When I first entered the insurance industry I had the good fortune to join a small insurance brokerage as a partner. There were only two of us in the business, and my partner wrote mainly general insurance. On the day I joined him I asked him this question " what kind of insurance pays best?" He said "life insurance" I then said, what part of the life business pays best? and he said, "pensions is top of the tree"

I then said ." In that case, I'm in the pension business, what is a pension scheme?" It was obvious that he did know much about pension schemes, but he knew a man that did. This man was a representative for one of the major insurance companies, so I made an appointment for him to come and visit me at our office.

I explained that I was looking for a pensions product to sell to limited companies. He described the pension plan that his company marketed. It was a low-cost plan designed for companies with five or more employees. It provided a better return to the employee for their money than the existing state pension scheme. The cost of the scheme is deducted from the payments being made to the state scheme. This was a perfectly legal arrangement, in the UK and was called "contracting out".

Thus I had a scheme that was already being paid for by the employee and employer and which also contained a life insurance benefit should the employee, die before retirement. At that time, very few employees had any life insurance other than perhaps a penny policy to cover their funeral expenses. So the benefits of the scheme over the State scheme were, extra pension and the valuable additional life insurance. Immediately I knew I had something I could sell.

Now, who were my prospects? It was designed for company employees, so these were my target audience. I was quite excited about this product and decided I would go to the largest trading estate in the area and cold-canvas all the companies on the estate. The next day, this was exactly what I did. I spent all day walking from company to company asking to speak to the Managing Director. By the end of the day I had visited over 50 companies and from all that effort I had only spoken with two Managing Directors, neither of whom would allow me to present my pension scheme to their employees.

Having given it my best shot for the whole day I decided that this was not the way to sell company pension schemes. Having been trained in telephone selling, I next tried making appointments with Managing Directors on the telephone instead of cold-canvassing them. The next morning I went into the office and opened the Yellow Pages, I began by phoning Engineering companies. I started with companies that were within walking distance of our office. I rang and asked to speak to the Managing Director. When I was asked by the receptionist the nature of my business I told them I had important information about changes to the Government pension scheme that would affect all their employee's which the Managing Director would need to know about as it would effect the company and his employees. I then spoke to the Managing Directors, saying the same thing, and offering to visit their office for a short appointment to explain to them what these changes were and how they could benefit from them.

By the time I had made five telephone calls I had already secured three appointments. I knew then that this was a system that would work. I immediately rang the local labour exchange and asked them to send me female employees to work on the telephone. I interviewed a number and selected one that I would train to make the appointments for me. The reason I decided to ask for females to interview was based on my experience in telephone sales, I had learned that Managing Directors were more easily persuaded by females, especially if they sounded bubbly and interesting.

I did not want a full-time employee, as I knew that cold canvassing on the telephone is not a job that an employee can sustain for seven or eight hours every day. I also knew that there were lots of housewives with children at school, who needed to work, but can only work a few hours a day. There are lots of intelligent, talented females, who would be very happy to work for a few hours, between school times. There is a vast reservoir of talent to choose from, which is not expensive to hire.

At this point, let me recap on the first steps in my Blueprint for selling to small and medium sized companies-

1) I had a product I felt I could sell
2) I had identified my market.
3) I had decided on the way to approach my market
4) I then made the problem of prospecting into a process.

One of the secrets I had learned about success in selling is that Prospecting is like shaving, unless you do something about it every day, you will soon become a bum. Prospecting is a problem for every salesman, unless, you make it into a process. I decided that prospecting was so important to my career, that I would not do it. Instead I would make it into a process and get somebody else to do it for me. This decision was the foundation of my success in the insurance business. Over the years I have met thousands of insurance salespeople both men and women from many nations, and I know that finding someone relevant to talk to, about your product is the on-going and most difficult part of the work.

I have advocated this system of appointment making to hundreds if not thousands of insurance people, but most are reluctant to invest in employing help. The first mistake, they make is, they think that they have to train their appointment makers to sell insurance. This is not so. What they have to do is, train people to make appointments, which is a far easier than selling insurance.

The second mistake is, they look at the annual cost of hiring the person and automatically think they can't afford to pay thousands of pounds per annum to hire someone. What they lose sight of is, they are only hiring by the week and if the person they hire is successful at making a number of new appointments for them, by the end of a few weeks, they will have made so many additional sales, they will have earned many times the cost of their appointment maker.

They will also be adding to their client bank and building up their repeat sales and renewals a lot faster than they would have been able to do if they had continued to do their own prospecting. Prospecting is fundamental to your success, but it's a chore, find someone to do it for you at a reasonable price, and you will multiply your own income.