Improve Your Odds for Success

 Planning encourages disciplined action. Planning is as important as doing. Planning should always take place before doing.

Throughout our careers, we have been closely allied and identified with the insurance industry. We have sold policies, hired and trained agents, and served as corporate officers and consultants in this great business.

During this time we have been analyzing the cause of agent success and failure. Our experience has taught us that selling success, financial success and lasting happiness are, in the main, the result of six things:

1. Living one's life in balance
2. Building a healthy self-image
3. Defining and steadfastly pursuing a series of specific, realistically high goals
4. Setting up a mastermind alliance
5. Developing self-discipline and self-management skills
6. Displaying faith and perseverance.

Life doesn't cheat. It doesn't pay in counterfeit coins. It doesn't lock up shop and go home when payday comes. It pays every person exactly what that person has earned. The age-old law that you get what you earn hasn't been suspended.

When you take these truths into your business life and believe in them - when you thoughtfully complete your yearly step-by-step approach to goals setting and action planning - you will have turned a big corner on the high road that will lead you to success throughout your selling career.

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How to Develop Clients

 "It takes less effort to keep an existing client satisfied than it does to get a new prospect interested."

What are some of the things you can do to make your sales stay closed and develop clients?

• First, you can assure your new client that he or she has made an intelligent decision. An effective way to do this is to write a congratulatory letter. This adds a distinctive touch. It displays professionalism. Many of your competitors will not be as well organized or take the time to write.

• Second, look for opportunities to communicate. There are many reasons you can find to send business or information to prospects and clients. Ask yourself this question regularly: "What can I do to help my client's business?"

• Next, after your product or service has been delivered, make follow-up courtesy calls. This eyeball-to-eyeball exposure with the new customer permits you to accomplish several important objectives. It permits you to resell the need for the product and, naturally, in talking to satisfied clients, you can get them thinking about future purchases.

• Finally, frequent, in-person contacts with new clients make it possible for you to get endorsements. Your best prospects will be developed in this manner. Satisfied clients will recommend you, your products and services. Every time you make a sale, you should ask yourself this question: "Who can I approach and sell a bit easier now because I made this sale?" Once you've sold a customer, make sure he or she is satisfied with your product or service and you.

Remember, it takes less effort to keep an existing client satisfied than to get a new prospect interested. Your clients will be presented claims and counter-claims from people who offer similar products and services.

The competitive edge you want to develop comes from the attitude you project of serving as you sell. You do this in two ways:

• First, you do whatever it takes to establish a record of consistent reliability. Earning the reputation of being a 100% reliable sales professional whose every word and promise can be depended upon takes application, effort and attention to detail.

• Second, you stay determined to be the best-informed sales professional who calls on your clients. This requires a commitment to excellence and a regular program of study.

Once you have established the image of being a reliable, well-informed sales professional, you are in an enviable position.

Again, the basic principle is: Never forget a customer. Never let a customer forget you. Serve what you sell.

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Do You Have a System?

 Make your process so simple that when ordinary people follow it, they perform in an extraordinary fashion

Systematize everything

Jack had coached for three years and then he went fulltime with Equitable (now AXA) selling in our hometown. While I was still in college, I was an intern with Equitable and didn’t go fulltime until I graduated.

I made the Million Dollar Round Table early in my career. It took Jack forever to make the MDRT. One of the reasons being, he was a coach. He had a good market, but he had never been in sales.

When we both became District Managers, I started in Bloomington, Illinois, a white collar college town. Bloomington had two great universities, Illinois Wesleyan and Illinois State. Jack went into management in Mt. Vernon, Illinois. In the 1950s, Mt. Vernon was a desolate part of the state.

After two years in management, I looked around and nobody was following me. I’d hired a lot of good people – captain of the football team, National Honor Society students, president of the student body. I had the best looking recruits you’d ever want to lay your eyes on, but I couldn’t find them. They had all left; they were gone.

Meanwhile, Jack was down in Mt. Vernon building a great organization. He had a crowd following him. One day I went down to see Jack so I could find out what was going on in Mt. Vernon. I told him, “I have the best prospects; you have the best retention. You have a crowd following you; I don’t have anybody following me. What are we doing differently?”

I’ll tell you what Jack was doing; he was teaching everybody a system. Jack had a system for everything. Jack taught me how to be systems oriented as a manager. If he hadn’t done this, I would have failed in management. As it was, I became the #1 District Manager in the country for Equitable in Bloomington, Illinois, all because of this valuable lesson I learned from my brother.

When Jack was in college he wrote a book called, Coaching Baseball. He had a system for every part of the game. Several colleges adopted the book as their textbook on how to coach baseball. It was written for college students who were getting ready to go into coaching.

Just as Jack had a system for everything in baseball, he also had a system for everything in management and selling.

• What you say when you contact people
• What you say when they object
• What you say the first two minutes of an interview
• Fact-finding questions to use
• How to get a money commitment
• He had a system for keeping score called the Travel Guide. Today, we call it the Progress Guide.

What was my system? “Get out there and SELL.”

And what were my instructions? “You’re not having enough interviews. That’s your problem. Get out there and sell!”

And as they would be going out the door, they would shout back – “HOW? How do you see the people? What do you say?”

Jack was giving them a system for everything. I learned from Jack to systematize everything as it relates to selling and management

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