Insurance sales are one of the most stressful jobs on the market today, with rapidly changing technology and growing competition along with frequent rejection and difficult clients. Add to that the pressure to meet certain quotas and update your records, and it’s easy to see why this job isn’t for everybody. Luckily, most agents come into the job with a thick skin, and can focus on long term goals to carry them through the tough times. However, if you’re feeling like you need a little extra motivation to tackle your days, here are a few quick tips to help you recharge and re-center.

With autumn closing in on us, here are a few quick pointers to evaluate your current sales approach and freshen up your techniques:

1. Qualify first, engage later: The most successful agents know that there is no point in wasting time on prospects without the means or inclination to purchase a new insurance plan. By making qualification the first step in your sales pitch, you can save yourself time and effort better used on more promising leads. Make sure when you are contacting prospects you find out whether they are in a position to buy, or if they have any recommendations of others who may be looking for your services. Remain polite and friendly, but keep on topic and move on when you sense that the call isn’t going to go forward.

Summer is almost at an end, and along with the change in seasons now is a great time to evaluate and change certain sales practices that might be limiting your ability to reach your full potential as an insurance agent. Here are several key points to go over when thinking about your own sales approach and management routine:

1. Prospecting: The most successful agents have a true passion for prospecting, and they are good at seeking out and maintaining new avenues of lead generation. Take time this season to look for new lead generation and follow-up techniques you can adopt into your regular sales routine. By keeping things fresh, and adding new elements into your monthly schedule you will be able to find and implement the best methods to fit your particular sales personality.

Are you putting in the work pounding the pavement, making the calls, and implementing fresh new marketing strategies, and yet you’re still feeling like you just can’t get ahead? Perhaps it’s time to evaluate your sales technique and figure out if there are some hidden reasons for your current rut. Here are a few areas to focus on during your sales “check-up”.

In order to gauge your current client satisfaction and hone your skills for future sales, a customer satisfaction survey is a great way to get a clear and honest series of subjective answers from respondents. Here are some simple tips for creating a clear, easy-to-follow survey to find out where you stand with your clients.

1. Keep it simple: Keep in mind that asking clients to fill out a survey takes effort on their part, so it will be up to you to make the survey as inviting and easy to understand as possible. Try and limit the number of questions to under 10, or one page, so that upon opening the survey they are not intimidated and immediately put-off by the amount of work involved in answering your questions.

“Summertime, and the living is easy…”

So sings jazz legend Billie Holiday, and as we enter into the dog days of August it can be tempting to sit back and take a breather from the demands of sales and prospecting. However, despite the inviting portrait of summer ease painted by Ms. Holiday, August is, in fact, an excellent time to put in some extra effort to smooth the transition into the autumn sales season. Here are some simple areas to focus on in order to hit the ground running for September.

As a busy agent, there may come a time when you are asked to do a public speaking presentation for an audience larger than you are used to addressing. Here are a few simple tips to ease on-stage jitters and make your talk run smoothly.

1. Make it visual: a great tool to get your message across, and also take some of the pressure off of you as a speaker is the Power Point Presentation. By integrating some useful graphics and writing up some pages of key points that you can go through with your audience, you will have an excellent co-pilot to calm your presentation anxiety. However, make sure that you are still focused on making your own connection with your audience—without the human touch, your message might get lost along the way.

As sales agents, we are known for outgoing personalities and exceptional communication skills. However, that doesn’t mean that we can’t sometimes get the public speaking jitters, or feel less than confident when put on the spot with a presentation. Here are a few simple strategies to overcome public speaking stress and make a positive impression upon any audience.

August is upon us with its motivation-crushing heat and vacation malaise, making it a particularly difficult time to re-evaluate your marketing strategy and revamp your lead generation process. However, there are ways to get out of the summer funk and back to productivity; by putting together a simple one-month pilot project right now, with clear start and end dates, you are more likely to stick with it for the full 30 days and reap the benefits of these new habits. At the end of the month, evaluate how things have changed in your business and decide whether or not you want to continue with any of these strategies.

It can be easy to fall into work-related rut if your sales are steady and your leads keep coming in, so here are a few quick ways to wake up your creative side to improve your engagement and motivation.

1. When working on a new problem, whether on the sales or marketing side of your job, take some time to brainstorm several different solutions to each problem before acting. Try and see each issue from several different angles and put yourself in the shoes of the lead, the current client, and your competition before making a decision on the best way to follow through.