Sales & Marketing

What are you waiting for?Go online! That’s the simplest piece of advice I can offer to any business person who wants to be successful. If you have established your business and it is trudging along nicely, the next step you can take to give it a boost is creating a website that produces the desired results. However, it is easier …

You know that to attract high-net-worth individuals and high-income earners, you have to be a little more creative and sophisticated with your approach to the referral process. One powerful strategy in my referral system is hosting client-appreciation events. Client-appreciation events help you grow business friendships with your clients. As your business friendships grow, so does client loyalty and the amount …

Technology has changed a lot for the modern annuity salesperson—whether it’s the fixed product purist or the VA-touting Registered Representative. Today’s agents have cell phones, email, laptops, iPads, social media, and a lot of other tools that salespeople didn’t have a generation ago. That is an advantage, but it is also an obstacle. Why? Because today’s prospects have the same …

When you sit down with a prospect or a client, you probably open the conversation with a brief comment about the weather followed by a discussion about families, or work, or a news headline. At some point, the conversation shifts, and you discuss some aspect of the client’s finances or portfolio—perhaps listening to their ideas or giving advice from research …

I recently returned from the 2013 NAIFA Conference in San Antonio, Texas. Hosting a booth enabled our team to meet some of NAIFA’s leading insurance and financial advisors—and expand our growing network of industry professionals.  Attending tradeshows like NAIFA is often exhausting. Between hosting our exhibit booth for hours each day, attending educational programs, and networking at the evening receptions, …

Even after the social media boom of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others, many of today’s producers still aren’t using any kind of social media strategies to gain leads. In the modern world, everything is done online. As I’ve said before, websites are the new business cards. At the very least, every producer should have their own website, even if they …

What does it take to get ahead in business today? While the experts may offer such suggestions as having cutting-edge skills and being a good team player, there are other, even more essential, measures to take. . The techniques are actually quite simple, but they have one common and fundamental characteristic that makes them so valuable: each one produces positive …

The goal of every presentation is to successfully influence how listeners will think or act. That said, few presentations make the cut. Although many treat presentations rather casually, every one counts and each one is equally important. And here’s why: we are our presentations. We’re the one on stage, and we’re judged by our listeners not only on what we …

I own a business and have a question for all the health insurance agents out there: Where are the agents focusing on suitability requirements for worksite supplemental benefits? Employer groups are not one-size-fits-all when it comes to their employees, and assuming so may insure some of my employees well, but leave others majorly exposed. When a group like mine is …

Our modern day methods of communication value fast, short, and information-rich conversations. With the rise of social media and texting as key ways to communicate information, conversations seem to be abbreviated. But, it hasn’t always been this way. For thousands of years, long before we had mobile devices or even the printed page, communicators have relied on one key tool …