Learning how to sell both P&C and life insurance successfully—it might appear simple, but it’s not easy. While the steps in the process seem to be pretty cut-and-dried, there’s more to success than following steps blindly.
Here, Brad Allan, an independent agent with Family First Life, shares some of his insider’s tips on how to become successful selling both P&C and life insurance. Here are three gems from Brad that you should take to heart.
Selling P&C or life insurance can be a rollercoaster. Some days you win—but some days (maybe more often than we really want to admit) being an insurance agent is difficult. People aren’t nice to you. There’s a lot of rejection. You get chargebacks. Prospects will deny you after you’ve traveled an hour to meet with them—these things happen to all successful agents!
And when they seem to happen frequently, you can get caught up in the lows and begin to believe you’re a worse agent than you really are.
But letting this type of negative thinking take over can be self-defeating. One key to selling life insurance successfully (or any type of insurance) is to minimize the potentially extreme highs and lows of the rollercoaster and remain consistent in your approach to sales. Keep the mindset that you’re never as good—or as bad—of an agent as you think you are, and you’ll be able to push forward when times are tough and stay hungry and hardworking when times are plentiful. (Tweet this!)
To sell insurance successfully for decades, your intentions need to be honorable. If you’re not out there trying to help families and you’re just doing this job solely to make money, it’s going to be hard for you to succeed in the long-term. To sustain in the industry, your work can’t be a sprint—it must be a marathon.
Ultimately, selling life insurance successfully is rooted in your mindset. Until you help another family, you can’t help your own family. All the sales processes, tips, tricks, etc. won’t matter if you can’t genuinely connect with your prospects about protecting the people and things they hold closest to them.
If you’re just kicking off your career as an agent, use these three milestones to help you become successful.
Milestone 1: Make 100 appointments.
From the get-go, your first goal should be to make 100 appointments and sit in 100 homes. After you’ve met that milestone, you’ll probably see many of the common customer scenarios that you’re going to see moving forward for your entire career, and the exposure to and experience with speaking to these 100 families will help you more than just about anything else you’ll do as a new agent.
As you’re moving forward toward this milestone, keep the following things in mind:
| "It took me six months of hard, full-time work to get to the milestone of 100 appointments. I’d dial on Mondays and Thursdays and work six or seven days a week to meet numbers. I took 20 to 25 appointments for weeks—of those, a quarter cancelled or rescheduled, 10-15 percent no-showed. Overall, 40 to 45 percent of the things I set out to do at the beginning didn’t work out the way I intended them to. But you know what? It was OK. I was consistent in my sales processes, and that consistency helped me continue through until I had all 100 of my appointments." |
Milestone 2: Get one year under your belt.
As an independent agent, we get paid for binding policies upfront (within the first three to five days), and trailing commission comes in at months 10-12. That’s where the good stuff starts to happen, because now you’re getting paid for work you did 10 months ago! Being rewarded for work you’ve already done not only feels good, it also gives you a great push of momentum that you’re going to need to keep moving. At this milestone, you’ll also experience (and survive!) your first tax season, so that scary obstacle is now complete.
Milestone 3: Make it to 4 years, and you won’t leave.
This is an exciting milestone: At this point, you’re looking at the following:
All these things give you a sense of peace and satisfaction, knowing that you’ve accomplished something you couldn’t necessarily see clearly when you began as an insurance agent. It takes time, but with consistency and a focus on helping people, you can get there.
We have several more free guides featuring other successful insurance agents you might find useful as you build out your sales processes, marketing strategies, and plans for growth. Check them out:
Brad Allan is looking to continue growing his agency—if you’re interested and located in the U.S., have a car, have a phone with a hotspot, and have a dedication to helping families and want to work hard, contact him to see if you might be a good fit for his team.