”? More often than not, right? Well you may be causing yourself to get a “no” when you should be getting a “yes”.

Of course, you don’t want a “no” but you don’t realize what you’re doing that is causing the “no”. So let’s replay the scenario and discover where you’re going wrong. The other person has agreed to have an appointment with you.

In fact, they’ve indicated there is a specific thing they want and they know you can help them with that. Now, you’re all excited because you’re thinking this is a sure paycheck. So they come to your office or you go to their home, and they start telling you what their problem is and may even tell you exactly what they want.

Once you hear their problem as the expert you immediately know what they need, and you tell them about it. At first they seem like they’re following along, but then you get to the cost and now all of a sudden they aren’t on board any longer. What happened?

You fell for a common sales trap. When you heard their first problem you immediately jumped in with a solution. Now in your defense you did that because you thought the first problem they told you about must be their biggest problem. Oops.

You mistakenly thought this was a transactional event plus you didn’t get to the real problem. In this simple and common scenario there are two grave mistakes happening. First, you never want to treat your business as a transactional business because you won’t succeed unless you make it relational business.

The second mistake was not getting to and building on the real pain for why they want to make this purchase. Unless you learn how to get to the real pain or the real desire your insurance sales will always be at the mercy of a price quote, and that’s a position you don’t want to be in. If you want to have a real insurance business you have to build one based on relationships, and if you don’t build a business based on relationships you’ll find that your retention rate is really low.

The prospect doesn’t maliciously misguide you, or lead you astray. They do it because quite often they don’t really know themselves, and until you help them to know they certainly can’t tell you. And guess whose job it is to help them to gain that clarity before you ever even mention any kind of solution?