Insurance Sales: Focus on the Money

The insurance industry is no different than any other industry when it comes to the fact that the hardest sale to make is the first sale. You can greatly increase your sales and reduce your efforts if you'll just focus on trying to gain sales from the right sources. And that means you have to treat your business like a business, and take control of how and where you invest your time. Yet, most agents erode away their valuable time responding to and chasing after the wrong sources. Consequently, you have little time to actually invest in the right sources and your earnings reflect this fact. But you think that because you're busy you're doing the right things with the right sources. Increase your focus on the money by focusing on your existing customer base and their future potential. All existing customers as not equal in their potential. Recognize that there are three ways this potential varies. Existing customers hold a potential for: development of a profitable target market for you, repeat and expanded business, and referral to other high potential prospects. Even veteran agents fail to identify profitable potential target markets among their existing customers. Development within a specific target market is one of the quickest ways to develop a highly profitable solid business for you. Look beyond product purchases to customer demographics to discover your potential target markets. Among your customers there are some you enjoy working with that have a high potential value. Pinpoint the commonalities among these customers so you can find more people just like them. The annual review serves to help you to identify opportunities for business expansion. All customers don't have equal potential for business expansion. Past notes and good questions help you to develop a list of the customers who are most likely to do additional business this year. You want to focus more time and energy on this list of customers than with customers who aren't likely to have additional needs until some time later. That's not to say you ignore and neglect customers who don't have more potential in the immediate future. If you do you can expect low retention rates and dissatisfaction. You always want to have ways to stay connected with every customer to maintain that relationship, but you also want to develop ways to make this process automated. You need a referral system that shores up your insurance sales success by making sure you properly take care of your customer relationships. You hate asking for referrals because you feel like you're either pressuring your customers to cough up a referral or you're begging for them. And using your your current approach that's exactly what you're doing. Because you don't know what to ask for or how to ask it. When you have a specific target market you want to focus on and you know who within that target market has the greatest potential for you it will be much easier for your customers to help you to make those connections, and they won't feel pressured to do so or like you're begging because you approach it differently.