Insurance Sales Success: Do You Have What It Takes To Make A Match?

When you try to sell instead of trying to match you can’t sell. Have you ever seen the children’s toy where the child tries to put different shaped objects into matching shaped holes? Essentially selling insurance is the same thing only the shapes and holes are conceptual rather than physical.

All too often you approach the client trying to push a product rather than trying to figure out what the client wants that you can match. Product pushing doesn’t work. Product pushing takes a great deal of effort, produces all kinds of stalls and objections, and frustrates the heck out of both you and the prospect.

The better approach focuses on the match. Before there can be a match between what the prospect wants and what you have, you both must be clear about what the prospect wants. As you gain clarity about what the prospect wants help the prospect to mentally experience what getting what they want would mean to them and how it would impact their daily life. As you do that you’re helping the prospect to identify and build their own motivation for finding a solution and taking action on that solution now.

Top producers are excellent match makers. Match makers have a set of underlying skills that make them so effective: they’re experts in very specific areas of their business, they focus on understanding the prospect and the prospects needs and are able to get the prospect to openly share that information with them, rather than selling anyone they’re educating and guiding the prospect to the best decision for them, they will not sell their solution to anyone who isn’t a match, and they realize that the sale is only the first step in the relationship. When you combine those skills it’s easy to understand why top producers hold fewer sales conversations yet sell far more than the average producer.

What do you need to do to move from selling to match making? Quite possibly the first shift will be entirely mental and attitudinal. From there you’ll want to pinpoint the behavioral changes that will turn you into a top producing match maker.