Daily sales & marketing tips for insurance professionals

When it comes to opening statements, I guess I’m a purist. I believe that an opening statement should include a hearty hello, your full name, an identification of your company, and your reason for calling. Pretty simple, but simple is good.

Tony Parinello, a writer for Entrepreneur, disagrees. He thinks it’s not worthwhile to state your name and business after the initial hello. “It’s too early in the relationship for you to pass along that kind of information,” says Parinello.

Too early? To say your name? To say why you’re calling? Okay …

Parinello advocates offering another pleasantry after the initial hello (”It’s an honor to finally speak with you!”) and then diving headlong into a scripted “hook,” which clearly is just a buzzword for “canned spiel.” Here’s his example of a hook: “”We’ve helped (three of the top five widget corporations reduce overhead costs by twelve percent this quarter–and they did it without laying off staff or sacrificing product quality).” Ugh. Maybe it’s my cynical Gen-Y makeup, but if I were on the receiving end of such a “hook,” I’d be checking my email before the guy knew the line was dead.

It gets worse. The big goal in your opening sales statement, Parinello says, is to “make it sound conversational.”

Call me crazy, but I think that you should endeavor to start an actual conversation with a prospect, not a phony one. And you should always tell the prospect who you are and why you’re calling. That’s just basic manners. And manners aren’t arbitrary–they exist for a reason, and if you master them they will help your cause tremendously. Being coy with someone you don’t know? Hitting the person with talking points before introducing yourself? Not cool. Worse, not effective.

Parinello’s “long-standing, well-proven statistic” is that you have eight seconds to make an impact in sales call. Here is Parinello relaying a story of how a colleague expressed doubt about the feasibility of his “statistic:”

Daniel was a bit skeptical about my eight-second standard. He looked at me and said, “Boss, eight seconds is too short a period of time! That’s hardly enough time to take a deep breath, let alone make a meaningful opening statement.”
We happened to be waiting at a red light when he said this. As the light turned green, I kept my foot on the brake and started counting: “One thousand one, one thousand two….” People started honking. By the time I got to “one thousand four,” Daniel was begging me to get moving. By the time we hit the sixth second, the guy behind us was starting to get out of his car, and Daniel was looking for a place under the floorboards to hide. When I finally hit eight, the intersection was a symphony of honking horns, “pointing fingers” and shouting mouths. I hit the gas.

Parinello’s anecdote inadvertently makes a completely different point–one that actually undermines his argument. If you’re looking to make an impact in eight seconds, you have one option: Make them angry. Eight seconds is not long enough to engender a strong positive reaction. Remember: Negative reactions come easily. Positive ones come much slower, particularly on sales calls. You’ve got to earn it, not force it to fit into an eight second window.

What do you think? Am I being too hard on the guy?

A few months ago, before her departure, Megan wrote a terrific white paper entitled “Lead Generation X: Tips for Finding Your Perfect Lead Vendor Match.” I came across it today and it occurred to me that it would be a great resource for Agent Blog readers.

Before you get too cynical and think it’s merely a treatise on the awesomeness of InsureMe leads, I want you to know that the paper is quite objective–Megan’s goal was merely to help agents understand what to look for in a lead generator, what questions to ask, and how to spot a shady vendor. It makes a couple pitches for InsureMe, but the bulk of the paper is admirably neutral.

So if you are looking for lead provider, or if you’re wondering if you’re paired with a good one now, click the image below to download this terrific document.

There are tons of ways to actively get referrals, but one method in particular may surprise you: Helping others get them.

Put simply, if you look out for other agents, they will look out for you, too. Going a step further, if you develop a reputation for helping your colleagues, you may end getting leads from agents who don’t even know you (often because they will have decided you’re a good person to know). Of course, I’m not talking about sending good prospects to your competitors. Heavens, no! But if you’re a property/casualty agent and one of your clients says she needs a life insurance policy, be ready to give her the name of a life agent you know. Grateful, that same life agent will likely send some business your way.

The insurance industry is incredibly competitive, and many agents have taken that to mean success is a zero-sum game. It isn’t. Once more agents realize that, they’ll realize that their good deeds pay karmic dividends.

I meant to write a meaty blog post today, but the day got away from me, so I’ll just leave you with a funny video about the scary world we’d live in if ad agencies designed traffic signs.

If you’ve noticed that this site has been acting funny and/or triggering warnings from Google, we apologize. We learned today that someone hacked our blog and installed some malicious code. We’ve removed the code and everything should be fine from here out. Sorry for any inconvenience.

– InsureMe

As strange as it sounds, sales and journalism are quite similar.

Every time a reporter calls a person to get a comment, the reportermust sell him or herself to the subject, who is often a little cagey and reluctant to talk–and probably has already fielded calls from other reporters. Thus the importance, in both professions, of projecting an air of trustworthiness. The reporter and sales person must successfully put the source or prospect at ease.

Similarly, the best sales people are excellent questioners. Their questions provide the basis for a story–a narrative that the sales person can use to determine the prospect’s personality, background and, most importantly, purchasing motivations.

So about Truman Capote. The author of In Cold Blood and the founding father of New Journalism, Capote was one of the best interviewers of his time, and one of his most impressive feats as a journalist was getting the notoriously guarded Marlon Brando to open up and tell his story.

Capote affirmed that he had found “the secret to the art of interviewing,” and he used it with mastery in his meeting with Brando. The secret? He had found that if you divulge a lot of information about yourself, the interviewee will eventually open up and become less guarded–as was the case with Brando.

To be sure, Capote may have abused this technique–see the movie In Cold Blood–lulling his subjects into a false sense of security and exploiting them. That’s the dark side of his art.

For you, as an agent, the key is to use this technique in a positive and constructive way. Open up about yourself, share some biographical details, and even if the prospect doesn’t react in kind, he or she will likely feel more comfortable around you. And if your prospect does open up, you’re on your way toward building rapport–and a little rapport goes a long way toward making the sale.

By now it’s a cliché: we’re told that empathy–the ability to put yourself in the other guy’s shoes–is an essential element to success in sales. So be empathetic, the pros say. Think of the client–what does he or she feel?

Well, the pros are right, and there has never been a better time to burnish your empathy skills. By lacing up your prospect’s shoes and going for a spin, you’ll better understand their motivations and goals. But more to the point, you’ll more clearly understand their fears. And if there is one fear in particular that is spreading like a prairie fire, it’s the fear of financial ruin.

Just look at this special series in the New York Times. It’s call the “Debt Trap,” and it chronicles how we Americans are drowning in debt. Harrowing stuff.

You know that your prospects want to save money. That’s what every rational consumer wants. But it’s also worth noting that your prospect is probably, if the polls are correct, feeling some level of financial strain.

The better you can understand their situation, the better you’ll be able to speak their language and address their concerns.

It is Friday afternoon in the middle of summer. In my mind, the very best time of the year (maybe second to the summer equinox). We are still weeks away from too much campaigning mania and the kids are not in school. I keep thinking about Tony Snow saying “… concentrate on living.” That is very good advice. So grab this time and live it.

When I started my career, there was a great manager at IBM that would go around on Friday afternoons and check on his entire team. If they weren’t working on an immediate deadline, he’d tell them to knock off early and enjoy the day. He wasn’t my manager but I heard about it.

Which brings up my final ‘affirmation comment’ for this Friday. From research, we know that doing someone a favor not only makes the person being helped feel better, but also the person doing the good deed has more endorphins moving around too. More than that, if a 3rd party observes the good deed, that person ALSO has the benefit of feeling better, just by seeing the kindly action.

So, if you are a manager, help your team leave early. Many people will benefit from that act, including you.

Lemonade stands, with their diminutive proprietors, are a summer staple. Recently, New York magazine interviewed a gaggle of New York City lemonade stand operators between the ages of 5 and 10.

Despite their youth, these kids clearly have some shrewd entrepreneurial instincts. (Maybe it’s city smarts?)

Check out these interviews, which were conducted by New York magazine writer Joanna Goddard. [Note the Agent Blog analysis after each one]:

REBECCA HORWITZ, 8, AND ARI HORWITZ, 5, SIBLINGS.
Location: On their stoop near Prospect Park in Park Slope.
Price per cup: 50 cents.
How do you make the lemonade? ELINOR: Real lemons, real sugar, and ice.
Do you sell anything else? ELINOR: We sometimes tell people’s fortunes.
What kinds of fortunes? ELINOR: We usually pick bad ones. Like this woman walked up and we said, “You’re going to grow a beard.”
Where do you put the money? OLIVER: In a jar, but you have to hide it under the table. Otherwise, they will say, “Oh, you already have too much money! We’re not going to buy lemonade!”
What will you do with the earnings? ELINOR: I like to wait for a rainy day. I’m saving for a car when I’m 16. I’ve never touched my piggy-bank money. Once I tried to count it, but it got away from me. I was like, “One, two, three, four, I’m tired.”
Do you go to other people’s lemonade stands? OLIVER: We’re not competitive. We’ll buy their lemonade.
Earnings . . . . . . . . . . $30 to $126

Stand 1

Note that they have diversified their product line by offering fortunes. They also know to keep their money jar away from the public eye. Oliver says they’re not competitive–an indication of confidence!–and that they will patronize other stands. This means they’ll likely get some good competitive intel.

…Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I had the good fortune to attend an Edward Tufte conference here in Denver.

Tufte, a professor emeritus at Yale, is an expert in the art and science of presenting data and information. He’s the author of Beautiful Evidence, Envisioning Information and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. He also wrote the now-classic anti-PowerPoint manifesto: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, which could also be titled “How PowerPoint Makes Us Stupid.” The New York Times calls him “the Leonardo da Vinci of data.”

Although I knew he had fans in design circles, I was amazed to observe yesterday that people were treating him like he was Mick Jagger, lining up for his autograph during every break. The audience consisted of everyone from business school teachers to trial lawyers to young designers from Crispin Porter. Everyone in attendance shared the same desire: to be better at presenting their case. Or their company’s case. Or their client’s case.

Tufte makes his living by telling people how to give better presentations, so the bar was pretty high going into the day-long seminar. He sure delivered–all without using a single PowerPoint slide. (He did show a couple short videos.) Anyway, I was scribbling notes the entire time he talked. This morning I translated my notes from handwritten scrawl to type. Check out a few of my paraphrased notes (in the form of 9 tips) after the jump …

…Read the rest of this entry »