Insurance Sales Success: Diary of a Doomed Phone Call
Talk about an uphill battle, the phone scripts that some of you use just beg to be hung up on. Here’s a typical script I hear from my clients that the company recommends they use when calling a referral. “Hi Bob this is Susan. I’m calling you today because John Smith a client of mine recommended I contact you for an appointment. Would Tuesday or Thursday work best for you?” A script anything like this example is just setting yourself up for a NO.
This call is a big mistake from the onset with little hope for sales success. You should never be calling referrals they should be calling you because the person who referred them talked to them about you and asked them to give you a call. Now I understand that’s a completely new mind set for most of you, so let’s focus on what you could do to at least set yourself up for sales success with this type of call. To do that you need to understand the components of a good call.
You only have a few seconds to demonstrate value to the person you are calling. Face it, they didn’t ask you to call them. You have rudely interrupted them. They don’t know you and they have no reason to want to talk to you, so it’s your job to give them a reason to want to give you another 10 seconds of their time. To do this you need to talk about the ultimate result or the big value the person, whose arm you twisted to get them to give up this person’s name, received from working with you.
Your ultimate value will get you an additional few seconds so now you have the opportunity to engagement this person you have so rudely interrupted. Hopefully when you got their name from the person referring them you also obtained a little background information about the person and their relationship with your referral source. Use this information to ask open ended questions to engage the other person and get them talking.
You don’t want to waste your time on useless appointments, and they certainly don’t want to waste their time meeting you when they have no interest in you or what you have to offer, so do both of you a huge favor and use this call to pre-screen the referral. After you get the person to open up and start talking a little bit start asking pertinent open ended questions that indicate if this person is an ideal client. In fact, you can even tell the person that you don’t want to waste their time so if they could answer just a couple quick questions you would both know if there would be any value in getting to know more about each other.
You don’t have to set yourself up for failure and make things so hard. Use a little common sense and change your calling approach. Recognize that when you make that call you are really earning your right to another view seconds of the other persons time. In order to make that happen you have to communicate an ultimate result that the referral would find enticing and then you have to engage them.
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