Not long after he published his famous work on the theory of relativity, Albert Einstein was asked about his plans for the future. “I never think of the future,” he said. “It comes soon enough.”
The future of insurance sales arrived at a “producers roundtable” organized for the International Disability Income Society (IDIS) at its fourth annual meeting in late October. There on the speakers’ platform in Las Vegas, tucked in among several graying veterans of the DI business, were two distinctly younger faces belonging to Steve Crawford and Anthony Delvecchio, both with Guardian Disability Insurance Brokerage of Rockville, Md., one of the top DI-producing agencies for Guardian Life/Berkshire Life.
During the expected give-and-take over the traditional concerns of the DI producer, Anthony briefly mentioned that he does business over the Internet. He offered a glimpse into the future potential for an insurance industry that can respond to a new generation of informed customers. Alas, no one asked him to elaborate on his approach, and the panel stuck with the present — a tough enough topic with the current financial turmoil and economic ills — rather than ponder the future.
The day after the producers’ panel, the IDIS awarded Anthony its first-ever Founders Award for achievement in professional DI sales and service. It is Anthony’s first industry award, outside of internal recognition from Guardian/Berkshire, and it most likely will not be his last.
So just how does a 31-year-old agent, having started with zero insurance experience, bring in nearly $300,000 of new DI premium in less than three years, without leaving the office? The answer: online selling. Using the system Steve Crawford built for his own agency, powered by a high-traffic Web site, disabilityquotes.com, as well as other Web sites, Anthony sells DI over the phone to prospects all over the country. He now has customers in 34 states and the District of Columbia; he has met very few of them in person.
Anthony’s success speaks not only to the power of online quoting, but also to the time-honored craft of the telephone sale. New agents (and more than a few old ones) know all about cold-calling to find qualified prospects who will grant an interview. In the realm of online quoting, however, the prospect comes to you, and the telephone is the medium not for arranging an initial meeting but for presenting the solution to an acknowledged need, and closing the sale.
Some armchair experts have predicted the doom of insurance agents and other intermediaries since the Internet first came of age in the 1990s. But the pundits forgot that people looking for insurance coverage will never stop needing personal advice on what to buy, especially for more complex purchases like disability income protection. That’s a need only a professional salesperson can address. After that, it’s just a question of how. And Anthony has learned the “how” quickly and effectively.
“It is easier to sell to somebody face-to-face,” Anthony admits. “There’s an interaction there, where on the phone, you just don’t know. But I have found that I have a unique way of talking to somebody over the phone and getting them to trust me. I’m comfortable over the phone. I can pick it up and talk to somebody, and within a minute, I know where the conversation is going.”
The Price Is RightThe typical sale starts with a request for a quote, coming from a visitor to one of the Web sites. Anthony follows up the request over the phone, specifying a quote but also asking questions to find out more about the prospect and customize the product solution. “By the time people come to me, they know they need DI, it’s just a matter of which product they are going to get,” he says. “I ask a question, and then listen to the person, and let him or her talk as opposed to talking over them.
“The one thing you can’t do over the phone, when you’re making a sale, is to get into all the details about the policy. I try to get people to feel what would happen if they became disabled, and use examples of how the policy or the riders would help them. I’ll lay it out for them in a story, so they can picture it.”
The picture, based on his quote, always includes the maximum coverage available for the client, including all riders. That allows Anthony to “work down from there” if the premium is unaffordable. “There’s a good chance I’m going to get beaten by somebody else on price,” he says. “But if people are going to buy from me, I want them to know that I offered everything so that they know this is the maximum and they can be confident about it. I tell people, ‘You’re getting this in case something happens; and if it does, you’re going to want the maximum benefit. I hope to God you never need this, and that technically you’ll be wasting your money. But you’ll have peace of mind.’”
Working down from the maximum benefit and premium amount to find the “happy medium” has worked better for Anthony than offering choices up front. He believes choices can lead to confusion and lost sales. “I don’t like giving people choices,” he says. “When you first make contact with a person, there’s maybe a 50% chance that person is going to buy. If you start with choices A, B, and C, you’re giving people too much information and it becomes mind-boggling.
“When you go to the doctor, he doesn’t say, ‘Do you want to take this medicine, or this one, or this one?’ In my business, I’m the expert, and I know what works.”
What works may or may not put dollars in his pocket, however, and Anthony has passed a big threshold of professionalism in recognizing that simple truth. “I don’t want to say that money doesn’t matter, because you want to make money at what you do, but what counts is that the person you work with gets something to help themselves, whether they buy from me or get quotes and buy from somebody else.”
A Generation OnlineLike most new agents, Anthony does a lot of business with people who are near his age — fellow members of Generation X, the children of baby boomers. Most of his clients are white-collar professionals, especially doctors in residence. He particularly likes working with consultants and salespeople, he says, “because to them, being on a commission basis or being paid for results, having this coverage is huge. Once they go back to work after being disabled, it takes awhile to make money, and this protects them until they get back on their feet.”
Now well into his third year in the profession, Anthony is starting to wean himself off the online leads — he now gets four or five a day instead of the 15 or 20 he got when he started—and build more business from referrals. Even so, he believes online selling to his generation is here to stay. “People go online and search things out for themselves, like going to WebMD,” he says. “There’s so much information out there, people don’t need to be physically face-to-face with somebody to be sold something. They can do their homework, educate themselves, and then make contact with an agent. And if you’re there, they contact you.”
That doesn’t mean the online world has cured prospects of procrastination. If the first call he makes, with the full quote and discussion, doesn’t proceed to the application, Anthony follows up by phone and e-mail over the next several weeks, or longer if necessary.
“You have to be persistent,” he says. “You can’t just make the initial contact, send a quote, and hope they get back to you. You have to get on top of it.” Not long ago, he sold a policy to a client from Washington state who he had first talked to exactly one year earlier. “He kept putting it off, and I’d follow up, because I had him in a special notebook of people I think I can close. Sure enough, a year goes by and he calls and says, ‘Anthony, thank you for being on top of this, I’ve been putting it off — let’s do the application.’ He had been wondering what his group policy would do.
“People put off spending money. The premiums are not cheap, and people have a tough time coming out of pocket for thousands of dollars. But if you stay on top of them, eventually they’re ready to go.”
At Home on the PhoneAnthony’s talent in “dialing for dollars” is not entirely a gift of nature. He had considerable experience honing his phone skills for more than 10 years in his previous career in sports marketing. “It was all phone sales,” Anthony says. “But I got frustrated with it. I wanted to do something more. The money was there, but it wasn’t a career.”
He knew Steve Crawford as a casual acquaintance, and when a mutual friend who was an agent under Steve talked about the advantages of being an agent, Anthony signed up in July, 2006. He confesses with a laugh that before then, he didn’t even have an e-mail address. “I didn’t know a thing about computers,” he says. “I didn’t need one. In my old work, if I wanted to talk to somebody, I’d call them on the phone or go over to their house. Now I can’t imagine living without a computer.”
The first day of his new life as an agent started with Steve handing him a phone and a stack of online leads. He got his first sale before the day was over, to an engineer. Two months later, Guardian/Berkshire published a DI production report with a ranking of agents, and Anthony saw his name in the lower right corner, ranked 98th. “I made it a goal that by the end of the year, I wanted to be on the left side of the page, in the top 50,” he says. “The year ended and I made it — I was 44th or 45th with $88,000 in new premium.” He also earned the company’s new-agent award for the most new cases in the last half of the year.
“I thought, ‘Wow, cool, it feels good to hit a goal,’” he says. “Now my goal is to be the top producer in my agency, because that would put me in the top 10 at Guardian. That’s probably not going to happen this year, but that’s where I want to be.” (He’s currently ranked second in the agency.)
Anthony has struck up an informal alliance with another agent in the shop, Tom Lloyd, who does life insurance as well as DI and has sold whole life to a number of Anthony’s clients. “We’re starting to realize the power of two,” Anthony says. “He has strengths, one of which is attention to detail. And I have strengths, one of which is not attention to detail.
“Tom and I would like to grow a business within Steve’s business, and set up a ‘one-stop shop’ for DI, life insurance, and long-term care. We want to stay with the agency because of the prestige it offers, but also generate our own business with our own leads.” Together they have hired an assistant, Stacy Rapant, who helps get the cases through underwriting. Anthony calls her “an all-star, a bulldog on details.”
Hiring Stacy represents the first tangible step in responding to what Anthony says he has learned from the veteran producers and agency heads he has met in Guardian’s Leaders’ Club. “Every person I’ve met there says the same thing — the only way you can grow is to put money back in your business. You have to invest in yourself; no one is going to invest in you otherwise. But if you do, the sky is the limit.”
Meeting the elite members of the Leaders’ Club has whet Anthony’s appetite for building a new business he can shape to his own vision. “When I look at the Leaders’ Club, I don’t see Michael Jordan- or Wayne Gretzky-type people who have ridiculous talent I don’t possess,” he says. “I see myself, that one day that can be me. Why not? They sell insurance, and so do I.
“It’s inspiring to know you can be an all-star in this business, be recognized for it, and in the process, do something great for people.”
The irony of Anthony’s career story is that beyond the first chapter, the importance of online leads — the springboard to his early success — will fade as he transforms his business into the traditional model with personal visits to local clients.
“I plan on spending a lot of money on myself to get to the next level. I would rather meet with people face-to-face and set up seminars. I hope to build something that’s bigger than me and that is not dependent on me anymore. That’s the ultimate goal.”
For now, though, this “agent of the future” is more than content with his chosen profession, because he knows that while the methods will evolve with the times, the fundamentals will never change. “I like to sell,” Anthony says. “That’s all I do. I don’t have a problem with saying I sell insurance. I love getting up and going to work, and I love what I do. It will benefit a lot of people in the long run.”