Getting Personal: Selling Individual Disability Packages
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Monday, September 21, 2015
Seasoned brokers know that some clients are naturally more receptive to learning about the value of an individual DI policy—but getting your message across can still be a challenge. Make it easier on yourself by adopting these strategies whenever the opportunity to discuss individual DI comes up.
What Matters Most
It’s true that we protect our incomes to prepare for the event of illness or injury, but don’t use that commonsense idea as your introduction. Most people don’t like to think about negative scenarios befalling their future, clearly a disadvantage for selling disability or life insurance. Instead let your introduction to individual DI focus on the positive aspects of your client’s life: goals, family, career.
Make a point of genuinely getting to know your client. Ask about their life goals, but instead of jotting notes or preparing your next question, really listen to the answer. Let the conversation naturally flow through topics such as what matters most, what your client loves about her career and where she sees herself in the future. Ask about family, about home life, and about hobbies.
This type of connection can lead to a productive discussion about protecting what we love in life by guarding our income. By starting with positive emotions and finishing with logic, you’ll avoid being turned away before you even get started.
Relevant Stories
Statistics are powerful unless the meaning gets lost in the numbers. Many of your clients will relate more readily to a narrative than a set of numbers. So give them the facts in story form.
Use real-life stories to illustrate the benefits of different types of individual disability insurance policies and give real-world examples of scenarios that would precipitate the need for each type.
You can find excellent real-life stories of people who have experienced total, presumptive, and partial disability on the Council for Disability Awareness website (link: http://www.disabilitycanhappen.org/stories/).
Practice
Particularly if you’re new to disability insurance sales, practice is key. Ask colleagues to challenge you with common resistance tactics and difficult questions. Before meeting with a client, review communications materials provided by insurers (which are often loaded with helpful phrases and tangible facts).
It may take several meetings to win clients over. But as you get to know them, you’ll find the right stories and important points that can help them understand the importance of income protection.
Contact us anytime with questions about working with your clients to protect their paychecks. We’re always happy to offer suggestions about creating meaningful connections with clients to help them better understand the importance of disability insurance.
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