Daily sales & marketing tips for insurance professionals

You know the saying ‘it never hurts to ask’? Seth Godin recently blogged about this phrase and he added some caveats, namely that it does hurt to ask sometimes—that is, when you don’t have permission to.

Godin, a prolific writer and web entrepreneur, popularized the concept of ‘permission marketing,’ a revolutionary yet simple idea that holds that you need to get people’s permission before you can successfully market your services to them. Note the ‘successfully’ in the previous sentence. You can shill for your product or service to anyone on the street, anyone with an email account, telephone, television or front door, but you won’t be successful unless you establish a relationship first.

Godin’s conception of permission marketing isn’t some warm and fuzzy notion that requires you to sacrifice old-school effectiveness for new-school niceties. In fact, permission marketing is all about being more effective. It’s about being more precise and less indiscriminate. “Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t,” says Godin. To give you an example, permission marketing is about trading the 2 percent response rate of direct mail for a 90 percent response rate among a highly targeted group that is willing to hear from you.

Permission can be built on something as simple as an introduction. It can be based on a gift. The point is, if you ask before you’ve earned it, you’ll hear a dial tone, or the digital equivalent—which is the sound of someone clicking the spam button.

Godin: “If you run into Elton John at the diner and say, ‘Hey Elton, will you sing at my daughter’s wedding?’ it hurts any chance you have to get on Elton John’s radar. You’ve just trained him to say no, you’ve taught him you’re both selfish and unrealistic.”

And what about insurance leads? Do you have permission to ask for the sale the minute the lead arrives in your email inbox? The good agents realize that while they’re dealing a targeted prospect, they do not quite have permission yet. A warm and professional introduction coupled with a demonstrated willingness to answer questions is usually all it takes to establish a permission-based relationship with a lead.

Still, deciding when to ask—knowing when you’ve secured permission—is a tricky thing that relies on intuition more than anything else.

Here’s the New Yorker’s Atul Gawande on why health care reform should be an organic, iterative process that improves upon existing structures and not a  radical, idealogy-driven razing of the current system.

He looks abroad and at the history books  to bolster his case.

“Every industrialized nation in the world except the United States has a national system that guarantees affordable health care for all its citizens,” says Gawande, who is also a practicing surgeon. “Nearly all have been popular and successful. But each has taken a drastically different form, and the reason has rarely been ideology. Rather, each country has built on its own history, however imperfect, unusual, and untidy.”

For example, Britain’s national health care system came not from mini socialist coup, but as an accident from a that country’s preparation for the Luftwaffe:

As tensions between [England and Germany] mounted, Britain’s ministers realized that they would have to prepare not only for land and sea combat but also for air attacks on cities on an unprecedented scale. And so, in the days before war was declared, the British government oversaw an immense evacuation; three and a half million people moved out of the cities and into the countryside. The government had to arrange transport and lodging for those in need, along with supervision, food, and schooling for hundreds of thousands of children whose parents had stayed behind to join in the war effort. It also had to insure that medical services were in place—both in the receiving regions, whose populations had exploded, and in the cities, where up to two million war-injured civilians and returning servicemen were anticipated.

After the war, they essentially said, “Hey, we’ve got this sweet health care system  in place, let’s keep it.” When the National Health Service came into effect, in 1948, it wasn’t even the biggest news story of the day. “Instead, there was only a four-paragraph notice between an item on the King and Queen’s return from a holiday in Scotland and one on currency problems in Germany.”

There’s another reason why health care reform in the U.S.  will have to come slowly:

American health care is an appallingly patched-together ship, with rotting timbers, water leaking in, mercenaries on board, and fifteen per cent of the passengers thrown over the rails just to keep it afloat. But hundreds of millions of people depend on it. The system provides more than thirty-five million hospital stays a year, sixty-four million surgical procedures, nine hundred million office visits, three and a half billion prescriptions. It represents a sixth of our economy. There is no dry-docking health care for a few months, or even for an afternoon, while we rebuild it. Grand plans admit no possibility of mistakes or failures, or the chance to learn from them. If we get things wrong, people will die. This doesn’t mean that ambitious reform is beyond us. But we have to start with what we have.

Interesting read if you’re into long, windy, Gladwell-esque  articles (I am). (Link)

Worthwhile reads from this week, freshly plucked from my Google Reader:

• Seth Godin on The Thing About Goals
• Ryan Healy on How Laziness Sneaks In
• Jeff Bezos on entrepreneurialism
• Penelope Trunk on why Tim Ferriss’ “4-Hour Workweek” is a scam
• The Kaiser Family Foundation on why health care is still on the agenda despite the dismal economy