Marketing Your Professional Services

By Charles Wallace


Successful life insurance agents traditionally were those who did the best job of "fact finding" whether with or without a data form - to find areas in the lives of their prospects where there were gaps between what the current situation is and what the prospect wants, and then offer life assurance as a solution that fills the opening.

The most renowned of all life assurance agents, when it comes to the marketing of professional services, take fact finding a complete different level - essentially engaging in what has become called coach type questions to draw out the prospect in a non-manipulative way, to expose the explanations behind their feelings and the feelings behind their wants.

Each year more folks enter the life assurance business and from those we have spoken with we have learned that the number one thing they have done which has resulted in dramatically increased production and profit, is business coach education.

That's correct, life assurance agents and professionals of all stripes become much more profitable after they became trained business coaches. Training in business coaching, not to become business coaches as such and not so they can refer to themselves as coaches - implying that they something other than what they are.

For them, those only a short time in the business, this looked like a natural way to go. Since they didn't know a lot about insurance and their prospects knew they did not know everything, it was less complicated for them to learn that raising questions is a rather more productive process that takes them nearer to what's necessary to the prospect than just showing up with a proposal for most of such and such sort of life assurance.

Business coach coaching allows us to get out of our own way, sanctions our prospects with precise confirmed questions we need the answers to, before we offer our solutions.

When we take the approach of a coach - asking our prospects what's most important to them, what is the situation now, and what's possible - given the crossing of their needs and their budgets, it is their problem and they are endeavoring to solve it. Life assurance, and any other product or service, stays on the books longer when the person who buys it understands particularly the crucial reasons which support their decision to make the acquisition.

Business owners let me know that for a number of them it costs 30 times more to acquire a new customer than to keep one they already have. As the saying goes, persistency pays - so when a life insurance professional acts like a coach, drawing the prospect into the difficulty and helping create the solution - the business stays on the books.

Life insurance companies have made a huge array of flexible and customizable products. The agent whose only aim is to address his or her prospects needs and agenda can creatively massage these products into the perfect solution for their prospects right then. Later, when things change the coverages can be modified to address the new situations.

If the concerns belong to the prospect. The solution and having to live with it is theirs too. As an agent you are only a coach - bringing the time (they'll do all of these things if they have time) in the form of greenbacks to finish the image of the present and the future that your customer has painted.

Not merely will the business stay on the books so you can spend your time trying to find new folk to serve, rather than replace the lost earnings when policies lapse, you will have clients who tell their pals and associates what an insightful fair. Caring person you are.

And all you did was ask the right questions!




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