Life Insurance Sales Training Tips to Improve Performance
Being a good salesperson is one of those things that people like to say is a natural gift-you either have it or you don’t. While it is true that a certain outgoing personality type is conducive for selling, making sales is a skill, and it can be taught. Intensive life insurance sales training is the key to putting your career into overdrive. There are specific best practices that salespeople can employ to do their jobs better, and each industry has its own specific keys to success.
In the insurance industry, the following insurance sales tips can transform a salesperson’s innate potential into actual high-performing results.
Learn How to Get in the Door
No matter how good salespeople are at building relationships in person, if they can’t even get to the face-to-face stage, they aren’t going to reach their sales goals. It’s critical to know how to talk on the phone-always with an eye toward progressing the relationship. Some of this is instinctual and common sense. But when giving your staff life insurance sales training, you’d be surprised how teaching them to consciously emphasize subtle techniques will result in more personal contact. Examples of these techniques include:
- Providing at least two choices for meeting times
- Framing the meeting as an opportunity to learn from the potential customer
- Learning how to manage “tone” in emails (in today’s world, the phone isn’t the only way to communicate before meeting in person)
Know What You’re Selling
A customer may like a salesperson, but if questions about your product line are commonly met with “I’ll have to check on that,” their confidence in the salesperson may quickly erode. People like to buy from experts who can get them the best insurance deal. Make sure your sales team is completely familiar with your products and carriers. Salespeople should also have a thorough understanding of the overall insurance industry and market trends. And they should be taught how to explain what they know in a way that customers can easily understand it-and in a way that always gently leads back to doing business with your company.
Consistently follow up
An unfortunate tendency of some salespeople is to lose focus on a customer once a sale is made. As you provide your teams with insurance sales tips, emphasize how important continuing the sales effort is to generating profitable repeat sales and referrals. You can’t expect to develop a long-term relationship with customers if your salespeople don’t treat their relationships with customers as an ongoing process.
Take advantage of technology
This isn’t just about knowing how to write emails that connect with customers. It’s about knowing how to use software such as sales management and contract management software systems (which your company should definitely be using). An automated life insurance sales system, for example, can:
- Give alerts to salespeople when it’s time to contact a customer
- Track the status of a customer from initial contact through follow-up after a sale
- Provide support in searching your product portfolio to find the best products for customers.
The Bottom Line
eFinancial offers many tools to help grow your business. From access to the comprehensive suite of life insurance products to effective tips and training, we are dedicated to helping brokers and agents succeed.