There have been too few changes in training over the last 50 years. Can you even imagine trying to use 50 year old tools to perform your daily tasks even such simple things as doing your laundry, cooking, or mowing the lawn? Just think how hard that would be, how ineffective. Yet if you practice and follow the direction that your training is telling you to, you are virtually doing the same thing.

One of the first things you’re taught in your training is to come up with a list of the names of at least 50 people who know you well enough to have an appointment with you. Ok, that’s good in that it gets you to start practicing in a safe environment. But your current training falls short because you really don’t know how to capitalize on that list. Many of the people on your list already have relationships with other agents and aren’t going to transfer their business to you, so you need to know how to help them to help you. These are the people who should be most interested and willing to help you if they only knew how.

Cold calling is an old training favorite. The theory goes that if you just make so many calls you will talk to so many people and so many of them will give you an appointment. How many of you like making endless dials to talk to a hand full of people who are annoyed that you are rudely interrupting them, and then trying to twist their arm into meeting with you? With the do not call list and additional regulations in the health insurance industry this is an even harder way to try to succeed. Plus the phone scripts you’re using couldn’t be much worse. Doesn’t it just make a whole lot more sense to make phone calls after you have a connection with someone rather than to start a connection?

The biggest red flag flaw in your current training, is that no one is teaching you how to   fill your sales funnel with the right people. The right people are the people who are most likely to do business with you. Plus you have to know how to pre-qualify even the right people if you want to be productive and start putting money in your bank account.

Your current training teaches you a mediocre way of getting referrals. To get really good referrals you need to follow a fail-safe sales process so your customers are so excited about working with you that they eagerly give you qualified referrals. A qualified referral is someone that they talked to about you and asked to call you. What you are doing now doesn’t place enough focus on building relationships, so the referrals you get are pretty weak.

You don’t have to do things the hard way to be successful. When you change the things you’re looking at you change the things you see. Start seeing a better easier way by updating your skills to the tools you need in today’s market by utilizing the ideas in this article.