How to Work a Life Insurance Sales Lead
When a life insurance sales lead comes in to your office, it’s very easy to feel overwhelmed by what you now have to do to make that lead convert to a sale. Your emotions are running high, the possibilities start drifting through your head, and you start to think about how you’re going to spend the money before you even close the deal. This is a big mistake, because there’s a lot of work and some smart thinking to be done before you can count on the sale and, at any time, you can easily derail the sale.
The first thing you should do when you receive a life insurance sales lead is to look over the lead and find out some specific things about the prospect. Pay the most attention to the lead’s story, if you’re lucky enough to get some of this information. What’s their situation and why are they looking for life insurance? You’ll be surprised at some of the reasons why people look for insurance, but this information is the key to closing to the lead. Try to find out exactly what they’re looking for and offer it to them.
If you can send something to the life insurance sales lead, like an article you wrote, an interview with you from the newspaper, an educational booklet on how to select the right life insurance, this will go a long way to helping you close the sale. You may have the mistaken idea to avoid sending things. This is partially correct,. you DO want to send items that b8uild your credibility (not sales literature) so that the lead is more inclined to buy from you.
Once you’ve taken a serious look at the life insurance lead’s situation, you should find out exactly how that lead was generated. This will tell you a lot about the prospect, and is the key to success with a life insurance sales lead. While the exact techniques you should use to market to the prospect have been debated for dozens of years, there are a few aspects of talking to a lead that all sales methods have in common.
To begin, you should always focus on the prospect. They don’t care about whom you are, what awards you’ve won or how you’ve had hundreds of years in the business. They only care about what’s in it for them. If you truly did your homework, you should already know exactly what the life insurance sales lead wants out of their life insurance, so closing with them should only be a matter of providing their ideal solution for them. If you don’t yet have this information, ask them what they want and what they would think of as their ideal insurance solution throughout your consultation. In sales, “to ask is your task.” Do little telling–let them do the telling.
Another good technique is to try to paint a picture for the prospect of what it will be like for them when they’ll have to use the insurance. Don’t go overboard, but try to make them see the value they’ll receive if they decide to buy the insurance they’re looking for. Put them in the situation you’re trying to insure them against and make sure they know that your product is superior to your competitors, without directly putting down your competitor.
Lastly, you must figure out your unique selling point. Your life insurance sales lead has a choice of thousands of insurance agents, so why should they choose you? For example, if you are an independent agent, you can stress how you will comparisonshop for them. If a captive agent, you can stress the multi-billion financial solidity of your firm. This goes way beyond your elevator speech and should truly set you apart from the rest of the crowd. One example is specialization – by showing that you specialize in dealing with the prospect’s situation, you’ll find that many more people will sign up with you, instead of your competitor.
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