Quit selling to reach Top of the Table

By Mark J. Hanna, CLU, ChFC

I quit selling when I realized that being a financial advisor is a profession of results. It doesn’t matter how many phone calls you make or how many appointments you go on if you’re not seeing results.

Succeeding is more about technique and strategies than it is about product. Clients don’t care about the product. They care about the resolution you achieve with the technique that uses the product. I learned this lesson when I became a specialist.

Offer the solution

My specialty became the specific use of life insurance under the U.S. tax code for large-net-worth clients, businesses, clients with tax problems and clients who had special needs in their families.

I spent my career identifying and focusing on mastering the strategies and techniques that enabled the best use for clients of the insurance and other products that we sell. It’s not about the insurance though. Insurance is the solution, not the problem. Paying the premium enables the solution, and the technique is what makes it all happen.

Understand clients’ fears

You must stay the course to understand what the client’s deepest fears are, the ones that keep them awake at night. If you can focus on the necessary steps to find a solution for what’s bothering them or what they desire most, then you can craft a solution with the products, services and financial tools you provide through your relationships and the skill set you offer.

There were thousands of people working for large employers who were looking for the specific solutions we had. I connected to this large group of clients by marketing to the companies that employed them, and our results multiplied.

When you do the job right, people take the solutions you offer. You don’t have to push it.

Mark Hanna, of Walnut Creek, California, USA, is a 35-year MDRT member who was the 2017 MDRT President and is a 24-time Top of the Table qualifier. See more from Hanna at mdrt.org/grow-faster-by-group-prospecting.

The mindset and courage to qualify for Top of the Table

By Tony Gordon

What took me to Top of the Table was a chance encounter on a bus on the first day of my first MDRT Annual Meeting. I was feeling like a big shot because I made it to the Round Table. I qualified for MDRT by setting daily goals to increase my production. That worked well as my production, which had been constant for eight years, doubled. But feeling like a big shot didn’t last long. On the bus, I met a guy who told me about Top of the Table.

When he told me what it took to qualify for that club, I said, “I could never do that.” Then he said those magic words, “We can achieve anything we want to achieve in this business if we just have the courage to believe we can achieve it.”

I didn’t sleep during the week of the Annual Meeting. I lay awake at night thinking, “Is this all it takes? Just believe I can do it?”

I’ve always felt that it’s better to try and not succeed than not to try. After all, if I only made three or four times MDRT production, I wouldn’t be failing. Whatever progress we make is a success, even if we don’t achieve the big goals we dream about.

Upon returning home from that meeting, I tore up my old goals. I made new goals to make it to Top of the Table. What’s interesting is that I was in the same office, same desk, same chair and seeing the same clients that I had before the meeting. All that changed was my self-belief.

By changing my self-belief, my progress took a different course. By the end of the year, I achieved production for Top of the Table. Because of MDRT, I set those daily goals and my business doubled. Then I found out about Top of the Table, and I started to believe that I could attain that. The potential to do so must always have been there. I often wonder how much unrealized potential lies within all of us.

Tony Gordon, of Bristol, England, UK, is a 46-year MDRT member. He’s a 45-time Top of the Table qualifier and was the 2001 MDRT President. See more from Gordon at mdrt.org/why-objections-are-really-questions.

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