Insurance Sales Success: Reason 4 You Can't Sell

Your own fear has a strangle hold on you, and it’s keeping you from insurance sales success. Fear isn’t a logical response it’s an emotional response, and emotional responses have very little if any logic to support them. You’re afraid: to focus on a target market, to ask people for an appointment, no one wants to talk to you, to make phone calls, of marketing yourself, of failing, and of succeeding. You know what you’re afraid, but what you may not know or understand is why you have that fear. So let’s look at the reasons you may be holding these fears.

You haven’t grown into your own skin. Whenever you’re new at anything you go through a phase that I call growing into your own skin. You really aren’t sure exactly what benefit you bring to people. Plus you want to sell anything you can to anyone who has a pulse, so the benefit or value you bring changes with each person you talk to. You don’t know how to make yourself unique, so you’re no different than the other agents in your area. Because you’re just like everyone else you don’t know why someone would want to meet with you. All these self-doubts are visibly obvious to everyone you talk to reinforcing your fear.

You don’t understand your customers. Because you don’t understand your customers you don’t know how to communicate to them in a way that gets their attention, and makes them want to meet with you. When you understand your customers and the top things they want you can create a core marketing message that gets them to ask you how you do that, and as you explain they suggest to you that perhaps you should meet to talk about that. You’re looking at insurance as a boring necessity that people have to have rather than finding a way to make what you have to offer part of the solution for what your customers want. Your product is the emotion your customers want to have.

You expect perfection. You want every phone call every meeting every conversation you have to go perfectly. And by perfectly you mean you either made a sale or you set a sales appointment. What if you made a conscious effort to have at least 10 imperfect conversations each week? And after your imperfect conversations what if you evaluated when, where, and how you could have improved that conversation? Is it possible that if you did that you would begin to have more perfect conversations, and you’d know why those conversations were perfect? Then wouldn’t you be able to have perfect conversations more often?

You haven’t figured out how to adapt everything you need to do to fit you and your strengths. You’ve been shown “systems” for sales and parts of those systems may be working very well for you, and parts of those systems feel like you have your left shoe on your right foot. When you’ve tried a “system” a number of times, and it just doesn’t feel right don’t presume the “system” is right and the problem is you. There isn’t one “system” that’s perfect for everyone because you aren’t everyone you’re you. You have to adapt and develop your own selling style until you’re comfortable with it because it builds on your natural strengths. Tiger Woods doesn’t focus on what he doesn’t do well. He focuses on what he does well and strives to do it better, and that’s what you want to do too.