Sales - Finding a Life Insurance Need

If you are selling them life insurance in your pitch, you are doing it wrong. Your pitch should get them interested in allowing you to review tier while financial security program. Once you know their needs/previous planning should you pitch a needed product.

With that said, what age group are you meeting with? I've almost never met with somebody that decided they didn't need any life insurance. The only debate was exactly how much and what type.

Annuities have a bad, bad rep... mostly deserved.

Mutual Funds and life insurance are very commoditized today. You can buy both with simply a computer and a phone. When you have companies advertising on the radio how easy it is to get life insurance with one phone call... my guess is that hurts the actual salesmen. Plus, you have the car/homeowners insurance companies cross-selling life insurance. That's how I bought my first life insurance policy in college - it was a 50K policy for $15/month, was sold by State Farm, who did my renters and car insurance, and my car insurance went DOWN $20/month due to a line discount for having life insurance with them. No brainer.

I know many people who have flamed out selling life insurance. I know two who have been very successful. One is a retired military O-6 who sells 98 percent of his policies to retired military officers. The other person just has a tremendous rolodex of wealthy people that he sells to.

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I never open with a pitch. Never.

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exactly. The only items I bring to my first meeting are business cards, a pen and legal pad. I'm there to gather information.

I'll bring proposals, prospectus and fact sheets later if necessary.

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Once you know their needs/previous planning should you pitch a needed product.

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I've never even gotten to this point. HOW IN THE FLYING FU** DO YOU GET TO THIS POINT? JESUS CHIRST!!!!!

What I have been doing the past 6 years and how I've been making a living is providing services and explaining Medicare to people initially enrolling onto Medicare. This is a service and it's way in for me to provide services(Medicare Supplement, Medicare Advantage) and cross sell later on, like Life Insurance, Mutual Funds, Annuities etc...

I can't wrap my brain around how to approach someone(20-60 years old) without sounding like a salesman.
The biggest problem I'm having is COMFORT ZONE. I'll do it all day, it's just that I don't have confidence in it yet because I haven't been successful in it at all. AND I MEAN AT ALL. So I'm not comfortable doing it.

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What I have been doing the past 6 years and how I've been making a living is providing services and explaining Medicare to people initially enrolling onto Medicare. This is a service and it's way in for me to provide services(Medicare Supplement, Medicare Advantage) and cross sell later on, like Life Insurance, Mutual Funds, Annuities etc...

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So, why did you leave your old posistion? I mean, everyone that gets to a certain age gets medicare, so it seems you have a built in set of, oh, super-qualified leads. DId you even have to prospect for leads? Or, was it just all people calling in and asking to meet with someone?

You said you had a base of 350 plus clients from your previous venture. How good of clients are they? Can they be mined as a referral base? Will they make a personal referral on your behalf to their friends and children?

Where is your trouble point? Are you not able to get appointments with qualified leads? Are you able to sit down with people and just can't get them to talk? Are you in plan design stage and just can't close?

And are you not getting any sales support from your company?

I've found that in any sort of personal services business (law, accounting, insurance, etc) 95 percent, if not more, of new clients come from referrals. You are not starting cold, maybe you just need to refocus yourself.

Finally... these groups get a bad name... but have you considered joining a group like BNI? In your line of work, you have to be constantly meeting people.

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So, why did you leave your old position?

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I haven't really. I change changed from an insurance broker to a Broker-Dealer.

Everything was going great until I found out the guy running the operations was withholding overwrite, renewals, lying, etc...
Then out of nowhere he decides he wants to sell the business and move to Dallas to take a job he was offered. I mean out of nowhere. Then we in the office find a letter where he initiated the whole process...not to mention he started falling behind on rent, phones, just became really unprofessional to say the least.
We are pretty positive he now has a drug problem. So I bolted.

I'm doing the same thing through Medicare, it's just that Prudential wants me to concentrate on a much larger age group than just 65 and older.