InsuranceNewsNet Magazine January 2011 : Page 12
FEATURE | THE LAW OF SALES SUCCESS WITH BRIAN TRACY we know what they are. They are pros-pecting, presenting and closing. Those are the three. Now, there are many other sales activ-ities. There’s getting organized and plan-ning and sending out follow-up letters and all kinds of things. But the three that are most important, upon which every-thing else is determined, are prospect-ing, presenting and closing. Prospecting is the point of the spear. It’s talking to more people. Presenting is making sure that your presentation is persuasive, effective, customer focused, customer-centric. And then closing—getting the customer to make a decision, sign the contract and give you a check. Those are the three. good on the most important skill that can help you the most. And whether that takes you a week or a month or a year, you put your head down and become really, really good at the one skill that is determining your income. And when-ever people do that, they’re absolutely astonished. They go from rags to riches in as little as a year. FEL DM A N : One of my f avor ite approaches that you have is to reverse-engineer your presentation. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? TRACY: Reverse engineering is when you start with the end in mind. And in sell-ing, the end is when the client accepts “Every single person who is good at sales was once poor.” If you’re having problems in selling, give yourself a grade of one to 10 in each of those three. And you’ll know instantly what your big problem is and what is determining your income today. And what you realize is that these are learn-able skills. Every single person who is good at sales was once poor. So what you do is simply settle down and get really, really 12 InsuranceNewsNet Magazine January 2011 your recommendation, signs the con-tract and gives you a check. So, you work back to the beginning. What has to hap-pen from the very beginning in order for you to achieve that at the end? One of the first things you have to do is to prospect and talk to the right peo-ple. So who is the ideal client for me as an insurance professional? Who is the ideal client who will buy from me, and will buy again, will recommend their friends and will be happy with my ser-vices? Who needs it? We start to ask that question. People say, oh, everybody needs insur-ance, or anybody that’s got money or anybody that’s got extra income. Well, that’s fine if you have no future. But you really have to sit down and think about it. I’ll give you an example. A good friend of mine has been in the Top of the Table starting about three years after he began in insurance, and is now a multi-million-aire. He started off in life insurance and they told him go call on doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, people with high income. Those are the best people to buy insurance. So he went out, and can you guess what he found? He found that every insurance agent within 500 miles was call-ing on all those people. So he couldn’t even get appointments because those people were just being inundated by insur-ance professionals trying to get appointments with people who had money. So he backed up and he said, “How do I get to see these peo-ple? Well, I need to have a really good understanding of their sit-uation.” So he picked the med-ical profession and focused on doctors. And then he started to do research. How do they earn money? What does it cost them to run their practice? What kind of insurance do they need? And he began to interview doctors. As he interviewed doctors, he wrote articles, which he then published in journals that doctors read on the essential requirements for financial planning for medical professionals. Well, eventually, they began to invite him to give talks to local chapters on how doctors could organize their lives so that they could end up financially independent. And he would talk about the pitfalls, the things they had to consider and the various alternatives they had. And afterward, can you guess what happened? People
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