Although golfing and selling have a lot in common, for most producers they’re like night and day. Golf is not only a great way to get to know clients and prospects, but a great metaphor for learning how to sell.
Think for a moment: How did you learn to golf? When and where did you practice? How often? When you just made a good shot after several bad ones, what was the difference in the way you held your hands, legs, and body? How did you know what needed adjusting?
Now, how about selling? Historically, learning to tell your sales story was extraordinarily important. Learning all you could about your product’s technical aspects took precedence. Only by doing so did you begin to succeed, as your learning curve flattened out.
Most golfers go through some sort of warm-up ritual: They might stretch, go to the driving range and hit several balls, and hit a few on the putting green before heading out to the course and without this warm-up, they’ll have a bad game. But how many producers warm up for sales calls, going over the questions and focusing on what they want to accomplish? Do you write down your objective for an appointment before you go out on it and practice a few times in the lobby while waiting to see your prospect? Do you carry some sort of outline in your briefcase to peruse on the way over, or look over your notes from the research you did on the organization before the appointment?
Think of the many hours (and dollars) that you’ve spent at the driving range just practicing. And not just for golf; it’s been said that most people spend more time planning their vacations than planning their future.
Unfortunately, most salespeople spend more time practicing their golf swing than their selling techniques. You might say, “Who cares? Practicing sales techniques is boring! The only reason I sell is so that I can play golf and have some fun.”
You’re right. If you can’t find a way to make it fun, it’s not going to happen. So the question is: How can you make learning to sell better, learning to ask different, more effective questions fun?
Ben Crenshaw is a right-handed golfer. Once he was aiming at a green on a peninsula surrounded 90% by water. His second shot landed on the far left side, only inches away from the water. A normal right-handed shot was out of the question. Now, Ben’s nature was to be creative, have fun, and try weird things when he practiced. It paid off on this shot. He pulled his putter out of his bag and, taking a left-handed stance, held the face of the putter vertically rather than horizontally, which is normal. His left-handed, vertically held putter cut through the tall grass and connected with the ball, rolling it to within four feet of the cup.
If Crenshaw hadn’t practiced that shot, he never would have hit it in the tournament. Your tournament is the sales interview. What would it take to make you practice? Even if you wanted to, could you find the time? And could you make it fun?
I have three suggestions for making sales training more fun:
1. Hunt for real problems when you’re questioning a client.
If the client has no problems, you’re out of business. If you can’t find a problem, don’t wimp out and say, “Maybe we can get this account with a good price.” If that’s your solution, I suggest that you spend more time on the golf course and send a courier over to make the sale; your chances of getting that deal are just about as good. Find a real problem and then solve it!
2. Stop believing in the intellectual obstacles that prospects and clients throw your way.
Clients will seldom switch from their agency to yours because you offer something remarkably better than their agency can; they move because of discomfort with the way things are now. That’s called pain.
The difference between intellectual hurt and pain is simple. Intellectual hurt is something a person complains about for years but never really intends to change. For example, my wife’s green beans just don’t taste very good. Maybe it’s the seasoning, maybe it’s the microwave, whatever. I eat them, although I don’t really like them. But I’m not going to do anything about it. I won’t start cooking, I’m not getting rid of my wife, and I haven’t been able to persuade her to cook them any differently. (In fact, I think she likes them the way they are.) My complaining expresses intellectual hurt.
When selling insurance, how often do you scurry to repair intellectual hurts that will never move your prospects to take decisive action? It’s a waste of time, albeit sometimes more comfortable than trying to find a real prospect.
On the other hand, finding pain - or potential pain - will hook you a real prospect. What is pain? My 21-month-old daughter standing next to my 20,000-gallon swimming pool; it would only take a few seconds for a disaster to happen. The vision of an accident was indeed so painful that I spent $1,100 on an ugly portable fence that reduces my view, cuts the yard in half, and creates a substantial obstacle for me and the dogs. Pain motivated me to take decisive action.
So when prospects throw you a problem let’s say, no perpetuation plan, test to see how real it is. Is it intellectual hurt or real pain? Then present enough information to make the depth of the problem self-evident.
3. Inject a little drama into the interview.
If you’re a straight-laced, CPCU, by-the-book kind of person, this will never work for you. Many “professional” people have a compelling need to know the answers to everything. (They see it as a mark of their professionalism.) You needn’t wear a dirty trench coat and smoke a stogie like Columbo, but at some point you’ve got to loosen up and let your prospects figure out for themselves that they have a problem.
This is called acting. Many think it’s a dirty word; they remember the first grade, when the teacher asked a question, and their hands were up and waving furiously. There was something special about being the first and the brightest back then. But now, having instant answers could be a problem. Anyone close to you; spouse, partner, boss, therapist, minister, could name your flaws in a minute. If they did so, you would probably deny them or get defensive. Your prospect or client will behave the same way.
You might not be a good actor. I used to think I was until I joined an improv team: They were fair and I was bad. After a lot of practice, I have risen from bad to poor, and that improvement has made me a lot of money. (Again, it’s like golf: Sure, you want to be perfect, but you’d be happy just to be better.) Even if you can’t act, you can slow down so your prospects can figure out their own problem. (Your questions, facial expressions, and occasional sighs might help things along.) By acting a little, and holding back, you allow your prospects to become emotionally involved-to go beyond knowing their pain to feeling it.
CONCLUSION:
You’ve probably heard this definition of insanity: “Doing things the way you’ve always done them and expecting different results.” Improvement, whether selling policies or sinking putts, requires a sense of play and creativity. If you want new results, do things a little differently.