National Underwriter Sales Essentials (Property & Casualty): The Wedge

Randy Schwantz

• Publisher: The National Underwriter Company
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781939829702
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Insurance
• Index: Business

The Wedge offers a powerful, proven technique to distinguish you from the incumbent agent and help you win new business. You will dramatically increase your "win ratio" and add satisfied clients to your book of business by researching a potential client, building rapport, and discovering the client's inner dissatisfaction in the current relationship. Learn Why Traditional Selling Doesn't Work Learn What You Need To Know To Win Rapport, Discovery, Differentiation The Six Steps of The Wedge Wedge Scripting Aids and More! Randy Schwantz s The Wedge strips away the theoretical and packs in the most practical sales techniques to come along in the last ten years. If a salesperson is not Driving the Wedge, they re just spinning their wheels! Richard F. Yadon, Jr. Director of Sales Willis Corroon Corporation of Kansas After reading The Wedge, and applying its principles to my sales presentations, I landed a rather large account that I know a competitor was also avidly pursuing. That alone makes the investment in this book worthwhile. kemspeaks Amazon.com online reviewer Phoenixville, PA Randy Schwantz is President & CEO of The Wedge Group, a sales training and consulting firm headquartered near Dallas, Texas. He is in the business of helping agencies, carriers and other companies accelerate their profitable growth by integrating their sales people, support staff and executive leadership into a high-performance team.

Chapter One

Stop Selling and Start Winning

“Winning isn’t everything. It’s the ONLY thing.”

— Vince Lombardi

This book is the result of literally thousands of hours I have spent working with salespeople like you who were motivated, intelligent, productive…and frustrated. Frustrated because they were not achieving the high goals they had set for themselves.

What I have learned over the years has helped many of them achieve their personal goals of doubling or tripling their income, of having more time to invest in their families and personal relationships, and of achieving the professional success that eluded them for so long.

Like the salesperson outlined in the Challenge, they couldn’t understand why they weren’t successful more often, why deals that seemed all but certain one day frequently disappeared the next. What were they doing wrong?

Nothing. And everything.

Their mistake, the most common mistake made by businesspeople in America today, is their belief in “selling.” Selling is important, but it is not the goal. Winning is the goal, and until you stop selling and start winning, you will never have the financial or personal success you desire.

“But Randy,” a client asked me once, “How can I stop selling? I’m in sales….I’m a salesperson for cryin’ out loud! What am I supposed to do?”

I’m not a motivational speaker or New Age guru. I’m not selling chicken soup for the salesman or the seven habits of the happy closer. I don’t believe in magic formulas or psychic energy.

I’m a businessman and a sales coach. I believe in techniques, strategies, and sales tactics that have proven they work because they’ve been tested under fire, in the conference rooms and business suites of America. No stunts, no tricks, no gimmicks — just results.

Because I have spent so many years looking at the sales industry from a practical, bottom-line viewpoint, I’ve learned, in a very practical way, that the obstacle most salespeople must overcome to succeed is their dependency on “selling.”

What Is Selling?

The simplest definition of selling I can give you is this: Every time you sit down with a prospect without a specific, well-developed, and effective strategy for winning, you are just selling. Period.

Selling is killing you out in the marketplace. It is wasting your time and your prospects. Anyone who says selling is hard is wrong. Selling is easy; winning is hard. Selling means making a good presentation. Winning means walking out with a check.

Selling is about looking good, prospecting, networking, “cocktailing,” color-copying, binding, packaging, and e-mailing. Winning is about putting money in the bank.

In other words, selling is believing in the process, while winning is focusing on the results and crafting a specific, workable, well-rehearsed method to achieve those results.

What Is Your Focus?

The difference between selling and winning is focus. When you’re selling, you’re focused on yourself. You know everything there is to know about your product, your service, your company. But you know almost nothing about the prospect you are calling on.

Because you’re so focused on yourself, you can probably think of a hundred reasons why everyone ought to hire you and fire your competition, but you probably can’t come up with one specific reason why it would benefit the prospect sitting right in front of you. Instead of a specific strategy to close this deal by connecting with the prospect, your hope (“hope” is what you have left after you abandon hard work and planning) is that your product’s benefits and features will somehow appeal to the prospect, and that she will make the connection for you.

As a result, your success depends completely on others. Even if you have the best deal, the best presentation, and the best personality, you are no closer to closing than the most amateur of your competitors. You’re just counting on luck to get positive results for you.

What Is Your Intent?

Another key difference is intent. The intent of the “seller” is merely to stay in the game, to have a shot at quoting or making an offer. Sellers are focused on opportunities to pitch and present.

The winner is looking for opportunities to close. He enters every sales call with the intent to close, to walk out with a deal. Winners aren’t playing numbers games, they aren’t throwing their deals against a wall and hoping some will stick. They want every shot to count.

An example of this difference in intent is two skiers at the top of a mountain. One skier is focused on just making it down the hill and nothing more. He just wants to make it back to the lodge in one piece so he can come out another day and do it again. Whether he makes good time or not doesn’t matter. He just wants to make it down one more time.

The other skier is focused on the course. He’s looking at the turns, the curves, the trees, and the obstacles. He’s not thinking about himself, he’s focused on the course and how it needs to be skied. He begins the course with a plan specific to this course that will let him make the best possible time.

Which skier is going to finish first? Which skier is going to be the most successful? The one whose focus is not on himself and whose intent is to master the problem at hand.

How to Tell if You’re “Selling”

As a sales coach who has worked with literally thousands of salespeople, I’ve noticed that many of them consider it a “win” just to get the chance to give a quote on a major account. They get estimates, they crunch numbers, package it up, run it through the color printer, put it in a glossy binder and hand it to their prospect, and then take a victory lap at their next sales meeting.

Back in the agency, the owner (or sales manager) and team members tell them “It’s OK, don’t worry if you don’t get the account this time, maybe next year. It could take two to three years, just keep trying. It’s all a numbers game.”

The problem with that approach is that you’ll starve to death before you make a living.

This is the epitome of selling: either the prospect will hear something he likes, or he won’t. The salesperson’s job is simply to get in front of as many prospects as possible and wait for lightning to strike.

What’s Wrong with “Selling?”

Selling wastes a lot of time on unqualified prospects. When you’re selling, you’re going through the motions: making calls, looking for a chance to quote, playing the percentages. This makes salespeople, in essence, peddlers. A peddler is a guy that knows his product pretty well and goes out telling everyone they should use it. It’s a numbers game. “If I call on enough people, I’ll make a sale.” It’s a low percentage game however; too much time is wasted in the process of quoting non-buyers. Time that could have been used to sharpen skills, investigate further the real needs of true prospects, and execute winning strategies to break incumbent relationships.

Selling allows the prospect to “use” you. When you go into a meeting with a prospect who has no intention of buying, you aren’t just wasting your time, you’re wasting his time, too. How does the prospect benefit from this meeting? By using you as an educational resource. You spend an hour telling him about potential gaps in his coverage, then, after you’re gone, he calls the incumbent agent to talk over those ideas and see if they should be added to his current contract.

Selling keeps the focus on you and your efforts, not on the real problem. To sellers, sales is like Olympic ice skating; a solo sport in which the performer wins or loses based solely on her performance. If you prepare yourself well, have the right attitude, hit all the marks, and dazzle the crowd, you will score enough points to skate away with a gold medal contract and a bouquet of lucrative clients.

But sales isn’t a solo sport. Sales is a contact sport. It’s not figure skating — it’s ice hockey. Sales is a sport in which, more often than not, someone else — the incumbent — is on the ice, controlling the puck.

And until you take the puck out of the incumbent’s control and put it back in play, there is no opportunity to succeed. You can have a presentation with the production values of Pixar or James Cameron, paired with the positive attitude of Mohandas Ghandi, plus a price so low it would make a Republican blush, but as long as the incumbent is in control, the person you are meeting with is not a real prospect. He’s just someone you are “selling” to.

The Two Problems Selling Can’t Solve

The reason selling is so inefficient is that it is based on the faulty premise that there are two people in every sales call (you and the prospect) and that the most important person in the process is you, the salesperson. Nothing could be further from the truth.

There are, in fact, three people in every sales call — you, the prospect and the incumbent agent — and you are the least important person in the group. The other two people will determine whether or not you close the deal, and before you can close, you must solve two key problems.

Problem Number One:
The Prospect Is Probably Lying

The number one problem facing people in sales is getting prospects to tell the truth. Overcome this problem, and you will become the most successful salesperson in America.

Why do prospects lie? Because they have no intention of buying. Their job is to check out their company’s options, so they want to meet with you and get educated without actually buying from you. However, most people find hurting the feelings of others by rejecting their offer to be an unpleasant experience, so they tell you “little white lies” instead.

How do they do that? By giving you part of what you want — the opportunity to bid and for them to review your offer. In your meetings they nod politely as you spew out the familiar sales pitch of “quality service, competitive prices, and commitment to satisfaction.” They compliment you on your professional presentation and maybe even let you buy them lunch, but when it’s over, they pat you on your head and send you off to your next meeting.

Most of the prospects you call on have no interest in engaging in an honest dialogue with you, and you make it easy for them to avoid a dialogue by “selling” instead of listening. What could be easier for a prospect than answering a couple of simple, open-ended sales-school questions they’ve heard a hundred times before, then drinking a cup of coffee while you babble on with abstract statistics and rehearsed sales pitches? In most sales presentations, if the prospect did want to have an honest dialogue about what he and his firm wanted to accomplish, he would have to interrupt the seller to do it!

The businesspeople you call on don’t want to have an honest, in-depth dialogue with you b...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Acknowledgement
• Preface: The Mission
• Introduction
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Appendix
• Sneak Preview: iWin