Daily sales & marketing tips for insurance professionals

This Friday blog is a bit late. I actually thought the weekend economic and political events might change the world dramatically, but alas and alack, they didn’t. We are on the same course we have been for about 2 weeks, uncertain but holding steady. At least we have a rescue bill agreed to on Capitol Hill.

Given that the world didn’t change all that much, in this blog, I’d like to highlight an inspiring lecture I attended by Joe Plumeri, Chairman and CEO of the Willis Group, a global insurance company, headquartered in London. Mr. Plumeri spoke at the eInsurance symposium recently in Dallas. Willis is recognized as a leading global insurance broker, handling risk management and reinsurance across a wide range of service areas and industries. But what was inspiring was the energy and dedication to the customer that Plumeri exuded.

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Recently, popular blogger Seth Godin observed that people pay a high premium simply to be treated nicely.

They will pay an extra $1000 for a nice flight attendant. They’ll shell out for the presidential suite in hopes that they will be treated with kindness by the front desk clerk.

Sure, those people might tell you they’re paying for extra leg room and 1000-thread-count sheets, but those things wouldn’t matter a whit if they came with the same service that comes with coach and the Motel 6.

People pay extra to be treated with dignity and respect. It’s the nice premium.

“I think there’s a huge gap between what people are willing to pay for nice (a lot) and what it would cost businesses to deliver it (almost nothing),” writes Godin. “Smells like an opportunity.”

It is. If you can be the agent or agency that delivers nice free of charge, you’ll find yourself with a lot of pleasantly surprised people, and they will return your kindness with gratitude and, best of all, positive word of mouth.

After attending the eInsurance Symposium last week, my head is swirling with so many insurance marketing items to discuss. However, for the time being, everything we learned has been heavily colored by the extreme economic news during last week. So, I think we should stick with topics around bailing out large companies and how this will affect the insurance industry.

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“I think AIG has a day,” New York Governor David Patterson told CNBC this morning. “I don’t know if anyone is really understanding the ramifications of this crisis. We’re in a terrible situation if we let the world’s largest industrial and technical insurance company go down.”

UPDATE: the Wall Street Journal gives some helpful context to the AIG crisis:

The company is such a big player in insuring risk for institutions around the world that its failure could shake the global financial system. [Emphasis added]

UPDATE 2: From yesterday’s Times: “We have a very strong message for consumers,” said David Neustadt, the deputy superintendent for public information for the State Insurance Department in New York, where A.I.G. has its headquarters. “If you have a policy with A.I.G. insurance company, they are financially strong and solvent. They have the capability to pay on any claims, and our job is to ensure that they continue to have the ability to pay.”

UPDATE 3: Understated headline of the day: “A Sense That Wall St.’s Boom Times Are Over“. No kidding.

First, a definition:

meme: n. an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture. [Source]

Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, authors of Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force, advocate the use of memes in marketing. In their book, they quote biologist Richard Dawkins, who popularized the word:

“Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashion, ways of making pots or of building arches,” Dawkins wrote in his book The Selfish Gene. “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”

Huba and McConnell translate Dawkin’s definition: “Memes communicate a complete idea simply and compactly … examples of memes from various industries are Got Milk?; America Online; NBC–Must See TV; and Intel Inside.” (Their examples are a bit dated, but you get the idea.)

But a meme is not merely a tagline: “A meme for your company’s products and services helps customer evangelists tell your story more succinctly,” write Huba and McConnell. “With a few words neatly arranged in a phrase that rolls of the tongue, a meme will be transmitted from person to person like a handshake.”

Granted, behemoths like NBC and Intel have huge advertising budgets that make it easier to spread their memes, but the success of a meme has more to do with its pithiness and stickiness than the dollars behind it. (A lot of big companies have dropped big money into failed memes.)

Also, creating a meme serves an important organizational purpose because it forces you to distill exactly what it is you’re offering to your customers, and the sooner you have a clear idea of that, the sooner you’ll be able to deliver it. Is it the best policy? The best service? Expediency?

In thinking about memes, I’m reminded of a post Seth Godin wrote a few months ago entitled “Start with a classified“:

Copy gets in the way.

Actually, thinking about copy gets in the way. You start writing and then you patch and layer and write and dissemble and defend and write and the next thing you know, you’ve killed it.

So, try this instead:

Write a classified ad.

Again, the exercise simply forces you to define your offer, your promise, your story.

“Marketing is the tax you pay for being unremarkable.”

*

Don’t get me wrong–there is a place for marketing. But this quote serves as a reminder that the remarkable don’t need to spend as much time tooting their own horn as the rest of us do. Their clients, customers, coworkers, friends and family members do it for them. The remarkable pay a much smaller “marketing tax.”

Of course, many have crunched the numbers and decided that they’d rather pay the marketing tax than do what it takes to be remarkable. That may, in fact, be the easier route. But it won’t be a decision you’ll look back on with a lot of pride.

Food for thought.

* Unfortunately, the source of this quote is unknown. I came across it today on 43 Folders.

Deadlines are a bad idea because they are intended to coerce, and coercion has no place in today’s sales climate.

From my recent article, published in the Agent Resource Center, entitled “Why Deadlines Are a Bad Idea.”

Check it out.

According to Confucius, a gentleman has nine aspirations:

1. To see clearly
2. To understand what he hears
3. To be warm in manner
4. To be dignified in bearing
5. To be faithful of speech
6. To be painstaking at work
7. To ask when in doubt
8. In anger to think of difficulties
9. In sight of gain to remember right

I would maintain that not only does this list apply to both gentlemen and gentlewomen, it has extreme applicability to the field of insurance sales.

Which brings up a larger point: most (if not all) of what it takes to be a good person translates into what it takes to be a successful insurance agent. Success doesn’t require knowing secret closing tactics or engaging in the latest marketing gimmickry.

I’d also add that 90 percent of the tips posted on this blog fall under at least one of Confucius’ nine directives listed here, particularly items 3-6.

Anyway, just some philosophical grist for your Monday.

Dear loyal Agent Blog readers:

All I’ve got for today is another nano-post, and it will be the last until next week. In the meantime, dig into the archives, check out some articles over at the resource center, or shoot me an email with a blog post idea.

But before I sign off, I’d like to share a great story, one that I meant to include in yesterday’s entry. Everything you need to know about persuasiveness you can learn by reading this guy’s tale of how he ended up buying a rug (even though he didn’t need one) on his first day visiting Turkey.

Hat tip: Guy Kawasaki

P.S. We’re currently working on a blog redesign. Exciting times!