How To Sell Insurance Using Powerful Stories By: Jason Hornung – President Jason Hornung Agency, Inc. I started off my agency career as a captive. If you've ever worked as a captive agent or are familiar with the corporate culture of captive insurance companies, you'll know how much of an importance they place on putting up big life insurance sales numbers. What's funny is that I've had the pleasure of working with two captive companies, one of them being the big dog that shall not be named geez, I kinda feel like I'm writing a Harry Potter script here, but I digress :) At each of these two fine companies, I went through the six month agency training process. Basically they bore you to death with all sorts of stuff that doesn't matter one bit with hardly a passing thought on the rocks of this business, like how to sell insurance! Just like any home office, they pump you up with product knowledge and computer system knowledge as if that's going to get a potential client to commit a few hundred bucks a month toward a life insurance policy! Then they throw you out to the wolves and expect you to produce. I was a young buck of only 23 when I started my first agency, so I really didn't know any better to think on my own I jumped in and did what they told me to do. I'd try selling life insurance to my prospects by talking about the features of the policy and then simply quoting price. I'd get a couple sales a month doing this, but it was nowhere near the production level the home office was expecting! My District Manager would be calling me all the time asking why I wasn't selling more. It really started to wear on me. It sucks enough feeling like you are a failure, but to be constantly reminded of it is even worse. Just so you know, I'm one of those extremely analytical types so I ended up spending a lot of time thinking through the process I was using to try and sell policies. And it didn't take long for me to come to the conclusion that it wasn't me that was a failure. It was the process I was using to try and sell life insurance! Another thing you should know about me is that I love doing research. Realizing that my selling process was broken, it sent me on a quest to discover how to sell insurance in the most effective way possible. ©2012 Jason Hornung Agency, Inc. – All Rights Reserved http://lifeinsurancemarketing.info Over the course of about six months, I made a couple of huge discoveries about how to sell insurance that allowed me to radically improve my sales for all lines, but particularly for life insurance. In fact, these simple changes allowed me to be able to make the company life insurance sales award year in and year out from that point forward. So in this article, I'm going to share those discoveries with you so you too can enjoy the same (or even better) sales increase that I had! Discovery #1 about how to sell insurance: All people buy products based on emotion. It's particularly true with life insurance. Everyone makes their purchase decision based on some type of emotion that they have. Then they justify that purchase decision based on logic. What you have to do is adjust your fact finding process so that you uncover what that emotion is in your prospect that will trigger them into buying insurance. For some people, it's the deep love for their family. For some, it's being able to put their kids through college. For some, it's financial security and peace of mind. For others, it's the thought of their spouse re-marrying A side note - I actually uncovered a statistic that shows the #1 reason a spouse re-marries after the death of a spouse is due to financial constraints. I would get a really strong reaction out of most men when I'd tell them this statistic and they'd feed back to me that they didn't want their wife to have to re-marry. That one sold a lot of policies for me! There are other emotional factors than the ones that I listed that you can uncover to trigger conversion. The point is that you have to ask the right questions in your fact finder and have the tough conversations that get down to the core of your prospect. Then when you are giving your pitch, you need to tie all the benefits of the product back to that emotion. Let me give you an example: Let's assume you have one of those guys that hates the thought of his wife re-marrying. I'd say something along these lines after having determined death benefit and policy type. "Ok, John. Here's the deal We've taken care of covering everything that is important to you with this protection. ©2012 Jason Hornung Agency, Inc. – All Rights Reserved http://lifeinsurancemarketing.info And what you are doing is guaranteeing that no matter what happens Susan is never put in the position where she is forced into re-marrying just to make the ends meet. We are going to be able to provide you this protection, security and peace of mind without having you spend any extra money out of your pocket on a monthly basis. Given that you are getting everything you want at absolutely no financial cost to you, do you see any reason NOT to move forward right now?" What you'll also notice in that example is that you use features, in this case how I used my techniques for finding the money to logically support his emotional decision. You can take that even further with every feature of the product you are selling. Discovery #2 about how to sell insurance: The most powerful way to really affect the emotions in your prospect is through story telling. Stories are basically ingrained in our psyches. If you think about it, before writing was invented, all communication was done through story telling. And even after writing, the vast majority of commoners couldn't read anyway, so story telling remained prevalent. Even today, with less people orally communicating stories and less people actually reading books, our primary form of entertainment is getting stories through television and movies. Once I learned how to sell insurance through telling my prospects a simple story, my sales went through the roof! So you are probably wondering how on earth you come up with stories or how you get into telling them, so let's address those one at a time. There's a few ways that you can find stories to sell life insurance. The best is if you have a personal experience with life insurance. The second best is using the story of a client of yours. And lastly you can even use stories of clients from other agents you know. You'll always hear guys and gals talking about delivering death checks. Ask them for the whole story and use it with your clients if you don't have your own personal or client stories to use yet. That's how I started. In order for your story to be effective it needs to really paint the before and after picture to your prospect. And there's two angles you can take. ©2012 Jason Hornung Agency, Inc. – All Rights Reserved http://lifeinsurancemarketing.info You can tell the positive story where the client bought life insurance, something tragic happened, but because of the life coverage they were taken care of and able to grieve properly without having to worry about money. Or you can tell the negative story where the client didn't buy life insurance, something tragic happened unexpectedly and the family was decimated. For most people telling the negative story is more difficult, but I've found that it will sell more policies (and bigger ones) than the positive story. The reason being that people will go to greater lengths to avoid loss than they will to have some type of gain. Psychologically, the family being decimated is a major loss, while many prospects actually view the family getting money as a gain from the death of the breadwinner. That idea of financial gain from his death is strong enough to actually kill the sale of many qualified prospects, so tread lightly with that angle! How you get into telling these stories is going to be different in each circumstance you are working with a prospect. The key is that you use your salesmanship to weave it into the natural flow of the conversation at the point you want to start talking about life coverage. So there you have it, everything I know about how to sell insurance using powerful stories. You can take this and modify your approach immediately and start seeing results. I can guarantee you that! Of course, none of this matters unless you have the butts in your chairs that you can tell these stories to. Fortunately for you, I have a surefire system that will make it faster and easier for you to accomplish that than ever before it's a system that leverages the power of the internet to create exclusive, qualified and pre-sold insurance prospects wanting to meet with you. And it works for any kind of insurance! What I've done is put together a free video that will give you the #1 secret that makes all of this happen. You can get it by simply clicking the button below: ©2012 Jason Hornung Agency, Inc. – All Rights Reserved http://lifeinsurancemarketing.info . better to think on my own I jumped in and did what they told me to do. I'd try selling life insurance to my prospects by talking about the features of the policy and then simply quoting price. I'd. #2 about how to sell insurance: The most powerful way to really affect the emotions in your prospect is through story telling. Stories are basically ingrained in our psyches. If you think about. me on a quest to discover how to sell insurance in the most effective way possible. ©2012 Jason Hornung Agency, Inc. – All Rights Reserved http://lifeinsurancemarketing.info Over the course of