Rolling the Dice, Bagging the Elephant, and Bucking a Trend

Each year as we read the entries for our annual FOCIS ^®  contest , we marvel at the ingenuity graduates of our consultative selling course, FOCIS, display as they put their skills and customized sales processes to work. Our winners for 2011 are great examples.

Insurance Sales Team Rolls the Dice to Win $32-Million Deal

$500 First Prize: Simon and Peg Boettger, National Account Representatives, Aetna Insurance

Insurance is all about risk. But how much risk do insurance companies like to take themselves? Ideally, none; practically, as little as possible-just like the rest of us.

Even Lloyd’s of London, which has famously insured famous assets such as Mariah Carey’s legs and singer Tom Jones’s chest hair, distributes the risk.

Nonetheless, FOCIS-trained Aetna national account representatives Simon Camaj and Peg Boettger “rolled the dice” to win a large disability insurance sale against a well-entrenched incumbent competitor: $8 million annually for four years, or $32 million.

Here’s how it happened.

Boettger and Camaj had secured a meeting with the benefits team of a prospect for Aetna’s disability products, a large corporation in the printing business. The team leader had made clear that they were well-satisfied with their current provider.

Since they just recently completed their customized FOCIS consultative sales training, Boettger and Camaj were eager to try the FOCIS approach in a major deal. Before attempting to persuade the prospect to switch, however, they needed to persuade their own supervisors to allow them to change the corporation’s standard presentation, a PowerPoint detailing “The Life of an Insurance Claim.” Eventually, they got the go-ahead to go with FOCIS.

So they left their comfort zone, abandoned the slide deck, and put their new, FOCIS-customized sales process to the test. They began simply by asking FOCIS questions. A lively discussion followed about the nature of risk, not the mechanics of claims: First, what was the prospect’s risk of switching carriers and, second, what was the risk of not switching?

Under skillful questioning, the benefits team acknowledged its #1 Challenge: The current provider could not incorporate four of the prospect’s automated processes into its systems. A “duct-tape” solution was keeping these important benefits functions on life support. Plus there were issues of employee dissatisfaction, the effort required to maintain the manual processes, and the time that monitoring the “fix” stole from more important work.

Boettger and Camaj were able to rip the duct tape off-or, at least, they explained how Aetna could readily accommodate the four processes without duct tape.

Even better, the in-depth discussion sparked by FOCIS questioning armed the insurance team’s internal advocates. They were able to win over strong resistance to switching carriers and clinch the $32-million deal for Camaj and Boettger. And there was an unusual bonus to boot.

Typically, new policies take effect on January 1. But the buyer insisted on an “off cycle” launch date of April 1. That rarely happens and had never happened to Camaj and Boettger. Needless to say, these FOCIS graduates were ecstatic that their “roll the dice” gamble paid off big.

Bagging the Elephant, Step One

Second Prize: $300
Brendan Kelly and Extended Team, Avison Young Commercial Real Estate

Working with the vice president of supply chain management for a major national corporation, Brendan Kelly, a principal with Avison Young commercial real estate, and his team closed on the first phase of a real estate deal worth $33 million. The proposal is at the board level, and Avison Young is the only finalist.

The account management challenges were especially complex because Avison Young is partnering with three other independent firms in an alliance that provides a highly efficient but not necessarily easy to explain “one-stop” solution. Along with Avison Young, two of those firms submitted their own proposals for a total of three in all.

This entry took second place in our contest because Kelly and his team employed multiple FOCIS principles over time.

The cooperative effort of Kelly’s four-company team:

Helped the Prospect Understand All Cost Implications:  Especially important was that Kelly showed the prospect how locating the facilities in foreign trade zones would save not just $500,000 for one year but $5  million  over the life of the project. After following the FOCIS process to discover this, and other hard-to-find implications, even Kelly was surprised at how large this number was. He and his team learned firsthand a key FOCIS principle: Prospects rarely know all the implications of the problems they face and often have no conception of how costly sticking with the status quo can be or how profitable the opportunity going forward.

Communicated the Value of Their Services:  Pressure on fees dropped like a stone. Kelly reported: “I was impressed the client signed the proposal [for Phase One, which did proceed] without a single change in word, punctuation, or fee on all three proposals. Never happened before-not to mention with three proposals!”

Beat Tough Competition with Persuasion, Not Education:  Early in the project Kelly received some discouraging intelligence: “I had been told by the president of one of the [prospect’s divisions] that he could not get us in.” The reason? The son of a board member headed up Avison Young’s chief competitor in the deal. But, thanks to skillful use of their customized FOCIS sales process, Kelly and other alliance members helped the prospect understand how large the financial implications were. The result was that “we beat the toughest political competitor,” Kelly said.

Earned Trusted Advisor Status:  The prospect came to see Avison Young and the extended four-company alliance, as a total outsourced solution for supply chain and real estate, to the point that the client asked if Kelly had an executive to oversee the project until a new internal executive was hired in several months.

“We are viewed as a valued advisor far beyond a commodity transaction broker,” Kelly explains. “With the presentation, visuals, and one-sentence questions, we established a dialogue as advisors vs. traditional chest-beaters. The differentiation FOCIS provided was high and, furthered by our integrated approach, made us the only choice. In effect, this became a no-bid contract.”

‘More Discovering, Less Fixing’

Third Prize: $200
Lisa Dieter, Financial Advisor, MorganStanleySmithBarney

Financial advisors in corporate-sponsored offices with retail fronts rotate “walk-in” watch. In Lisa Dieter’s experience, walk-in prospects don’t offer much potential. And that seemed to be true for a couple Dieter greeted one day on her watch. So, instead of taking the traditional route and talking about her firm, she asked a FOCIS question that involved the couple immediately with little ice breaking or small talk.

She continued down that path until she . . .

She adjusted her price because FOCIS discovery revealed that the couple’s finances were highly organized: Managing their investments would not require the typical time commitment.

Key Point:  Such a price adjustment is  not a discount  because it’s based on her lower investment of time.

In addition, industry practice is to prepare an investment plan as a way to sign up new clients-in other words, “demonstrating too soon.” Dieter provided no demonstration or sample of her skills to get this sale. She was persuading, not educating, and describes her use of FOCIS as “more discovering, less fixing.”

“In the past, I’ve felt like a miner with one of those flashlight hats who occasionally spots a gem but then doesn’t have a pickax handy to dig it out,” she explains. “With FOCIS, I feel like the mine is flooded with light, and I have a range of pickaxes at my disposal.”

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