Selling Questions for Claude

Mathew, study the master of insurance sales,
the late Ben Feldman.

He would phrase it as "I'll buy it for pennies on your dollar
when you walk out."

"My dollars will pay for more than your dollars."

"if you part us next week, your savings won't of made a dent
with your funeral expense."

"Your dollars could never buy as much as mine will."

He would keep going back to it was going to cost more
by not buying.

He would then move to get a medical on them.

He wasn't selling funeral cover as such though,
just life insurance to achieve a tailor made goal having money in a certain event.
.
His book is The Feldman Method and Claude has a recording
of him speaking at a conference.

Best,
Ewen

Mathew; Thanks for asking.

When you say that you sell Funeral Insurance, do you mean insurance policies? I'm going to assume that's what you sell.

You need to dovetail what you sell, with their situation. In other words, when they bring up that they have savings, don't treat it as an objection. Treat it as the next step in selling.

For example, they say "We don't need insurance. We have savings that will pay for all my funeral expenses".

You might say "I sell money. And you already have saved on your own, to provide for your final expenses. That shows some sensible financial planning on your part. You see, most of my clients have already saved money, and don't get this insurance because they need insurance. They get this insurance because it creates money."

(I'm going to use a $10,000 figure for comparison. Use any figure you like)

"So you already have saved the ten thousand dollars, am I right?"
"And how much did that ten thousand dollars cost you?"
(You have to keep asking, in different ways to have then tell you that the ten grand cost them...ten grand)
"Would you like to see how to get ten thousand dollars, tax free, for only $5,000?"

"You see, our company sets aside ten thousand dollars with your name on it. You pay a monthly premium of $(whatever it is), and when you are gone, the ten thousand is yours, in any way you tell us. You may pay $500 for the ten thousand, you may pay $5,000 for the ten thousand...we don't know the future...but you'll never pay the ten thousand dollars. Your buying dollars on sale. All the money is going for the same purpose.....some is from your savings, and some is coming from us. But it will increase what money you control".

Mathew;
You see, the whole idea is that you are just helping them do, what they are doing now..accumulating money for final expenses...or for any other purpose.

You are creating money for them, that wouldn't exist, without you.

Get out of the idea of selling emotionally, and trying to scare them with the idea that their plan won't work.

Show them how your idea will just help them with the plan they already have.


The way you were taught, is to argue with them until they give up. That's incredibly stupid.

Never argue with what they are doing right now. Always praise them for what they are doing right now, and show them how you can make their plan work even better.

It helps dramatically, if you actually think this way, and not just sell this way.


added later; I just saw what Ewen posted. Yup.The idea I just gave you is how I sold life insurance for a year or so. And I was the third top selling agent that year, out of 2,200 agents. I got the structure of the idea from a Feldman book I read in 1976.

Buy the Ben Feldman book. The Feldman Method on Amazon.com. It's worth its weight in gold to any insurance agent with a brain.

And added a minute later; It's far better to ask about their savings at the beginning. It's also better to give this story as part of your presentation, and not as an answer to an objection. But it should help either way.

As Claude said do not make this adversarial.

I have NO experience selling funeral insurance but if someone said to me "I have the money put away to take care of that" I would say something like this:

That's great and exactly what I would expect. Most of the people that buy funeral insurance from us have done the same. It's a misunderstanding that people that buy funeral insurance have no money. Its the opposite actually. Generally they are very smart money managers and they like to cover all their bases. The truth is that our customers buy funeral insurance for two reasons. One is to have the option to free up that money in the bank in case of an unexpected emergency such as needing to help a child or grandchild. The other is they realize that insurance lets them buy that final expense at a huge discount allowing them to leave the balance of the saved money to loved ones or a charity close to their hearts.

Of course that is just a rough example but it is the style and approach I would take.
Its important to test different tactics and VERY important to try to slide to the next step without missing a beat. If there is an exam needed its going straight to the booking etc..

Although I have nothing directly to add here, I love the thinking and concepts involved. I was involved in sales but never insurance. My dad used to be in the insurance industry for many years and thrived because he knew people. That is one of the keys.
Not being adversarial is another. Thanks to you all for sharing.

I was thinking the same thing, too. Matthew, with all of your telemarketing experience you should be working independently. All you need to do is simply find a market that has a need, make sure that they're fairly easy to reach, find out how to fulfill that need or "needs", negotiate good pricing so you can compete, get some targeted leads and go to work.

You'll need to be able to accept credit cards, but that's pretty easy to do.

Important! Ask if they intend to hold money in a reserve fund before you sign up for any credit card processor! If they say they do, move on. If they say they don't, ask for it in writing. If they won't give it to you in writing, move on.

An excellent way to do telemarketing is business to business, particularly businesses that use repeat expendables. Businesses have money set aside for certain items that they must have, so there's little doubt whether they can afford to buy or not.

Also, instead of doing one and done sales you can build up a customer base of repeat buyers. It's much easier to sell to a list of people who've already bought from you before than it is to constantly be prospecting. Of course, you'll always have to cold call to an extent, but things will get easier after awhile.

Send me a PM if you'd like some ideas.

Joe

Hook up with someone who has an excellent high paid service where they do the fulfillment, and you get the work for them and get paid decent commissions. Like RedShifted does.

You have all good points about the lead, and thanks to everyone for your suggestions. The leads keep getting recycled over and over, again and again. You get knocked back almost instantly most of the time. But what I don't understand, is why some people are consistently selling more than others on these leads? I am not the top performer, I'd be somewhere in the top middle of the pack. There are some people making twice as many sales, calling the same leads, making the same presentation selling the same product. I don't understand what they are doing differently to me. I guess you can't answer that either unless you compared our calls. But I've asked them, my managers, quality assurance.. and they say we are all basically the same. I wonder if its random.. as some agents are do much better than the others some weeks, and the next they make barely no sales. It's hard to gauge where you are when there is so much variance.

I'm hanging in there, because you eventually get other lead sources if you convert more than the average, which I am doing. You get warm, website, and online surveys eventually, as well as trained on other products such as Life, & Income Protection which leads are not so heavily recycled. This is harder than cold calling, and really all you can do is ride the call out all the way out to the end. I'm still making decent money doing this, so I'm not really complaining, but the constant knock backs do wear you down, and sometimes doubt creeps in about the job/role you are peforming.

Great write up guys. Thanks.

A few bullet points:

1) You are working for a churn-and-burn. Burial insurance is BEST sold face-to-face with FRESH leads, not worn-out aged leads.

If you prefer to sell over the phone, I can recommend several outfits that have their system down pat. However, face-to-face selling is generally superior as (a) the senior population is used to it, (b), you can overcome tough phone-based objections like giving out Social Security and bank account numbers easier in person, and (c), your overall conversions across the table will be better as you can approach a prospect face-to-face without calling them.

2) I learned that selling burial insurance IS NOT a slick sales game, as much as it is a NUMBERS game. Most likely your sales presentation model works fairly well; where you are failing is that you are calling on aged leads that statistically lack both URGENCY and NEED.

While language, inflection, and overall presentation is very important, NOTHING trumps you actually HAVING FRESH PROSPECTS TO SELL TO. I would argue if you focus your efforts NOT on how to change what you are saying, but instead focus on HOW MANY and HOW FRESH your leads are that you work weekly, you'll have faster and more dramatic results.

Truly what you need is a lead generation model that will send you a weekly supply of FRESH leads. Several of the outfits mentioned above can provide that to you. There are even face-to-face outfits that provide free fresh leads if you cannot invest money into your operation, which is at least $3000-$4000 tied up continuously to ensure you always have fresh leads to see.

3) How many sales presentations -- defined as asking for the order -- did you do this entire week? Can you post your raw number of call attempts, presentations-to-call ratio, and your closed app to presentation ratio?