94. Cross Selling? Should we also carry other products?

 

Life Insurance Sales has always been referred to as a "Low percentage, High rewards" career, that to get to a "sale"! Advisors typically have to overcome countless setbacks and rejection from people who may not yet appreciate the role of life insurance in a financially secure family portfolio. And even if the prospect commits, there is still a chance that he may change his mind, a lot of us is not new to this situation.

The key to success therefore is having a lot of prospects to work with, to have the opportunity to present and show to prospects how mitigating life's risk is as important as generating decent returns in their financial portfolio.

Life Insurance may not be in the top of mind of the prospect at the time of our initial approach, countless "sales seminars" tell us that we should not give up, and should strive to make the prospect change his mind by "closing techniques" and "objection handling", to me, this may already border on "forcing" the prospect to get a solution he may not yet to ready for, which is not a good way to start a mutually beneficial relationship. So how do we resolve this awkward situation?

One approach is to patiently probe and try to understand what the financial priority of the prospect at the moment, and by probing we may discover that what the prospect needs now is another product.

This is where the benefit of cross selling comes in, having other products on offer may increase the chances of turning a prospect to a client by making available a financial product the prospect currently needs, the client relationship created would surely help in any future life insurance proposition.

just a word of caution, while carrying other products may enhance our total product proposition, care should be taken as to the type of products that we eventually decide to carry, best would be to have complimentary products, like life and non-life insurance, life and funds (UIT or MF), life and HMO, etc

another word of caution is we have to ensure that we do not spread ourselves too thin, as these other products would also require a certain level of commitment in terms of time spent and maybe production requirements, as such, we may have to give up some of the time and effort intended in building up our life insurance career.

all the best my friends!

#acgadvice