In addition to understanding the products in your portfolio, there are four "core" skills that must be mastered by anyone seeking to build a successful career in insurance and financial services. These are:
- Marketing - Finding enough of the right kinds of people to see who meets your "on-profile" definition of a prospect.
- Selling - Helping people discover their needs and wants, showing how they can resolve them with your products, and getting them to act now.
- Client-Building - Turning customers (people who buy from you once) into clients (people who will buy from you over and over).
- Business Management - Planning to have enough sales production and renewals to meet your income and profitability goals.
These are closely related skills. If you market yourself and your services to the right groups of prospective buyers, selling becomes easier. By taking a consultative, problem-solving approach to selling, building a loyal clientele becomes easier.
By maintaining healthy, productive relationships with your clients and treating service as a profit-center, managing your business becomes easier. And, by managing your business effectively and pursuing continuing professional education throughout your career, you can look forward to doing the rest of these things very profitably for a long, long time.
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