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Brad's Bits
A Barrier to Entry?
Email:
bradh@onlyfinancialgroup.com
There are a few challenges that
always come into play with agents who decide to work in direct response
selling. The most commonly sited challenge is lack of money, but that’s not the
first most fundamental challenge to overcome.
The first challenge new agents
face, the REAL barrier to entry, is an agent’s mindset or paradigm. I’ll start
with a recent story. A successful lead buyer with agents indicated that they
noticed the leads they purchased from us enjoyed lower conversions than in the
past and as compared to other leads they had purchased recently. We asked if
the leads coming from us were delivered to the agents just as before and
formatted to look like all the other leads. The answer should have been “yes”,
that they looked the same as all other leads (they were using LeadBoss but
printed off leads), but after some investigation the answer came back “no”.
Recent leads had been delivered to agents in color stock, not white as in the
past. The color of the stock was changed back to white, as it had been before,
and matching all the other leads. Conversions moved back up to the previously
high levels.
Be A Slave To Your Systems
What are we to learn from
this? There appeared to be a feeling amongst the agents that these “new” leads
(a different color) weren’t as good as the old ones, though they were the same.
It seems an agent had a bad experience with one lead and then formed an opinion
about ALL the leads that matched this new color. This “feeling” was shared with
other agents and so it went till agents just stopped following up as procedure
dictated, convinced the leads would not produce. When the agent could no longer
differentiate one lead from another his paradigm changed (he thought they we not
used anymore), call protocols resumed, and lead sales went up.
It’s important to be a “slave
to the systems” and remove emotion from the front-end process. Always follow
through with the entire call protocol. If your protocol says attempt contact
for 10 days, don’t stop at 7. If you are taking a small number of leads on a
daily basis this becomes even more important. Take for example the conversion
rate on quote request lead of 15%. If an agent is receiving only one lead per
day, what’s the conversion rate at the end of day one? It’s not a whole number
is it? It would take 7 days before the math says a sale would be made. How
many agents get excited about a sale a week?
LeadBoss is Key
In these situations it’s
important to separate the success of the math from the psychology of how you
feel. Many times I’ve visited with agents who felt the selling process
wasn’t working and when we did the math, they were on target. It was the
psychology of one sale per week that was impacting their attitude and mindset.
As a rule, the smaller the daily numbers of leads you take the more you have be
a “slave to the system”.
From this discussion we can
conclude a few things. Successful agents are not directed solely by how they
“feel” things are going. They know the systems, they know the numbers and they
keep track. Check with any good agent and you’ll see that they are “slaves” to
LeadBoss. That’s their system; it talks to their clients, it reminds them of
action steps, it tracks, reports and allows diagnosis of problems in their
selling process. You can never remove all personal feelings based on a negative
selling experience, but you can be aware of this natural tendency and remain
focused and attentive to following up and following through with your systems.
Good selling……...
Brad Howard, Director
Only Financial Group
866-INS-ONLY ext 108
bradh@onlyfinancial.com
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