Summer Reading Suggestions From Agency Checklists
It’s official! Summer has finally begun. As such, Agency Checklists thought it might be interesting to offer a suggested summer reading list of interesting insurance titles to inspire you over these summer months.
As you know, Agency Checklists brings you high quality, insightful insurance articles and information each week for free.
When deciding to buy something related to your insurance business or career (or even for yourself!), you can actively support Agency Checklists’ by buying these or any titles via the affiliate links provided below. In return, Agency Checklists will receive a commission from our partners without any additional cost to you, the reader. With that in mind, we have poured through the online racks to find these five titles that we think our readers may enjoy.
A win-win for all, we say.
Book #1
The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results
The author, Gary Keller, is chairman of the board and co-founder of Keller Williams Realty, Inc., which holds the #1 position as the largest real estate company in the world. His New York Times bestselling books have sold more than 2,000,000 copies.
The ONE Thing has made more than 400 appearances on national bestseller lists, including #1 Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and USA Today. It won 12 book awards, has been translated into 30 languages and voted one of Top 100 Business Books of All Time on Goodreads.
Book #2
Agents of Change: Rethinking Insurance Agency Marketing
In this engaging and easy-to-read book, follow along with fictional insurance agency owner, Jim Wakefield, as he fights to keep his struggling small business afloat. Slowly and surely, he discovers not only how to find more customers, but also how to retain them for the long-term through loyalty-generating marketing initiatives. For clarity, the authors step in at the end of each chapter to provide further explanation and free valuable resources to help you attain the same success as Jim in your own hometown insurance agency…or any other business.
Book #3
How to Get More Leads from Your Insurance Agency Website
Michael R Guerin is a veteran of the USAF, serving from 1985 to 1990. He graduated from St John’s University in 1998 with a BA in Theology and received his MA in Philosophy from Fordham University in 2002. In 2008 he founded Success Marketing, LLC, a web marketing company. Since that time he has worked with a number of clients focusing on online lead generation.
Book #4
Confessions of an Insurance Agent: From hating insurance to selling it! How I built a business using the heart and skills of a teacher
I grew up in small towns all my life. Ten different towns and six different schools before the 7th grade seemed like a terrible thing when I was a kid. In hindsight, I think it helped me learn how to interact with strangers and try to make them into friends. That happens to be a skill that every business person would like to have.
I was a teacher and coach for eight years before becoming an insurance agency owner. The last 16 years I have been trying to navigate the waters of being a business owner in the insurance industry. I have never been “agent-of-the-year,” but I have learned you don’t have to be in order to be successful. The best teachers and coaches are the ones that try to make a lifelong impact on their students and players. It’s not just about the grades or the final score of a game. With this same motivation, I have developed my business-view. Teaching people about insurance is not just explaining coverage terms. That’s like saying Algebra is just explaining formulas. Haven’t we all said, “Why do I need to learn this”? Insurance is a tool, and I want to teach people how to use it effectively and efficiently.
Book #5
Getting “Yes” Decisions: What insurance agents and financial advisors can say to clients
What causes potential clients to say “yes” or “no” to our proposals?
Well, if we could read our potential clients’ minds, we would see the five questions they use to make their decisions.
Five questions? Yes. We will know the exact sequence and importance of these decision-making or decision-breaking questions. And 80% of this process happens even before our presentations or proposals begin.
What does this mean for us in real life? No more convincing, proving, and information dumps. Instead, we will allow our prospects to willingly volunteer to do business with us before we even propose solutions.
Enjoy this clear and fascinating journey into our potential clients’ minds. Discover why the old school sales techniques of the 1980s no longer work. Our prospects are over-marketed to, subject to constant advertising, and can search for their own solutions online. But none of this matters when we do our job of guiding them through the minefield of insecurity and doubt.
In the new world of instant decisions, we need to master the words and phrases to successfully move our potential clients to lifelong clients. Easy … when we can read their minds and service their needs immediately.
Can we master these new words, phrases, and five questions quickly? Of course we can, and this book shows us how.
Let sales experts Bernie De Souza and Tom “Big Al” Schreiter share their secrets of instant rapport through closing.