Life Insurance: How to Overcome Buyer Resistance

by Alan Rigg

Recently I received an e-mail from a life insurance salesperson who was asking for help with "several of the most severe challenges facing those who market life insurance". His questions were:

What sales ideas do you have on marketing life insurance?
What ideas do you have for overcoming buyer resistance?
What ideas do you have for overcoming buyers' fears of admitting a salesman into their homes?

This article provides responses for each of these questions.

1. What sales ideas do you have on marketing life insurance?

Regardless of what a salesperson sells, I usually begin by asking the same questions:

What problems does your product or service solve?
What questions can you ask to:
- Determine whether a prospect has any of these problems, and
- If they do, to engage the prospect's emotions?

One of the biggest problems life insurance addresses is financial risk. There are many questions a salesperson can ask to determine whether a potential prospect has adequately addressed this risk. However, each question may produce a different kind of response. Here are several examples:

Do you have life insurance?

While this question gets right to the heart of the matter, it is a relatively poor question. The prospect can provide a complete answer with a simple "yes" or "no". The structure of the question does not encourage them to provide any additional details.
What would happen to your family if you passed away?

This is a better question. It is an open-ended question that is likely to result in more information being shared than a simple "yes" or a "no". It also engages the prospect's emotions. However, since many people are uncomfortable thinking about death (whether it is their own or someone else's), there would need to be a certain amount of trust between you and the prospect before you asked this kind of question.
How are you managing your family's financial risk?

This may be the best question. It is an open-ended question that is likely to produce more information than just a "yes" or a "no". It is also likely to be perceived as being more "comfortable" to answer than the "death" question.

If you are successful in drawing a prospect into a conversation about financial risk, you can still engage their emotions. Then, you can gradually work the conversation toward topics that are perceived as being more "threatening" (such as the financial risks associated with death).

NOTE: One of the biggest benefits of life insurance is peace of mind. However, peace of mind has more perceived value when it is discussed after a detailed discussion of problems and the impacts of those problems. Leading with benefits tends to create less urgency (and elicit less response) than leading with problems.

2. What ideas do you have for overcoming buyer resistance?

The best strategy I know of for overcoming buyer resistance is to ask a lot of questions to help a potential buyer quantify the impact of his or her problems and visualize the impact of those problems.

Quantifying the impact is useful because it provides a framework for discussing price. If you discuss price "in a vacuum" (with nothing to compare it to), your price will always sound high. However, if you can compare price against the quantified impact of your prospect's problems, it is much more likely to sound fair (or even low).

To start quantifying the impact of not having life insurance, you might ask these questions:

What is the total of your family's monthly bills?
How much of this total do you pay?
How much of this total does your spouse/partner pay?
What additional major expenses do you see coming down the road? (Examples might include starting a family, private school for children, college, retirement, etc.)
How will your family handle these expenses if your contribution was no longer available?

The last two questions begin the process of helping your prospect visualize what could happen if they continue without adequate life insurance. This visualization can be a powerful tool for creating the discomfort that is required to induce a prospect to take action.

3. What ideas do you have for overcoming buyers' fears of admitting a salesman into their homes?

The real issue here is not the location of the meeting. The real issue is the prospect's fear of being sold something they don't want or need.

Why would a prospect buy something they don't want or need? There are many reasons. Here are two of them:

The prospect may know he or she is emotional and prone to buying when his or her emotions are fired up.
The prospect may be one of the many people who are very concerned about hurting someone else's feelings. As a result, they buy (or say "let me think about it") instead of saying no.

The best way to overcome this resistance is by giving your prospects permission to say "no"! You can take the pressure out of your meetings with prospects by saying something like:

"Let's be clear about something right up front. There may or may not be a fit between your situation and what I offer. If at any point during our conversation you feel there isn't a fit, are you OK telling me 'no'?"

Offer this permission to say "no" when you are working with prospects to schedule meetings and again at the beginning of each meeting. This will dramatically reduce their resistance to allowing you into their homes.

Conclusion

If you want to sell more life insurance:

Focus your conversations on the problems you can help your prospects solve and quantifying the impact of those problems.
Ask questions that will engage your prospects' emotions and help them visualize the potential impact of their problems.
Take the pressure out of your meetings with prospects by giving them permission to say "no". Do this when you are scheduling your meetings and at the beginning of each meeting.

These strategies will help you make great strides in overcoming buyer resistance!

About the Author

Sales performance expert Alan Rigg is the author of How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Sales Team Performance: A Step-By-Step Guide to Building and Managing Top-Performing Sales Teams, and the companion book, How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Selling: A Step-By-Step Guide to Achieving Top Sales Performance. His 80/20 Selling System™ helps business owners, executives, and managers end the frustration of 80/20 sales team performance, where 20% of salespeople produce 80% of sales. For more information and more FREE sales and sales management tips, visit http://www.8020salesperformance.com.

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