Inspiring true story to ponder.........read through you will know yourself! ......................................................................................................................... Inspiring Life--of an Extraordinary Salesman : Motivation: Its not Ben Feldmans fault that life insurance isnt universal. Its just that he didnt have time to sell to everyone. AST LIVERPOOL, Ohio — He didnt look like a salesman. He looked more like a gnome--short and stooped, pudgy and balding, with eyelids so droopy he appeared half-asleep. He didnt sound like a salesman. He talked softly, hesitantly, with a lisp. Sometimes he just sat there, blinking, and said nothing. He didnt act like a salesman. No cigars, no back-slapping. When he tried to retell the latest joke, hed start chuckling before the punch line. He was so shy that he once insisted on standing behind a screen when he spoke to an audience of fellow agents. But when he died in November at 81, Ben Feldman was beyond question the worlds greatest life insurance salesman. Without straying 60 miles from his home in this shabby old river town, Feldman would sell more life insurance in a day than most agents sell in a year, more in a year than most sell in a career. In the 70s, he personally wrote more business than 1,500 of the nations 1,800 life insurance companies. Feldman sold life insurance policies with a face value of about $1.5 billion--a third of it after he turned 65--and transformed his industry. He told insurance agents they could sell more, and he told insurance companies they had to. When he was starting his rise, New York Life Insurance would insure no one life for more than $500,000; he helped push that limit to $20 million. What made him run? Harry Hohn, chairman of New York Life, suggested an answer to those who gathered for his funeral: Ben really felt everyone in the world was underinsured. And he would do whatever it took to insure them, as a prominent Youngstown real estate developer discovered. After weeks of trying to get in to see the busy tycoon, Ben finally asked the secretary to take five $100 bills into her boss--to buy five minutes of his time. If I dont have a good idea for him, Ben told her, he can keep the money. He got in, and sold a $14-million policy. A few years later, Ben decided the same businessman needed another $20 million in coverage. But the man, busier than ever, refused to make time for the required physical exam. So Ben rented a fully equipped medical van in Chicago, hired a doctor, and sent both to wait for the man. The policy was so large that no one company would issue it. So Ben put together a consortium himself. When Ben was finished with him, the mans life was insured for $52 million. Ben Feldman was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who settled in eastern Ohio, where they dealt junk and poultry. He had dropped out of school at his fathers insistence and was selling eggs at $10 a week when he met Fritzie Zaremberg, a teacher who became his wife. Her response to his marriage proposal--How are you going to support me?--would goad him for the rest of his life. Ben started selling insurance shortly before World War II, but soon reached the point where most agents quit: Hed sold friends and relatives, and needed new prospects. So he began focusing on owners of small industrial corporations that were flourishing in eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania during and after the war. These men were building families and homes as well as businesses, and young Feldman appealed to their need to protect these assets with ever-increasing amounts of life insurance. As they grew, he grew. Other salesmen focused on such a clientele. But they werent as sincere as Ben Feldman. Some salesmen are crippled by suspicion--well-founded, critics argue--that life insurance isnt the best investment in many cases. But Bens ambitious young businessmen were so well-suited for insurance that this shy man drew courage from his cause. He really felt he was helping people, and this conviction propelled him. He bought life insurance himself. If I dont buy it, I cant sell it, he used to say, so he kept buying until he had $6 million worth. Other salesmen were sincere. But they didnt have Ben Feldmans drive. He worked 12-hour days, six or seven days a week. Hed drop in on four or five prospects a day, many of them strangers. But he knew all about them. Hed scoped out their plants, ordered a financial profile of their company, chatted up his other clients about the new prospect. Hed sat up late, crafting the pithy sayings that he called power phrases and rehearsing with a tape recorder. The only time his two sons could be sure of seeing him was Friday night, because Fritzie insisted on his presence at supper. So they started hanging around his office, filing or cleaning up. When Fritzie died in 1974, he only sold harder. The next year was his best. He was a workaholic, said his son Richard. Other salesmen were workaholics. But they didnt have Ben Feldmans goals. He set apparently unreachable sales targets, and then broke them down into achievable steps--a certain number of calls per week, or so many signed policy applications a month.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 23:47:08 +0000
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