A great number of books and articles have been written on the power of positive thinking. One of the books I read in the early 1970s supports the idea that you can think positive thoughts, affirm positive ideas, and believe that positive things will happen.
Life insurance agents have a pretty serious problem when it comes to positive thinking. A life agent's living relies on a very serious negative event: Death.
One of my mentors, Judge Ziglar, trained insurance agents. Before he trained them, he spent some time as an agent himself. He told me this story about his experience as he became the top agent in his agency and held that position throughout his short career selling life insurance. He actually did this and I have toyed with the idea: Judge bought a hearse. A black one. Placing a coffin in the back and driving in a black suit with a black hat and cane, Judge would back the hearse into someone's driveway, knock on their front door, back away as the door opened and, pointing to the hearse with his cane, he would say, "One of these days they are going to carry you out in one of these." One can only imagine the startled response as he asked to come in to talk about it.
Death is negative, but a very powerful motivator. The likelihood of someone dying is 100%. So what will the prospect do about it? I have an excerpt from a book written by the great preacher T. DeWitt Talmage. He speaks eloquently about the need of life insurance even though he spoke on the subject over a century ago. Things haven't changed since then. People still die. Talmage said, "The difficulty is that when men think of their death, they usually only think of it in connection with their own spiritual welfare and not of devastation of a household, which will come because of their emigration from it. It is really selfish for you to be so absorbed in the heaven to which you are going that you forget what is to become of your wife and children after you are dead... It is a mean thing for you to go up to heaven, while they go to the poor house."
Obviously T. DeWitt Talmage didn't pull his punches. I'll be glad to send the rest of the article upon request.
Possibly, one of the reasons you are not selling life insurance in large quantities is your belief level. Do you believe people will die? Are you willing to take a little abuse and rejection? If not, why not? People will buy life insurance if you will present it. Why? Because the most negative event in life is death and it creates lots of problems that life insurance solves.
So, here is your main opening line: "I have good news and bad news. The bad news is, you're going to die. The good news is that it doesn't have to be devastating financially for your family."
Kim L. Magdalein is a producer and owner of PresentYourPractice.com. He entered the industry in 1985, and went into private practice in 2001 serving the Jacksonville, Fla., retirement community. He has personally presented hundreds of seminars and created a thriving practice. He created Present Your Practice in 2004 to serve producers with seminar productions and methods for optimizing seminar attendance with qualified prospects. He can be reached at (800)909-9894.
