Ninety-Two Percent of All Agents Fail - Why?

[arnguy]

....And there you have the conundrum. Fantastic post by the way, should be required reading.

Paul, are you still using conundrums? Don't your girfriends prefer sans conundrums?

 

[JacquesWerth]

AgentExhorter wrote, in part:
"The problem is that most agents try to sell what the prospect needs and not what they want. People very rarely buy motivated by logic and almost always buy motivated by emotions. This is evidenced by the homes we live in, the cars we drive and the clothes we wear."
As in the rest of his post, he is entirely correct.

So, if people only buy what they want, why do almost all agents spend their time and resources with prospects who are merely "interested?" Oops, that is a Rhetorical question.

Here are reasons that I think most agents do that.

• They don't believe there really are prospects who already want to buy insurance.
• They only know how to cold-call, direct market, and network, to find "interested" prospects.
• They don't know how to find and make appointments with "High Probability Prospects."

 

[moonlightandmargaritas]

Paul, are you still using conundrums? Don't your girfriends prefer sans conundrums?

Can't be too careful these days arn....

 

[YouGotMyMoney]

So how does one find these "High Probability Prospects"?

 

[moonlightandmargaritas]

So how does one find these "High Probability Prospects"?

By doing "High Probability Prospecting".

 

[bill3173]

There are many who disqualify clients instead of qualifying them.

Very often a consumer is a potential client but are passed by, during a disqualification process.

I'm with you on that one, but fortunately, most agents will let them slip by, and that's where we come in.

I probably wouldn't be alive today, if it weren't for my willingness to qualify new clients for something.

There are little things that you can do to make $$ instead of running away from it. I picked up two non resident state appts. last year, not because I wanted to, but because I have referrals in those states that wanted to do biz with me.

One of the appts. resulted in $3k in commission and the other $2.5K. Not a fortune, but why walk away from it. You can't make any money being a lazy jerk in this biz.

 

[JacquesWerth]

There are a lot of good reasons to attempt to disqualify all prospects.

The simplest, and one of the most important reasons, is that high probability prospects will not allow themselves to be disqualified. Therefore, you spend almost all of your selling time with prospects who will buy.

 

[YouGotMyMoney]

Jacques, I thought that "High Probability Selling" is most successfully used with cold calling, not with $7 a pop internet leads.

Am I right?

 

[briko3]

I read somewhere that High Probability Selling by cold calling in insurance doesn't create good numbers. Has anyone used this method and been successful?

 

[Guest]

Here are a few reasons that most agents fail. Feel free to add your own.

Many agents think that they really are agents. Look up the legal definition of "agent." Then realize you are a "salesperson." The only thing that you get paid to do is to sell.

The way that most insurance companies and their agencies teach agents to sell benefits the companies and their managers far more than it benefits the agents.

You frequently hear about top producers who earn huge commissions. What you are not told is that, with the exception of managers, the average gross earnings of all agents is about $45,000 per year. So, after struggling for four or five years it is unlikely that most agents that survive will be highly successful.

You also are not told that most really successful agents have spent their own money on excellent sales training and have years of sales experience.

Most agents who fail never learn a complete, modern sales process. So they get stuck doing ineffective things like cold-calling, need analyses, showing prospects their pain, preparing proposals, persuading, and convincing. All that, while trying to get poorly qualified prospects to buy.

By the time most agents realize that they need sales training, they have no ability to pay for it.

Sort of reminds me of this!

J Walter Thmpson - 1924