Every professional salesperson understands “people buy emotionally, then rationalize their decision logically.”
The discussion of Long-Term Care can quickly become an emotional time bomb for insurance agents and financial planners:
- I will never go to a nursing home
- My family will care for me
- I will just go on Medicaid
- I won’t buy insurance that I lose if I don’t use
None of these “objections” are rational, logical arguments, but they are highly charged emotional responses that will result in agents being shown the door.
So, you need your client to emotionally feel the need for LTC Insurance, but you can’t risk those negative emotions pouring all over their dining room table.
How do you turn those negative emotions around to help people buy LTC Insurance?
The Path of Guided Self-Discovery
More often than not, you will not turn negative emotions around by telling, telling, telling a prospective client all of the facts about Long-Term Care, the physical, emotional and financial burdens faced by family caregivers, how they will need to spend-down their assets or the true costs of self-insurance.
Instead, you need to turn those emotions around by asking carefully crafted questions and listening attentively to their answers.
Why is this approach so important? Because your prospective client’s words are the windows to their deeply held beliefs, attitudes and feelings!
If you are in tell, tell, tell mode, your prospective client is most likely only hearing “blah! blah! blah!”
But if you are asking carefully crafted questions, listening attentively, and probing deeper and deeper to truly understand your client’s emotions, you will earn their most valuable emotion:
Trust!
Yes, trust is an emotion. If you don’t agree, try losing a person’s trust and see how they feel about you now!
How do you earn the trust of your prospective client? One way is to get on the same “learning channel” as your prospective client.
All people have a preferred method of receiving information – visual, auditory or kinesthetic (by touch). You must access all of these senses to discover the prospect’s preferred learning method and maximize your use of that method.
When something is explained to you, how do you respond? Are you more likely to say, “I see what you mean” or “That sounds about right” or “That feels right.”
We structure our internal representations through our senses – primarily sight, sound and touch. Our senses play a large role in our learning and ultimately in our decision making.
- Visual: Many prospects base their decisions on what they see. You can talk to them all day long, but if they can not look at it and visually process the information, you will not convince them.
- Auditory: Other prospects need to hear your message – and be sure that you hear their message. These people may be less interested in what you show them, but are focused on what you say to make their decision.
- Kinesthetic: Some prospects must touch your product in some way to make their decision. If they can’t feel it, they are not motivated to make a decision.
The importance of accessing all of the senses during the LTC insurance home interview is illustrated by the following statistics on learning. We remember:
- 20% of what we read.
- 30% of what we hear.
- 40% of what we see.
- 50% of what we say.
- 60% of what we do.
- 90% of what we see, hear, see, say and do.
If you are going to engage your client’s emotions in a positive manner, you need to get them involved in the discussion of Long-Term Care and LTC Insurance.
- You need to let them read some information, ask them questions about it and discuss it
- You need to explain some information, ask them questions about it and discuss it
- You need to show them information (graphs and charts), ask them questions about it and discuss it
- You need them to tell you how they feel about the information you are discussing – how they see it, how it sounds to them, how they feel about it (depending on their learning style)
- Lastly, you need them to tell you what they would do if they needed Long-Term Care and what they would do if they didn’t have LTC Insurance
Get all of your prospective client’s senses involved … so you can learn how they learn … and open those windows to their deeply held beliefs, attitudes and feelings.
