7 Tips for Closing Life Insurance Sales
When you’ve put many hours of time into nurturing prospects, you don’t want to lose them in the home stretch. This is why improving your closing sales is such a critical skill to refine.
Consider every life insurance sale closing a crowning moment of the time and effort you’ve dedicated to the prospect before you.
To help you improve your life insurance closing skills, we’re covering why you should work on your technique and giving you 7 tips for closing life insurance sales.
Shortcuts:
Why Work on Your Closing Skills?
- Improving Closing Skills Boosts Your Career
- Improving Closing Skills Protects Individuals and Families
- The Outlook for Life Insurance Sales Is Optimistic
7 Tips for Closing Life Insurance Sales
- Get Organized
- Set as Many Virtual Appointments as Possible
- Use Effective Communication Strategies
- Present the Best Solution Professionally
- Handle Their Objections
- Implement a Follow-up Strategy
- Practice and Seek Feedback
5 Closing Techniques for Life Insurance Sales
After the Close: Making the Final Sale
Implementing Closing Tips Can Have a Big Impact
Why Work on Your Closing Skills?
As a life insurance agent, you have daily opportunities to help every contact in your sales funnel while supporting yourself financially.
Improving Closing Skills Boosts Your Career
Selling life insurance products is a lucrative career. Why? Ongoing commissions will boost your income and help you and your family have an enjoyable quality of life.
While closing lots of life insurance sales benefits you and your loved ones, it also benefits your clients.
Improving Closing Skills Protects Individuals and Families
None of us knows what the future will bring, so it’s wise to plan for the worst-case scenario. A successful life insurance sale may help a family out at an unknown time of future loss.
Here are some solid reasons why your future clients will benefit from the policies you sell them:
- Nearly everyone needs life insurance
- Affordable policies are available for every client
- Life insurance helps protect families
- Life insurance can be an important part of financial planning
- A variety of riders are available to customize coverage
- Ongoing commissions boost your income
The Outlook for Life Insurance Sales Is Optimistic
The best sales jobs offer products people need and want. Statistics prove just how broad the life insurance market is and why it’s such a great career.
Here are some statistics to review when you need some motivation to increase your sales goals:
- 39% of consumers intend to purchase life insurance within the next year
- Among Gen Z adults, 44% are planning to purchase life insurance
- About half of millennials intend to purchase a life insurance policy
- 59% of parents are interested in purchasing life insurance
- 47% of parents believe their life insurance coverage is not sufficient
- Single mothers are increasingly purchasing life insurance (LIMRA)
These statistics highlight the vast potential for life insurance sales among Gen Z-ers, millennials, and parents. Each of these audiences knows many other people with the same demographics, which is also a good source of referrals.
If you’re not putting yourself before these audiences, another agent will get the business. By following our tips for closing life insurance sales, you’re in the best position to get the sale.
7 Tips for Closing Life Insurance Sales
We’ve put together the following 7 tips for closing life insurance sales to assist you in your goal of improving your closing skills:
1. Get Organizedc
Research the best target audiences for the products you’re offering. In matching audiences with products, consider the following:
- Age
- Income
- Family status
- Values and interests
- Financial goals
Once you have segmented your audiences, create presentations geared toward each of them.
Also, choose the right tools for life insurance marketing and lead generation. Equip yourself with a CRM, email contact software, project management software, and screen-sharing software.
2. Set as Many Virtual Appointments as Possible
Some prospects may insist upon meeting you in person, but most people are happy to meet with you virtually. Technology allows you and your prospects to communicate and interact remotely without glitches.
Virtual appointments save time for you and the prospect. By meeting with prospects remotely, you can maximize sales efficiency and productivity.
Try to schedule as many appointments as possible while giving yourself some time in between in case an appointment runs over time.
3. Use Effective Communication Strategies
Engage in active listening, which means allowing the other person to talk and respond to them using sound, facial expressions, and body language.
Also, simplify complex insurance terms and explain what they mean. Give examples by sharing real-life stories prospects can relate to.
Recognize emotional cues and respond to them with empathy and understanding.
4. Present the Best Solution Professionally
Assimilate all the information you have for a prospect. Use the information to tailor your interactions and proposals to the potential client.
As you interact with prospects, learn their goals for seeking life insurance quotes and highlight the benefits of your solutions that meet their needs. Explain how your recommendations differentiate you and your products from the competition.
Leverage visual aids and illustrations via your screen-sharing tool to explain coverage and drive home the reasons they shouldn’t hesitate to decide.
5. Handle Their Objections
Learn the common objections and how to handle them with ease. Your peers can be of great assistance in helping you perfect this skill.
Prepare responses in advance, but also be prepared to handle objections on the fly. With a little practice, you’ll become better at it.
Be aware that objections can also present opportunities to add value. An objection may present an opening to highlight an additional benefit you haven’t yet covered.
6. Implement a Follow-up Strategy
You won’t get the sale every time, so be prepared with a follow-up strategy.
If you do get the sale, take the opportunity to ask for a referral. Everyone knows someone who needs to learn more about life insurance.
Craft effective follow-up messages and leverage technology by automating emails and reminders.
7. Practice and Seek Feedback
Practice is helpful even if you’ve been in sales for a long time. Partner up with another life insurance agent and get some feedback on your presentations. Offer to do the same for your partner.
Be open to constructive criticism and use it to improve your skills. You can learn a lot from new and experienced insurance agents.
5 Closing Techniques for Life Insurance Sales
As your life insurance sales appointment winds down, it’s time to go in for the close and ask for the sale.
The right closing technique can make the difference between pushing for the sale and coming off as a pushy salesperson.
A benefit of the sales process is that every interaction lends insight into your future customer. If you’re paying attention, the information you gain along the way should lead you to the best closing technique for a successful sale.
While you may have a favorite closing technique, it’s a good idea to keep a few others in your pocket.
As you gain experience with sales appointments, you’ll get better at determining the best closing technique for a particular prospect early on in the sales process.
We’re giving you five closing techniques to perfect your close.
1. Assumptive Close
Sales trainings commonly teach salespeople to use an assumptive close. With this technique, you assume you’ve done such a great job in presenting the case for buying life insurance that the prospect is ready to buy.
The theory behind an assumptive close is that you are so confident that the product suits the prospect that they couldn’t possibly say no.
There are a couple of ways to approach the assumptive close. For example, you might ask if they want to purchase life insurance product A or life insurance product B. A second and more direct approach is to ask the prospect if they want to pay by check or with a credit card.
2. Urgency and Scarcity Close
Most of us have purchased something at one time or another because we fear missing out, whether the sale is ending soon or there is a limited quantity of a product.
This technique may be effective when you can share statistics or trends that indicate the cost of life insurance may be going up. By keeping an eye on evolving regulations, you may also be able to educate a prospect on the benefit of purchasing a particular product now rather than later.
When using this closing technique, it’s essential to be honest and genuine. For the best results, avoid exaggerating claims or guilt-tripping your prospects. These tactics are bound to backfire.
3. Trial Close
A trial close refers to giving a prospect a trial period to test out the product to see if they like it.
While the trial close is not generally a popular choice for salespeople, life insurance policies naturally lend themselves to this type of closing.
Here’s why. Every life insurance policy has a built-in free-look period, as the law requires. The free-look period is usually between ten and thirty days, depending on state law. Customers can cancel their life insurance policy at any time during the free-look window.
This type of closing may alleviate some of the fear and hesitation associated with signing a life insurance application at the end of your presentation.
4. Scale Close
With some appointments, it can be challenging to gauge a prospect’s reaction to your presentation, making it difficult to determine whether they are ready to buy. What you need is a way to gauge the prospect’s temperature as to their readiness to buy.
In this situation, a scale close will give you an idea of where to take your presentation next.
With the scale close, you will ask your prospects to rate the life insurance prospect you recommend for them on a scale of 1-10. A number on the lower end indicates you need to spend more time nurturing them, while a high number should signal you to start an application.
5. Summary Close
Buying a life insurance policy is a major life decision, and it’s not one that people make often. For that reason, prospects are likely to get quotes from multiple insurance carriers. They may even be working with several life insurance agents.
Your challenge is demonstrating why your products are the best and why you are the best choice as an insurance agent.
If you know that you are up against the competition, a summary close can help you highlight why a particular life insurance product is their best choice and what you have to offer as their insurance agent.
When using a summary close, you briefly summarize the product’s benefits and relate them to how a particular policy will solve their problems or fit their needs. This is a natural lead-in to asking for the sale.
After the Close: Making the Final Sale
Regardless of your chosen closing technique and your confidence in using it, there’s always a chance that the prospect will come up with one last objection. You must be prepared to address the prospect’s objection.
An objection at this juncture doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve lost the sale or that the prospect will put you off. It might just mean they need an extra bit of assurance that they’re making the right choice. You can explain the next steps in the application process by handling the objection successfully and providing this assurance.
Lastly, you may have mastered a preferred closing technique that works well most of the time, yet every prospect is different. Knowing your customers and their needs and learning various closing techniques allows you to select the best closing technique for the situation.
Implementing Closing Tips Can Have a Big Impact
If you’re not progressing in your life insurance sales career as you’d hoped, our tips for closing life insurance sales should motivate you to pull out all the stops to take your career to the next level.
Life insurance protects individuals and their families. By increasing your sales, you will receive larger commissions, which will help your own family.
The proper closing strategy can make a massive difference in finalizing a sale. Our suggestions for various closing strategies should help you revamp your closing strategies.
Overall, following the tips we’ve highlighted here can help you perfect your closing skills. Take some time out of each day to refine your closing skills.