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Life Health > Life Insurance

2 Quick Ideas to Help You Close More Disability Insurance Sales

By Maggie Leyes

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There is something very powerful — and motivating — about listening to another person’s story. This is especially true when an agent is trying to underscore the importance of an insurance product, like disability insurance. The LIFE Foundation website features a dozen web-based realLIFEstories videos that focus on the power of disability insurance – videos that you can access and use with your clients for free.

1. How DI saved a family

Matthew Tassey of Burwell & Burwell in Portland, ME, who has been selling disability insurance to small-business owners for three decades, talks about how he uses one of these videos with his clients:

“We like using the LIFE website when we’re working with business owners and disability insurance,” said Tassey. “There’s one online realLIFEstory in particular that we focus on: Rick Matthews. He’s the poster child of a self-made business owner, and this video shows how disability insurance ‘saved’ his life and his family’s life — it’s just a marvelous story.

“If you’re in the business world, the key is to get an owner to listen to what another owner went through — in his own words — because both of them share the same problems of: How do I face the payroll? What am I going to about benefits? How am I going to pay the taxes and keep the ship afloat? Matthews is the perfect person to relay the message: ‘Talk to your advisor. Talk to someone who can help you plan … Don’t think you can do it on your own and don’t think you’re infallible.’ This story has been very effective.”

2. Cold, hard facts

Another tactic that is often successful in selling disability insurance is to have the person sitting across from you provide his or her own answers. That’s what Tassey does when it comes to the disability coverage that a client needs.

“If we’re talking to someone new about the need for DI, we’ll often refer them directly to the LIFE website to use its online Disability Insurance Needs Calculator so they can ‘do the math’ on their own,” he said. “I first started by using LIFE’s online Life Insurance Needs Calculator, and discovered that we were selling policies for about 50 percent more than I thought we would because people were doing the math on their own.

“So now we’re doing the same with the Disability Insurance Needs Calculator and find that about half of the time, they actually do go and use it. If the prospect isn’t Internet savvy, we ask that a person in the office who is savvy do the math for them, which gains us an immediate ally — it works really well. We also use this method with current clients who we’re trying to convince that it’s time for them to address their disability needs or to update them. If you can convince them to do the math themselves, the sale will be made without any problems.”

In addition to the Disability Insurance Needs Calculator, you can also help clients understand that they are a “millionaire” – or even “multimillionaire” – in the making with LIFE’s online Lifetime Earnings Calculator. Or, as Tassey does, have them use it on their own so they can come to their own conclusion about needing to protect their potential to earn an income.

These are just a couple of the sales and marketing ideas that are available to you on LIFE’s Agent Idea Exchange, a place where fellow agents and advisors share ideas about how they use LIFE’s tools and products to better reach out to their clients and prospects.

Maggie Leyes is the Disability Insurance Awareness Month campaign manager for the LIFE Foundation. She can be reached at [email protected].

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