Have you ever thought of a top insurance producer and said, “They sure do have it all together. Everything must happen so easily for them. Sales must fall at their feet.”?
Don’t confuse PERCEPTION and REALITY.
In truth, for 99% of people – including Mr. Success – there are aspects of our work that we will not like. There might be some things in your job that you dread doing, even so far as the “h” word – hate.
It may seem strange, but there SHOULD be things we don’t love doing. When we persevere and push through the challenging (but necessary) tasks that we MUST do, we move closer to reaching a high level of success in insurance sales.
I was at a conference a few years back, and our speaker was a gentleman in his 60s from California who started from scratch and built an enormous financial service book throughout his career. He’s in the TOP 1% of this industry.
Do you know what he did every single day of his career and STILL does every single day now?
Why?
Because he understands that he must do this task if he is going to meet new people and write more business.
He is a multi-millionaire who LOVES what he does overall as a LIFE INSURANCE AGENT. What he shared with us that day is this: not only does he make cold calls every single day, but that he ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY HATES making cold calls every single day!
You have probably heard this, and it bears repeating:
SUCCESSFUL people do the things that UNSUCCESSFUL people are NOT willing to do.
This man’s story got me thinking and reflecting because, ironically, I hated making cold calls, too. (I’d guess most of us would rather be doing anything but making cold calls).
So what I did back in my days selling mortgages is this: I developed an approach where I recognized what I wanted to do the LEAST and made it a point to do that FIRST!
I called these my morning “Quick Hits.”
Each evening I created a list of 20 people I would call FIRST THING in the morning.
It had to be the VERY first thing I did each morning.
No checking emails.
No checking voicemails.
No chit-chat around the water cooler.
I didn’t even allow myself a morning coffee (call me Crazy).
NOTHING got done until I completed my 20 QUICK HITS. I had to plow through them as quickly as possible. Many times I just left messages because it was 9 AM, but that was okay.
The goal of this exercise was to accomplish these things:
- Get the #1 thing I didn’t want to do off my plate quickly.
- It allowed me to get my mojo going and feel a sense of accomplishment early in the day.
- It created momentum and excitement, which carried over to the next part of my day.
- Some people would call me back, giving me new opportunities to work that day.
Now it’s your turn.
Identify the ONE thing you know you NEED to do but don’t WANT to do each day.
THEN… make it the VERY FIRST thing you do each morning. Maybe yours is cold calling. Perhaps it’s something completely different. But whatever it is, when you tackle it first, you will feel a sense of relief each day when you’ve checked it off the list. And you will also very likely experience the feeling of accomplishment that I did.
Let’s admit it: when we tackle something that isn’t fun, but we know is good for us, we get a unique sense of personal triumph…. “If we can do this, we can do anything!”
Perseverance is a key to achieving success in insurance sales. And sometimes, that means doing the mundane tasks that don’t deliver an immediate, profitable result. In most cases, it is worth it in the end.
