SALES METHODS

to be trained masters of these subjects as well as the detail of the life contract and proposition. There are more books to be had today about chickens and cattle than about life insurance and allied subjects. But things are changing, and changing rapidly.

In selling merely protection, we have been selling by indirection the real service we can and do render the public, and making it more difficult for ourselves to sell.

If you went to men and told them you could guarantee that they would live to be 75 years of age, you could not sell a policy. But each man is an economic entity and the business of insurance is to project his life, work, ability and estate to the extent of the full three-score and ten, and you can sell him the means to accomplish this.

Ten years ago you couldn't insure, in such states as Indiana and Iowa, except for the benefit of blood relations. Today we insure for many other relationships, the principal ones including business relations. It is now recognized that the man has an economic value and that he can insure and otherwise proceed accordingly.

The value of a man in these respects is threefold: Static, the value of the hour and the day; dynamic, the value of the power in motion through life, and potential, the value that is there and can and should be used. The prospect should be most interested in his potential value, in what he can create and save.

A prospect can get a substitute for war service, etc., but he can't get a substitute for his static, dynamic or potential value. He himself must serve out the fruitage of a life, or provide its equivalent.

Necessity of Correct Advance Information. By B. A. Notzen

To improve on the number of closed cases for interviews made, I suggest that you secure, before you have your interview, a full and complete knowledge of your prospect and the exact conditions existing with that prospect, so that you are in a position to intelligently present your proposition so that it will properly cover him and the conditions existing with him.

Let me illustrate this phase of the work by an experience I had that will bring out the point clearly to you :

I was doing joint work with a salesman who knew the ter-20