02 The Importance of Field Training

Field training is crucial for success in Primerica. Going on multiple field training appointments with a skilled trainer leads to better results and higher agent retention. It is recommended to have at least 10 field training appointments, preferably 20. Field training should be seen as an investment in building a successful business. Training helps develop skills in recruiting, training others, and closing deals. It is important to overcome objections and learn how to set appointments effectively. A winning presentation is also necessary to impress potential clients. Proper training and experience lead to confidence and better results. the importance of being field-trained. The key to developing successful people who you retain is dependent totally on the quality of the field training you do and your ability to explain clearly how you get the results you get. You know, the importance of field training can't ever be overestimated. In my experience, the people who go on the most field training appointments with a skilled trainer ultimately do significantly better, and the retention of these agents is dramatically higher. You know, the number of adequate field training appointments in my opinion is at least 10, minimum of 10, and 20 would be a lot better. Most of the best people that I've trained and developed, they went on at least 20 appointments. You know, when you're being field-trained, it's common to worry about losing potential commissions. I hear this a lot from people. They want to wait until they get licensed because they're afraid of what they're going to lose, but that is a result of your lack of understanding of how to build a successful Primerica business. You should be looking at your field training as an investment, like going back to school to get a degree or to learn what you need to learn to ensure you become a success once you graduate. You know, getting properly field-trained is what's going to allow you to effectively recruit, train, and build a great business and become wealthy. You know, I never worried about commission I was losing during my field training because I knew the most important thing for me was to get fundamentally sound, to know what I was doing, to get trained properly so that when I started to go out and see clients myself and when I started to train my own team, I was super effective. I didn't want to miss a beat in that area. I wanted to make sure I was very good. And I knew if I'd go on 10 or 15 or 20 or 30 appointments before I got my license and have lots of experience, that when I started recruiting people or when I started training the people that I recruited and I started seeing people on my own, that I was going to have infinitely more success than if I went on one or two or three appointments where I didn't really know what I was doing. See, the key to longevity in Primeirica is you getting good at the business, right? You being effective, which means closing, knowing how to do a great presentation, knowing how to overcome the different questions and objections that come up. You've got to good at that. And the only way to get good at that is through field training. Although you will miss out on a little commission in the short term by being trained well, you will quickly make up any perceived loss of commission as you begin training your new recruits in their warm market. You see, when you're out there training people, you got trained well and you're out there training all these new recruits, you're gonna make so much money in the field training process of training new recruits that the money that you didn't make while you were being trained is gonna be infinitesimal in comparison. You see, what you do with your trainer is what your new people will do with you. It's kind of like a circle. It all works out financially, but the most important thing is that you get trained well so you have the opportunity to succeed once you're licensed. Imagine if every new person you recruited wanted to get licensed before they did anything. You would have a team of licensed incompetents, which doesn't do anyone any good, doesn't do them any good, doesn't do you any good, and nobody wins from that. Instead, what you want is everyone who gets licensed to be so well trained by the time they get licensed, they can go on appointments and get results immediately and have the ability to train others effectively so the process repeats itself. Imagine every new person getting a license, being totally prepared to get results with the ability to recruit and train people from the beginning. Your growth could be potentially incredible, but if no one knows what they're doing, you're dead in the water. You've got to get people trained, and you've got to get trained. See, you learn Primerica similar to the way you learn to fly a plane. First, you do some classwork, then you go up with the trainer in a plane who you watch them. They go over what they're doing, they explain what they're doing, and then you can get a feel of how it's done. And then pretty soon, you begin doing some of the flying with them. You spend hours with a trainer until they believe you can take off and land without their help. By the time that happens, they feel you're competent enough to go solo. Without killing yourself, they'll allow you to go up alone. That's how you get trained. The more time you spend training in an airplane, the more confident you're gonna be when you solo. Well, folks, that's exactly what happens in Primerica. The more time you spend in training, when you go solo, you feel very confident. You don't feel like you're gonna crash and burn. You feel like you can recruit people. You feel like you can get results. You feel like you can get referrals. You feel like you can grow your business. You feel like you can do this thing. But if you go on two or three or four appointments, there's no way to get that feeling. It's not possible. So you wanna make sure you get trained really well. Get as much experience as you can prior to going solo. You're gonna feel a lot better, a lot more confident, which automatically is gonna allow you to have better results, meaning you're gonna make a lot more money, and that's what you want, isn't it? Number two, I think you need to listen. I have a CD that I put out called Overcoming Objections. So you're gonna hear objections like, I wanna think about it, I'm not much of a salesperson, I wanna talk to my agent, I have a financial planner. They're gonna hear all kinds of things that people are gonna come up with. I'm too busy, et cetera. Your ability to overcome people's concerns or objections is really gonna be a huge element in the success you have. In other words, the better you get at that, the more people you're gonna get to follow you, to go ahead and do business with you, to set appointments with you. You're gonna make Primerica a really fun, easy business. If you have a challenge at overcoming objections, everything about it's gonna be difficult. So I'd recommend that you listen to this Overcoming Objections CD that I did at least 100 times. And when you hear 100, you might think, wow, that's a lot. I think you should listen to it 500 times, but I mean, you should listen to it a lot. Let me tell you the reason that is, because I spent years and years and years developing my skill at doing this, and I am frankly very, very good at doing this. And what you're gonna find as you listen to it, you're gonna learn how to do that in a really professional, pleasant way without offending people, which is really important. And what you're gonna find is, in listening to it, what I'd like you to do when you listen to this Overcoming Objections CD, is I'd like you to really pay attention to the questions I ask. One of the things that people make the mistake, they think if I give them more information, they'll wanna go ahead. The truth is, that doesn't work. The more questions you ask, the better results you're gonna get. So I would really focus on listening to the way that I ask the questions, listen to the tonality, and learn how to ask those questions so that they become reflexes for you. So when you're talking to someone about the business, or you're doing an appointment, and they come up with an objection, if you completely have it down, in other words, you've got it memorized, you can then operate on a more kind of reflexive level where you're not having to seem like you're coming from a script. You're gonna be able to talk in a more conversational manner. It's gonna be a lot more effective. So that's why you need to repeat it over and over and over so that it becomes embedded in your memory so that when those objections come up, you'll know exactly what to say. You won't hesitate, you'll be relaxed, and you'll be infinitely more effective, believe me. So that's the second thing. The next thing I think you need to learn how to do is how to master how to set appointments. And they're gonna be later in this CD program. We're gonna be covering all these things, exactly how to do them step by step. So all of this is gonna be part of the program. So I'm just kind of pointing these things out initially to get you thinking about it. So you need to master how to set appointments. Why is that important? Because if you can't get an appointment with a couple, right, or an individual, there's no way to get them to do business with you because you need an appointment to do that. There's no way to recruit them into the business because you need to sit down with them to do that. Nothing can happen. You can't close business, and you cannot recruit people unless you have an appointment. So everything begins with the appointment. Your ability to set appointments, your ability to teach new people how to set appointments is gonna determine how much business you do and how you grow. So you've gotta really learn how to do that. And it's gonna be a little bit uncomfortable in the beginning, but you're gonna learn how to do it, especially if you follow the scripts that we have. And we'll be talking about exactly how to do that. It's really very easy to do, and you can do it, again, without being pushy, without being confrontational. There's a way to do it. It's very professional. We're gonna teach you how to do that. The next thing is develop a winning presentation. Once you know how to set up an appointment, when you get on that appointment, you have to be able to do a presentation that's compelling, that gets the person that you're sitting down with, the couple that you're sitting down with, to go, wow, that's really fantastic stuff. I really would like to do that. I could see how that could benefit me in my life and allow me to accomplish the things that I wanna accomplish. So you've gotta learn how to do a presentation. And part of this program, again, will have me doing the presentation, how to do a really effective presentation. You need to spend a lot of time practicing that. I used to practice doing my presentation and setting appointments. I would tape myself. I would do it with my wife. I would do it with friends. I would do it over and over, and then I would tape myself till I could hear myself later and see what I sounded like, to see if I was any good or not, or where I needed to improve. And that's one of the things you're gonna wanna do as well. The next thing you have to learn how to do is how to prospect. How to prospect, how to talk. Prospecting is really simple. I'm gonna talk at great length about prospecting, but in essence, prospecting's a very simple thing. Prospecting is simply talking to people about what you do with the intention of getting an appointment to see if you can get them involved in some way. That's all it is. That's all prospecting is. The more people that you talk to, the greater the probability you're gonna get people to join your business or do business with you. So it's really, prospecting is simply telling people what you do and giving the opportunity to them to say yes or no to it. Then the next thing after prospecting is you gotta learn how to get referrals. You know, when you go see people and you help people, your ability to get them to refer other people to you like them is gonna make growing your business much, much easier. You're gonna be able to expand at a really fast rate if you get really adept at getting those referrals. And getting referrals really is a function of doing a really great job with everybody you sit down with. If you sit down with a couple and you really put together a really fabulous, comprehensive plan that they can see clearly how it can help them get where they wanna go and they're excited about the future as a result of it, you're never gonna have any problem getting referrals. Believe me. So your number one key to getting referrals is always focusing on doing a tremendous job for your clients and for the people that you do business with. The next thing is you need to set aside specific time every week committed to building your business. If you're a part-time, like when I was part-time, what I used to do is off on Mondays and Wednesdays. So I couldn't really do primary on the other days because I used to work evenings. So I made a commitment that on Mondays and Wednesdays from five to 10 o'clock at night, I would set up time to go see people, do appointments, meet with people, to do business and recruit them. So I worked those nights. That's what I did. So whatever time you can fit in, you need to set aside specific time to do that. You can't do it willy-nilly. You have to really put together a schedule and then get committed to that schedule and then work your business on those days. It's kind of like if you had a part-time job, right? If you had a part-time job and you work for, say Nordstrom, a department store, they would have a schedule for you and you have to show up or you're gonna get fired or you're not gonna make any money. You just show up. You don't think about it. Well, this is your own business. You have a lot of leeway, a lot of flexibility, a lot of freedom, but you still have to work off a schedule if you're gonna be successful. You have to plan it all out and work that schedule. So make sure you set aside specific time every week, hours that you're gonna commit to building your Primerica business. The next thing is you need to take a long-term view of mastering the business. You can learn to be great at all parts if you begin with a long-term point of view. Every part of the business is learnable. There's no, you might be better at some parts than others in the beginning, but every part of the business, if you think about this more in a long-term point of view, and I'm gonna talk about that in a second as well on another CD, that's very important because you're not gonna get, I always have this saying. I said you have to be bad before you can be good and you have to be good before you can be great and you have to be great before you can be incredible. Nobody goes from being bad to being incredible in anything, in any business. There's a learning curve in everything, including our business, but if you're willing and you take a long-term point of view, perspective on building your Primerica business and you give yourself a chance to learn and you're easy on yourself when you make a mistake because you're gonna make mistakes. There's no way to build any kind of business and not make mistakes along the way. You're going to. It's gonna be part and parcel of any business. I don't care what you did, you're gonna make lots of mistakes. The key is to learn from them and keep growing and that's what you need to do in Primerica. I made a lot of mistakes in my first two or three or four years and I still make mistakes every now and then, but a lot fewer than I used to, but I made tons of them early and you're gonna do that too, but I also really understood that the only way for me to get better is for me to be bad in the beginning and to learn from those things. So give yourself a break and do that, okay? So this is what I did with a new recruit when I recruited him. One of the things that's important, you're gonna start recruiting agents. One of the things we're gonna do is you start building your business, you're gonna go out with a trainer. The trainer is gonna do everything in the beginning. They're gonna do the presentation, they're gonna close all the transactions, they're gonna recruit agents for you because number one, you're not licensed, you're not capable of doing that, you're not able legally to do that. Number two is you don't know enough to do that yet, so you're gonna have to learn that. You're gonna learn how to do our business by watching another competent person do the business and you're gonna mimic and model those people, okay? So once you do recruit somebody, I wanna talk a little bit about what you need to do with that new recruit so that making sure, one thing is that you know what to do and if you have somebody that's training you, that your trainer is doing these things, okay? That's another thing that the reason I wanted to put this audio out is so that you can make sure whoever's training you, you know what they should be doing and if they're not doing that, you need to discuss that with them or talk to your regional vice president and have them make sure they're doing that, okay? So this is what I would do if I were just recruited you and you're just getting started in the business, this is what I'd do. Number one, I'd complete your hiring application or your independent business application, that's the first step, doesn't take very long, takes about 15 minutes to do that. Complete all that independent business application and then what I would do is I would have you, the new agent, bring out their address book so that what we could do with the address book, the reason for the address book is so we could put together a warm market list of all of the people you know, the warm ones, the cool ones and even the cold ones, okay? Put together a list with as many names as possible without judging them right now. Right now, I don't wanna judge anybody, I just wanna put, if I can put down 25, 50, 100, 200 names, as many names as possible. Once I got a long list of names, then the next thing I would do is I would sort that list out and I would take that and from that list, I would start narrowing down the top people we wanted to see first. We would sort them out from five pointers on down, I'll explain what a five pointer is. A five pointer is an individual that is married, has children, is a homeowner, is employed with an income of at least $25,000 a year and up has lived in the area two years or longer and is looking to do something kind of special. You know, wants to build a business, wants to do something great with their life. You know, the most qualified person all the way to the least qualified person, the hottest market where people really like and trust you down to the people that you don't know very well, okay? And then after that, once I got that, I would have you, let's say we sorted it down to maybe 30 or 40 people, okay, that we really wanted to go see first. Then I would have you do a thing, we call it the direct contact referral letter. It's a letter that you can get, it's printed off the F&A. It's really simple, it's a form letter and the letter just basically introduces, if I'm training you, it introduces me, okay? And on that letter, it basically says, you know, I'd like you to, I'll introduce you to Hector Lamarck, he's gonna be calling you to talk to you about blah, blah, blah, all right? So that's basically just real simple. But the point of this letter is this, it's a referral letter from you about me to somebody that trusts you, that likes you. So on that letter, what I'm gonna have you do is I'm gonna have you postscript it and say something like this on that, within your own handwriting. Everything's printed out, but your handwriting's gonna say, listen, when Hector gives you a call, make the time to meet with him. I promise you it's gonna be time well spent. It was amazing what he was able to do for me. And then just sign it with your name, okay? So then what happens, I'm gonna keep all those letters, and I'm gonna send those out. And then so that way, if I call them, or you call them, they're gonna expect it. Or if I call them for you to set up an appointment with them, I'm not calling some guy out of the blue, right? They're gonna have received a letter from you, somebody they like and trust, referring me to them. So they're gonna be much more receptive to talk to me, okay? And so then we have those letters. We put those aside. We're gonna use those. We may or may not need to use those depending on how comfortable you feel calling your War Market. If you have a lot of confidence with your War Market, you know everybody likes you, they trust you, and they'll meet with you, we'll just have you call and set them up. Otherwise, we'll do the letters. So we're gonna have two options.