Sales

I’ve read so many business books on how to do this or do that better I’ve become jaded. People don’t change, which is why Socrates and Thucydides remain high quality sources of wisdom and strategy. Ancient Greeks may sound boring, but wise people recognize these are sources of great insight into how to get people to do what you want, though sometimes you must look inward first.

Fast forward about 2,500 years to a long-forgotten book, The Force, by David Dorsey, on how high pressured a sales job is versus a high-pressured sale. Until a person is in sales, and assuming the person is not the recipient of family money/contacts/Heisman Trophy, it’s hard to understand just how mentally and emotionally tough sales is. Even when a producer is making six figures and sometimes more, insurance sales are hard.

At the higher level, you are selling a carrier’s underwriter as much as you may be selling a client. And in this market, selling the underwriter is often the tougher task, especially when the underwriter’s position (and there’s simply no other way to describe their position) is categorically stupid.

To lose an important client to a stupid underwriting decision is possibly the hardest lost sale to deal with for some producers.

So many of my clients work through holidays, even if the underwriters do not, to ensure those accounts are renewed with the agreed upon coverages and rates. The emotional toll accumulates. Which brings me to a passage in David Dorsey’s book:

“At the end of the year, when you wait for the final word on a crucial deal, you lose all confidence in yourself for hours at a time. You sit at your desk and question everything you’ve ever done in life. It isn’t the sort of doubt that confines itself to the deal in question. It’s a categorical doubt, a metaphysical doubt, as a German thinker once defined it, a doubt that calls into question you, the questioner…” “The phone rings. It’s your customer. He says yes. Suddenly you’re superhuman again. You forget every question that crossed your mind over the previous half hour…”

This is the emotional toil that so many qualified producers feel on a regular basis. It can make living with such people hard. It can make work life stressful for account managers too, especially because their paycheck is guaranteed. Their idea of who they are is not wrapped up in whether the client accepts or rejects them.

In working with producers for 35 years and in my own sales, I have noticed that even the truly superhuman producers are stung when rejected by a customer, especially a long time customer. It’s a personal rejection most of the time. Yet the really good producers don’t go so far as many poor producers in making customers and prospective customers happy at any price. They know how to draw the lines and from somewhere within them, they possess the emotional fortitude to draw that line. And with time, they all learn that one of the most powerful ways to close a sale is exhibiting a willingness to walk away.

In my readings, the vast majority of sales and management books describe strategies and tactics. Tell a prospect this or that or slyly explain how their current agent is not good enough, or do this or that on your cold calls or never do cold calls, only do broker of record letters, as so on and so on.

Assuming a person has sales ability, teaching emotional strength along with learning how to ride the ups and downs is just as important. After all, it is tough to ask 100 people for a sale and maybe, initially, get one deal.

As with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, when starting in sales, making enough money to eat and live is the primary focus. I don’t ever want to relive those years. Beyond that time, the ups and downs, to some extent, can be mitigated by focusing on the customer rather than yourself. If you can develop your own personal sales model by which you help people even if it is only giving them the best coverage proposal possible, you can know you have benefited someone. Rather than focusing on not making the sale, focusing on how you did partially achieve your goal of helping someone even if it was not recognized can help a good person make it through rejections.

Then focus on communication skills as to why they would reject your better proposal. Was it that you need to improve your delivery or was it because their brother-in-law needed a customer? If the latter, try to laugh and chalk it up to life.

Quite often the reason will be because the client does not adequately understand how to judge quality versus rate in the insurance proposal. What can you do to help clients judge quality? In this hard market, quality is being subjugated to price far too often even to the point of customers buying policies from fraudulent entities and likely soon to be impaired carriers. Then you have the illusory coverages. Those policies are often far less expensive because they don’t actually provide coverage! But they look like they provide coverage. And then you lose the sale and you’re in the emotional sales trough again!

Knowing a customer rejected you for illusory coverage is a bad feeling. Some insurance carriers and distributors focus on uneducated sales forces because these people are most likely to sell believability and they succeed because they do not know what they are selling. How do you counter that?

I like the idea of planting seeds. Every year, maybe every six months, visit the client and plant another seed, a seed of doubt using facts. By elongating the sales process rather than focusing on not making the sale immediately helps even out those emotional troughs. You are resetting your expectations and provided you are not needing that sale to make the next car payment, longer term expectations can even out the stress of sales. It will not eliminate the stress, but nip some off the top. Doing so can also provide more energy to build a bigger pipeline and the bigger a salesperson’s pipeline, the more likely they will achieve their sales goals, and feel superhuman.

Insurance sales is simply a tough career emotionally even for people that make it big. I hope this little article helps someone out there see their ups and downs are normal. I hope the few little tips helps someone see a longer time horizon that alleviates those sharp ups and downs. And when I figure out what to do with stupid underwriting decisions that don’t arrive until 24 hours prior to renewal, I’ll be sure to write an article on that too!

---

NOTE: The information provided herein is intended for educational and informational purposes only and it represents only the views of the authors. It is not a recommendation that a particular course of action be followed. Burand & Associates, LLC and Chris Burand assume, and will have, no responsibility for liability or damage which may result from the use of any of this information.

None of the materials in this article should be construed as offering legal advice, and the specific advice of legal counsel is recommended before acting on any matter discussed in this article. Regulated individuals/entities should also ensure that they comply with all applicable laws, rules, and regulations.