Insurance Sales: Do You Hate To Prospect?

Even members of the MDRT will tell you they don’t really like prospecting, but they know it’s something they have to do. Prospecting should be something you look forward to with excited anticipation because you can’t sell anyone anything until you have someone to talk to, but you don’t. And you don’t because you don’t like being told “no”. n nYou need a system for prospecting to be good at it. But a system is worthless if you won’t consistently implement it. So, let’s talk about why you don’t like prospecting now. and how you could like prospecting. nnIn general there are two ways you can approach prospecting, face-to-face or direct response. Face-to-face prospecting involves: networking, cold calling via the telephone, cold calling via knocking on doors, and asking for referrals. When you think about prospecting you usually only ever think of the face-to-face options. nnAnd you probably have the greatest resistance to the face-to-face approaches to prospecting. The reason you have the most resistance to face-to-face prospecting is because you run the risk of being told “no”, and you take that “no” personally. That happens because you don’t have a way to communicate the value of what you do in terms of what the people you want to work with want. n nThe other approach to prospecting involves direct response prospecting. In this case, you’ll still get a “no” when the other party isn’t ready to buy, but it won’t be face-to-face and it won’t feel personal and it can still be a way to make a connection that turns into a buyer later. And there are a number of things you can do to increase the likelihood of getting a “yes” response to your direct response prospecting. nnYou have to have something that the people you want to work with want. Education based prospecting works really well when you know what the people you’re trying to reach really want, and you provide them with a way to get that. A big mistake that many financial advisors make is they offer a seminar, but they either don’t know enough about their market to know what they want or they position it in a way that doesn’t even sound interesting to a prospect. nnThink about giving first. There can be great value in giving information that isn’t directly related to what you offer, but that you know they want. You increase your value just by serving as the connecting point between what they want and how to get it. nnRemember prospecting is less about you being rejected, and more about filtering out those who aren’t right for you to identify the people who are right for you. Of course, you have to grow out of that “I can help everyone mentality” to get this concept. If you want insurance sales you have to prospect, and if you have to prospect you may as well learn how to do it right, and when you do you won’t hate prospecting anymore. n