Real insurance sales is harder than ever today. As we continue to travel across the country we hear the same challenges. Customers only care about price, the speed prospects want quotes is hard to manage and new customers are hard to find these days. Too often we have become brainwashed by these theories and we hate when a customer brings them to our attention.
Our challenge is simple. If we don’t believe in its value, how will the customer ever believe there is more to insurance than price?
When I think about insurance sales I have to giggle. If you are the least expensive you aren’t selling anything. You are simply collecting signatures. Anyone can collect a signature! You are selling when you have to convince someone to spend more with you than they are currently spending because they will get you and your team as their people. As we provide consulting on insurance sales across the country we often pull up the agent’s pipeline and ask them why prospects didn’t choose them. Amazingly, price is the answer 99% of the time price.
Now, for those of you who I work with, you know that is a completely unacceptable answer. Using the price excuse is not going to make you even 5% a better sales person. You need to challenge yourself and ask yourself these questions:
- Did I build enough rapport with the person to get them to trust me?
- Did I work quick enough and meet their expectations?
- Did I ask enough prequalifying questions to know where I stood in getting the sale?
- Did I clearly distribute my value in the process?
- Did I give the person options rather than a quote?
- Did I email the quote without being able to present my hard work?
- Did I find out why they were shopping other than price?
- Did I find out, other than price, what they are looking for in an agent?
- Did I tell them we shop multiple carriers and can be their one stop shop?
- Did I ask them for honest feedback on why they didn’t choose me?
- Did I follow up no less than 6 times both phone and email to get the sale?
Often you will find it has little to do with price if you can build rapport and find out how many other agents they have called. Yes that’s right! Getting someone to stop shopping helps you punch your competition right in the nose. Now if you don’t build rapport and don’t work quickly, the prospect has zero reason to do business with you other than price. You just shot yourself in your sales foot.
We all need to move away from the insurance interrogation of just asking the application questions. If they wanted to be interrogated they would have done it in their PJs, on their couch, and online. Instead, think about befriending them. Think about getting to know them so you can recommend policies that matter to them. One of our favorite sales lines is “Because you have X, we recommend Y.” For example, “Because you have a swimming pool there is a higher likelihood of an accident at your home, we recommend an umbrella policy. Let me tell you a little more about it.”
If you simply take the application, you are only winning on price. You haven’t given them anything else to value, trust or go off of. Really think about your sales process. Believe that people want the best value and that you are it. When you start believing, the whole world changes.
