Protecting Your Magic Bo

o can make a decision?

o is advancing career-wise?

If you can "load up your wagon," so to speak, with prospects who fit this profile, you can never make a prospecting mistake. In addition to those four questions, you should ask about referrals' circumstances. Do they own a business? How many employees do they have? Is it family-held?

This filtering process never changes. Unfortunately, few people take the time to assess the qualities of the potential buyer. As agents, we are so busy trying to be successful (or dealing with our call reluctance) that we easily forget the basics of success.

Now if you think back, I said there are two filters, both of which I use to protect my magic box. The first filter is your criteria. The second filter is the client's criteria.

Suppose you had a magic box that accepted unlimited pieces of paper and dispensed crisp, $100 bills. If you had a box like this, what would you do?

Obviously, you would be very nice to it. You would protect it from harm. But you probably would put all the paper you could find into the slot, so that you could get those $100 bills to put in your pocket.

Unfortunately, one day your box stops producing bills. You wonder why. As you ponder the reasons, you begin to realize that maybe you got greedy. Perhaps you put too much, or the wrong type of, paper in the machine. Or you added paper at the wrong speed.

So, you tell yourself, "If this stupid machine ever starts working again, I will be a lot more careful about the paper I use and how fast I feed the paper." You think, "What I need is a safeguard, a filter that can evaluate each piece of paper before I insert it in the machine."

Fortunately, the machine starts to run again, putting you back in business. Your filter begins to work protecting your magic box and keeping it working.

This magic box, an allegory for our business, comprises the people and resources we use to produce the policies we sell. The people do the illustrations, process the applications, and facilitate the underwriting and the other services we rely upon. If you go through the drill and the policy doesn't get placed, not only is this discouraging to the team, it also draws resources from other projects.

How do you guard against this? After you complete your opening interview, you ask the prospect a simple question, "If I can help you solve this problem, do you see any reason why you can't do business with me?"

Now that is blunt. But truthfully, isn't that the question? We all want to ask it, but we are afraid of the answer. You can't lose something you never had. If they don't want to do business with you now, they aren't likely to change their opinion later.

Before you move on to the next step in your process, you need to give clients a chance to say 'no.' If they do so, then you dodged a bullet. But if they do want to move forward, it means you have a great prospect who will ultimately become a client.

Recapping the Points

In this article, we have seen that every salesperson uses the same process, that each step is a precursor to the next step and that you must sell each step.

We also learned that you need two filters: one that you use to make sure you want to do business with them and one they use to make sure they want to do business with you. These two filters protect your magic box from clogging up with bad paper and from not printing your $100 bills.

Guy Baker is managing director of BTA Advisory Group, Laguna Hills, Calif. You can e-mail him at [email protected].

This magic box, an allegory for our business, comprises the people and resources we use to produce the policies we sell

Once you have identified your prospect you need a sales process–your 'magic box'