It would be easy to brush aside anyone who does not jump at the chance to work with you. Some would argue that it is more efficient not to wait for prospects to come around.
For Maria Rosalinda Reyes Panuncialman, though, it’s an opportunity to work with these potential clients in the future by keeping them on her list and categorizing them on a tracking sheet based on their timeline. The four-year MDRT member from Makati, Philippines, compiles a list of all prospects she has met with who have not signed up for any policy and breaks them down into the following categories:
- Those who say they will be ready in a few weeks or months
- Those who say they are interested but would not answer follow-up calls
- Those who say they are either not ready or not interested
She constantly keeps in touch with these prospects to ensure they know they are important to her, greeting them on special occasions, inviting them to lunch or coffee and offering help on personal matters.
By doing this, Panuncialman closed a $32,000 annual premium and a $200,000 single premium policy from a prospect she approached three years ago.
“Because I kept her on my list, I constantly kept in touch with her by greeting her on special occasions and liking her posts on Facebook,” she said. “She was the one who called me and told me that she was ready to get a policy from me.”
This tracking sheet also allows prospects to play a role on her monthly achievable goal sheet — a list of target clients for the month — when the prospect has expressed an intention to start a policy on a particular month. Through this organized approach, Panuncialman can project her monthly production and her prospective closes for the month.
Read more in 12 ideas for prospecting.
Written by Matt Pais, MDRT Content Specialist
I’ve heard countless stories of prospects that just were not ready… even taking seven years but finally when they took action, the deals are often substantially larger.
This makes me think of including a “gauge” early in my process to objectively measure prospects readiness & stage of change. For example, during my days of voluntary medical research the transtheoretical model (TTM) was heavily used for weight loss, smoking cessation, and for good reason, as it had a substantial amount of evidence to support it’s use.
Thank you!