Presentation and Selling Skills.What’s
So Difficult About Selling Life Insurance?
Part 5 of 7
articles
By
John Lensi, CLU, ChFC, RHU, REBC, CMFC, LLIF
Vice
President,
Sales,
Impact Technologies Group.
Lets examine the several selling skills you need to perform at each step, starting with the opening face-to-face sales interview:
 Most
producers are fairly competent in
this skill set – although after observing and personally conducting in
the area of several thousand sales interviews, plenty of room for
improvement exists in our industry (myself included).The key phase of the sales interview I have seen most often short changed, is the fact-gathering phase. This is where the true “close” in selling life insurance takes place. Show me a fully completed fact-finder, and a quality sale more often than not took place. Surprisingly, quite often the veteran sales person tends to short change this phase frequently. Having seen “this situation many times before”, veteran sales people ‘in error’ often jump to the solution for the client’s life insurance problem. Although often the protection need is quite apparent to the producer, its not so apparent to the layperson who’s patiently listening and silently wondering “why is this sales person recommending the purchase of this particular policy … I don’t see the connection to what I need” ... “besides, this sales person doesn’t know me all that well (partially completed fact-finder), so it seems to me that he/she is just trying to sell me an insurance policy”. Two diverse sales processes. The diagram below illustrates the two diverse sales processes. The triangle represents the amount of time – same amount for two diverse sales approaches – spent on a sales interview with a prospect.  The ‘transactional’ sales person - illustrated on the left in the above pyramid - short changes the sales interview during the fact-finding phase. Consequently, the amount of time needed in the “close” phase is a great deal more than the ‘relationship-based’ sales person. Typically these are sales people who attempt to gain clients through “convincing” the consumer how good their company’s product is – usually through a detailed and time-consuming review of a computer generated prodct illustration. The financial professional illustrated on the right in the above pyramid is a relationship-based sales person who spends sufficient time in the fact-finding phase getting to know the client’s dreams, goals, and desires – along with the financial position of the client. This style sales process will almost always lead to a higher closing ratio, better persistency, an easier time closing the sale, result in quality referrals and repeat or multiple product sales. Learn how this proven-relationship-based sales concept works, and it will help you make more money selling insurance. CLOSING
THE SALE
Basically, there are two types of agents when it comes to closing the sale.
The
“transactional” sales person “sells” … while the
relationship based financial professional “helps customers
buy”.
Learn and Earn Return to the life insurance help library.
|
