What Happens When Your Prospect Says “No”?

Receiving customer objections with grace is one of the toughest, yet most important, soft skills an insurance agent can have.

Handle a “No” badly—by getting upset or defensive—and you risk losing that customer permanently and even damaging your reputation.

Learn how to deal with objections the right way, however, and you’d be surprised at how often you can turn a “No” into a “Yes!”

If you’re tired of letting rejection get you down, check out our free ebook, Turning “No” Into Opportunity: Overcoming Customer Objections. We picked the brains of two experts, Andrea Waltz and Thomas Ntuk, on how to right the ship when your prospects keep turning you down. There’s too much information packed into that ebook to relay all of it here, but below is a small taste of what’s inside.

Overcoming Customer Objections The Right Way

It all begins with a mindset shift.

Maybe you’ve been having a great conversation with a potential customer so far. They seem interested in what you’re offering, and they’ve been engaged and proactive the whole time.

Then, when it’s time to sign on the dotted line…. they hesitate. They might say, “I need to talk to my spouse first,” or “Maybe I just can’t afford this right now.” It’s understandable if you feel a little exasperated by the situation.

However, what if you stopped thinking of “No” as a roadblock and instead viewing it as a crucial step in your path toward success?

Andrea recommends shifting your perspective to stop avoiding “No” and start embracing it. She goes so far as to set goals to get a certain number of “No” answers in a given time period—with the knowledge that if you can blast through enough rejection without letting it get to you, you will eventually find your “Yes.”

Agents who take rejections to heart may start to let each obstacle affect their enthusiasm for the job. It’s a normal human reaction to internalize rejection and wonder if it keeps happening because you’re doing something wrong. While it is important to always keep honing your technique and striving for improvement, what you don’t want to do is get bogged down in a perceived lack of success.

Highly successful agents still hear “No” frequently. The difference is, these agents have learned to treat objections as no big deal. They know the secret: You can either try to work around the obstacle or simply move on to the next promising lead.

One tactic you can use to surmount a “No”: Ask disturbing questions

One of Thomas’s favorite ways to get a good policy discussion back on the table is to ask the most thought-provoking, emotionally charged questions you can think of. He calls them “disturbing questions.”

Their purpose is to remind the customer why they thought they needed a policy in the first place. These types of questions help the customer visualize the loss or regret that would result if they neglected to get a life insurance policy.

“It’s not about talking them into buying something,” Thomas says. “It’s about asking the questions that make them realize they have a problem.”

Essentially, you’re bringing the customer’s pain points back as the focal point of the conversation.

You’ll get examples of these types of questions—and learn about other strategies for breaking down “No” barriers—in the ebook, Turning “No” Into Opportunity: Overcoming Customer Objections.

Download the ebook for proven scripts to handle any common customer objection.

Keep these talk tracks handy, and you’ll never again have to wonder what to say to get your customer back on board. Download your free copy today and stop letting “No” get between you and success.