Daily sales & marketing tips for insurance professionals

Are your coworkers stressing you out? Is there someone in your office who absolutely drives you bonkers–and sends your blood pressure through the roof–with their annoying jargon, constant gossip or inconsiderate behavior?

Or maybe you’re fed up with slow computer systems, arctic office temperatures or equipment that never seems to work properly?

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. A new survey conducted in London by Opinium research reveals that something drives most everyone crazy at work–whether or not it’s discussed openly.

Discussed in a recent Reuters article, the survey shows that nearly two-thirds of respondents said they were stressed out over various office irritations–and one in 10 have actually left a job because the stress became too overwhelming.

What kinds of things tend to drive people crazy in their work environments? Top responses include:

• Grumpy or moody colleagues (37 percent)
• Slow computers (36 percent)
• Office gossip (19 percent)
• Use of annoying jargon, like ”Think outside the box,” “Drill down to a more granular level,” “Bring your A-game” (18 percent)
• Not showing up for meetings on time–or at all (16 percent)
• Not cleaning up after oneself in the kitchen (15 percent)

Do any of these issues strike a chord with you? If so, how do you deal with frustrating situations at work?

Do you…

a.) confront the party at fault head-on?

b.) vent to your coworkers behind the person’s back?

c.) suffer in silence, wishing they would just quit their job so you wouldn’t have to deal with it anymore?

d.) fire the person (if you’re the boss) when you just can’t stand it anymore?

At one time or another, we’ve all grumbled and moaned about selfish, uncaring coworkers who make our lives miserable–or malfunctioning office equipment that stalls our productivity.

If you’re an agent or broker dealing with unpleasant situations like these in business, remember, you’re not alone. And if you’ve found ways to help diffuse the situation, cope with it or move on, please feel free to share! We’d love to hear from you.

Whether you’re a captive or an independent agent, becoming successful in this industry takes hard work.

Talk to anyone who’s been around more than a year or two, and each of them will tell you they put their heart and soul into their business to get where they are.

Let’s face it, becoming a top insurance producer takes time–and sacrifice. If you’re new to the biz, you might not become successful overnight.

But if you hang in there and copy what you see the super successful doing, you can move your way up the same ladder of success.

So what sets top producers apart? What do they do that others don’t to grow their businesses, make more sales, and establish long-lasting relationships that pay off for years to come?

Here’s the key: It’s all about establishing good habits. In fact, top producers consistently practice habits like these:

• They invest in themselves, using their income to stay up-to-date on their knowledge and continually improving their practice. They also put 10 to 20 percent back into their business for future growth.
• They terminate relationships that don’t pay off. Time is money, so they make sure they’re getting what they want out of the relationships they’re maintaining.
• They work smart. Reducing interruptions can add more hours to the day, giving everyone more time to sell.
• They put their own needs first. Believe it or not, setting aside time for things like physical fitness, family interaction and relaxation helps keep them fresh, on their toes and ready to provide exceptional service, as well as call on new customers.

What are you doing to achieve success? Do you, like some, make excuses, blaming your lack of income on being a new agent, not having the experience or training others have, or refusing to prospect because you really dislike cold-calling? Or are you replicating the actions of top producers?

If you want to become successful as an agent, stop making excuses and start forming good habits. It’s already working for some–and it can work for you, too.

More Resources:

Tips for New Insurance Agents

Building Solid Client Relationships

Now that 2010 is in full swing, have you given any thought to your marketing plans? Or have you been putting that off, not sure where to go from here–or how to get started?

Along with a new year comes new opportunity: a chance to expand your business, increase your contacts, and set and reach new goals. And, like many other things we attempt at the start of a new year, successful marketing requires planning.

But how can you form a marketing strategy if you’re new to the industry, are filling a new position of leadership, or have little to no business experience?

Well, here’s a hint: Your marketing goals should be a supportive part of your overall business plan and goals for the year. For instance, if your business plan calls for growing your business by 20 percent by year’s end, your marketing plan should support that goal by outlining the steps you’ll take to get there–and possibly the tools that will help you achieve those goals.

As you reflect on everything your business experienced in 2009, consider these four goal-setting strategies that could help propel you to greater success in 2010. Then use them as stepping stones to help you move toward a more successful year than ever.

1. Start fresh. You can’t do anything about last year now; but you can learn from what happened and use those experiences in setting this year’s goals.
2. Know what you want to accomplish. How can you know if you’re achieving your goals if you’re not sure what they are? We recommend setting monthly, quarterly, semi-quarterly and yearly goals to keep you focused and on-task. Setting a course, then making changes along the way, ensures you accomplish what you need to accomplish.
3. Define your goals in quantifiable, measureable, specific and realistic terms. The more specific the goal, the easier it is to attain. Don’t set them so high that they’re out of reach; but keep yourself challenged.
4. List your goals in written form. Whether handwritten or stored on your computer, having them close at hand allows you to refer back to your goals as you move through the year–and check them off as you accomplish and complete them.

Your goals can be big or small, like earning a certain amount of profit by the end of the year or gaining five new clients each month. However you define them, use the new year to set and achieve reachable goals. There’s no better way to help grow your business now.

My wife and I insure our cars and home with Safeco (which, as it happens, is now teamed up with the awesome Liberty Mutual) and we bought our combo policy through The Denver Agency, a well established and respected independent agency located in, you guessed it, Denver, Colorado.

When we decided to consolidate our home and auto policies last year (we had been insuring our cars direct with Progressive), our agent was incredibly helpful and responsive, and the process went smoothly.

Point for The Denver Agency.

However, where The Denver Agency comes up short, and I’m looking at this as both a client and a student of marketing and customer service, is in conveying the sense that they care about me. To be sure, every time I call or email, I get excellent and attentive service. But the rest of the time there is … silence. No communication whatsoever.

For some consumers, this is just how they want it: forget the boring newsletters and mail-merged holiday cards, they say, just get me covered and leave me alone.

While I can understand this point of view, I think it’s risky for agencies to assume that it is widespread. I would venture that most consumers want to have some kind of regular interaction with their agent or agency, even if it’s as simple as a yearly email asking if there’s anything they can do. Such touch points reinforce the relationship, and they give people a reason to stay.

Without any communication, consumers are left to wonder if the agency takes their business for granted, and such thoughts, needless to say, prevent any kind of loyalty from developing. My experience is case in point: to put it bluntly, inertia is perhaps the only thing keeping my wife and I with the Denver Agency, and while inertia is a powerful thing, it’s not something a business should bank on.

Earlier this year, J.D. Powers’ surveyed independent agents, asking them to rate their satisfaction with their insurers. The survey results revealed that “agent satisfaction typically increases the more often agents interact with the business contact from their insurance company. Agents prefer to receive business contacts via phone or e-mail at least once or twice a month.”

As a matter of fact, independent agents value their relationships with their carriers more than their compensation.

Consumers are the same as agents. We all want to feel valued, connected. Regular touches can create this feeling, generating satisfaction and loyalty in the process.

Maybe it’s because I’m a little sleep deprived, but this short video, with its upbeat message and inspiring piano track, made me a little misty. (Grasshopper, a telecommunications company, put it together.)

It made me lot more optimistic about our country’s future. It reminded me of why our country is so great: we have an indomitable entrepreneurial spirit, a restless drive to innovate. It’s an impulse that begins in childhood and if it’s nurtured properly, extends into adulthood.

Fear and inertia can dull this creative impulse, but we need only look back to our youthful desire to create to get it back.

Why should I care? I used to think this was a rude statement (my mother forbade us from saying “I couldn’t care less”)…but I recently discovered it is the most important question to answer in the selling process.

Our CEO recently recommended that I meet with someone who had been calling on him. Because the CEO recommended it, I, of course, agreed.

I didn’t have much background about the product but the sales person had even less ability to sell. I learned an important, if not obvious, step in selling. The very first step in selling is making sure the prospect understands why they should care.

No matter how great your product is, no matter how current the technology is, no matter how many other people love it, no matter how many features it has, no matter how slick the demo is, and, the very worst, no matter how good you or your company is … it doesn’t matter if the prospect doesn’t know how or why the product could help them.

In this particular sales call, the woman used all her internal jargon to explain the product, but that meant nothing to me. I needed to hear why I should care in plain English. If you can’t explain what your product does without using industry-specific terms, you won’t reach many in your audience and I’m not sure you understand your product very well.

In this situation, I really wanted to hear how this product could help me, since the CEO recommended it to me, but in the end, I let the saleswoman go on with her spiel and ended the call as quickly as I could. I have the nagging thought it was a missed opportunity for both of us.

But before we get to the Don, let’s talk about a lesser-known guy named Nassim Taleb.

Nassim Taleb is an economist and the author of Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

Black Swan’s thesis statement is thus: improbable events are actually more probable than we think, and their effects are often devastating.

“What you don’t know can really hurt you,” was the lesson Motley Fool book reviewer Jack Uldrich took from the book.

The “black swan” of the title refers to the discovery of the Australian black swan. Until the discovery, most of the world was operating under the belief that all swans were white. The presence of a black swan came as a shock.

Now, the term “black swan” refers to any event that comes as a surprise and debunks long-held beliefs.

Some might say that the current financial meltdown was a black swan: with a couple of decades of incredible economic growth and globalization, people started to believe that the market was invulnerable, that the invisible hand would always guide us to greater wealth and stability …

“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” said Alan Greenspan last October as the U.S. economy unraveled.

“This modern risk-management paradigm held sway for decades,” Greenspan said. “The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year.”

To continue with Taleb’s metaphor, Greenspan thought all swans were white until the summer of 2007. He thought the free market system was perfectly calibrated by rational self-interest. He never thought that it could spin wildly out of control. Boy was he wrong!

Unknown unknowns
Remember when former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld talked about “known knowns” and “known unknowns”? Here’s the full quote, which got him a lot of jeers at the time:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

The thing is, despite being a terrible military planner—perhaps the worst ever—Rumsfeld was right on the money with this quote. (The tragedy is that he didn’t heed this known known: invading and occupying a country, particularly if it’s a Muslim country,  is never, ever a cake walk.)

It’s the “unknown unknowns” that Taleb focuses on in Black Swan. They are the things that seemingly come out of nowhere and in seconds demolish our bedrock beliefs.

Anyway, all of this is preamble to this list of Nassim Taleb’s life tips, which he shared with the Times (UK) recently. I figured that if I posted them without any context, you might just brush them off. But, truly, everyone should be listening to this guy:

Taleb’s top life tips

1. Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2. Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3. It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4. Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5. Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6. Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7. Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8. Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants… or (again) parties.

9. Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10. Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

Go to parties? Skip the news? Tease people who take themselves too seriously? Brilliant.

In simplistic characterizations of our current health care crisis, insurers make for easy villains. After all, they’re the ones assiduously looking to deny or drop coverage, refuse benefits, raise premiums, etc.

But there is another player in this drama that’s gotten a free pass from critics: health care providers. Doctors and their places of work, hospitals, have somehow been able to remain above the fray. (Maybe it’s part of our culture’s collective idolization of those in the medical profession.)

The thing is, doctors, collectively represented by the lobby known as the American Medical Association, are perhaps the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo, and they are incredibly influential in their efforts to perpetuate it. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, “the AMA ranks second over the last ten years in the amount it has spent to influence Congress.” Maybe it’s just the hardened cynic in me, but it seems that money has been spent on putting breaks on reform.

Teamed up with increasingly unhealthy patients, doctors are among the biggest drivers behind skyrocketing health care costs. But no one seems to question this trend: most of the public’s ire gets aimed at insurers for not paying, not those MDs who scribble out prescriptions willy-nilly and suggest every costly treatment in the book.

The fact is, true health care reform will require steps that reduce medical spending while improving medical results. This excerpt from an article in the Columbia Journalism Review sums ups our situation up nicely:

In a presentation to Congress, acting [Congressional Budget Office] director Robert Sunshine amplified this point: “Significantly reducing the level of growth of health care spending would require substantial changes in the incentives faced by doctors and hospitals to control costs,” he said. Translation: to really reduce medical spending, doctors and hospitals might face cost controls that could lower their incomes. The American Medical Association successfully fought this possibility every time health reform rose on the national agenda, and it’s a good bet they will fight again, while angling for a prominent place at Obama’s table. [Emphasis added]

While not at all blameless, insurers get perhaps an inordinate amount of flack for our current health care woes. It’s time we put a little heat on health care providers.

Note: this post’s headline refers to the time period known as the 21st century (lower case ‘C’), as in the century that came after the 20th.

A lot has changed in insurance sales, and that begs the question: What are the essential attributes of a successful agent in the 21^st century?

Persistence

Persistence has always been a requirement in sales, but it may be more important than ever. Why? Because the general populace is busier and more distracted than ever. The added challenge is that persistence is now predicated on first getting permission—interruption tactics no longer work. (Read more on permission vs. interruption marketing.)

Proficiency with technology

The information revolution fundamentally and irrevocably changed the insurance industry:

Technology has greatly affected the insurance business, making it much more efficient and giving the agent the ability to take on more clients. Agents’ computers are now linked directly to insurance carriers via the Internet, making the tasks of obtaining price quotes and processing applications and service requests faster and easier. Computers also allow agents to be better informed about new products that the insurance carriers may be offering.

–Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor

Those agents who are limber enough to adapt to an ever-changing technological environment will be greatly rewarded. In short, sales success these days is less about being a good schmoozer and more about being a good techie.

Ability to specialize in multiple areas

More and more, agents sell a panoply of insurance and financial products, from auto and homeowner’s policies to mutual funds and mortgage loans. This enlarged job description places a heavy cognitive load on today’s agent and requires a mind that can retain a great deal of information AND dispense it in a way that is clear to the layman. The agents that can do these things effectively will have greater success in cross-selling, which has become increasingly important.

Reasonable expectations

Let’s look at this attribute from the perspective of online leads. While the use of internet leads isn’t particularly new—InsureMe came online in 1995—many agents are only now getting on the bandwagon, often at the behest of the people at corporate, who realize that their agents must go where the people are going—online, to get free quotes.

Selling internet leads requires an additional layer or two of persistence mixed with a set of reasonable expectations. This is a balancing act. If you treat your online leads like expendable commodities, they’ll respond poorly and you’ll be left with a lousy closing ratio. On the flip side, if you make a point to convert every prospect into a sale, you’ll burn out and get discouraged in short order. Selling online leads is a numbers game that requires tenacity, technological savvy and a systems-based approach that also has human touch.

With financial panic spreading every day, it’s tempting to tense up and move toward the safe, tried and true. That nervousness is contagious. Resist it!

The irony, of course, is that the financial crisis is itself partly the result of people tensing up and moving toward the safe, tried and true.

As an agent you may have, aware or not, become a little bit more guarded, little bit more short-sighted in your thinking, a little more tense. Indeed, you may have lost a bit of the carefree attitude that you had when times were bullish. Perhaps your former inclination to play at work may now be out of the question in these serious times. By play I mean explore possibilities from a standpoint of abundance, as opposed to scarcity.

The problem–one of the problems–is that tension, fear and seriousness are antithetical to creativity and innovation. And innovation and creativity are what you need to thrive, no matter what line of work you’re in.

This post was inspired by this presentation at last year’s TED conference. Check it out and be inspired.