Life insurance is sold ever purchased

It's the oldest adage in the book.<span class="fullpost">
People are sold life assurance, they don't buy it.
Unfortunately some advisers sell it badly and have little success. Where they do sell products, the customer wonders what they bought after the event and will often cancel the direct debit which causes all sorts of problems to the adviser's income.
No, life assurance or protection products such as health insurance, critical illness, redundancy, private medical insurance, need to be sold. Sold by helping the customer discover the real need they might have for this kind of protection.
So how do we do this successfully and ethically?
Scare them
Many use statistics to scare the customer. You know the ones...every 5 minutes someone in the UK will have a stroke...over 100 women in the UK are diagnosed with breast cancer every day. Product providers are very able to provide these often on glossy brochures and posters. They scare customers but many still have the "it won't happen to me" feeling.
I once heard of a life assurance salesforce in the1980's, who used to issue their salespeople with miniature coffins which they instructed them to place on the customer's coffee table when the subject was being discussed. Boy that would have petrified me. Apparently the coffin had a lid that could open and inside they would place photographs of the customers.
Factfind them
A typical financial services factfind can be used effectively but these have their shortcomings. Typically the factfind will drive the adviser down the road of quantifying the customer's protection shortfalls, quantifying the need logically and leading the adviser towards the Suitability Letter. Factfinds are cold.
Cold and logical and that's where it can go terribly wrong. People buy on emotion and then afterwards use logic to justify the purchase. This has always been the case.
Emotion sell them
This year I failed to get to the Glastonbury Festival which I've been able to attend every year for quite some time. Awfully disappointed I was, especially as the festival approached, and the TV and the newspapers were saying what a brilliant Glastonbury it was going to be and one of my favourite bands - Blur - were going to headline.
So I decided to record every piece of Glastonbury that the BBC could show and watch the recordings over and over again as a consolation. The BBC probably show about 50 hours in total of the festival so using Sky Plus was out of the question since it doesn't have the capacity. I picked up a new Archos Personal Video Recorder (PVR) to attach to the TV to ensure I didn't miss one showing of the festival. I'd cracked it - I could now relax and look forward to watching hour after hour of Glasto, whenever and wherever I liked.
That was a pure emotion purchase because people make buying decisions based on emotion not logic but we justify the purchase afterwards logically. You see I can use the PVR to do other TV recordings, record movies and transfer them onto my Netbook for watching when on the train, use the gadget to store photos when we're on holiday and the camera memory card gets filled up and even use it for work purposes as well.
A logical justification in any one's money.
Personalise the emotion
So we can show statistics to heighten the awareness, show videos of families where the breadwinner has died, talk about the implications of illness or death, gather information for the factfind...but these don't really focus on the emotion or go anywhere to personalise it for the customer. No, we have to go to the next step and that is to help our customer think through what would happen to them if...and help them to wallow in the pains and discomfort this produces.
Probing Triangle
We do this using a series of questions, served up with first class listening and empathy skills having established a rock solid rapport. The questions we ask are based around a three part sequence - a probing triangle.

We start by asking the customer questions around their current situation with many of these beyond the typical factfind style of questions. The aim here is to establish what cover they have, how important it is to them, what plans they have in place, what contingencies do they have. Here're some examples:
"What sort of life protection do you have"
"How much would it cost a month to run this family without you?"
"When did you take out the cover?"
"What did you like about the plan you bought?"
"What have you planned in case you died tonight?"
"What have you done for the children?"
We then move onto questions which will help our customer appreciate and feel the emotions of what would happen if...
If they died or became long term ill what would happen to mortgage, their family, their home, how would they survive, where would they live and so on.
These are known to be the hardest of all questions and many advisers ask one or two and then leave it at that. As long as you have excellent rapport and the customer knows why you're asking them and you have first rate listening and empathy, then keep going to really personalise it for them.
Here's some examples:

"If the breadwinner died, how could we replace their income?"
"Where would that money come from?"
"Where would your wife's / husband's death leave you?"
"And what effect would that have?"
"Tell me more."
"If there was no money coming in, what would that mean?"
"Where do you see that leading?"
"How would you feel if you knew that they would have to move to a smaller house?"
The last part of the probing triangle helps you to personalise the advice even more and helps the customer appreciate what advice can do for them and means to them. Rather than just saying to the customer, "not to worry I'll arrange everything for you" to remove these problems, ask them a question or two to help them see it and say it too.
Remember people buy on emotion not logic.

"What would you want to happen?"
"How important is.....?"
"Why is that important?"
"What would you put top of your priority list?"
"If you had adequate provision, what difference would it make?"
"What better way is there to provide for that?"
Your customer is really thinking about the benefits of providing protection so we need to build a package of advice in their heads and gain some early commitment to it. Talk about a singular item of a package of advice rather than individual products and talk about the fact that this can help you buy your home and ensure that nothing can take it away such as death or long term illness. Remind them of why they felt it was important, the emotions they expressed during the conversations you had and make sure that you present the advice around their situation.
The Oldest Adage
Life assurance has to be sold it's never bought but if you follow the discovery strategies your customer will soon realise they have a need and will buy the cover from you, a professional adviser.
And I still haven't watched all those 50 hours of Glastonbury yet...can you remind me why I bought the Archos 400? Oh yes it was hard-drive storage, the ability to record TV programmes and to use on presentation skills programmes at work.
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