Life Insurance Awareness Month (LIAM) marks the life insurance industry's annual effort to motivate American consumers to review their life insurance needs. Coordinated by the Life and Health Insurance Foundation for Education (LIFE), this is LIAM's third year. The event represents an effort of more than 100 life insurance companies and associations that will direct millions of advertising and public relations dollars to reminding American consumers that they need to think about life insurance planning -- and that insurance agents are the ones they need to talk to.
How can you leverage this effort, and where can you get help? Here are some suggestions.
1. Make a brand-new effort to open up sales opportunities using questions. Just think about how many people you deal with every day that you have probably never even approached -- the gas station owner, the dry cleaner, the beauty shop owner, your doctor or dentist, the restaurant owner, your accountant, your lawyer, your landscaper. Reach out to the people with whom you regularly do business, people who need your help.
2. Ask your companies if they are participating in LIAM and, if so, what programs and materials are available to you. They may have special incentives and cooperative advertising support.
3. Take a look at how close you are to qualifying for the Million Dollar Round Table. If you are already a qualifier but would like to reach Court of the Table or Top of the Table production levels, use LIAM as the launching pad for a significant production push during the last four months of 2006.
4. September might be a good time to get involved with the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors (NAIFA). NAIFA's legislative advocacy efforts and sales education materials might just jump-start a life insurance career that's so far been dormant.
5. Check out LIFE's Web site at www.life-line.org. You'll find plenty of insurance needs calculators, helpful statistics, and printable consumer guides.
Someone once said, "It's not that we don't know what to do. It's that we don't do what we know." Life Insurance Awareness Month gives us a time, a reason, and an opportunity to meet people and ask the questions we know need to be asked. If not us, who? If not now, when? Resolve that this September, and you will make a difference.
Brian H. Ashe, CLU, is a 35-year member of the Million Dollar Round Table (MDRT). He served as president of MDRT in 2000, has two Top of the Table and eight Court of the Table honors, and is a Platinum Knight to the MDRT Foundation. He is president of Brian Ashe and Associates Ltd. in Lisle, IL and specializes in estate planning, retirement planning, employee benefits, and business insurance solutions.
