A successful salesman in his late 30s was fired from his job after a competitor bought out the company he had worked for. He decided on a new career selling insurance policies and financial planning products.
Fortunately his reputation preceded him and he was hired by one of the largest financial services companies.
I asked him what made him think he could be successful selling insurance and financial plans. " I want to help people," he said. "This company will give me the training I need. And once I make a sale, I'll get referred to other prospects."
I then learned that over 80 percent of the people starting a career in insurance sales and financial planning fail. So being interested in this young man's career I asked his new boss why so many new people in his business failed. He listed three reasons:
1. They should not have been in the business in the first place. They do not have the correct abilities and drive.
2. They will not follow the proven skills and techniques that help make a person in the insurance or investment advising business successful.
3. They are not aggressive enough to start succeeding.
The same principles apply to most careers. Over my many years in the wholesale, retail and manufacturing businesses I have seen established businesses become less and less aggressive in doing what made them successful in the first place. The biggest area of sales and marketing where businesses tend to fail is in asking their present customers to help them find and gain new customers, better known as referral marketing.
Recently I helped the contractor who built my sunroom on my house win a job building a three-room addition. He aggressively used referral marketing by having his prospect telephone me and ask me about the quality of his work. He had done a great job for me, and I could not stop telling the prospect about it. He recently telephoned me today to thank me for helping him land the job.
The young man new to the insurance / financial planning business got his first sale from one of his old colleagues and then his second sale from a friend of that first sale. The young man will be quite successful in his new career because he is aggressive in learning his new skills and techniques, and he works hard at making one success breed another.
