Points that help you sell

• When one of your clients asks about changing a beneficiary, don’t just provide the online link or email over the form – set up an appointment. Not only is this just good service, but it is an opportunity because in a high percentage of these instances, there have been changes in the responsibilities of the insured, who may well need additional coverage. If the client is thinking about his insurance enough to change the beneficiary, there’s a good chance he’s thinking about buying more insurance right away.

• “Mr. Prospect, if you wouldn’t want to live the rest of your life on the face amount of your present life insurance, why would you expect your wife to do so?”

• If the life underwriter can find out from the prospect how much she can save, or how much money she would be willing to put into a life insurance policy, the rest is comparatively easy, because once she has made that commitment, the job is to design the best life insurance policy or program that can be purchased for that amount. A good selling technique is to put the savings amount on a weekly or monthly basis and ask her if she can save a certain figure weekly, for example. Even more effective is to put the amount in the terms of something that she uses, which she regards as no huge consequence in her budget, such as a “tall” Starbucks coffee. Ask her if she could save the cost of that cup of coffee each day, which would come to about $10 per week or roughly $40 per month. That would buy a very nice policy for many a prospect.

• “Mr. Business Owner, your key employees are money-making machines. Key-man insurance will provide a guaranteed profit for your company.”

• If you think the Million Dollar Round Table-level producer regards himself as having arrived and does not have to work at getting better, think about MDRT qualifiers attending the annual meeting, and how eagerly these producers, who are certainly successful, try to learn more. It makes you think about spring training for professional baseball teams. The superstars don’t sit on the bench while the rookies work out. Top players are practicing just as hard or harder than the others. This is even more apt to be true in the life insurance business than in baseball because it is that eagerness and that enthusiasm that the MDRT producer has that carries him to his high place as compared to the ordinary life underwriter who insists on getting his coffee breaks and never works on a Saturday, and then wonders why he never qualifies for MDRT.

Editor’s note: If you have a “Point that Helps You Sell” you would like to share, email it to [email protected].