If your goal is to make more insurance sales this year, you have two basic options. The first option involves working harder to secure and follow up on more leads. The second option involves working smarter by targeting common sales killers. Unless you have unlimited time and resources, you should probably opt for the latter.
It’s All About the Numbers
Being a successful insurance agent is often a numbers game. If you have 100 leads and your closing rate is 10%, you can expect to close 10% of 100. That’s 10 sales. If you want to close more than 10 sales, you have to change one of the numbers in your equation.
For example, if you want to make 20 sales, you can achieve this by working 200 leads. Unfortunately, this means doubling the amount of work you do. Many sales professionals are already working long hours. Doubling their efforts just isn’t practical.
There’s another option. Instead of increasing the number of leads, you can improve your closing rate. Continuing the example, if you can double your closing rate, you can achieve 20 sales while still starting with 100 leads.
You Have to Improve Your Strategy
You can’t keep doing the same thing and expect different results. To improve your closing rate, you have to improve your strategy.
This may not be as hard as you think. Many insurance sales professionals are inadvertently undermining their success with common mistakes. These sales killers can lower your close ratio and force you to work harder to make sales.
For example, many disability insurance sales professionals lose sales by framing the value incorrectly and making coverage look like a bad deal. To be clear, disability insurance offers a great value. Yes, some policies can be pricy, but disability insurance provides financial protection for a person’s income, and that’s often a person’s most valuable asset. However, benefits aren’t paid out all at once. They’re paid out in monthly installments, just like a person’s regular income. When you focus on the value of the monthly benefit instead of the total value of the policy, the annual premium cost may not seem worthwhile.
Reframing the value is an easy way to improve your pitch and, as a result, your close ratio. But that’s just one example. There are other common sales killers, and eliminating them is only easy if you know what you’re doing wrong.
Which Sales Killers Are Hurting Your Close Ratio?
Think of all the resources you pour into your leads. First, you have to obtain the leads. High quality leads can be costly, so you don’t want to waste them with ineffective techniques. Then you have to follow up on those leads. This can involve multiple phone calls, emails and in-person meetings, and that’s time that you’ll never get back.
Finetuning your sales strategy is the best way to make more sales while protecting your time. When it comes to disability insurance, many otherwise successful agents are making common mistakes. To help you identify and correct mistakes in your disability insurance sales pitch, we’ve put together a resource with six common sales killers. As a bonus, it also includes one sales technique that can help you place those some of those tricky cases. Download it today.
