Good and talented insurance sales trainers are adept at improvising effective sales techniques from experts in fields other than insurance sales to enhance and strengthen your insurance sales training efforts. Two noteworthy techniques are the elevator pitch and the stair pitch. Both offer great advice to aspiring sales professionals on how to develop their sales pitch and create real-life scenarios around which the technique is built.
The elevator pitch is always from the salesperson’s perspective and the idea behind it is this. If you were in an elevator with a prospective client and had just 30 seconds (or an elevator ride to the top floor of an office building) to make a memorable impression, what could you say in that time to make an impact? What statement of yours could make the difference between being remembered and forgotten? The ladder pitch is typically from the perspective of the prospect and the idea behind it is this. What if your description of who you are and who and what you represent is so interesting that the prospect really wants to know more? Shouldn’t your presentation be good enough to spark a conversation that lasts as long as taking the stairs to the top floor, not just a quick ride in the elevator?
Each of these techniques has built-in components that ensure success upon delivery, and both find common ground in key assumptions such as these:
• You only get one chance, one chance to seize the moment. Will you capture him or let him escape?
• You only have 30-60 seconds (or a little more, if you’re walking up the stairs!) to make a powerful first impression;
• The attention span of an average person is 30 seconds. After that, the mind starts to wander.
• People lead busy lives. You need to grab them quickly or lose them forever.
Here is my list of what I consider to be the basic elements of a powerful 30 second presentation. These elements could easily be integrated into any insurance sales training program.
• Be clear, concise and specific. Use language that everyone understands. Don’t try to sound smarter or more informed than you are, and definitely don’t use company or industry jargon.
• Develop your presentation so that it is unique to you and the company you represent, and encourage yourself to talk about both.
• Let your personality shine on the pitch and let your voice convey your passion and enthusiasm for your job.
• Create something visual. Paint a picture with your words and let your words tell a story. Let those words and that story come to life in your prospect’s mind, and let those two things reveal who you are and what you do.
• Always have a “hook”, the only thing that gets your prospect’s attention. It is the part of your presentation that stimulates their curiosity. It’s what prompts them to ask questions, like “How do you do that?”
Although the staircase pitch hasn’t been around as long as the elevator pitch, it is nevertheless based on a good, solid approach and can also be easily integrated into any insurance sales training program. Many of the same elements found in an elevator pitch are found in the stair pitch, but your perspective is always from the point of view of the prospect, not the presenter. I particularly like the use of the “ladder” scenario because it lends itself so well to the real life sales situations insurance salespeople face.
The key components of the stair slope are:
• Communicate action and results to the prospect, not position. It is not enough to simply state where you stand. Saying that to a prospect is not interested or excited. You have said nothing about what you do and the results you have produced. Always use action verbs and talk about the results quickly.
• It implies exclusivity. Create a conversation with the prospect and make it clear that you and the company you work for are special, unique, like no other. If you do this effectively, you’ll get your prospect’s attention, mainly because no one wants to feel left out of something that someone else has exclusive access to.
• Ask everyone in your office to creatively ask and respond to the question: “What do you do?” and gives you the opportunity to create a shared mission together. Skillfully crafted and delivered with true conviction, it can be used by all salespeople and communicated in every sales situation. Like the elevator pitch, it also prompts your prospect to ask, “How do you do that?”
The goals of a ladder presentation are communication and conversation, and the real life scenario created in the presentation is this. To be effective, don’t you want your presentation to be unique? You want your potential customer to want to know more about you and what you do, right? Don’t you want to find yourself in a productive conversation with a potential client that lasts as long as taking the stairs to the top floor instead of taking the elevator? You want to take the prospect one step at a time up these stairs into your world and what it has to offer, right? And while you’re walking up the stairs, don’t you really want to talk to your prospect and figure out how you can help them? Don’t you want to start building a lasting relationship with them?
It is these questions and the three components of the ladder pitch that make this technique so attractive to insurance sales trainers as you work to turn your agents into good salespeople. Its vendors do not sell iPhones, appliances, or home entertainment systems. Your insurance agents are like doctors, dentists, bankers, investment brokers. They are service providers, relationship builders, and spend their careers working with people to meet their short- and long-term insurance needs and managing all the life changes that occur in between. They invest a considerable amount of time and resources on a daily basis, charting a future that provides these people with stability, security, and peace of mind.
As a good and talented insurance sales trainer, you can easily and effectively incorporate these two sales techniques into your ongoing insurance sales training program. It’s not so much a question of which sales technique is most effective. Rather, it’s about taking some of the most powerful elements of the elevator pitch and integrating them with the three key components of the ladder pitch. Use the real life goal and scenario of the ladder toss. Combine some of the most powerful elements of the elevator pitch, but let the key components of the ladder pitch be the driving force of the presentation. That way, you create for yourself a new and innovative insurance sales technique and sales strategy that is sure to make your agents better salespeople and enhance and strengthen your insurance sales training efforts for years to come. .