Contact Sport

Now that the NHL season has begun in earnest, let me ask brokers what the selling process more closely resembles – figure skating or hockey? I believe many salespeople think of it as a graceful solo sport.

Here’s what often happens. You do your routine, hoping your technical skills will impress the judges. After your presentation, you wait for the score, confidently expecting a perfect 10. Then WHAM! Someone delivers a vicious body check and takes your medal. Turns out you were playing the wrong game.

Welcome to the real world, where selling is a contact sport and where the person who already has the business is the home team – and you are the visiting underdog.

The realization that selling is a contact sport must begin with the knowledge that your prospect has an incumbent broker. Your job is to break that relationship. That is the essence of The Wedge, as we showed in our previous article (CU, October 2005).

SCOUTING THE OPPOSITION

In my day-to-day discussions with salespeople, it surprises me how few brokers actually know who the incumbent is or what the relationship is like. Who influenced the buying decision? How did the current provider get the prospect’s business? Is there any scuttlebutt on problems or issues in the recent past? This forms part of what we term the vital “pre-call research.”

How do you define true research? The purpose of research based on The Wedge is to identify the competition’s vulnerabilities – those areas where your competition is underserving of your prospect’s business – and use this to motivate your prospect to hire you instead of keeping them.

FEELING THE PAIN

The next step is to get the prospect to acknowledge any “pain” in the insurance process. Behavioral studies show that 65-70% of human motivation comes from avoiding pain. If there is no realization of any problems, there is no solution – and you have nothing to sell. But don’t expect to walk into a prospect’s office and get him automatically to unburden insurance pain. If you ask a client how service or coverage (or anything!) has been, the typical response will be “fine.”

So, you need to find the concrete things that allow your clients to visualize pain. Put yourself in their shoes and then develop a list of potential painful symptoms:

“My calls are not returned quickly”

“They don’t seem to ‘get’ our business”

“They give us things at the last minute.”

Once the pain has been established, now comes the difficult part. You have to define what makes your brokerage different from the competitor. Here’s a simple definition of competitive advantage – your strengths versus your competitor’s weaknesses. There are three ways to gain competitive advantage. First, you provide a service no one else provides (unlikely). Second, you provide a service that others provide, but you have a better process that gets better results. Or third, you describe your service in such a compelling way that prospects want to buy from you, not competitors.

Most brokers are moving a mile a minute and haven’t stopped to consider their competitive advantages. In 1996, my consulting firm conducted a survey of insurance agencies in the United States. We asked each agency to tell us what made them unique. The uniformity of responses was striking – competitive prices, great service, impeccable reputation, highly trained professionals, years in business and commitment to quality.

DUMPING ABSTRACTION

All these sound good, but how do you visualize “quality” or draw a mental picture of “service”? We refer to a technique developed by the late U.S. senator and linguist, S.I. Hayakawa, called the “ladder of abstraction.” He put the language we use on a scale from abstract to concrete. The lower on the ladder, the more concrete the word. This is where brokers need to be specific and sell on the “lower rungs of the ladder.” Where do I have better processes that produce better results? How do I drill down into the details to find them? Where do I find the corresponding weaknesses in the competition?

A broker’s job as a salesperson is to proactively control the experiences of clients, making their future more predictable. If you can articulate what you do and how you do it better than your competitors, you will win new business, plain and simple. That’s The Wedge in action.

Since 1998, Lombard Canada has recognized the power of The Wedge and has sponsored more than 500 brokers in Wedge workshops across Canada. In fact, Lombard has integrated The Wedge principles into the training provided to employees across the country so they are able to effectively communicate with brokers on new accounts.