This summer, I had an internship in the financial industry. I was selling insurance to people with union jobs all throughout the state of Ohio. There were many people that I had to meet with and they all came from different backgrounds. One thing that I found to be true, is that you can not treat every sale the same, and every client is different. For the different type of people, you must adjust your sales techniques.
One type of person that I had to meet with is a laid back person that wants to take things slow, and build a relationship before you ever discuss business details. They really valued the trust built between them and I. It was nice to sit down with them an build some rapport, this made it easy to pitch to them because you could figure out pain points for them and what you were going to focus on when you finally pitched. You had to feel this type of personality out early, because if you went to business too fast, they would not feel comfortable.
The other kind of personality was very rushed and wanted to waste no time. You had to really adapt because you could not easily find pain points to sell them on. I found it very important to ask these people good questions up front. That way you aren’t just giving them information that isn’t useful to them. If you spend 20 minutes discussing life insurance additions, and they already have them, you just wasted both of our time. You had to give them something that caught their immediate attention, and hopefully that would buy you more of their time.
BoweryJE22
I work at a golf course and I have to adapt myself towards every single member. Depending on their age, speed at which they are trying to get out on the course, their mood, etc., I have to adapt my behavior and actions in order to be on the same page as them.
I did a similar internship and had the same types of problems, though I don’t think I handled them as well as you did because I like to take things slow and most people wanted to rush right to the business part.
That is a great experience you had to talk to different types of people and sell insurance. That is not an easy thing to sell. I would imagine at first it is a little hard to adjust to each different type of person at first, but you get used to it.