The first sweet taste of success!

Ahh, the first sweet taste of success. A couple weeks ago, I finally broke through and sold my first insurance policy. It takes a lot of work and effort to reach a goal like that… and a lot of starving in between.

What most people don’t know about insurance agents is how hard they have to work just to sell one policy, especially in the early going when you’re just getting started. To sell that one policy, I had to make (approximately) 200 phone calls, only about 50 of which I contacted. Of those, I was able to set up meetings with about 15, but most of those folks cancelled or delayed on me. So I ended up with about four meetings that were kept, only one of which turned into my first sold policy.

It’s a rush of excitement, joy and relief when you get that first taste of helping someone out. It’s thrilling. But it’s also easy to forget just how hard you had to work to get there. It becomes tempting to begin thinking, “Okay, things are rolling now, soon I’ll have people calling me and it’ll get easier to help people.”

But that’s not solid thinking. The numbers don’t change much. You still need to do 100-200 calls to contact 50 people to set up 15 meetings, at least half of which will cancel or delay their meeting time with you, after you’ve already set a date and time. All that effort is necessary in order to get in front of 5-7 people and, hopefully, once you’re experienced enough, you can sell at least half of those.

But if you cut back on your calls, the numbers diminish and the rest of the numbers go down, too. That’s the hard part… to keep working at that high level, in order to acheive the level of success you need to make a good living.

If you slack off, call fewer people simply because you have a paycheck in your hand… well, you probably won’t, next week. A lesson I’m learning the hard way… but at least I’m learning it.