The training you’re getting from the insurance agency and insurance carriers does little to prepare you for success. For the most part, this training provides half-solutions and makes your job at least 100 times harder than it has to be. Look over this list and circle each bullet point that represents a critical mistake you’re making as a result of your training:

• You try to set appointments with the wrong people.
• You use a presentation during the appointment.
• You are too eager to make the sale.
• You talk about products and features.
• You don’t know how to ask for referrals in a way that helps people to give them to you.
• You think you can sell to everyone.
• You don’t build relationships.
• There isn’t anything about you that makes people specifically want to contact you.
• You seek to persuade rather than to understand.
• You’re thinking about you and your needs rather than the customer and their needs.

Your training places you on the offensive and your customer on the defensive. With this positioning a win-win isn’t possible, but you can change that. You need to position yourself as the expert partnering with them to find the solution to the problem or challenge they don’t want to live with anymore.

The best training will help you to position yourself as a trusted advisor. A trusted advisor is someone your   customers know, like, and trust to help them make decisions resulting in the best outcome for them. When you’re focused on selling a product so you can get a paycheck you can’t possibly be acting as your customer’s trusted advisor, and they can sense that without anyone ever having to tell them.

The best insurance sales training will help you to see that it’s to your benefit to seek first to understand than it is to persuade. Persuasion backfires on you because no one likes to be talked into or sold anything, but everyone loves to be understood. When your customers believe that you understand them and their needs they will trust your advice, they will do repeat business with you, and they will refer people just like them to you.