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CHAPTER 15
PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
Personal Development embraces all those traits and activities which enhances the performing capability of a person. For an Insurance Agent to be successful he needs to cultivate and develop certain traits viz.-
• To be outgoing
• Energetic
• Having lots of enthusiasm
• Aggressive
•Persistence
• Initiative taker
•Self-confidence
• Job commitment
•Motivated
•Excellent listener, who is a friend to a customer
Growth performance of an Insurance Agent is measured
* in terms of the business he procures – agent should set a personal target in terms of the business he aims to achieve. This work target itself will act as a “motivator” for him to progress.
• the commission he earns – the more the business that the agent is able to procure, the more the commission.
• The reputation he enjoys in the society –As the social contact of the Agent spreads, he becomes more of a ‘known’ person. Also, if he is able to instill in the minds of the people “trust” about him, the more popular he becomes. Trust can be built up in a number of ways :
(i) by educating the public about the insurance and the benefits they can derive by ensuring themselves.
(ii) by fulfilling a promise. (iii) by giving excellent service etc.
Essential Qualities for success of an Insurance Agent
Product knowledge:-
• The concept of insurance being abstract and somewhat conflicting with our ingrained patterns of traditional, cultural belief, the need is not readily understood and accepted.
• The sacrifice involved in payment of premium is immediate and real whereas the benefit are perceived as contingent and distant, leading to a tendency to procrastinate and delay decision.
• Product knowledge helps the Agent to sell the right kind of product to a prospect. For e.g. if the prospect is a couple with a small child then the Agent can offer various Children’s Plans like Jeevan Kishore, Komal Jeevan, Marriage endowment/Educational Annuity Policy for the benefit of prospect’s child.
• If the Prospect desires money at periodic intervals then Jeevan Surabhi Plan may be suggested.
• If a Prospect is on the verge of retirement then annuity Plans like Jeevan Suraksha or Jeevan Akshay may be offered.
An Agent should be very well conversant with the –
attributes/distinguishing features of various insurance products.
the tax implication thereon etc.
needs of the prospect so there is a fit between the product he sells and the prospect’s needs.
Customer Orientation:
Essential Qualities for success of an Insurance Agent:
There are a no. of books and other materials available to teach people the “art” of selling. The aim of all this is to enable a seller to identify the customer needs and find solutions. Thus customer oriented approach presumes that the customer needs provide serious opportunities, that customer appreciate good suggestions and that they would be loyal to sales people who have their long term interest at heart.
The customers generally dislike when the agents are pushy, arrogant, unreliable, too talkative and fail to ask about customer needs. The customer value reliability and credibility, integrity, innovativeness in solving problems and product knowledge.
An Agent should conduct himself with:
The customer’s interest foremost in his mind and not his personal gains/transaction which will ensure the clients satisfaction and will lead to generation of overall good-will in favour of the Agent.Give full information about the product he sells to the client. The right to information is enshrined in the Consumer Protection Act.
Business target:
• Business goals of an Agent can be in terms of the -
• sales he makes
• number of clients to be contacted
• number of closures that result and so on.
• Goals set the tempo on for further activities.
Personal Goals:
An Agent should have some personal goals like –
the desire to become a member of exclusive clubs viz. D.M’s Club Membership, Z.M’s Club Membership, qualifying for MDRT etc.
Resource Management:• Resources like time, knowledge,
money, materials and skills have to be managed with efficiency so as to achieve the desired goals.
• A good manager continuously finds ways to improve the utilization of his resources. For eg. If there is a reduction in the no. of hours or calls required to complete a sale, then there is improvement. In this way a no. of inputs can be monitored and ways found to improve both efficiency and effectiveness.
Time Management:
Agents need to know how to use their time efficiently. They should prepare their activity schedule in such a way that sufficient time is allotted to different activities in a day/month. Advances in technological equipment – desktop and laptop computers, video cassette recorders etc have allowed dramatic break through in improving sales force productivity.
Selling face to face is by far the best way to achieve personal rapport with the prospect. But once the relationship is built by way of closing a sale, the agent can resort to phone calls for future service calls and need not visit clients personally thus saving a lot of traveling time.
A lot of time is wasted when all the available information /reports are not gathered at a time. For eg. The agent may have collected all the personal details of the prospect in the proposal form but forgotten to collect the age-proof from the client. Thus the proposal submitted at the Branch Office is not complete in all respects.
Prioritization of a various activities is a must, otherwise certain important area of work may get neglected and trivial activity gets more attention.
An Agent should keep the following in mind:
• time is an invaluable resource• Each job should get the appropriate
time that it deserves for e.g. assume that the agent has to carry out the following activities in a day:- calling a client for the first time- reminding the customer about the premium due date.
- following-up with the customer for submission of discharge form and policy document to the Branch Office for processing a maturity claim
- Attending an Agents meeting. - Watching a test match on T.V.
From the above activities, the activity that should get more time is calling a client for the first time.
Second comes attending agents meet, reminding a customer about premium due date and so on.
• Reservation of some time for his family/personal growth/relaxation.
If an agent is all the time thinking about work and nothing else it may so happen that his family will become unhappy with him. So an agent should necessarily spend some time with his family members. In this way he can relax himself also. When a person is completely relaxed it gives him an opportunity to think more clearly.
An Agent should also periodically attend workshops on communication, interpersonal skills, marketing so as to upgrade his knowledge/skill and make him more competent.
Target Market:
An Agent cannot satisfy all consumers in a given market. There are too many different kinds of consumers in a given market with too many different kinds of needs. Thus the Agent must study the total market and choose those segments which he can serve better.
Consumer can be grouped in various ways based on –
•geographic factors – regions, cities
• demographic factors - sex, age, income, education.
• Psychographic factors – Social classes, life-style.
• Behavioral factors – Purchase occasions, benefits sought etc.
The process of classifying customers into groups with different needs, characteristics or behaviour is called market segmentation.
A market segment consists of consumers who respond in a similar way to a given set of marketing stimuli for e.g. consider the
class of salaried employees. This is a typical example of a homogenous market segment wherein people have more or less similar needs, likes, dislikes etc.
Consider another group of agricultural farmers. This group has many things in common viz. their occupation (agriculture), their place of stay (village), their way of life, their food habits, their general outlook towards life etc.
Trustworthiness :• Insurance contracts are basically
contracts of good faith. An Agent has to earn the trust of the client if he has to succeed in his profession.
• The customer buys the product mainly because he believes in the statements and the promises made by the Agent.
• Trustworthiness will lead to repeat business and referrals.
LONG TERM RELATIONSHIP:
• Insurance contracts are long term contracts and as such the Agent should continuously strive to build long term relationship with the clients.
•An Agent has to act as guide, counsellor to the client in selecting an appropriate product, give guidance to the claimant at the time of claim, through periodic service calls to ensure that the policies are kept in force etc.
•Sellers who know how to build and manage strong relationship with key customers will gain greater sales from these customers. Thus marketers need to master relationship marketing skills.
• Relationship marketing is most important in life insurance business because there is a long term contract and the product is intangible. Those who invest heavily in relationship marketing benefit handsomely in getting repeat sales from current customers and also in getting referrals current customers.
MOTIVATION:• A person has many needs at any given
time. Some needs are biological, arising from states of tension such as hunger, thirst or discomfort. Other needs are psychological or recognition, esteem or belonging.
• A need becomes a motive when it is aroused to a sufficient level of intensity.
• A motive (or drive) is a need that is sufficiently pressing to direct the person to seek satisfaction.
• Since an Agent is an independent professional he has to be self motivated. The source of his motivation can be varied such as –
• he has a high performing agent as his role model and aspires to reach that level.
• he may be socially oriented which drives him to work ceaselessly for the welfare of the Society.
• In order to outshine others he may invest his time and money in learning, attending lectures and seminars etc. which enable him upgrade his knowledge/hone his skills.
MORALE :
The morale of a sales force is very closely entwined with the satisfaction people get from their jobs. Morale goes up when the job is going well. Customers are buying or reacting in a positive manner and relations are harmonious within the work environment. When anyone of these factors is negative, morale typically decreases.
Feeling good or not good about one’s work is a question of morale or enthusiasm about work. If an agent is convinced that he is in a noble profession that looks after the welfare of people and their families as nothing else can do, he cannot but feel good about his work.
To keep up his morale, he has only to say himself that his is a job that brings cheer to others at a time, when a whole lot of circumstances have conspired to take away the cheer.
For e.g. when a sole earning member of a family dies an untimely death, the family is devastated. In such circumstances the claim money from a LIC policy would bring a little cheer to the family members and enable the family to tide over the adversity.
A client buys an insurance product mainly because he trusts the Agent. For this it is very much essential that the Agent should conduct his business with lot of conviction about the inherent goodness of his profession.He should exude confidence and his personality should be charismatic so as to impress the customer.
COMMUNICATION SKILLS:
•Communication is essentially the ability of one person to make contact with another and to make himself/herself understood.
•Communication should be direct, clear and complete.
• In an Agent’s profession communication skills are of utmost importance because of the very nature of insurance product. He has to explain and persuade. Any misunderstanding might become evident only much later. It will then be attributed to the failure of the agent to inform, alleging even deliberate cheating or suppression of material facts.
•During the pre-approach stage, the Agent should prepare as far as possible an exclusive, typed hand-out for the client and ensure that all proposal forms, rate-tables, sale literature and other stationery is available.
• In the sales presentation interview, an insurance Agent needs to be more vigilant, more accomplished in every aspect of his interaction with the client. The initial resistance to the approach, objections as also final hesitation in signing the proposal then and there, are likely to be more marked and recurrent.
Answering objections:• It is very seldom, if at all, that at the end of the explanatory exposition by the sales person, the client may volunteer to sign on the dotted line. He is quite likely to raise several objections in a bid to ensure that he understands the proposition correctly or sometimes even to postpone the decision. These objections raised by the client can be of different types and must be answered satisfactorily by the Agent before the sale is closed. An Agent must remember that objections are the windows through which he or she can peep into the client’s mind and must learn to welcome them rather then avoid them, be annoyed with them.
Motivation and closing:• Even after the client has been satisfied about the product and all his objections have been satisfactorily answered, it does not follow that he will voluntarily proceed to take the buying decision. This is even more so in respect of decision about buying insurance and the Agent must gently motivate him to reach the favourable decision and sign on the dotted line. The process of achieving this is called motivation and closing.
PERSUASIVE SKILLS:• Persuasion and communication play a decisive role in influencing the thinking process of a client.
• In India insurance is rarely brought but has to be sold. The Agent has to tactfully persuade and convince a client so as to close a sale without any element of any pressure whatsoever.
• Persuasion in no way should suppress the clients doubts and queries.
ANALYTICAL ABILITY:
•An Agent must be able to analyze the various needs of the prospect and find the best plan to meet those needs.
BEHAVIOUR WITH OTHERS:
•The Agent should have or cultivate some behavioral traits which would enable him to get support and co-operation from all concerned.
•He should act like a bridge between the office staff on one hand and the client on the other hand.
•He should exhibit professional ethics at all times and should at no time compromise on his value system.
