Authored by SNL Final Expense Agent Contributor
Having a hard time connecting with clients? Do your sales need a boost to propel them to closing? Refocus your approach by thinking about what it might be like to “be in their shoes.”
I’m hopping on the blog today to remind our agents across the country of the impact final expense insurance has on actual people’s real lives, every day. It’s easy in this industry to separate yourself from the clients you talk to in an “us” and “them” scenario—not in a prejudicial or judgmental way, but in an organized, neat-and-tidy set of groupings that make sense for your projections, charts, and data collection. However, I recently had a personal experienced that caused me to refocus my sales tactics on the people I hope to serve instead of the numbers I hope to achieve.
I’ve been an agent for 15 years now, and I often help friends and family members recognize the need for quality life insurance. It has always helped my sales strategies that I believe strongly in the product I’m selling, so I never have barriers or reservations about offering my final expense insurance services to people in my personal life. A great friend of mine and long-time neighbor approached me about 5 years ago to ask some questions about life insurance since he was leaving his long-time job and going into business for himself. I helped him set up a comprehensive and comfortable insurance package similar to the one I have set up for myself and my wife.
A few months ago, I saw on Facebook that my friend and neighbor was diagnosed with a rare type of cancer. The disease spread quickly through his body, and unfortunately he passed away just 5 months after his initial diagnosis. I was shocked. He was my age (I’m 55), healthy, working hard to launch a business that had just started really succeeding, and then one day he was gone.
His wife eventually called me to talk about the state of his financial affairs. She expressed her crushing concern and explained that their savings had recently been spent on his entrepreneurial venture, and the business was just turning a reliable profit when he died. She bemoaned the number of medical and hospital bills that were coming her way from his recent 5 months of tests and treatments.
I looked up her husband’s policy and felt a strong wave of joy and relief. I was thrilled to give her the news that the policy I had set up with her husband would more than cover all the medical bills and funeral costs.
My fellow agents, that experience changed me. I was able to see firsthand what I always tell my clients may happen—after a tragedy that throws someone’s entire life into chaos, there is a safety net in final expense insurance that will begin to set things straight. Remember as you go forward day to day, trying to contact, cold call, close, what have you, that your efforts can change someone’s entire life if the worst should happen—which it sometimes does.
