Is the holiday season actually the best time to focus on selling income protection?
The holiday season is busy. People are buying presents, preparing large meals, and planning family get-togethers. With the hustle and bustle of the holidays, you might think this is the worst time to sell income protection, but it could actually be the best. Yes, people are busy, but they’re also thinking about their loved ones and everything they’re thankful for. It’s the perfect opportunity to overcome price objections by showing how disability insurance can help them safeguard the things they’re grateful for and protect their loved ones.
Drawing on the Emotions of the Holidays
The holidays are often associated with sentimentality. But don’t be too quick to dismiss all the holiday movies, greeting cards and commercials that are common this time of year as overly sappy. Humans are emotional creatures, and emotions play a larger role in buying decisions than you might want to admit.
Baba Shiv, a Professor of Marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business, says that around 90% to 95% of our decisions and behaviors are shaped non-consciously by our emotions. According to Yale, research shows that people are more likely to stick to decisions that are rooted in emotions.
As the successful author and sales professional Zig Ziglar said, “People buy on emotion and justify on logic.”
For disability insurance sales, this is a huge revelation. While you may need facts and figures on disability to appeal to clients who value logic and reason, you still need to appeal to emotion to close sales. The holidays provide the perfect opportunity to do this.
What Are Your Clients Thankful For?
During the holidays, a good way to broach the topic of income protection is to ask your clients what they’re thankful for.
- If they say they’re grateful for their family, ask how a disability would impact their family. If they could no longer earn a paycheck because of an illness or injury, how would their family make ends meet? What would the loss of income mean for their plans for family vacations or college tuition?
- If they say they’re grateful for their home, ask how they would keep their house if a disability prevented them from earning a paycheck. Do they have enough savings to cover medical bills as well as a prolonged period of lost income?
- If they say they’re grateful for their career, ask what they would do for money if they had to quit due to disability. No matter how much they love their work, a serious health problem could force them to step back. What would they do without the income?
- If they say they’re grateful for their health, ask if they’ve every thought about how they would handle the financial impact of an illness or injury. Nobody enjoys good health forever, and a cancer diagnosis, spinal cord injury or other disability can change a person’s life in the blink of an eye. How would life change for them in the face of an unexpected disability?
Don’t Let Your Clients Take Their Good Fortune for Granted
When you’ve always been healthy, it’s easy to take good health for granted. The same goes for things like having a roof over your head and food on your table.
A report from the Financial Health Network found that only 10% of working-age people with disabilities are considered financially healthy, while 46% had unmanageable levels of debt. The National Disability Institute says people with disabilities are more likely to be late on mortgage payments, overdraw on checking accounts and take loans from retirement accounts compared to people without disabilities.
Planning for disability is a critical part of wealth preservation. Unfortunately, many individuals skip this essential step because they don’t think disability could happen to them, so they don’t want to spend money on disability insurance. For many individuals, this will prove to be a huge mistake – the Social Security Administration says that one in four 20-year-olds will experience disability before reaching retirement age.
This holiday season, help your clients protect the things they’re thankful for. DIS has developed a Wealth Preservation Sales System that can help you overcome common price objections so you can make more disability insurance sales and protect more of your clients against the financial impact of disability. The kit include a pre-approach letter, flier, script and more. Download your kit today.
