In my prior article – Challengers Are Made Not Born” I  introduced the idea of the Challenger Sale. Since that time I have seen numerous articles on this concept.  Amanda Wilson has written a great article on rolling out this idea.

Enjoy.

4 Tips on Rolling Out Challenger Selling to Your Sales Team

Posted By Amanda Wilson

I have had the pleasure in my career of working with some of the best reps in the industry. Most of them are very disciplined in how they approach their days. Yesterday I was chatting with one of the best of them. He told me of a ritual he does every night- right before he goes to bed- that I thought might be helpful to us all.

1. Review your to-do-list – Of course this means you must have a to-do-list. So if you don’t have one maybe you can start by creating one. However, reviewing it the night before gets you mentally prepared for the next day. It also gives you a chance to prioritize and add or subtract tasks as needed.
2. Do a Brain Dump– If your thoughts are running wild, write them down, Once you get them on paper you will find that your brain settles down and you can rest more easily.
3. Turn off electronics 2 hours before bed time– This he says is essential. Unplug yourself and you will see that your ability to focus on the present will increase and when it is time for bed you will be better able to focus on the above mentioned activities.
4. Give yourself the time to do this – At least 20 minutes is needed for the above. So don’t watch TV until you fall asleep. Take the 20 minutes to decompress…focus on your list and get your thoughts on paper. If you do you will see a different you when you wake the next day.

Any new habit takes practice. It is said if you do something every day for 30 days it becomes a habit. Give this a try and see how each day becomes more productive and each night a bit more restful.

How do great agents avoid failure and maximize every sales and marketing opportunity? The answer is not rocket science-

1. lightning fast contact of incoming sales leads
2. consistent, persistent follow up

In other words…call fast and don’t give up too soon. LIMRA studies show that your odds of reaching a sales lead drop over 10x if you wait longer than the first hour of shown interest. The odds of converting that lead decreases 6x after the first 60 minutes.

The bottom line- response times to new sales leads should be measured in minutes, not hours and days. That is the answer to number one above – a 15 minute response time should be the norm.

Dean Smith remembered for his influence on others away from court
By Pat Forde February 8, 2015 12:42 PM Yahoo Sports

David Chadwick played basketball for Dean Smith at North Carolina from 1967-71. That was a long time ago, and he was not a star player. But when Chadwick asked the great coach for a favor three decades after his playing days were over, Smith granted it immediately.

Chadwick’s son, David Jr., a promising young basketball player, had suffered a major knee injury. He was discouraged. David Sr. left a message for Smith, asking if he could call and offer a word of encouragement to his son.

The next day on the answering machine, there was the unmistakable, nasally voice of the legend.

David Jr. called Smith back, and they talked for 15 minutes. After the conversation, David Sr. asked his son what the conversation was like. He said Smith’s first words were, “How are your grades?”

“That,” David Sr. told me last summer, “is a Dean Smith classic. He was more concerned with him as a student than as an athlete. He was more concerned with all of us as people than as players.

“He was the Godfather of 300 lettermen. So many of us would call him and ask him for advice in career and personal issues, and if possible he would immediately take your call. He had an unyielding loyalty to us. That’s why we had that fierce commitment to him, because he had that commitment to us.”

That conversation I had with Chadwick came immediately to mind on this sad Sunday, when the world learned of Dean Smith’s death at the age of 83. It is a great loss to college basketball, a game that made Smith famous and he made nobler.

The sport has had more than its share of rogues and charlatans, then and now. Dean Smith was not one of them – he wasn’t a perfect man or coach, but his combination of class and competitiveness was extremely rare. He not only won 879 games, for a time the all-time Division men’s record, he did it while earning more widespread respect and admiration than almost anyone in his hyper-competitive, oft-jealous profession.

The Carolina Way became the name for the Dean Smith Way. There was some arrogance attached to that, and some irony given the recent revelations of decades-long academic fraud that involved thousands of athletes. But for the most part, the Carolina Way was very much worth emulating.

The sprawling Smith coaching tree is filled with smart men who carried on his punctilious system – the same offensive and defensive schemes, yes, but also copying the smallest details. How to set a screen. How to signal the bench that you need a breather. The next time you see Roy Williams spring a sideline trap coming out of a timeout, smile and know that’s a Dean hand-me-down. Same thing when you see Williams with a pocket full of timeouts late in the game – rarely wasted in the early going.

When you make a record 23 straight NCAA tournament appearances, a record 13 straight Sweet 16s, 11 Final Fours and win two national titles, it works.

Yet for all his impact on basketball, Smith’s passing is a greater loss for those who knew him outside the arena. He was a smart, worldly man with unapologetic political beliefs. He urged his players to know the world around them, and the world beyond the gym.

Bill Chamberlain was the second African-American scholarship basketball player at North Carolina, following Charlie Scott. Chamberlain was the Most Valuable Player of the 1971 NIT, and he was offered a chance to turn pro in the locker room after the title game. He returned to school for his senior year in part because of the imperative Smith put on education – and disappointing Smith was something no Tar Heel wanted to do.

Chamberlain earned a degree in General Studies and was drafted by both the NBA and ABA, and chose the ABA. He suffered an injury after his rookie year and it curtailed his career.

“I was done playing at age 26 or 27,” Chamberlain told me last summer. “But I had my education. At Chapel Hill we went to class, played hard and won.”

Among my greatest privileges as a sports writer was having two extended interviews with Smith in his office in the mid-’90s. He showed me daily practice plans – detailed to the minute, with a Thought for the Day at the top long before Thoughts for the Day were more commonplace than the pick-and-roll. His memory was incredible – he recalled during our second meeting what I’d said in our first, that I was an admirer of former North Carolina defensive specialist Bobby Jones. (The irony of Smith’s steel-trap memory being robbed in his later years by Alzheimer’s disease is particularly cruel.) He was uncomfortable when my questions veered too much toward his personal success.

There have been countless attempts to capture the essence of the Smith Era at North Carolina, to chronicle an exalted time in an athletic program’s history. David Chadwick did his part, writing a book called “The 12 Leadership Principles of Dean Smith.” In the foreword, he notes that after Smith gave him his blessing to write the book, he added, “Please, please don’t deify me!”

Chadwick did not deify Dean. But he did capture the larger man who existed beyond the iconic basketball coach.

“Ask any former player,” Chadwick wrote. “Ask any of his assistants. We would all extend super-human effort for him. Why? We believed in him.”

No Income Tax on Social Security Benefits

by Bob Ritter

How about a way of getting referrals that most planners do not think about? It is so simple that it is often overlooked. What is that you ask? Why not spend a little time with everyone on your staff that helps you, and explain to them what you do. This would be anyone, from the part-timer to your direct assistant. You cannot be everywhere…but your staff can be.

I go into a lot of offices and many times when I ask the staff about the firm, they know a lot about what they do specifically but have trouble explaining what the rest of the firm does. In a small advisors office cross training is often vital to your success…but do not overlook the idea of cross training your staff on asking for referrals. And how can you expect your staff to ask for referrals if they don’t know for sure exactly what you do?

An easy way for your staff to be trained on what you do is to be sure you have your entire staff at all of your events. All your seminars, your client dinners and appreciation days…have the staff there. This will help you in 3 ways:

1. Your clients and their guests will see your staff and know how professional your team is
2. Your staff will get as much knowledge about what you do as possible
3. Your staff will get caught up in the enthusiasm of our business and this leads to better employees and better referrers!

Don’t wait. Referrals on a regular basis can change your practice.

QDR is a web-based, one of its kind, term life insurance lead generator and consumer quoting tool. It’s fun. It’s fast. It simplifies insurance-speak or ignores it altogether. It’s broker-powered. Our Agency can invite an already appointed Banner broker to setup a profile for a personalized version of QDR that will include his/her contact information on every page.

 Using our marketing materials, brokers can advertise QDR to consumers. A consumer can run a needs analysis (if desired), get a term quote, and select an appointment time to talk to you, the broker. You are notified of this new lead by email and will call the consumer at the indicated time. If all goes well during that call, you can drop an automated ticket to App Assist, where our team will collect the full life insurance application at the consumer’s convenience.

Our Reps can even use QDR as an engaging track to follow during a sales call. What does it cost you? Nothing. It’s free. Commissions? Same as making an OPTerm sale any other way!

What makes QDR so unique?
Test drive it here or call us about the tool.

Have questions?

Call ISN@800-338-1892 x 215

A Guest Article Posted by Garrett Hollander

You think gatekeepers live in a vacuum? All of the techniques you’ve used to bypass the gatekeeper in the past… they rarely work anymore.

I recently called on a CEO I met through a mutual acquaintance at Dreamforce and his gatekeeper, Maria, answered the phone. “What’s the purpose of your call?” she asked. I mentioned that the CEO and I had met at a conference and the name of the mutual friend who had introduced us.

She put me on hold… and then came back and said the CEO was unavailable. I left Maria with my contact details and figured I’d been blocked and that the CEO would scarcely remember my name, much less remember me from the message that Maria MIGHT place on his desk. Find out what happened at the end of the article.

I walked down the hall and talked to one of our own gatekeepers about how people get through to our CEO. What do they say? What did the ones that crashed and burned do wrong?

She cited some real-world experience for me. Apparently, cold callers have a habit of lying. She recounted that many claim they had already spoken to the CEO, which simply isn’t true. Some are arrogant and pushy, some are out-and-out offensive in their attempt to supersede her. Most callers, though, try to lay on the schmooze in a vain attempt at getting through to the CEO. Some call relentlessly, which has the opposite effect.

The overall impression I got in talking to our own gatekeeper is that she can detect a sham almost immediately. You’re not going to get away with pretending that you and the CEO are frat buddies.

So what happened with Maria? Maria’s boss called me back within the hour. He was interested to reconnect as we had some mutual interests. It was surprising. After he and I were through speaking, I thought about Maria and other admins that work tirelessly to protect their bosses from salesy people that might disrupt their day.

The moral of the story?

The keys to gaining access from the gatekeeper are these:

1. Be honest. Even if you are calling cold, just be honest about why you are calling. Anything less starts the relationship on a bad foot. Adopt the mindset that gatekeepers are not your opponent; they’re important people in their organizations that empower executives to do their jobs. The secret to getting past them isn’t deceiving them.
2. Get a referral if possible, or mention a specific connection. If you have had a connection with your target, mention it. Any common ground helps. The most effective connection is a referral from someone you both know. Perhaps you can speak to a member of the CEO’s staff and get a referral up the chain. Or you might look the target up on LinkedIn and see that you have mutual connections from whom you can ask a referral.

There really is no gimmick… and there’s no substitution for honesty and familiarity in the relationship-building process.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 7,000 times in 2014. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Policy Analysis and Review (PAR) is a fundamental process of our training. Without question reps in the insurance industry should be reviewing their clients policies on a regular basis. This also includes reviewing the policies that you did not sell them. In most cases you will be able to provide three possible outcomes:

1. They will be able to get a new policy with the same benefit for less money.
2. They will be able to get a new policy with the same premium but more benefits and guarantees.
3. You will let them know they have the right policy and should stay right where they are.

But what happens when you run into a policy that has a big loan attached to it? Most of the reps we deal with see this as a no-win scenario. But that does not have to be true. There are several carriers that will take a 1035 exchange that includes an existing loan. Here is an example of how that would work.

How to Rescue a Client from a Policy Loan