SELLING: GOT QUESTIONS?
by Bill Hoos
When you meet potential buyers, do you ask or do you tell? If you’re like most salespeople, you probably do the latter. In fact, you probably tell them all about your features and benefits in the first five minutes of meeting with them. But, guess what: buyers don’t care! They don’t care that you’ve been in business for 50 years, that you have great service, or even that you represent multiple carriers. They don’t care because they’ve heard it all before from every other insurance agent who has ever walked through the door. They don’t care because they can’t see how any of this information can help them.
Buyers want to know only one thing: how you can help them make their lives or businesses better. Most buyers equate this with the lowest price. Why? Because they don’t know any better. What’s worse is that most insurance agents (not you, of course) don’t know any better either.
So how do you figure out what’s meaningful to your buyers and what you can do to help them improve make their lives or businesses? It’s not rocket science: Ask them!
Properly crafted questions will help you discover what buyers value, make them think in ways they haven’t considered before, and disturb the status quo. Good questions position you as a professional in the minds of buyers. They demonstrate your concern for the buyer’s needs and well-being.
Beyond the obvious, most buyers don’t know what their needs are; that is, they don’t know what they don’t know. Your job as an insurance sales professional is to help them discover those needs. Good questions will help you to do that.
Mastering the art of asking the right questions takes time. Begin by developing a list of at least 25 questions, with one or two follow-up questions for each. Over time, your list will grow and the questions will become second nature to you.
These questions should engage your prospects and make them think. In other words, they should not be yes or no questions. If your first question doesn’t reveal enough information or hasn’t helped the buyer discover a need, be prepared with a good follow-up question.
Suppose you ask your prospect, “When evaluating your insurance program, what’s most important to you?” One likely reply might be “Price is very important. Like everybody else, I need to keep my costs in line.” With this answer, your prospect has revealed that they haven’t thought much about the issue beyond the price, and that they don’t believe there’s much difference between you and the competition. To engage this prospect, you might follow-up with something as basic as: “Okay, and what else?” If you wanted to be a little more provocative, you might say, “I don’t like paying premiums either, but let me ask you this: are you more interested in the cheapest premium or the lowest overall net cost?” This question will engage the buyer and cause them to want to learn more.
Another good lead-in question is, “Thinking about your current insurance program, how confident are you that your business or personal assets have enough protection if the unthinkable happens?” If the prospect replies, “I think I’m in pretty good shape,” your follow-up could be “Do you think, or do you know?” After a little give and take, the prospect will probably reveal that they don’t know for sure. This gives you the opportunity to follow-up by asking, “When would you like to know – now, or after disaster strikes?”
These are just a couple of examples of how the questioning process works. Asking enough of these types of questions will lead your prospect to doubt the worth of their current program and sets you up as the expert who can fix their problems.
A wise mentor once told me: “Never reveal a problem for which you have no solution.” With this in mind, you’ll need a value proposition that responds to each of the needs you discover; but that’s a topic for another article. My question is, “Are you going to get started now, or will you keep doing the same lame show-and-tell routine that you know doesn’t work?”
Bill Hoos, CPCU, is President of Agency Sales Pro, LLC, an outsourced sales management firm serving independent insurance agencies exclusively. He has more than 35 years of sales and sales management experience with almost 30 years specific to the insurance industry. During that time, Bill has worked for two large regional insurance carriers, owned and operated two businesses, worked with two major sales training companies, and attained the CPCU designation. For more information, contact Bill at Agency Sales Pro, LLC, 220 Christina Circle, Collegeville, PA 19473; Telephone: (610) 624-3800; Toll free: (866) 274-6279; Cell: 610) 613-5842;-e-mail: [email protected]; Web site: www.agencysalespro.com.