Overcoming Specific Objections

[LGilmore]

Used to have a fellow agent who would make that 5-6 hour sales call where people would finally give him a check to get him out of their house.

Then they'd skip their exams and or cancel 30 days later and not let the guy back into the house.

As I said, a lot of work involved in sales. I'd rather work hard and keep business on the books, rather than force the sale and deal with the chargeback later.

 

[Rearden]

I'll preface my comment in that my experience is from selling final expense, all predominately done on a one-call close basis.

Reviewing the article, I am not see "objections," but the salesperson's inability to properly pre-qualify his prospect in advance of asking the sale.

For example, "insurance is a waste of money," "we want to shop around," "we can't afford it" - these are "objections" that a skilled agent - one-call closing or not - will knock out well in advance, near the beginning of the sales call, to determine whether or not the suspect is actually a prospect!

I am a big advocate of so-called "consultative sales," where the agent spends the lion's share of his time asking the tough questions up front in order to determine if the odds are that the person is worth spending time with pitching or not.

Here's my video of me discussing the importance of pre-qualifying in Final Expense, and an article summarizing why I think pre-qualifying is the most important step of the sales process when selling final expense.

 

[Robert Barney]

When I sold life insurance, almost 20 years ago, my sale was always needs based. I focussed first on defining what the problem was that I was trying to address. That was to point out that if the breadwinner died, the family dependent on the breadwinner's paycheck was going to lose that paycheck.

I then asked that if I could come up with a way to replace that paycheck, wouldn't that solve the problem? I didn't get many arguments with that. I then, using my income replacement calculator, asked four basic (simple) questions.

1. How much income do you think your family will need?
2. How long will they need it?
3. What inflation do you think we will have during that period (estimate).
4. What interest do you think you family can earn during that period (estimate).​

I then fed the customer's number (sure, I discussed those with them, but ALWAYS used the numbers they agreed to) into this calculator:

Term4Sale - Life Insurance Calculator

NOTE: The free term4sale calculator asks more questions, the one in the Compulife program is actually simpler and more focused on the 4 numbers.

I then proceeded to display the results, and explain, year by year for the first 3 or 4 years, how it works.

I then pointed to the bottom of the spreadsheet, and showed them at the end of that period of time, that ALL the money was gone.

I discovered, using that spreadsheet, as hundreds of other agents who use it all the time now know, that the consumer quickly goes from being worried about getting sold too much life insurance, to worrying about the ZERO at the end.

Once the need was clearly defined, selling a solution was/is a simple one stop sale. It is also a VERY easy needs analysis to do by phone.

If you are interested in this approach, ask me about the "money hunt" that I used to do after the spreadsheet.