Interested in selling term life insurance?

In this article, I provide three strategies on how to sell term life insurance.

The reason I’m putting this particular training together is to help you understand what I feel are the most common and successful routes to sell term insurance.

Let’s begin!

Quick Navigation Article Links

• • Term 101

• • Mortgage Protection

• • Businesses

• • Warm Market

• • Summary

What Is Term Life Insurance?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4EKY783xew&t=28s

Term insurance is the most popular form of life insurance sold. Thousands of people buy it every day.

Term insurance is a huge market that you can jump into in a traditional sense, prospecting face to face.

That’s what mostly we’ll be covering in this article.

Of course, you can sell over the phone. Or using the Internet.

There are a lot of methods that you can employ to help you sell distantly.

However, today, we’re going to focus on face-to-face strategies we can use to sell more term insurance.

Mortgage Protection

Let’s talk about the first strategy: selling mortgage protection insurance.

First of all, “mortgage protection” is a marketing term that describes a use that you can purchase term insurance for.

Specifically, one of the biggest reasons why people buy term life insurance is to pay off final expenses or debts like mortgages.

With mortgages being the largest household debt Americans hold, it’s a common thought to want to make sure that debt is covered for.

This is especially true for people who just purchased a home.

Many times, when people purchase a new home, they get mortgage protection leads offering coverage with various riders.

For example, they may get living benefits if they get disabled or suffer from a chronic illness.

The Window Of Opportunity

The concept here is that we are soliciting a group of people within a “window of opportunity.”

Once you go through one of these windows of opportunities, the likelihood of someone buying life insurance is much higher.

In this case, when you go into significant debt, it’s a great opportunity to convince someone to buy life insurance.

For example, this debt can be from a mortgage or a business loan.

We’re hitting them with this particular marketing strategy right at the beginning of their financial concern.

This means that the likelihood of buying is a lot higher.

Beyond that, people are more open-minded to life insurance in general and are more likely to listen to you.

Term Insurance Leads For Mortgage Protection

There are a couple of different strategies you can use to gain leads for mortgage protection.

Direct Mail

Agents selling term life insurance via a mortgage protection strategy can implement a direct mail lead program.

This approach helps identify people who just closed on a home, and we hit them right when there is an opportunity to make a sale.

Free Term Leads

Also, we’ll teach an agent to go down to the courthouse, pull title records, and see where recent mortgage filings have been done.

From there, we can collect all the same information that the direct mail card gets.

In the end, we actually can reach these people faster through a cold door-knocking process. And, the results are great.

Example

Right now, I’ve got an agent in Texas, and he doesn’t have the money to do direct mail for mortgage protection.

He does this exact same method, and it takes him approximately ten knocks to get a presentation. About one out of three/four actually buy.

So, yes, you’ve got activity. Yes, you’ve got to knock on doors, but it costs next to nothing to acquire that lead.

Plus the likelihood’s reasonably high that you’re going to sell to someone who is interested in mortgage protection.

Selling Term Insurance Without An Exam

Now, the kind of term insurance people buy when we’re looking at mortgage protection is “non-medical.”

It is a fully underwritten process where no examination is necessary.

Most of the people who buy a term life insurance plan to protect their mortgage may have a mortgage for several hundred thousand dollars. In most cases it’s not multi-millions.

Many life insurance plans do not require an exam.

A lot of competition is coming to the term market due to pricing and ease of applying for term insurance plans.

Eliminating the fully underwritten process also causes competition.

Benefits Of Selling Term Life Insurance With No Exam

What’s nice about this style of term insurance is that when you sell it, you don’t have to go back for an exam.

Many times, you can even get an instant decision if they’re healthy.

If there are health concerns it takes a week to two weeks to get a decision if nothing is outstanding that you didn’t expect.

If you like the idea of selling term insurance, mortgage protection is a great market to go into. There are a lot of opportunities.

People are always buying homes in both great and not-so-great markets.

Plus, they’re in that window of opportunity that offers great potential!

Selling Term Life Insurance To Business Owners

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM0UE3g-PxY

The second market you can target is business owners.

Business owners, obviously, are people who own businesses. You can target large businesses, medium-sized businesses, or small businesses.

I prefer agents who are newer to selling life insurance to target small businesses to start.

Then, they can work into targeting medium and larger-sized businesses as they gain experience dealing with a business market.

Benefits Of Selling To Business Owners

The reason that I like targeting small businesses for term insurance include:

• • Small businessmen are usually more approachable than larger businesses.

For example, when you deal with a five or ten-man operation, you’re likely not going to have a gatekeeper like a receptionist to deal with. Many times, you can talk directly to the owner.

• • A lot of these small business people have never had a life insurance agent show up.

For example, before selling life insurance, I was a personal trainer. I would describe myself as the ideal prospect I’m talking about right now.

I had one insurance man approached me in five years. Guess what? I bought health insurance when he showed up because I really needed it.

Lots Of Business To Be Had

Business is sitting out there, just waiting for somebody to take it if you’ll just show up.

I’ve heard the same story time and time again. Agents who sell to small business people often tell me about how little competition they have.

Also, I don’t know how many times I’ve heard business owners say that they’ve never been approached by a life insurance agent.

This is mind-blowing because there’s a lot of other segments of the population that regularly get hit by life insurance agents.

Another benefit:

• • The other thing about small business owners is they don’t have benefits.

They don’t have an employee benefit plan. They don’t get coverage from work like a large employer.

They’ve got to self-insure. Not just life insurance, but a lot of other insurance products, too.

And, they appreciate people who have the balls to show up and talk to them unannounced because they’re in business, also.

As a person who shows up and asks politely for some time to show them what you do, they’re usually going to give you at least 30-60 seconds just to hear you out.

They’re fair people and understand that you’re in business just as much as they are.

Other Benefits Of Working With Business Owners

Plus, a lot of these small business owners make good incomes. They make above average income, even if they run a small shop.

The more income you have, typically, the more demands for life insurance.

This goes for other products, too, including disability insurance and sell agreements (for life insurance) if you’ve got partnerships.

The business market is fantastic. You’ll do a mix of non-medical term insurance and fully-underwritten insurance.

Again, the kind of business that you’re doing here is going to be more lucrative than working a blue or gray collar employee, like you would with mortgage protection.

Small business owners will probably require more fully-underwritten products.

But you will write some non-med too because a lot of these guys are just hard to pin down.

They work all the time, like 70-80 hour/week. This means it may just be easier to do a non-medical application for them.

Term Insurance Sales To Your Warm Market

The last market is selling term life insurance to your warm market.

The idea behind warm marketing is to go to friends and family (your sphere of influence), and you ask for an opportunity just to show them what you do.

Remember, this isn’t to buy, you do this with no obligation whatsoever.

From there, you go through a fact finder to figure out where they stand.

Then, if they have a problem that your product can solve, you just show them what it is and allow them to decide if they are interested.

Why Sell To Your Warm Market?

Generally, a lot of the people in your warm market are going to buy term insurance.

A lot of your friends and family, I promise you, are buying term insurance.

They usually just resort to buying it online or requesting help from a stranger, when they would prefer to buy from somebody they already know, like, and trust.

That’s where you come in. You have to remember this mindset when you go call on your sphere of influence.

You’ve got an opportunity to really help them out in a way that they cannot be helped otherwise.

Again, most people just prefer to do business within the confines of people they already know versus inviting in a stranger.

Final Thoughts

Bottom line, there are lucrative ways to sell life insurance face-to-face. You just have to be willing to get out there and do it!

The critical thing is to find one strategy and go all in.

With the mortgage protection plan approach, you’ll mostly do direct mail. Some of you could do cold calling, for sure.

When it comes to most business owners, the best way to prospect them is to show up unannounced or possibly call and set appointments.

Also, you can show up unannounced, collect some contact information, and keep dialing them until they agree to an appointment.

Prospecting business owners cold is fantastic. Face-to-face, it works wonders.

In some ways, I believe, it is way easier to do than calling on residential markets.

Then, the same thing for your warm market approach.

These are people that already know you, and the likelihood is very high that they will agree to meet with you if the pressure to buy isn’t present.

Thank you for finishing this article on selling term life insurance. I hope it was beneficial to you.

Learn more about selling insurance with my national agency here. And read a variety of Agent Success Stories and check out my highly-reviewed insurance sales books.