If you watched the last coaching video, you learned how to book more appointments. But how do you turn those appointments into closed business?
In this video, I’ll teach you the three simple strategies you need to be implementing on every discovery call you have with a prospect. I’m not sharing some secret closing tactic; these are tried-and-true strategies that actually work.
Resources:
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- Connect with me on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/andyneary/
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Video Transcript:
This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.
In this video, you are going to learn three strategies that are going to help you turn appointments into closed business. Hi, my name is Andy Neary, CEO and founder of Complete Game Consulting, where we are on a mission to help 25,000 insurance professionals sell their first $250,000 of an insurance. And in this video, you’re going to learn how to convert your loss discovery calls into clients.
You see, one of the biggest challenges insurance producers have is closing business. They’re booking appointments. They’re getting discovery calls on the calendar, but they’re just not going anywhere. In this video, we’re going to help you fix that. In my earlier video, my previous video, I talked about how you can be booking more appointments by shifting your energy towards prospecting.
Now we’re going to take those appointments, and we’re going to turn them into close business by sharing three strategies you can execute throughout the sales process. They’re going to help you be more effective. Now I’m going to warn you, I’m not teaching any secret closing tactic. I’m not teaching some secret script in your proposals that always convert clients.
Now I’m teaching you three high level strategies that actually work. The first strategy is how you bring confidence into discovery. Call one of the best strategies we teach our clients is how to sell with exclusivity. You see, when you go into a discovery call with a prospect, most of the time you go in so excited because you got an opportunity.
The problem is, you enter that meeting with a sense of desperation. You feel like you have to win this piece of business in order to hit your goals, and you bring that pressure to the conversation and your prospect can sense it. They smell the desperation they sell that you have that must win attitude, and that’s why they are not interested in moving forward.
It actually turns them off. I want you to walk into these discovery meetings with more confidence. Now confidence is very different than arrogance. Confidence is walking in, acting like you don’t need the business. Confidence is walking in and saying, hey, I’m looking to work with so many new clients this year. I’m hoping you might be one of them.
Confidence is walking in stating the obvious, saying, hey, I understand you already work with an advisor. I’m going to assume you’re already happy with them. But my goal today is to learn more about you, and maybe there’s an opportunity for me to earn your trust like your current advisor has. You see, the more you walk in confident, the more trust and credibility you are going to bring to that prospect.
Talking about why you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread, beating down the competition and telling them about everything you can do for them actually, is this giving them the sense that you’re desperate for the win? You don’t want to do that. You want to walk in with confidence. We call it selling with exclusivity. You can’t help everybody, nor do you want to help everybody.
You’re not a fit for everybody. So walk in with that attitude and tell them who you’re trying to work with, and that your goal is to see if they might be one of those people. It gives off a whole different energy to the prospect, and it’s an energy that keeps the prospect engaged. Strategy number two are you spending enough time uncovering their pain?
This is one of the main reasons producers don’t turn a discovery call into a second meeting. It was my biggest challenge when I was an advisor early in my career. I’d walk into the discovery call. I’d say all the right things. I’d talk about these amazing strategies. They have never heard. The problem was, I never spent time uncovering their actual pain.
And if you do not uncover pain, they’re not going to walk away from that discovery meeting with a desire to continue the conversation. They may even love what you have to say, but you have to remember prospects make decisions. Prospects keep moving because they want to move away from a pain. They want to move away from a pain even more than they want to achieve again.
So if you focus all of your conversation on what you can do for them and all the amazing results you can create for them, but you don’t spend any time uncovering their pain, it’s going to be really hard for them to keep moving forward into the sales process with you. You have to focus on their pain points now in the world of insurance.
Sometimes the prospect doesn’t even know what their pain points are, because they have just come to accept the poor results as it is what it is. So you have to do a very good job at sticking to the pain. And when you find that pain point, I want you to keep digging. Let’s get to the root cause of why they even took the meeting in the first place.
The more pain you uncover, the greater the odds that they keep the conversation going. Which leads to strategy number three. You may think you have an engage prospect after that first meeting, but guess what? When that meeting’s over, they’re going to go back to their world. They’re going to go back to running their business and putting out the fires that they have to put out every single day.
You’re no longer the most important person in their world, so you got to be persistent. The third strategic approach to an effective sales process is to be persistent. You see, yeses are the best answer you can get in sales because it means a new client. It means a second meeting. As much as we hate getting the answer, no, at least it’s clear.
You know you don’t have an opportunity. But the answer that keeps us from selling business and frustrates us more than anything is a maybe. And when a prospect isn’t getting back to you, a prospect isn’t clear about what they want to do next. You now are caught in the world of maybe, and you have no idea where they stand.
So you have to take it upon yourself to be persistent. Your number one objective in a sales process is to help a prospect prospect make a clear decision, whether that’s a yes or a no. Maybes suck, and when maybes are hitting your sales pipeline, you are dealing with prospects who get stuck, who don’t get back to you. But the problem is, you’re just not being persistent enough.
You’ve got to follow up with them again and again and again. They owe you no obligation to reply or to keep moving forward. It is on you to stay persistent. And if you can’t get Ahold of them, if you can’t get a reply, try different channels. Email them, DM them on LinkedIn. Call them, text them, do whatever it takes to get their attention.
And if they tell you to go away because you’re being too persistent, they were never buying from you in the first place. But your job is to help prospects make a clear decision even when it’s a no. You have to be persistent to get them to the finish line. So those are my three tactics for you. I apologize.
There’s no secret sauce here. There’s no silver bullet. It’s just tactics that work. Walk into the discovery meeting with more confidence. Sell with exclusivity. State the obvious. Tell them who you’re looking for. Tell them you hope to earn their business. Number two, you got to find their pain points and then just sit and dig until you get the root cause of their pain.
And then the third strategy to turn more appointments into clients is you got to be persistent. You have to keep following up. Go at it with the attitude that they’re not going to get back to you right away. But if you stay persistent enough, you will turn more prospect into clients. When you’re persistent, they actually thank you for staying persistent, because that’s what builds the trust in you, because they know you want their business.
So give it a try. Let me know how it goes. But this is what works if you want to turn more prospects in the clients. It’s not about having the perfect script in the proposal. It is just about being more confident, finding the pain and being persistent. That is what’s going to help you sell more business and make more money. Be good.
Business is no longer about who you know. Business is about who knows you. In a noisy industry like we’re in gang, you got to get people to know who you are.