Poor Lead Cultivation
Too many sales professionals spend their time with life insurance leads who do not buy. That is a very expensive usage of time. If you are in sales, how much money could you generate if your whole day was spent with individuals who purchased? You'd make a lot and that points me to the question, "why would you spend time with insurance leads who don't purchase?"
Initially, this question may seem to be ludicrous since your problem is that you don't know ahead of time who will purchase and which prospective buyers will not. However, you are able to determine that in 5 minutes. But you don't and you continue to get in touch with and drip on insurance leads who are non-buyers. You have a periodic success with these tactics so you keep doing them. But the number of sales you lose by investing time to non-buyers costs you a lot of money. I've realized that individuals who sell have frequently been trained to commit the majority of their time to hard prospective customers. They have learned lessons like "the sale doesn't begin until you hear 'no' six times" or "never take no for an answer."
Rich Agent Lead Cultivation
Yet, I've realized that rich sales people don't abide by these rules. Rather, they commit not more than 5 minutes with an insurance lead to determine if there is a match between the potential customer's desires and the seller's product/service. If there is no match, the expert sales person asks for a referral and moves on. Less successful sellers will grind the potential customer and attempt to convince the prospect why the seller's product/service is so excellent and why the prospective client should want it. Please don't do this, for three reasons:
* It is disrespectful. If the insurance lead says they have no interest, respect what they say. The reasons that sales persons of all sorts (e.g. car sales people, insurance agents, financial planners) get low marks for trustworthiness is because of their agenda to sell their product rather than placing the prospect's goals first. Sure, you might get 10% of these people to ultimately buy, but there is no way these couple of sales can justify the time and energy committed to the 90% who never buy.
* This is not the kind of client you desire. If you have to grind them to a close, this is a person who will have buyer's remorse, likely cancel the purchase or just turn out to be a headache later. These are the insurance leads who require extra service and are not profitable for you.
* It makes you poor by allocating most of one's time to individuals who don't buy instead of prospective buyers who DO purchase. It's easy to forget that every minute you spend with a non-buyer is a minute that you did not invest with a profitable insurance lead. Your time and effort, your most valuable resources, have a tremendously high opportunity cost.
How come you try to influence insurance leads when they communicate no interest? Because you believe that prospective buyers are scarce. This is not correct but most of the economy operates under this incorrect assumption. By omitting the marketing step, as so many organizations do and is crucial for any fruitful sales program, the sales process becomes distorted and inefficient as explained. In the event you don't want a scarcity of prospective customers, then you must become a marketer and not just a sales person.