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Cheryl A. Clausen's Articles in Business

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Insurance Sales Success: 3 Things You Never Want To Do You may be shocked to learn the three things you should never do are exactly what you're told to do by your sales manager/mentor. But when you do these three things you're setting yourself up for an arduous struggle and, in all likelihood, failure. And that's exactly why over 90% of the people entering the industry will fail in less than three years. The first thing you never want to do that you're told you have to do is cold call. It's time to put that dog to bed. Cold calling has never been a high pay-off activity and now with the legal ramifications and people's increased intolerance it's an even worse thing to do. Insurance Sales Success: What Top Producers Understand You want to be a top producer, but you're stuck being average. You do what you're supposed to do according to the industry experts yet it isn't working. You're frustrated and exhausted and you don't know what you don't know. You're not alone, and if you keep doing what you've been doing you'll stay stuck and frustrated. The thing about success is that it can actually be the very thing that stifles future growth. The very things it took to get you to the level of success you enjoy today will keep you trapped at that level. Insurance Sales: Sitting in the Coffee Shop Licking Your Wounds? A poor sales conversation can get you off tracking. Even though you may not be aware you're doing it, after a bad appointment you shut down and don't function at your best. You're calling a time out. I encourage you to take a time out. Just make sure you spend that time in a way that provides value for you. Insurance Sales: Focus on the Money In any business the first sale is the hardest sale and the insurance industry is no different. When you focus on the right sources you can increase your sales and reduce your efforts. Treat your business like a business, and control how and where you invest your time. It's easy to get caught up chasing after the wrong sources, and when you do it's reflected in your revenue. Being busy isn't being productive. Productivity is about doing the right things at the right time with the right sources. Increase Insurance Sales in Spite of Money Objections When a prospect tells you they don't have any money do you accept it? How about when they tell you they want more money? Both are a sales trap that result in "no sale" for you. When a prospect tells you these things is sounds very logical. Your natural reaction is to move on or wait until the will have money if they don't have money now. In nearly all cases you're missing an opportunity, but you don't realize it. Sales Techniques to Avoid Interrogation Questions are a critical part of the sales process. Do you find that the questions you ask aren't producing the results you want? The way you structure the questions you ask, and the intent behind them have a dramatic impact on the prospect. Questions help you to establish rapport with the prospect. Questions help you to put the prospect at ease, gets them to open up to you, and makes them feel comfortable with you. Your questions must demonstrate your sincere interest in the prospect. Sales Coaching for Prospecting 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". You 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. What does Strategic Planning have to do with Insurance Sales? If you enjoy working hard, and struggling day in and day out to hit your targets then strategic planning has nothing to do with sales. But if you'd like to make more and work less then strategic planning has everything to do with sales. There are two distinct approaches to sales, and the choice is yours to make. The approach that most sales people take is to focus on being incredibly active hoping that all that activity will result in sales. The problem with that approach is that you and I both know people who tried that approach, worked nearly night and day yet they still failed. And that contradicts what you're constantly being told by sales managers, broker dealers, underwriters, and others. Sales Coaching to Avoid Cold Feet Have you ever had a prospect tell you they want to buy, and then they changed their mind? Have you ever had a prospect buy almost immediately and then they backed out of the deal, wanted a refund, or wanted to cancel their premium? You were left wondering how that could happen when they seemed so excited and on board. Every beginner and many seasoned professionals experience this but they don't understand why it happens. There is a very logical reason this happens. Time Management Skills Improve Customer Focus & Time Value Increasing the value of your time is as easy as 1-2-3. Identify who your ideal customers are. Don't guess know what they're actively looking for. Develop a message and the right bait to get their attention and interest. Your target market is the customers with the greatest potential for you. Be specific enough about this group of potential customers that you know their names. List the top 10-100 prospects that you want to focus on converting into customers. Hot Sales Techniques If your sales aren't hot you may be frustrated and confused. You know the sales and marketing systems you're using are working for others, but they aren't working for you. How or why can that be? Because you're reading this article I'm pretty confident that you have at least some experience and knowledge with eating. And that's why I think you'll be able to relate to the examples I'm going to use to convey my point even if you've never personally eaten chili. In case you don't know what chili is, it's a hot spicy soup. Sales Coaching to Make Your Training Stick Perhaps you've read, studied, or even trained with the best salespeople yet those sales techniques just aren't working for you. Consequently you're frustrated and confused. It doesn't matter if you've studied Zig Ziglar, Tom Hopkins, Jeffrey Gitomer, Neil Rackham, or any other big name in sales training, there's no doubt that what they're saying works for other people; but it isn't working for you. You need sales now and you're in an emotional frenzy trying to figure out what to do next. It isn't your fault and it isn't their fault that it isn't working for you. Understand that there is a perfectly logical reason this is happening to you, and there is a way for you to succeed in sales in spite of your current frustrations. Sales Coaching to End Closing Fears Why do perfectly normal people break out in a sweat when it comes time to close the deal? Normal people have closing anxiety because they haven't properly handled the earlier steps in the sales process. Closing should be nothing more than a natural conclusion to a selling conversation. If you're suffering from closing anxiety it's due to one of four reasons. The prospect didn't agree to a selling conversation in the first place. You confused the buyer by presenting too many options. You didn't take the buyer through a thought process that helped them to buy. Or you didn't stir up the emotional reason the prospect should act and act now. Time Management Tips for Top Sales Professionals If you aren't focused on doing the right things at the right time you lose financially. To make up for your inefficiencies you have to work yourself to death to hit your targets. But, you can avoid that with a little planning. You want the majority of your actions to be focused on those that result in a sale. You fill your sales funnel by prospecting, yet all too often you have a poor approach to prospecting. Develop a list of your most dream future customers. It's easier to develop effective ways to approach them when you know who you're focusing on and why. You Can't Sell Insurance to People Who Don't Want to be Sold to But don't you waste a lot of time and energy doing just that? You could be selling more insurance in less time with less work if you just knew how. Focus your efforts on people who already know they want what you have. You feel rejected when suspects continually turn you down, but they aren't rejecting you personally they'd reject anyone because they don't want what you're offering. When you try to sell to these people it's foolish and self-destructive. The reason you do it is because you're focusing on trying to fill your appointment book instead of focusing on only meeting with people who want to talk to you about what you have to offer. Insurance Sales: If You have to Cold Call I wouldn't recommend cold calling, but there are times when you may to do it. When you're in that situation why not learn how to do it well? You can do to do it better and have greater success if you'll just do a few simple things. When you're fairly new in the industry your sales manager will force you to do it, and if you've been in the industry awhile but you don't know how to market yourself you may have to do it. 84% of all sales people have call reluctance so you are far from alone. When you do it you hate it because it takes a ton of time and you get poor results plus it damages your ego. Insurance Sales: Are You Recession Proof? If the forecasted recession becomes a reality you have three choices. You can watch it happen and do nothing to prevent its impact on you, you can tighten your belt hoping to survive it, or you can develop a plan to thrive because of the recession. The choice and the result you'll get is all yours. Allowing external circumstances to determine your future is never a good idea and certainly not something a top producer will do. Start formulating your plan by identifying how you'll be impacted by a recession if you do nothing and what you can do to protect yourself. Identify how a recession will impact your customers and potential customers if they do nothing to protect themselves, and what you can do to help them to avoid that impact. Law of Success Requires Speedy Implementation You can pinpoint successful people because they are the people who immediately take action to implement their plans and ideas. Unsuccessful people rarely ever implement anything they learn. These people get caught in the learning and analysis cycle and just can't seem to move forward and take action. Quite often unsuccessful people can't take action because they have to ask everyone around them for their opinion and they get confused and frightened by everyone else's opinions. The really ridiculous thing is that usually the people around unsuccessful people aren't successful. Does it makes sense to ask someone who can't succeed themselves if you should do something that would help you to succeed? Speed of Implementation is Key to Success You can pinpoint successful people because they are the people who immediately take action to implement their plans and ideas. Unsuccessful people rarely ever implement anything they learn. These people get caught in the learning and analysis cycle and just can't seem to move forward and take action. Quite often unsuccessful people can't take action because they have to ask everyone around them for their opinion and they get confused and frightened by everyone else's opinions. The really ridiculous thing is that usually the people around unsuccessful people aren't successful. Does it makes sense to ask someone who can't succeed themselves if you should do something that would help you to succeed? Time Management Tips to Stop Chasing Down Call Backs If you're a sales professional/business owner this time management tip will help you to be more time effective and increase your sales. It's no secret sales people like you like lots of activity. You think lots of activity means more sales but your thinking is actually counter productive. Your greatest potential for immediate sales is in your current customers. Customers are more likely to buy from you again and again and again than most prospects. Some of your customers are responsive in that they buy from you occasionally and some of your customers are highly responsive and will buy nearly everything you show them. Sales Coaching to Get Referrals without being Pushy You've been trained to ask for referrals in a pushy, obnoxious, and downright embarrassing manner. When you use the tactics you've been trained to use it's very harmful to your relationship with your customer. Don't try asking ever so clever questions like, who do you golf with. Choke, puke, gag. These tactics are manipulative and you should stop using them right now. Don't stoop to using these high pressure approaches to get the referrals you need. Use these Sales Techniques to Make Getting Referrals Easy The way you're trained to ask for referrals is pushy, obnoxious, and downright embarrassing. You hate it and your clients hate it, and it does nothing to further you're relationship. You ask clever questions like, who are the three people who speak most highly of you. Choke, puke, gag. Stop it and stop it right now if you're using these horrendous highly manipulative tactics. You don't have to stoop to these high pressure approaches to get the referrals you want and need. Sales Coaching to Wn the Sale before the Sale You can't sell anyone anything until you sell them on having an appointment? One of the biggest challenges most agents have is filling their appointment book with real prospects. Just think how much easier and how much less stressful your life would be if you could hold appointments with people who are genuinely interested in doing business with you. Even though this may seem almost impossible to you now, you can. To make that possible you have to realize that selling starts long before the appointment. You have to set yourself up to attract the people you want to work with in a way that gets them to want to have an appointment with you. Translating Concepts into Actions for Insurance Sales Success When you begin to learn how to sell you're learning at a conceptual level. Everything you read and hear sounds pretty good. After all it has worked for other people it should work for you, right? Well, yes and no. Yes, it has worked for other people. But you aren't other people you're you and what worked like gang busters for someone else may be a total flop for you. Sales Techniques to Fix what Isn't Working Don't make the emotionally debilitating mistake of persistently doing the wrong things. You've been mislead into thinking that sales is a numbers game and that if you're just active enough you'll eventually get what you want and you won't have to work so hard. The only reason sales is a numbers game is most sales people get so focused on activity rather than productivity that they don't learn how to make sales a success system. You don't have to keep getting unnecessarily rejected and walking away without with nothing but a bruised ego. Sales as a scientific process revolving around you that you can develop so you can consistently obtain sales success. Law of Success Requires Plans Turning into Actions When you can't turn your plans into reality you're just a dreamer. It's ok to dream, but you have to turn those dreams into actions if you ever want to be an achiever. Start with a clear plan and turn that plan into actions. You develop power through your ability to turn plans into actions. That power will help you to have the ability, strength, and capacity to achieve the success you want. You will succeed through your own actions and the help you get from others. Law of Success is Easy Success is hard for you because you tell yourself it's hard. On top of that you make it hard for yourself because you avoid taking action. This deadly combination of your thoughts and your inaction are ruining any chance you have for success. Successful people think and act differently than unsuccessful people. But you can adopt that thinking and commitment to action and you can succeed too. Yet you probably won't. Sales Coaching to Help You to Become a Skilled Questioner If you feel awkward asking questions it may be because you aren't asking the right questions in the right order for the right reason. Effective questioning is definitely a skill and the best sales people are masters at. But most sales people ask questions that do little to help them with their sales success. It's a big mistake to ask questions that you could easily know the answer to if you'd just done your homework. Business owners and executives have zero patience for educating you. And when you ask questions that are generally known they view you as inept and you've lost the sale from the start. Time Management Tips: Do You Act before You Think? Does your day start with you running to your first appointment? When you get there how often do you find that you don't have what you need? Both are clear signs that it's time for you to slow down, and plan what you're going to do before you take action. You'll get more done faster with less stress if you set aside proper planning time. Even though sales people love action and they would rather be doing than thinking you need to discipline yourself to plan before you act. You think as long as you're doing something you're making progress. Goals are a Great Time Management Technique Goals are a great time management tool. You understand that goals are important but you may not be very good at setting and getting them. This inefficiency in goal setting creates a lack of focus and that lack of focus causes you to make poor time related decisions. People mess up with their goal setting because they try to set too many goals at once. This creates confusion because you can't focus on or track too many goals so you're better off setting a few goals and really concentrating on getting those than trying to do everything at once. And when you only have a few goals it's much easier to plan the next actions you need to take to get them. Blaming and Complaining are Success Killers Unless you accept full responsibility for your current conditions you'll use excuses, blame others, and complain about your lack of success. These habits and behaviors move you away from success. And they take you away from success rapidly. You only have yourself to thank for your current current situation whether you like it or hate it. As you begin to realize that you created whatever your experiencing take responsibility for changing it. The future success you want can only happen through your plans and actions. Time Management Tips: Don't Confuse Activity with Results Sales people like action. You're high energy and you'd rather be out shaking the bushes than sitting in the office. That's a good quality as long as you're taking action on the right things. Because you're a high energy person in a demanding business responsible for your own results who is getting pulled in multiple directions all day everyday you have to become a fanatic about your time. Time literally is money to you because if you aren't getting the most value from your time you aren't getting the money you could be. Even though you have customers, staff, and sometimes sales managers all making demands of your time you have to allocate your time in the best way. The Commodity Business is a Bad Sales Technique When you compete on price you lose. You don't want a business full of price shoppers because they're invariably your worst clients, so why would you ever want to intentionally attract them? Yet when you offer to quote someone insurance that's exactly what you're doing. Send the price shoppers to the internet or your competition for quotes, but don't let them bother you. When you quote a price don't you make that quote based on the assumption that the customer knows exactly what they need and why? And how often is that really true? Do yourself and your prospects a favor by refusing to quote prices. Time Management Tips: It's Not about Doing More Are you trying to cram more into your day? If you are you're probably stressed out, exhausted, and irritable because you're working too hard. If this sounds like you take a time out. You've got to stop focusing on the wrong things before you burn out. You probably think you just need to figure out how to cram more into your day, but that's the wrong approach. You're only focusing on efficiency. Time Management Tips: Don't know What to Do Next? When you look at everything you need to do are you feeling overwhelmed, and you don't know where to start? Are you even sure if you know everything you have to do? There are a few time management techniques you can use to get unstuck and going again. Begin by taking stock. Get out a blank piece of paper and list all the actions you've committed to taking. Don't make the mistake of listing things that involve more than one action or ideas. Risk Reduction is a Necessary Sales Technique Prospects don't buy whey they feel buying is too risky. Risk is a very valid concern that needs to be properly addressed. Wrong decisions can get then locked into products that are wrong for them and too costly to get out of. You need to help them to identify their risks and use the facts to make a good decision. Perceived risks and extraneous information rather than facts are the foundation of many of their concerns. Plus they worry that the money they're investing today is less valuable than the investment you're asking them to make. Do you Care Enough to Keep Trying so you can Succeed? There isn't an instant path to success. You want success and you want it now and you don't want any challenges or obstacles along the way. Common sense tells you there's no such thing as a free lunch. You can't expect to have an idea and then have that idea instantly materialize into success. You need a valuable idea to succeed and to carry it out you have to have persistence. Strategic Sales Action Plan can Increase Your Insurance Sales Do you want to shake up your sales results? It's time to rethink you're approach and come up with a plan that will produce results. A strategic sales action plan provides an implementable quantifiable path to significantly improve your results. Let's begin by identifying the key elements of a strategic sales action plan. The key elements of your strategic sales action plan include: the value you provide, your unique market position, your marketing plan, your sales plan, and your follow-up plan. Each element is critical, but you want to develop or review them in a specific order. Success through Continuous Action To succeed you must transform your dreams into actions. You must take those actions each and every day to achieve success. And that's why most people never succeed. Most people lack the persistence to take action each and every day. To succeed you must have a clear plan for what success means to you and how you'll get it. Then each and every day you must take at least one action that will move you closer to what you want. Insurance Sales: Make the Complicated and Confusing Simple & Win Most people don't understand insurance and they don't want to. Use that fact to your advantage by making the complicated simple so people will buy and buy from you. There are two very good reasons this will improve your sales results. When you make it simple you remove a lot of the risk involved in a buying decision for the prospect. When people a risk in making a decision they worry about looking stupid, feeling foolish, wasting their money on the wrong thing, spending more than they need to, or buying things that don't get them what they want. Plus when they're confused and overwhelmed all their fears about the risks involved prevent them from saying yes. Sales Techniques:Are You Getting Leads from Your Business Cards? Start using your business cards as a lead generation tool Always have your business cards with you. Right now you probably don't think much about them because you aren't getting the maximum value from these little marketing tools. Realize you get business cards for a reason. Currently you give out your business card so people can contact you and remember you. That approach is based on your presumption that at some point they'll want to contact or remember you, but you aren't providing them with a valid reason to do so. Sales Coaching to help You Sell Money at a Discount Stop trying to sell your products when you should be selling your service. You can increase your sales if you'll just stop trying to market or sell products. Dan Kennedy talks about the technique of selling money at a discount. That's what you should be doing, but you're approaching it all wrong. Instead of using the approach of asking to quote a prospects insurance, you should be selling money at a discount. Success: Wear Your Courage on Your Sleeve Do you have the courage to succeed? Success can't be had unless you have the courage to succeed. Courage is the ability to deal with difficulty, uncertainty, and pain without getting side tracked from your chosen course of action. Success requires heavy investment of your time, treasures, and emotion. The emotion is often the hardest part to deal with. When you want to succeed you put so much effort, so much time, and so much of yourself into the quest that it's nearly impossible to have an impartial view of your experience on this journey. Time Management Techniques to Improve What, When & How The reason you struggle with time management each day is because you don't know what to do, when to do it, or how to do it when it comes to the actions you need to take. You can focus when you want to. Each day you write things down to prevent forgetting and overlooking things. You know the outcomes or results of your actions. You know how to review your options and make choices. Yet good time management skills seem to elude you. These struggles reflect your internal struggles. Until you understand your drivers for taking action or avoiding action your struggles will continue. These internal struggles stem from your natural behaviors and motivators. When you're really overwhelmed and stressed out doing what you're doing it's because there's a miss match between your natural behavioral styles and the environment you're working in. Time Management Techniques to Improve What, When & How You struggle with time management each day because you aren't sure what you need to do, when to do it, or how to do it. You know how to focus, you write things down so you don't forget, and you understand the outcomes or results of your actions. You've reviewed your options yet you struggle to make choices. These stressful struggles come about because of the internal struggles you have going on. You don't know why it's so hard to manage your time or why you're so stressed and you can't begin to figure it out until you understand your natural behaviors and motivators. It's not uncommon to find a miss match between your natural behavioral styles and the environment you're trying to function in. Time Management Tips: Reduce Your Stress in 15 Minutes per Week Invest 15 minutes each week to reduce your stress and get more value from your time. Effective time management is a skill anyone can develop and this technique will help you to develop good skills faster. And it only requires about 15 minutes of your time. How do you wrap up your week now? Do you rush off from work leaving everything as is until you start the work week again on Monday? When you do that there are two negative things that happen. Time Management Tips: Use the Power of Positive Change within You The way you handle time is based on your mindset. Dave Kahle defines a mindset as a group of beliefs that are so deep and firmly held that they are the source of many of your thoughts. So how do your thoughts relate to how you handle your time? Your thoughts determine your actions and your actions determine your results. If you're content with the way you handle your time now you aren't very likely to make any real changes. But if the pain of how you deal with time now is great enough you'll commit to making positive changes to get what you want. Insurance Sales: You aren't Born Creative You Become Creative You probably think creativity is something those artsy aesthetics types have. You may be surprised to know that creativity is a learned skill. And you may be ever more surprised to learn that creativity can be a skill that leads to improved sales techniques. Creativity is just a thought process that produces ideas. To become creative you need a positive attitude. And you need to be open to allowing yourself to be creative. Insurance Techniques: The Secret Weapon for Influencing People The secret to influence probably isn't what you're expecting. Powerful influence is a result of the way you listen. You can be a master of influence if you know how to listen to unlock this powerful influencing force. Your current listening behaviors make it unnecessarily hard for yourself. The listening behaviors that reduce your effectiveness include: allowing other thoughts to clutter your mind, thinking about what you're going to say next while the other person is still talking, trying to rush the prospect, and you losing focus. These bad listening behaviors eliminate your persuasion potential. Time Management Skills: Improving through Actions If you want to have confidence that you are taking the right actions at the right time for the right reasons you'll need to improve your time management skills. Do you have a daunting amount of stuff overflowing in your stack trays, so many emails you don't know where to start, and so many voice mail messages it would take hours to just listen to them all? Law of Success: Do I Need to Hire More People? If you were able to double your revenue with your existing people resources why would you think you need to add more people? Wrongly hiring additional people can be a big mistake. Employees cost your business far more than the salary you pay them. Sales Coaching: The Solution to Turning Objections into Sales Stop being told "no" and "not now" when the answer should be "yes". Earn the "yes" you deserve by taking responsibility for getting it. When you're told "no" and "not now" when the answer should be "yes" it's happening for one to three reasons. One prime reason is that you fail to prepare to prevent anything but "yes". If you haven't heard all the possible objections yet ask around until you get a comprehensive list. Identify every question, concern, or objection the prospect could possibly throw at you so you can develop a plan. Success: Don't Let Fear Drive Your Decisions If at some point you had a job there was always someone else you could either blame or count on to bail you out, but now as a business owner there's no one to count on but you. When things aren't going well it can feel like the world is crumbling around you and failure is one heartbeat away? You can't succeed when you're trapped in the grips of fear. Keys to Success: You Can't Succeed if You Can't Make a Decision Do you procrastinate? Does it seem like everything you try ends in failure? There's a simple explanation for this. You can't make a decision. And because you can't make a decision you can't succeed. Develop the habit of making decisions quickly. You think it's hard to make decisions. The reason you find it so hard to make decisions is because you place too much focus on information over the facts, and you don't have a clear plan for what you want and how you're going to get there. Time Management Tips: Are You a Time Management Strategy Victim? Do you feel like you never have enough time? Do you allow other people to interrupt you and keep you from getting things done? Your negativity and passiveness may be the source of your poor time management skills. It's easy to place the blame on others and responding to every distraction or crisis that hits your radar screen. Yet when you choose to respond to every distraction you're allowing other people to control your time and your outcomes. You aren't choosing how you will invest your time, and you're keeping yourself from having time for the things you want. Stop behaving like a victim and take control of your time. It's your responsibility to decide how you will use your time every moment of every day. Sales Techniques: Are You Tracking for Increased Sales? The way you track your sales funnel and sales cycle can significantly impact your insurance sales success. Is the way you track now complicated and cumbersome? Could a simple system be more efficient and effective? Yes. You need to know at a glance exactly who is in your sales funnel, where they are in your sales process, their preferred contact information, the outcome and commitment from your last contact, and the next action you need to take to keep your prospect on track for closing. Insurance Sales: Could You be Responsible As a sales professional, do you take full responsibility for your actions? Do you take full responsibility for what happens to you? You are responsible for your actions, your decisions, and what happens to you. Blaming yourself or anyone else, using excuses, and denial only hurt you and keep you from being able to succeed. But the people who are supposed to support you just make things more difficult, and they don't do what they say they will. Ok, so you know this to be true. That just means you're responsible and as a responsible person you take action to get it done yourself. Insurance Sales: Turn Trade Shows into Premium Lead Events You can find your very best prospects at trade shows if you know how to take advantage of the opportunity. Rather than spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars renting a space at the event you can reap the benefits without having to rent a booth. The problem with renting a booth is that you are trapped in your booth unable to roam the event and mingle with the other vendors. As you begin to investigate trade shows you'll find that most are annual events making it easy for you to plan a year in advance. This gives you you plenty of time to plan your sales strategy for using this sales coaching tip. In most cases the event will be held at a hotel or a convention center connected to a hotel. That's great for you because you can rent a meeting room during the event and use a pre-event direct mail campaign to invite prospects to visit you and get a special valuable gift. You could even host a private cocktail hour at the end of the day just for your best prospects. Insurance Sales: Could You be Responsible No one but you is responsible for your actions. But are you taking responsibility for what happens to you? You decide the actions you will or won't take. You make your own decisions. And the things that happens to you are a direct result of those actions or inactions and decisions. Placing blame, making excuses, and denying the facts hurts you and keeps you from the sales success you want. Yet, you may find that the people who are supposed to support you just make things more difficult, and they don't do what they say they will. When you know this to be true it just means that you have to take on the responsibility and take action to get it done. Insurance Sales: Don't be Accidentally Successful Have you ever looked at the results of another sales person, and thought to yourself that person sure is lucky? I'll bet you have. The fact is that top producers are never lucky. Top producers don't fall into long-term success they earn it. Sales Coaching: Increase Your Sales through Better Tracking How you track your sales funnel and sales cycle can significantly impact your career sales success. All too often the way you track now is complicated and cumbersome when a simple system would be more efficient and effective. You need to know at a glance exactly who is in your sales funnel, where they are in your sales cycle, their contact information, the result of your last contact, and the next action on your part. Insurance Sales: Tracking for Increased Sales The way you track your sales funnel and sales cycle can significantly impact your insurance sales success. Is the way you track now complicated and cumbersome? Could a simple system be more efficient and effective? Yes. You need to know at a glance exactly who is in your sales funnel, where they are in your sales process, their preferred contact information, the outcome and commitment from your last contact, and the next action you need to take to keep your prospect on track for closing. Insurance Sales: Don't be Accidentally Successful You've said it, I know you have. At one point or another you've looked at the results achieved by another sales person, and you thought to yourself that person sure is lucky. Those who have tremendous success in their sales careers are never lucky. They're never accidentally successful long-term. Sales Coaching: Be Intentionally Successful Have you ever looked at the results of another sales person, and thought to yourself that person sure is lucky? I'll bet you have. The fact is that top producers are never lucky. Top producers don't fall into long-term success they earn it. Sales Techniques: Are You Responsible? No one but you is responsible for your actions. But are you taking responsibility for what happens to you? You decide the actions you will or won't take. You make your own decisions. And the things that happens to you are a direct result of those actions or inactions and decisions. Placing blame, making excuses, and denying the facts hurts you and keeps you from the sales success you want. Yet, you may find that the people who are supposed to support you just make things more difficult, and they don't do what they say they will. When you know this to be true it just means that you have to take on the responsibility and take action to get it done. Sales Techniques: Don't Quit too Soon Your sales are down, your self-confidence is gone, you feel like you're beating your head against a brick wall maybe you should just quit. Maybe you should and maybe you're on the verge of a major breakthrough, but if you quit now you'll never know. How will you feel when you find out that the next call, the next appointment, the next referral, or the next chunk of repeat business would have been life changing for you? What exactly are you quitting? Are you quitting a company because it doesn't match your values? Are you quitting a boss because they lack integrity? Are you quitting a product or service because it just doesn't meet expectations? If you're quitting these things you should and you should feel good about it and hold your head high as you move on to the next thing that does support your values, standards, and integrity. Insurance Sales: Don't be Accidentally Successful Are those top performers just lucky? Haven't you ever thought to yourself that salesperson sure is lucky? To you it just seems like they can't help but tripping into more business than you can beat the bushes tracking down each day. In reality top performers aren't lucky, but they sure know how to set up systems that produce their luck. You don't accidentally stumble into long-term sales success you develop systems that produce long-term sales success. Sales Coaching: Be a Trade Show Success Identify the trade shows that your best prospects attend and make sure that'll you'll be there and have a clear plan to use this opportunity to increase your insurance sales. You don't have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars renting a space at the event, in fact that's one of the last things you want to do. You can get numerous great leads without having to rent a booth. Renting a booth actually inhibits your potential for the event because when you have to man a booth you can't mingle and meet with the other vendors. It's no secret that most trade shows are annual events so it's easy for you to plan and prepare for the event. Don't go unless you have your sales strategy developed for increasing your insurance sales success. In most cases the event will be held at a hotel or a convention center connected to a hotel. In addition to walking the trade show you may also want to rent a meeting room during the event and use a pre-event direct mail campaign to invite prospects to visit you and get a special valuable gift. You may also want to host an invitation only cocktail hour at the end of the day just for your best prospects. Insurance Sales: Could You be Responsible If you don't take full responsibility for your own actions you can't expect to obtain the sales success you want? As a sales coach I strongly urge you to always take full responsibility for your outcomes. Your actions and your decisions produce the outcomes you experience. Blaming yourself or anyone else, using excuses, and denial are all futile. Yes, you may have people who are supposed to support you who just make things more difficult, and they may not do what they say they will; but if you know this to be true you have to devise a plan to keep these people from inhibiting your success. Even if that means taking the action to get it done yourself. Sales Techniques: Do You have a Selling Attitude? A positive attitude is not the same thing as a selling attitude. You need a selling attitude for insurance sales success. A positive attitude doesn't produce results. A selling attitude does. Rather than trying to talk yourself into a positive attitude get a positive attitude based on your selling attitude.

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