The Executive Suite: How to Succeed Selling Life Insurance

Thursday, November 14, 2013

How to Succeed Selling Life Insurance

The life insurance business is extremely challenging. You can expect long hours, especially when you first start building your practice. You will experience a steady stream of rejection and disappointment, from prospects who don't become clients to applications that are rejected by underwriters. If you can stick with it, though, the life insurance industry can provide you with potentially unlimited income, a steady stream of residual income, a great deal of personal freedom and the satisfaction of helping people protect their families against financial catastrophe and pass on their assets to their children and grandchildren.

Suggestions

Prospect relentlessly. Your goal is to keep at least 15 booked appointments every week, where you are speaking to people specifically about their life insurance coverage. Of those, some will cancel and reschedule. Your primary battle is to keep your calendar full of booked appointments, which gives you the opportunity to make sales. This amount of activity, however, requires hundreds of phone calls and dozens of walk-ins every week.
Get organized. If you prospect every day, you will quickly have more sales prospects than you can keep track of in your head. You must create a system that can help you organize your contacts and prioritize your time. You can purchase a sales contact manager program such as ACT, use Outlook or a similar calendar program to manage your calendar or use a paper contact manager system such as the OneCard system. Whatever system you use, stick with it, and use it to the hilt.
Concentrate on qualified prospects. A qualified prospect is someone who wants the benefits of life insurance, needs the protection for his family and can afford the premiums. Focus your sales efforts on people who have all three characteristics. You cannot help people who are irresponsible or who cannot afford to pay their life insurance premiums.
Focus your time on prospecting, presenting, selling and delivering policies, and conducting annual reviews for your clients. Strive to delegate any ancillary activities, such as mailing, administration, calendar management and anything that takes away from your relentless focus on customer acquisition to staff. This will be difficult at first, as few agents can afford help in the early years. As your practice grows, however, you may wish to consider hiring at least part-time help.

Tip

Strive to do nothing from 8 a.m. through 5 p.m. doing nothing but seeing people or trying to see people about their life insurance coverage. Save your administrative tasks, printing illustrations and case preparation work for evenings and weekends.