Prospecting is one area which trouble agents no end. Which is the reason many of you end up buying leads or spend a lot of money to get leads. Development officers pay money for agency leads, agents spend money for business leads. Most of time this expenditure does not reflect in business and is money down the drain.

How much of time, money and effort we spend fruitlessly!

Great efforts are put to getting leads from the chairman or secretary of a housing society, or leads are purchased from people who claim that they can customize their data base to your specific needs, which almost every time cannot be done. Many sales persons also go through a a lot of effort putting up canopies in railway stations, airports and in shopping malls, in the hope of getting a few quality leads. I once met a poorly informed direct marketing life insurance sales executive with his canopy at Hyderabad airport. Being curious I went up to him and asked what did he hope to achieve at the airport. He told me that he is expecting HNI leads. He had been sitting there for three days, and he had not collected even one lead. An he was paying a huge sum for putting up his canopy at the airport.

All such methods are costly, time consuming and finally do not give results. At best you get names of people not known to you. When you get names of people not known to you, the first thing you have to do is relationship building. This could take anywhere between a few months to a few years. This can be very frustrating period. Because you go with an expectation of selling and the prospect has not developed adequate trust in you.

Cold calls of the type described above do not produce results. They are best avoided. So how should you prospect?

Sell to Known Persons

Selling life insurance is a emotional process, where the prospect should have sufficient professional and emotional trust in the agent. As the great agent and professional coach, Gary Kinder once said “Logic may get the customer to see the benefits of buying a policy, it is emotion that closes the sale”. An emotion in a customer can be brought out only when we know the customer very well. It is therefore important to sell to known people.

Ben Feldman, considered as one of the greatest agents ever, was globally a top performing agent. He lived and sold in a town whose population was never more than 25,000. He did not sell outside his town, yet he was the top performing agent in the whole world, in his time for many decades.

Next time you have a prospecting problem, all you have to do is draw up a list of 500 persons you know. Do this exercise every year at the beginning of the year. Also learn to get references. These two activities will solve your prospecting problem forever. You do not need any other prospecting technique.

You have earned your respect from the people you already know, this is what will help you get business. Through references, earn more respect to get more business