Until now this insurance leads blog has been about generating and using insurance leads. My mentor has now written a 20 article series on selling insurance in general. If you pay attention to what he writes I am sure you will learn a lot and close more insurance sales.
Hi Everybody,
For those of you I have not met
My name is Randy Mc Arthur.
I started selling health insurance about three years ago for a captive company who shall remain nameless. In the beginning, I was broke and did not want to buy health leads. I simply did not want to pay for them. So, if you don’t buy your leads, how do you get them?
I tried several different things, the only one of which that worked was direct marketing, or as most people know it, cold calling.
I did sell a good amount of health insurance cold calling but when I looked at the amount of time I was spending, driving from town to town and business to business, I became disappointed with my hourly rate.
Let’s face it, everyone works a certain amount of hours and makes a certain amount of money, so everybody works by the hour. Anyway, I gave in and started buying health leads. It made all the difference in the world.
I figured out that I needed to do more than one thing to make health insurance work for me . Should I cold call or buy leads? I needed to do both. I still needed to cold call some, just not as much, and to buy and work internet health leads.
Well, about six months passed, and with my new strategy my business started to take off. An amazing thing started to happen: Instead of me having to make every phone call, my phone started to ring.
People that I had talked to previously started calling me with everything from questions, (which are really buying signals), to invitations to come over and sign them up. They were now ready to buy.
When my sales increased, I got promoted to District Sales Leader or DSL for short. The DSL job gave me a team that came with a little override to supplement my income, and my team consistently led the division. Everybody on my team bought health leads and did reasonably well.
Now, while you do need to do some other things to grow your business like putting out signs and cold calling. You are not going to find anything as efficient as an internet health lead. Internet leads come to you.
Sure, they cost a little money, but they save you on your most valuable asset, your precious time. If I have learned one lesson in the past three years, it’s that time management is the key to success in the insurance business.
Remember, we all really work by the hour because we all make a certain amount of money in a certain amount of time. So, the trick is to give yourself a raise by increasing the amount of money you make while decreasing the amount of time it takes to make it.
Of course, there have been some ups and downs in the past three years, but there are ups and downs in everything you will ever do, just like life itself.
You just have to hope for the best and prepare for the worst, and everything will fall somewhere in between.
Now in just three years time, I am starting my own full service brokerage, offering everything from annuities to final expense, with health insurance as one of our featured defensive financial products.
I already have nine agents working with me. All of us are very excited to start this company and are truly looking forward to helping as many people as we can. If I hadn’t started buying health leads, I bet you that I would have quit before my first year ended.
I would have missed out on the career that I am going to do until I retire.
As insurance agents, we have the unique opportunity to actually help people protect their very existence in this country where everything is so expensive.
For instance, take a second to think about everybody whom you know that paid cash for their car, cash for their house, does not have any college loans, could quit working anytime they wanted, and could pay cash for any medical or financial catastrophe.
If you happen to know one of these lucky, lucky people, I’ll bet you can’t name two of them under the age of fifty.
Well, I’m not quite as dumb as a box of hair, but it took me a lot longer than I’d like to admit to realize what I’m getting ready to share with you.
Selling health insurance is just like every thing else on this planet. It is about 2% inspiration, 8% perspiration, and 90% attitude. Don’t get me wrong, I am not a crusader. I’m just a regular 45 year old guy supporting my family and living my life.
Just like most of us, I got into health insurance because it looked like a good way to make money fast. Wouldn’t you think that with the claims that every recruitment call, letter, and email makes. Now I know that was the wrong way to look at it.
Have you ever heard the saying, “Do what you love and the money will come?” Well it is true.
With insurance the love has to be helping people. Helping people feels good and it pays a whole lot better than trying to beat people over the head to sign up for something that they don’t realize they need.
Striving to actually help the customer first and worrying about the commission second makes it very easy to present the value of your point of view to the customer’s benefit.
Once they believe in your point of view, they actually believe in you. Then it is just a matter of doing the paperwork.
By the way, some people don’t realize what they need; they just know they need something. That is why you are seeing their name on a lead.
I will teach you how to find out what the customer actually needs through asking the right questions. It’s kind of a long process that has more to do with active listening than anything else.
It is impossible to help someone until you know what they need.
On this note I want to share with you my new company’s mission statement to demonstrate my philosophy and, who knows, it may help you to develop your business. I hope it does!
Our mission is to first, only and always, do the right thing to help the customer insure that, through their own choices, they have made only necessary cost effective decisions that guarantee they have protected their lifetime of hard work.
I’ve enjoyed sharing this concept with all of you and have a whole lot more to tell you, but, I have to cook for my kids right now. My wife is working tonight and they are hungry. Some of you know how it is now, and some of you will know in a few years.
Anyway, I’d love to hear from you if you have any questions or just something to add. You can get me at randymcarthur@ymail.com or (919)781-2018. I try to answer every phone call, but, a lot of times that is just not possible. So if you don’t get me just leave a message and I’ll call you back as soon as I get a chance.
Good luck in all of your endeavors and God bless you.
Randy Mcarthur
Thanks for stopping by my health insurance leads blog.
Cheers,
Mac