Haste Makes Waste When Selling Annuities
October 13, 2011 by Lev Barinskiy
Lev Barinskiy
AnnuityNews.com
Selling requires patience. And this is especially true when selling a complex product such as annuities. If you rush through any step in the sales process, you risk alienating your customer with a style that feels high pressure and uncomfortable to them.
Each step must be conducted with skill and thoroughness. And while it may be possible to progress through all four steps in a single meeting – it is unlikely with a purchase as important and sophisticated as an annuity because each step of the cycle is necessary.
The complete sales process has four steps: qualifying, interviewing, presentation and closing.
1. First is qualifying, which is also called prospecting. In this phase, you initially contact the prospective buyer to see if he may have a need for your product and service.
2. Next is the interviewing stage when you gather information to determine the prospect’s experience with annuities and other relevant investment products and their overall life / financial situation. You will work with these findings to solve the prospect’s financial challenge.
3. Then, the presentation is your opportunity to explain how the annuity uniquely solves the problem you and the customer have identified.
4. Finally comes the closing, where you complete the sale.
When responding to a purchased lead, the qualifying step is largely completed before you call the prospect. The sales process feels much easier when the customer comes to you instead of you having to do the tracking down through cold calling, direct mail or other tactics. After all, they have proactively requested your call on the lead website. This gets the sales process off to an easy start since the customer wants to talk with you.
When step one proceeds so easily, it’s tempting to become overconfident or even lazy, trying to complete the sale in one big leap instead of the usual number of appointments – to collect information, analyze it, and carefully prepare and present your offer.
Consider these benefits to pacing the sales process correctly:
- You’ll build a personal, trusting relationship with the prospect that will immunize them against approaches from your competitors. Since insurance leads companies typically sell the same lead to more than one agent, you want to be the first to contact the lead.
- You’ll collect all the information you need to understand the customer more completely and become the customer’s trusted financial advisor.
- Complex products require sufficient explanation to help customers make the right decision. The better they understand how the annuity meets their needs, the more confident they are in their choice and the more likely the sale will stick.
- The decision will be based on more than price. You certainly do not want to take part in a price-only sale by revealing only the number in a quick email or simple phone message.
The more you understand the customer’s situation, the easier it is to cross-sell additional products and services. In addition, this conversation will provide clues to potential referrals. Note the family members, coworkers and social circles to which the customer belongs and use this information to suggest referral sources.
Selling is like gardening. If you try to plant seeds one day and pull the seedling from the ground a short time later, you’ll harvest no ripe vegetables. And it’s unlikely that you can put the seedling back in the ground in such a way that it will resume growing. So you have to keep cultivating both plants and customer relationships until they are ripe and ready.
Lev Barinskiy is president of InsuranceAgents.com. InsuranceAgents.com was ranked the 24th fastest-growing company in the U.S. by Inc Magazine in 2009. It serves the marketing needs of thousands of agents nationwide with real-time insurance leads.
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