Becoming an insurance agent can be a very rewarding experience. As an agent, you deal with people and/or businesses every day, helping these entities understand their exposure to certain types of risks or life accidents. These events, if not protected by the proper types and amounts of insurance coverage, can destroy a business or place serious financial hardship on a person or family. As an agent, you can take pride in knowing that you are helping educate and protect a business and/or individuals and families from life’s unexpected events.
Insurance is a relationship business. People buy from people they trust and like. To be a successful agent, you must truly care, while taking pride and ownership in what you do every day. Your client or prospect will see and feel your commitment which, in turn, will build trust. This trust will lead to your success. Your clients must feel and know that you truly care about their needs and not that you only care about making a sale. If you approach every day, every client, every prospect with the attitude that their needs come first and foremost, you will reap the rewards through customer retention and referrals.
Personal attributes to be successful; you must be a self-starter, self-motivated, goal-oriented, and committed to excelling. As an agent you are basically self-employed, no one is forcing you to go to work every day. If you can do this, your reward is building a clientele or book of business that pays you an annual or residual income for life, or as long as you own that book of business. This means you earn a commission at the point of sale as well as every year thereafter when that policy renews. Building a big book of business means a bigger income every year.
Last, anything worth doing does not come easy. Being an agent is not easy for all the things mentioned above. You must be able to take rejection – not every person or business is going to say “yes” and buy from you. More often than not, you will hear with words “thank you, but no.” You must stay strong and understand this is a numbers game, the more “no’s” you get means the closer you are to the next “yes.”
In summation, here are the top qualities of a great insurance agent:
- Have a client-comes-first attitude
- Be committed to building trust
- Be goal-oriented
- Be a self-motivated go-getter
