Online Life Insurance Sales

Online life insurance sales may be a new game, still, to long-experienced agents who may be still young and yet still vividly remember 1951 Topps baseball cards advent of the Internet and the launch of Windows 95. Online life insurance sales add a new dimension to an age-old game that was already familiar with educating the public, one-meeting closing, following up, keeping your name and company Fantastic Four front of people, doing thorough fact finding and analysis, and social networking.

The real significant differences between selling life insurance "the old fashioned way" and making the most of this miraculous new tool we call the Internet are that the Internet allows people to put up a buffer between you and their "personal space", and the Internet makes it possible for life insurance salesmen to do everything agents always did before with greater speed and less expense (both financially and physically).

Nevertheless, these simple differences have profound complications at times for the life insurance agent's way of doing business and making money.

For one thing, it used to be that life insurance agents were far and away more worried about getting their foot in someone's door and then getting to their kitchen table than they were about sitting down to do the selling and closing. Ironically, the Internet has made it far easier for them to get into someone's home and "sit at" their kitchen table "with them"...while making it significantly more difficult to actively engage in the art and science of selling to win that prospect's mind and trust, and close that sale's door in the face of all those ghosts of doubtful fears that prospects invariably come up with.

What does this mean for the life insurance sales agent? It means that if you're going to sell life insurance All-Star Comics you need to be long on customer service, short (although by no means lacking!) on selling. The Internet world makes exceptionally prompt service and the providing of quality information paramount for those who want to succeed in sales. Life insurance agents now need to do what those who have been selling top-quality products in other industries (and of a different nature) have long been trained to do: allow the prospects to sell themselves on the products, while you more or less sit back and take their order. People love to buy and hate to be sold. The Internet makes it possible for people to feel like they are buying while you are selling without leaving any footprint!

Now, what this means for you as a life insurance sales agent is that you need to be more knowledgeable than the average agent ever was before. Great agents who made buckets of money were always among the most knowledgeable, to be sure. But the bar has been raised. Many of those agents were highly knowledgeable, 1921 Koester Bread baseball cards only about their company's products. Then their winning personalities kicked in to finish off the deal and close the sale. That's not usually going to be so these days. Whatever you tell a prospect online, be certain that they are going to compare what you say against several other agents. They want the best price on the best product--and they absolutely demand the best service. No, you need to be among the very smartest of all life insurance agents, period. With the advent of the Internet, life insurance sales is more of a technical brain game and less of a personality game than ever before (although, you still need to be extremely personable--personality does still come through; coy computer geeks need not apply). This all applies to you whether you are a captured agent or an insurance broker.

Now, at this point you should already have figured out that you had better have a hot website. Investigate, find, use the best ISPs, the best website templates or designers, the best professional e-mail service providers with the best stationary and fonts and features, the best VoIP or all-in-one broadband cable/telephone service, and by all means invest in an auto-responder and publish articles and record podcasts for free online. If need be, go to a multimedia marketing company to Superboy you design the hottest print materials to send out via snail mail if your prospects demand them through your website--and always have that option for them, too.

And, one final note: keep yourself a "Joe Cool". Know your Internet communications protocols and lingo. The Internet makes possible a world that changes more rapidly than ever before, and life insurance sales are all about communications. Stay on top of things, be prepared, and have fun!

The author lives with her husband in Maryland, with their two dogs and cat. She put together the website href="affordable-life-insurance-guru.com">affordable-life-insurance-guru.com in order to help the everyday person navigate the often confusing world of life insurance