Life & Health Sales Essentials Series

William H. Byrnes

• Editorial: The National Underwriter Company
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781939829740
• Categoría: Betriebswirtschaft
• Categoría: Vertrieb

Prospecting: Combines all of the most practical, proven sales techniques advisors, agents, brokers, producers, sales managers or agency owners need to convert prospects into customers, win new business, and to grow sales. Managing Your Agency: Time is the most critical resource every insurance professional must learn to manage. Getting maximum results from your time and maximizing your profit requires learning time and agency management techniques. By examining and carefully evaluating your work styles and habits and making needed changes, you can achieve maximum results in your agency. Practical and easy-to-implement, Managing Your Agency will help you eliminate time-wasters and show you how to effectively manage your business for the greatest productivity possible. The Edge: Every insurance professional can use new ways to connect with clients and improve his or her visibility in the community. Successful practice building requires the right frame of mind and philosophy for success. By taking time to learn from history's most successful leaders and thinkers, you can become more aware of the value that you provide to your clients, and build the confidence you need to help your clients achieve their risk-management goals while reaching your own personal sales milestones. This book is a conversational guide designed to help professionals of all experience levels achieve the their business and personal goals. It will show you to how to re-direct your thoughts to areas that will allow your practice to flourish and help you gain the respect of your peers. Long-term accomplishment requires the right philosophy, and this roadmap will show you the paths already travelled by those who have also faced many of the same challenges as today's industry leaders.

Chapter

1

Procrastinating

This article would have begun with the joke about how this book has always meant to deal with procrastination but never got around to it, but you heard that one before we could get around to telling it.

Procrastination can have other devastating effects, as with a failure to visit the doctor until it’s too late to do something. Less drastically, procrastination is all around us and has been for ages. Consider this from Edward Young, an 18th-century British poet and playwright:

Procrastination is defined as postponing the actions required to complete a task, attain a goal, or rise to the challenge of an opportunity. The required actions may be postponed to a time later than the present or to a time that never arrives. Often, important tasks go completely undone. At other times, opportunity knocks and it goes on begging.

Procrastination, then, is not just deferring an unpleasant task; it can take many forms, including:

• being reluctant to take risks;

• staying at home or in the same old job;

• getting sick when faced with an unpleasant job;

• avoiding confrontations or decisions;

• blaming others or the situation to avoid doing something; and

• making big plans but never carrying them out.

Yet pervasive though it may be, procrastination is still only a habit, a dysfunctional learned behavior that can be replaced by a functional learned behavior, though it might not be as easy as that makes it sound. It takes work because even though procrastination is a dysfunctional habit, it has some functional aspect for the procrastinator—otherwise it would never have been formed in the first place.

How much work and what kind? There’s an interesting division of opinion between business coaches and consultants, on one side, and psychologists, on the other. Time management coaches take a largely practical approach, offering tips to break you out of a procrastinative slump. At worst, this is Nike Therapy (the exhortation to “Just Do It!”); at best, they can be very helpful in replacing bad habits with good ones. Psychologists, as one would expect, insist that procrastination has underlying causes that need to be addressed if the habit is to be broken, and distinguish various kinds of procrastinators moved (or held in place) by different drives.

It’s clear that neither approach can do without the other. Nike Therapy gives the procrastinator no reason to change a style that seems to be working for him or her, after a fashion; it’s like telling a clinically depressed person to “Just Cheer Up!” You won’t make any lasting progress because you aren’t getting at the underlying causes. And the psychologists may be able to tell you the underlying cause of your procrastination, but you need practical measures to deal with it while you’re waiting for that lengthy, expensive therapy to kick in. Thus, this article will offer an overview of procrastinator psychology, and the sequel will present a sampling of tips for the procrastinator who wants to break the cycle. The important point, on which both approaches agree, is that procrastination is learned behavior, a habit that can be unlearned.

The Happy Procrastinator

Some psychologists distinguish two personality types among procrastinators:

• The “relaxed-happy” procrastinator avoids as much stress as possible by dismissing his or her work or disregarding more challenging tasks and concentrating on “having fun” or some other distracting activity. The dysfunctional behavior here is denial that the avoided task needs to be done.

• The “tense-afraid” procrastinator, by contrast, feels overwhelmed by pressures, unrealistic about time, uncertain about goals, dissatisfied with accomplishments, indecisive, blaming of others or circumstances for his/her failures, lacking in confidence and, sometimes, perfectionistic. Here the need to perform the task is acknowledged but some other blockage prevents the procrastinator from starting.

The relaxed-happy procrastinator is much more likely to be found on a college campus (pretty much every university health services web page has a section on procrastination) than in an office of financial advisors. People who believe, as relaxed procrastinators are said to, that their goals require too much unpleasant hard work (and who protest that hard work by procrastinating) are unlikely to last long in the financial services industry. Nonetheless, you could find that specific instances of procrastination conform to this type, so it is worth knowing about. Is there a specific task you dislike so much that you feel you “shouldn’t” have to do it, one for which you’ll cut corners when you do have to do it? Do you find yourself playing just one more game of Minesweeper when you should be doing it? As it happens, there is one activity that answers this description for many professional advisors. That activity is, of course, cold calling. If you agree (as many but not all advisors do) that cold calling is indispensable to your work, but you just can’t bring yourself to do it, this may be the root of the problem.

The Fearful Procrastinator

Scratch a dysfunctional behavior and you’re sure to find a fear. That’s true even of the relaxed-happy procrastinator (whose fear is of putting in the hard work needed to achieve goals), and clear for the tense-unhappy procrastinator. It’s no surprise that psychologists have identified a whole galaxy of fears that can underlie procrastination. However, three stand out above the rest:

• Fear of failure. It’s obvious how this widespread fear plays into procrastination. The only way you can ensure you won’t fail is never even to try. It’s surprising how little fear of failure it takes to get you to overlook the fact that by not trying you also ensure that you won’t succeed. Besides, you are going to try, only not right now. Maybe later in the afternoon, when you’re more up to it. After a game of two of Minesweeper ….

• Fear of success. In the corporate and business worlds, this concept may seem alien, even unintelligible. Yet it is very real. Success breeds new challenges, but with these come new expectations to live up to; new possibilities, but also new burdens. Success leads to change just as much as failure, and change can be frightening because it represents the unknown. Even if you relish new challenges, who’s to say that the next one won’t be overwhelming? As Buffy the Vampire Slayer once said, “I have to win every time; they only have to win once.” If, as many do, you take every challenge this seriously, fear of failure and fear of success will feed off each other.

• Perfectionism. Likely a common problem among financial advisors, perfectionism is a special case of fear of failure. The perfectionist’s fear is that the work will never measure up to the ideal image of a perfect, completed task he or she has in mind before starting. The temptation is to buy relief from this disappointment by putting off the effort. In an extreme case, the perfectionist never gets started at all—proving himself or herself right (the work never measures up to the idea) while avoiding the pain of failure (you can’t fail if you don’t try). If things were only that simple.

Which Kind Are You?

Why is it worth looking at these theories? Because really overcoming procrastination depends on understanding and correcting its underlying causes. There is a big difference here between the “relaxed” and the “tense” procrastinator. The former is the shallower of the two, in that there often is no underlying cause. There’s a reason that the paradigm relaxed procrastinator is the college student with an exam coming up. Faced with an unpleasant task—studying—he or she, being human, would rather not do it, and avoids it by playing video games or watching reruns. In the most straightforward cases, the problem is simply denial that the unpleasant task needs to be done. This is the situation in which Nike Therapy may actually work in a particular case, where the procrastinator has to buckle down and Just Do the unpleasant thing—though Nike Therapy in a single case is not enough. What’s needed is to establish a counter-habit to the habit of avoidance. Perhaps nothing more is required than to use an organizer and adopt a regimen of time management, as explained elsewhere in Chapter 3-5 of this book.

But even college students may suffer from fears that can’t be dispelled by a simple rah-rah. That goes double for financial advisers. Thus, if you’ve determined that you have a problem with procrastination, you need to look carefully to determine exactly what your problem is. To start doing that, keep a procrastination record: when you find yourself procrastinating, note what you are putting off, how you are distracting yourself, and what you’re telling yourself about it.

Do you just dislike cold calling, the way everyone else does? If so, you are probably a relaxed procrastinator about cold calling, and will probably benefit by taking a deep breath and picking up the phone at the same time every morning, working the tips given in Part II of this series. But what if you find that you engage in self-talk like the following?

• I hate cold calling, what if I set myself the goal of making twenty cold calls today and they all hung up on me?

• I hate cold calling, I never do my best telephone work without a lead, and I don’t always get a positive response.

These examples, of course, are meant to express underlying fears—of failure in the first case, and of being less than perfect in the second. If this is the sort of thing you tell yourself, you don’t just need to pick up the phone and start dialing; you need to start telling yourself different (and more accurate) stories. For example, instead of telling yourself “I must make a follow-up appointment as a result of every call,” substitute the truth: “It’s impossible to get a follow-up out of every call, it doesn’t reflect on my worth if I don’t.” By combining such positive self-talk with renewed effort, you’ll reduce your fears. Your successes will register as vividly as your failures, and you will be less likely to judge your failures as a disfiguring blotch on your sense of your abilities or self-worth (that is, less perfectionist).

So far we have explained that procrastination might be a simple matter of putting off a disagreeable task, or might result from deeper fears of failure, failure to be perfect, or success, to name only three. As noted, business coaches and consultants tend to be less concerned with the underlying psychology than with practical devices for breaking out of procrastination. The remainder of this subdivision explains the most useful suggestions.

Technique #1: Break It Down

Probably the single best suggestion to defeat procrastination is to break the project down into manageable chunks. As the proverb says, the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. That’s true in every walk of life. When Martin Scorsese began work on “The Aviator,” he didn’t say: “I have a three-hour film to make. What a lot of work! I think I’ll watch ‘The Simpsons’ instead” or “There’s so much that can go wrong with this project, I think I’ll do something safer.” (He may have said “I hate this process, the finished product never comes close to the movie in my head,” but he clearly used techniques like those described here to get over this perfectionism.) Instead, he broke the overwhelming task into a bunch of smaller tasks—casting, locations, special effects, etc., etc.—then broke those down further until he had a list of manageable tasks: “Call Leo’s agent in the morning,” not “Make $100 million Howard Hughes biopic in the morning.”

David Allen, the well-known productivity guru, subsumes this idea under his general approach. For any project, Allen counsels, ask what is the next step that has to be accomplished to move the project forward. That is, break the project down. Allen’s view is that only bright, imaginative people procrastinate, because only those with a vivid imagination can see all the ways a project can go wrong. Stolid people just forge right ahead without a care for the pitfalls. Flattery of his audience aside, Allen has a point. If you define the next action you really need to take in order to keep the project going, you distract yourself from the bigger, scarier, pitfall-strewn picture. Like a tightrope walker, you put one foot after another and don’t look down.

Technique #2: Start with the Most Manageable Tasks

Equally important, by definition the next action you really need to take is necessarily a manageable chunk of the whole, something that you can do. (If it isn’t, you haven’t broken things down far enough.) This has several obvious advantages:

• A task that can be accomplished in a simple step or two (“Call Leo’s agent”) will tend to get accomplished, unlike one that can’t be (“Film gigantic biopic”).

• Getting a small task done (and breaking down the big one into lots of other small doable tasks) confers a feeling of progress.

• If there is some way to keep a visual record of your progress, that can ...