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How To Sell Insurance Using Powerful Stories
By: Jason Hornung – President
Jason Hornung Agency, Inc.
I started off my agency career as a captive. If you've ever worked as a captive agent or are
familiar with the corporate culture of captive insurance companies, you'll know how much of an
importance they place on putting up big life insurance sales numbers.
What's funny is that I've had the pleasure of working with two captive companies, one of them
being the big dog that shall not be named geez, I kinda feel like I'm writing a Harry Potter
script here, but I digress :)
At each of these two fine companies, I went through the six month agency training process.
Basically they bore you to death with all sorts of stuff that doesn't matter one bit
with hardly a passing thought on the rocks of this business, like how to sell insurance!
Just like any home office, they pump you up with product knowledge and computer system
knowledge as if that's going to get a potential client to commit a few hundred bucks a month
toward a life insurance policy!
Then they throw you out to the wolves and expect you to produce. I was a young buck of only
23 when I started my first agency, so I really didn't know any better to think on my own
I jumped in and did what they told me to do. I'd try selling life insurance to my prospects by
talking about the features of the policy and then simply quoting price.
I'd get a couple sales a month doing this, but it was nowhere near the production level the home
office was expecting!
My District Manager would be calling me all the time asking why I wasn't selling more. It really
started to wear on me. It sucks enough feeling like you are a failure, but to be constantly
reminded of it is even worse.
Just so you know, I'm one of those extremely analytical types so I ended up spending a lot of
time thinking through the process I was using to try and sell policies.
And it didn't take long for me to come to the conclusion that it wasn't me that was a failure. It
was the process I was using to try and sell life insurance!
Another thing you should know about me is that I love doing research. Realizing that my selling
process was broken, it sent me on a quest to discover how to sell insurance in the most effective
way possible.

©2012 Jason Hornung Agency, Inc. – All Rights Reserved
o
Over the course of about six months, I made a couple of huge discoveries about how to sell
insurance that allowed me to radically improve my sales for all lines, but particularly for life
insurance.
In fact, these simple changes allowed me to be able to make the company life insurance sales
award year in and year out from that point forward.
So in this article, I'm going to share those discoveries with you so you too can enjoy the same (or
even better) sales increase that I had!
Discovery #1 about how to sell insurance:
All people buy products based on emotion. It's particularly true with life insurance. Everyone
makes their purchase decision based on some type of emotion that they have. Then they justify
that purchase decision based on logic.
What you have to do is adjust your fact finding process so that you uncover what that emotion is
in your prospect that will trigger them into buying insurance.
For some people, it's the deep love for their family. For some, it's being able to put their kids
through college. For some, it's financial security and peace of mind. For others, it's the thought
of their spouse re-marrying
A side note - I actually uncovered a statistic that shows the #1 reason a spouse re-marries after
the death of a spouse is due to financial constraints.
I would get a really strong reaction out of most men when I'd tell them this statistic and they'd
feed back to me that they didn't want their wife to have to re-marry. That one sold a lot of
policies for me!
There are other emotional factors than the ones that I listed that you can uncover to trigger
conversion. The point is that you have to ask the right questions in your fact finder and have the
tough conversations that get down to the core of your prospect.
Then when you are giving your pitch, you need to tie all the benefits of the product back to that
emotion.
Let me give you an example:
Let's assume you have one of those guys that hates the thought of his wife re-marrying. I'd say

something along these lines after having determined death benefit and policy type.
"Ok, John. Here's the deal We've taken care of covering everything that is important to you
with this protection.
©2012 Jason Hornung Agency, Inc. – All Rights Reserved
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And what you are doing is guaranteeing that no matter what happens Susan is never put in the
position where she is forced into re-marrying just to make the ends meet.
We are going to be able to provide you this protection, security and peace of mind without
having you spend any extra money out of your pocket on a monthly basis.
Given that you are getting everything you want at absolutely no financial cost to you, do you see
any reason NOT to move forward right now?"
What you'll also notice in that example is that you use features, in this case how I used my
techniques for finding the money to logically support his emotional decision.
You can take that even further with every feature of the product you are selling.
Discovery #2 about how to sell insurance:
The most powerful way to really affect the emotions in your prospect is through story telling.
Stories are basically ingrained in our psyches. If you think about it, before writing was invented,
all communication was done through story telling. And even after writing, the vast majority of
commoners couldn't read anyway, so story telling remained prevalent.
Even today, with less people orally communicating stories and less people actually reading
books, our primary form of entertainment is getting stories through television and movies.
Once I learned how to sell insurance through telling my prospects a simple story, my sales went
through the roof!
So you are probably wondering how on earth you come up with stories or how you get into
telling them, so let's address those one at a time.
There's a few ways that you can find stories to sell life insurance. The best is if you have a
personal experience with life insurance.
The second best is using the story of a client of yours. And lastly you can even use stories of
clients from other agents you know.
You'll always hear guys and gals talking about delivering death checks. Ask them for the whole

story and use it with your clients if you don't have your own personal or client stories to use yet.
That's how I started.
In order for your story to be effective it needs to really paint the before and after picture to your
prospect. And there's two angles you can take.
©2012 Jason Hornung Agency, Inc. – All Rights Reserved
o
You can tell the positive story where the client bought life insurance, something tragic happened,
but because of the life coverage they were taken care of and able to grieve properly without
having to worry about money.
Or you can tell the negative story where the client didn't buy life insurance, something tragic
happened unexpectedly and the family was decimated.
For most people telling the negative story is more difficult, but I've found that it will sell more
policies (and bigger ones) than the positive story.
The reason being that people will go to greater lengths to avoid loss than they will to have some
type of gain.
Psychologically, the family being decimated is a major loss, while many prospects actually view
the family getting money as a gain from the death of the breadwinner.
That idea of financial gain from his death is strong enough to actually kill the sale of many
qualified prospects, so tread lightly with that angle!
How you get into telling these stories is going to be different in each circumstance you are
working with a prospect. The key is that you use your salesmanship to weave it into the natural
flow of the conversation at the point you want to start talking about life coverage.
So there you have it, everything I know about how to sell insurance using powerful stories. You
can take this and modify your approach immediately and start seeing results. I can guarantee
you that!
Of course, none of this matters unless you have the butts in your chairs that you can tell these
stories to. Fortunately for you, I have a surefire system that will make it faster and easier for you
to accomplish that than ever before
it's a system that leverages the power of the internet to create exclusive, qualified and pre-sold
insurance prospects wanting to meet with you. And it works for any kind of insurance!

What I've done is put together a free video that will give you the #1 secret that makes all of this
happen. You can get it by simply clicking the button below:
©2012 Jason Hornung Agency, Inc. – All Rights Reserved
o