Transcripts of recorded sessions & interviews

Sales call reluctance

This is a transcript of a business oriented conversation with Robert Blake, a young life insurance agent. While the setting has to do with life insurance, the concepts are applicable across the board to all businesses. Call reluctance, for example, is an issue for almost anyone in business and EFT can be quite helpful in alleviating it.  It is a MAJOR issue for corporations and their sales people.

Cheers, Gary

Gary: You're in the insurance business, right?

Robert: Correct.

Gary:  Is it life insurance, casualty, what?

Robert:  It's primarily life, but I do some health.

Gary:  I don't know if you know it or not, but that's where I got my business start. I haven't used my insurance license in years, but I'm a CLU and all of that. So I kind of cut my teeth where you're coming from.

Robert:  You're an engineer also, aren't you?

Gary:  By academic degree. I never really practiced being an engineer. I just run around with this overdeveloped left brain. I kind of tilt to the left sometimes because of it.

So, I guess the general term we are dealing with here is call reluctance?

Robert:  Right. I guess that's the term that's used most frequently now.

Gary:  Call reluctance to me is comprised of two things: One is the fear of rejection. We don't want to be told no because we tend to take it personally even though our trainers say, "Oh, don't take it personally."   That's a great theory, of course.

Robert:  I've been in business so long and I've been rejected so many times, you know what? Just to be a little bit more precise, it's not the fear of someone saying no. What happens is just a sort of critical mass builds up with the frequency of the no's. Therefore, I have to engage in what I was told is called avoidance behaviors. Instead of keeping going and trying to prospect, all of a sudden you have to start doing other things. Little trivial things all of a sudden become compulsive, and you have to do them, when in fact you're just trying to get away from the pain of the no's.

Gary:  Let me get back to the pain of the no's in a moment. I said there were two things, at least in my experience, that have to do with call reluctance. One of those is what I call the fear of rejection, the pain of the no's. The other is what I call product congruence.

Robert:  That's a new one for me.

Gary:  Let me go back and give you my own personal example. When I was in the insurance business, I somehow had it in my head that if I was going to be selling something ... for example, insurance--it had to be this wonder product. It had to do everything for everybody. And, of course, people would say to me, "Well, Gary, this whole life insurance that you're selling. It's a lousy investment." And, indeed, if you compare it to investments that are designed to be investments ...

Robert:  It is lousy.

Gary:  It is lousy. But to me, at that young age, I did a lot of numbers and figures and tax figures and I ended up creating reasons to call it a reasonable investment, although I think I fudged my own logic in doing it. Why?  Because I wanted it to be everything to everybody. But deep down underneath, I knew it wasn't. So I was not congruent with my product. My product does wonderful things. It does things nothing else will do, but I wasn't totally product congruent on it, because I wanted it to do something else.  And it didn't.

Robert:  Now the product congruency idea makes more sense to me. I'll certainly not ever be canonized, but I consider myself a very honest person. But when I'm doing a certain presentation, I can't profess that this particular thing will solve their problems when I know it won't even though it's the only arrow I have in my quiver. Now I'm at the point where I'll say to them, "Look, what you need are the services of someone else." And I may refer them to a colleague of mine instead of trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole like I used to do years ago.

Gary:  And what you used to do years ago is the same thing that I used to do years ago.

Ponder this, Robert"..Gold, right now, is selling at about $290 an ounce. If you could go out and sell gold for $10 an ounce, would you have any problem with call reluctance?

Robert:  Absolutely not.

Gary:  Let's think about that for a second. Let's take that one apart. Because you know you have a $290 product, you're selling for $10.

Robert:  The only problem I would have that I would anticipate is people believing that I'm going to sell them something that's worth $290 for $10. I know that I'd be selling something that's much more valuable than I'm asking them to pay for it.

Gary:  So you'd have no call reluctance?

Robert:  I'd have very little. I can't imagine having any.

Gary:  OK.   Now let me get back to product congruence. From your point of view, you don't have that same kind of product congruence with insurance or you wouldn't have call reluctance.

Robert:  Perhaps not.

Gary:  It would really be nice to sell something for $10 that's worth $290, and that would help meet somebody's financial needs. That has nothing to do with their relationship needs or their health needs, by the way. It's only going to zero in on one of their needs. Life insurance is a financial need product. It doesn't do a thing for their health, for example, or their nutrition. I mention that to you to suggest that somewhere within all this is a product congruence issue. It may be--and I'm going back to my own stuff--that we have the following idea built into us: "People resist insurance salespeople because when they buy life insurance"...it's something they've got to pay for that somebody else gets""and they've got to die for that somebody else to get it."  There's kind of a resistance there that I guess could influence our sense of product congruence.

Robert:  In the current portfolio I'm working with, there's definitely some product congruence problem. My specialty up to now has been mortgage protection. Somebody buys a house for $80,000 and I go in and sell them mortgage protection so the survivor has enough money to pay off the mortgage and thus keep the family in the house. The product that I'm selling now, because of my recent position in the company, puts me in a very uncompetitive position.  Thus I don't have the tools I need to work effectively in that market any longer. I either have to switch my markets to a market that, frankly, I probably wouldn't be pleased working with, which would be final expense market. I prefer speaking to people in my age range rather than people old enough to be my parents. I have more in common with them. I tend to build rapport faster. That's definitely one of the reasons I don't have product congruence now because I know I don't have the tools to match the market that I'm used to.

Gary:  As long as you don't have product congruence"".even going beyond what you said""someone else has a better product at a lower price?

Robert:  Better designed product AND lower price.

Gary:  As long as any of that is out there, that's going to cause a part of your call reluctance. Because at some level, you're not congruent within yourself. There's that internal gulp that may not show, but you radiate it anyway. It's called the pain of the no's.  Before we get to the pain of the no's, however, you said something about your liking to deal with people your own age.

Robert:  I prefer speaking with persons that still have a lot of their working life ahead of them rather than behind them. It's just more to protect. I can write more business with someone who is 40 or 35 and they have two kids ready to go to college or they haven't retired yet and they're maybe 15 or 20 years away from retirement and they have retirement needs to address"...things of that nature"..rather than talking to someone who's 71. Those issues are years in the past, and they're only concerned about making sure their kids don't have to pay for their funeral. Generally, when someone's 70, a lot of the issues have been resolved or just gone away. There may be estate problems or things like that, but I'm not in that marketplace where the person has so many assets, there's an estate problem.

Gary:  Why aren't you in that market?

Robert:  I'm training myself to get to that market. I just started my first course in certified estate planning. I'll probably have my designation in about a year. However, the company I'm with isn't suited for that market. I'll have to make a market change.

Gary:  Have you seen our Web site?

Robert:  Yes, I've seen your Web site.

Gary:  There's a section on it called the Palace of Possibilities. Have you gone through that?

Robert:  I think I browsed it, but I didn't really go onto it.

Gary:  I would go through it.  Why? Because I took the very same thing you're talking about ... getting into the business area ... and substantially increased my income. And a lot of the things you face here are a direct result of being in a certain comfort zone with clients that make the same kind of money you do, are the same age you are, etc. etc. Yet if you go off and talk to the guy who's 50 and 60 years old--and he's got a roaring business-- you're talking about much bigger insurance needs for taking care of estate taxes, for group insurance for his employees, pension plans. It goes on and on and on.

Robert:  That is one of my goals, Gary, to get into the small business market.

Gary:  And from there to the big business market.

Robert:  I hadn't really made that leap. I don't have the knowledge base for that yet. But once I get it, no problem.

Gary:  We're talking about business blocks in general, and one of those is one's comfort zone. I started off earning $18,000 a year.  That was years and years and years ago ... and I knew I was capable of more. But my problem was I was just staying in this market I was "comfortable" with. "A business owner?  Oh my goodness, no!  I'm too young for him. He's out of my league, etc. etc. etc."

Robert:  I used to be a stockbroker. Most of my clients had a lot more money than me. They were only voices over the phone, 80 percent of them were. I had maybe half a dozen doctors as clients, and I found out that they do real well bringing the money in. They don't know anything about what to do with it.

Gary:  That's right. They're not trained that way. Let's get back to the pain of the no's, for a second. Let me suggest to you that the pain of the no's--the not wanting to have the no's and the frequency and all of that--isn't so much that somebody tells you no today--it's more like--and I don't know how to zero in on this specifically for you ... but the pain of that no would not be there if it wasn't for the fact that it reflected off of some form of pain, rejection, etc., in your past. If those rejections and pains in the past were not there, somebody saying no to you now would not be taken personally.

Robert:  I wouldn't have a reference point for them, right?

Gary:  Right! Let me just make something up, for example. Here you are, age 8 and kids are choosing up sides for baseball. And you're chosen last or they said, "We don't want you because you're not good enough, so why don't you go home?" Rejection. That hurts. That's pain. You add a few of those up, and then when something happens today in the business world or elsewhere and somebody  "rejects you,"--that is, tells you no or whatever--it's a replay of that previous pain, even though you might not be able to articulate exactly what it is.

Robert:  It's just somewhere in the file.

Gary:  Yea. And you'll do anything to avoid it, including not make your calls. That's where EFT comes in. That's where it's so beautiful and so useful. What you need to do is go back and remember all those times when you were rejected or had pain ... things like what your father said or mother said or brother said or whatever. Start using EFT with those events. Start unloading those so they just become a shrug of the shoulders to you. As you unload those, then the pain of the no's is going to shift to the mere experience of the no's. Do you see the difference in the terminology?

Robert:  Right. I'll be able to reflect upon it, but I won't attach the pain with it.

Gary:  Yea, and you'll recognize that somebody is saying no to something they don't understand yet. Do you know who Ben Feldman was?

Robert:  Oh sure. Probably one of the greatest salespersons in the country.

Gary:  I've still got some of his books here, and I read his philosophy once in a while. But there was a man - getting back to product congruence ... that was absolutely congruent. It did not matter where you were coming from, you had to have the insurance. And he knew it at a level so congruently that it didn't matter what no's you gave him. He got lots of no's and, as far as he was concerned, when he got a no it was no big deal. It was just part of the process.  It's only temporary.  He would say to himself""Now that guy knows my name. That's good because he'll recognize when I come back." And he did. He came back over and over and over again. He was selling, in his mind, $290 gold for $10. Unstoppable. That's why I got to the product congruence thing. Enough product congruence overcomes the pain of the no's.

Robert:  Your belief radiates so much that the person listens to you.

Gary:  And if they do say no, it's not a no. That's just part of the conversation.

Robert:  Part of the process.

Gary:  Part of the process. That's fine. Go back to those past no's--those past rejections--and unload them with EFT.  I think that would do marvelous good for sales people. I think corporations that have sales people--when they finally recognize the power in this--will start hiring specialists in it.

Robert:  I believe so. I'm too left-brained, so it'll take a while, but once the flood gates open, people that are doing wonderful work like you are not going to have enough hours in the day to solve problems for corporations.

Gary:  There are tons of things around. The employees have migraine headaches and trauma and phobias and all kinds of stuff that gets in the way of their performance. They have health issues and all kinds of things.

Robert:  I don't currently have your EFT set. I have to go to the Web site to order it?

Gary:  Yes.

Robert:  I really appreciate your time.

Gary:  Glad I could help.  

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