Use storytelling to differentiate your sales process and practice

Let’s say you are a football coach and a FedEx delivery person comes to your door with a playbook. What would happen?

The playbook might sit on your desk. You may read it sometime. Or it could go in the trash. Now imagine the same scenario, but this time the FedEx delivery person is Steve Spurrier, University of South Carolina’s football coach. Would you want to sit down and talk with him about the playbook?

We want to be like the professional coach. We want to be perceived as the professional consultants who apply the life insurance playbook. We don’t want to be perceived as just dropping off packages of tax, estate planning and product information.

Establishing ourselves and our experience in developing life insurance planning concepts and product solutions means that we need to reach beyond product and planning fundamentals. Products and planning concepts are important, but they are only the playbook.

The difference between winning cases and clients in today’s planning environment is the experience the insurance and financial professional communicates in conversations with the client. We therefore need to enhance our ability to connect emotionally and logically with clients, and, to that end, use storytelling to make memorable and lasting impressions.

Of course, listening is as important as telling. So, I’ve briefly outlined an approach to “storylistening” and storytelling as a way to differentiate an insurance and financial planning practice.

Storylistening

The first step in any successful sales process is listening to the client’s story. My first mentor in the insurance and financial planning business emphasized that gathering the client data was the most important part of the sales process.

In developing estate and business planning cases, we focus on the financial facts, which are always important and fundamental elements of our analysis. But we must go beyond these facts to create a relationship that results in a productive, long-term engagement.

So, my first suggestion is to listen for the emotional facts in the client’s story in addition to the financial facts. This takes time; we cannot ask clients to reveal all their emotions in the first meeting.

Getting the client’s full story, which may take several meetings, involves more art than science. You may consider including questions about the client’s life, history and hopes for his or her children.

Everyone has a story to tell. By asking questions that few investment professionals ask, you will hear stories that few people get to hear and take a step toward establishing an unbreakable bond with your clients.

Building Stories: An Approach

The next step is to build stories that bridge the products and planning you offer to the client situation. Stories always have been important because they help people visualize, relate the familiar to the unfamiliar and connect with emotions, which are powerful drivers of client decisions.