When I started in the life insurance business, I was only 23, and a young looking 23 at that. I knew when I started that it was going to be a problem getting any mature person to talk to me seriously about his financial affairs.
So I decided to apply a principle that I've used many times since, and that is to find some way to turn a liability into an asset and then capitalize on it. I would say something like this to each new prospect: "You know, Mr. Prospect, tremendous changes have taken place in the past few years in life insurance; changes that involve new techniques, new methods of using life insurance to help men to
solve their tax and other financial problems. I realize that I am still very young and relatively new in the business, but strangely I find this is a great advantage both for you and me. It permits me to learn these new methods. It is easier for me to learn these newer techniques than it is for some of the older men who have to unlearn the obsolete methods before they can show you how to adopt the new methods."
The statement sounded good, and it worked. What it did was to keep me from being put on the defensive, and it made me work hard to live up to my promise that I knew how to use the new methods.
Another thing I did was to go to older men in the agency for joint work. I found I could always talk glowingly about the other man's ability easier than about my own, because I could talk about someone else without running the risk of sounding conceited.
It took me five years to discover that production could be made the result of a mathematical formula, the factors of which were in my control, and I learned that at the time when I had the opportunity to work for seven weeks in the summer of 1931 with Clay Hamlin, one of the real greats of our business who had set records for more than a decade and up into the twenties. I remember exactly when and how the concept first struck me of controlling my production by controlling the factors that went into the formula.
I was riding on a subway in New York City on a hot day in August of 1931. Hamlin had talked to me about it and had given me some material in writing which I was reading while on my way downtown from Grand Central. Here was the formula:
Number of attempts X Percentage of efficiency X Average sized case = Production
It hit me like a flash! I knew what my average size case had been. I could very soon find out what percent of the cases I had tried to close were closed.
If there was anything that was in my control for sure, it was how many attempts to close I would make. Nobody could stop me from stepping up my effort and making a certain number of calls every week.
Of course the formula was working, whether I had realized it or not. But all of a sudden I knew I could take control, and that instead of having my production be just a great big question mark,
I could set my goal and know what it took to reach it.
That was what put me in the Million Dollar Round Table, even thought it was four years later before I first qualified. Why did it take me four more years (making 9 years in the business in all) to get up to my first Million Dollar year in 1935? There was something going on that they called a depression. That was the time when life insurance once again proved itself, and that was a time when writing life insurance in large volume was tough to do. Things were tough all over!
What was really happening was that business was off at least 50%. I was setting my goal each year to write a million, and as a consequence, I was doing one-half million. But the half million dollar colleagues in my company who had not yet learned how to use the production formula were ending up by doing only one-fourth million because they just didn't realize until it was too late how much effort had to be stepped up if they hoped to stay with their production of prior years.
But because I was following this formula, watching it like a hawk, I knew month by month how much I would have to step up my effort - and by doing so, I stayed even instead of having my business cut in half or more.
So my work pattern was geared to do a million, and when ratios began to improve, suddenly there it was - my first million dollar year.
My faith in the formula had paid off - and I sincerely believe it will pay off for you.
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