How to Succeed in Selling Health & Life Insurance
If you decide to make a career of selling health and life insurance, you'll find it's one of the most rewarding and yet frustrating jobs anywhere. You make very little money in the beginning of your career if your production is similar to the average agent's, and achieving success usually takes several years. Many managers joke that they never learn the name of an agent's spouse at the first Christmas party, because it's often unnecessary information by the next. But people who stick it out and achieve success selling life and health insurance can make lucrative incomes.
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Instructions
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Maintain a good work ethic. Even if nobody checks up on you, you need to be persistent with your work habits. If you don't have an appointment in the morning, get up, get dressed and leave the house as though you do. Use the time to prospect, call clients for a six-month review or update your records. Time is the most valuable asset when you sell health and life insurance, so don't waste it.
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Keep good records of your activities. Winners keep score. While it seems insignificant, recording each phone call or cold call with a hash mark, each individual you reached, every appointment you scheduled and those you sold is an important task. These numbers give you ammunition to improve your sales. You need to record the premium and commission per sale and find the average. Armed with your statistics, you'll find the answers not only to where you need improvement but also how to make that improvement.
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Develop a system for your life and health insurance business. This approach helps make certain that you use time properly. One system to use is the point system, where you attempt to achieve 10 points a day. Assign points to several tasks. Prospecting, scheduling appointments and making sales presentations should have the highest values. Use your ratios to calculate how many appointments you need in a week to achieve the amount of commission necessary to support you and your family. From those numbers, derive the way you dole out the points.
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Remember that the job of insurance sales is a numbers game. Mention your job and give people your business card when you meet them socially. Don't go into details or give a sales presentation, or you'll find people hiding whenever they see you. Just use each available opportunity as a form of personal advertising.
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Smile and remain positive, no matter how bad the situation might seem. Sometimes regardless of how hard you work, sales seem to be out of reach. This is simply a short dry spell, which will eventually end if you maintain your good work ethic. Think of your ratio of presentations to sales. Every time you get a "no," you're one person closer to a "yes."
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Make copies of all client documents, and keep them organized in a file. A handy tool to create for each file is a client contact form that you put on the inside cover of each file. Record every contact you have with a client or prospect, and list any important pieces of information. If you make a recommendation that you firmly believe your client should follow but doesn't, note it in the form and ask him to initial or sign it. This action has two effects. First, it makes your client realize the importance of the recommendation. Second, you are protected from a lawsuit if your recommendation was sound and the client doesn't seem to remember all the facts of the incident.
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Focus on the fact that your job is extremely important to families and businesses. Salespeople help those who need life and health insurance coverage make the important decision to carry it.
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