Here’s an analogy for you: if selling insurance is like playing music, your product presentation is your Symphony No. 9. Ask any musician: fine-tuning your instrument is an essential step in performing your masterpiece. Let’s take a look at a few ways you can polish up that pitch:
Increase the Interaction
One of the pivotal aspects of a great sales presentation is interacting with the client. Listening is sometimes more important than speaking, especially for preneed and final expense insurance agents getting to know a new client. Good listening skills will set you apart from other sales experiences the client may have had in the past. As you go back through your sales script, insert interactive portions. Ask the client some personal questions, invite them to give you feedback, get to know what background they have with the different types of insurance, you can even open up a conversation about their concerns. For face-to-face sales presentations, you’re aiming for a 60/40 proportion—60% you talking, 40% the client talking. This will make the presentation feel organic and natural, and the client will feel at ease from the start.
Share some Stories
Those of us who have been in the final expense and preneed insurance game for a while have a collection of experiences that can be told like testimonials. Sharing the story of a past client who benefited from your services can build trust between you and the person to whom you are pitching. These true stories from your actual sales experience can be hugely powerful and extremely persuasive, when used at the right time during a presentation. When you look at your typical presentation outline to improve it today, insert two experiences like bookends—one near the beginning of the conversation and one toward the end. If you’re like me, you could make a list of 20-odd anecdotes that authentically show how preneed insurance improves lives. I encourage you to rotate through these stories until you are so familiar with their retelling, you can call them up on command based on the client in front of you.
Plan a Follow Up
Every strong sales pitch ends with an impactful conclusion and some kind of homework or challenge for the client. If you let that presentation hang for too long, you’ll lose the great groundwork you just built. Follow ups are one of those things that take experimenting. For me, I like to give 3 business days before I make a call to the client, hoping to leave a voicemail. You may not know your perfect follow up method right now, so I encourage you to do a little experimenting in the next month or so. Call the client and track your success at various intervals of time. Send a text the next morning, or an email a week later. Gather the data over a month, and you’ll see what follow up method works best for you—then plan it into each and every sales pitch you give!
