Five TED Talks Insurance Agents Need to Watch
By Joseph Peters
To succeed in sales, you must be well-educated about the human condition. Watching TED Talks for insurance agents will help you get there.
Professional development is a way of life for insurance agents. Between completing the product knowledge and compliance courses your carriers provide and the sales training your insurance marketing organizations (IMOs) offer, learning is a big part of your job. And, let’s remember the continuing-education courses state insurance departments require.
All of this training provides nuts-and-bolts information you need to succeed in your career. But what about acquiring insights outside the ordinary— concepts derived from the bleeding edge of human understanding? For these, you need to experience the 18-minute presentations that have affectionately become known as TED Talks.
TED Talks (for Technology, Education and Design) began in 2006 at a Monterey, California, conference, with the publishing of its six speakers on the internet. Dedicated to promoting “ideas worth spreading,” the brief and accessible videos quickly went viral. Over the years, TED has posted thousands more presentations (4,100 and counting). Today, people watch TED videos at least three billion times a year.
Fortunately, TED’s videos address more than just subjects like space exploration or the future of computing. They also address topics related to insurance professionals, including the five insurance agent TED talks recommended here. These talks aren’t brand new, but their topics have stood the test of time. Enjoy!
Tony Robbins, Why We Do What We Do
Tony Robbins, a master business coach and motivational speaker, explored the six needs that influence what people think, feel, do and buy.
Unleashing a word torrent, Robbins discussed each need in great detail: certainty, significance, variety, love/connection, growth and contribution. By understanding them, he claimed one could understand why there’s violence, greed and suffering in the world. More importantly, Robbins said people can learn why they behave the way they do. This lets them regain control over their lives by creating new, more fulfilling behavior patterns.
Jack Vincent, A Sale Is a Love Affair
In their training, insurance agents learn how to uncover needs, design and present solutions and close sales. They also learn how to deal with consumer objections that arise along the way. What they might need to understand better are the emotions of selling. For Jack Vincent, a sales advisor, trainer and author, the primary feeling to master is love.
In his TedxLugano talk, Vincent expresses his conviction that a successful sales career depends on love. Insurance agents must love their customers and persuade them to reciprocate the feeling. How to earn that love? By behaving with emotional intelligence (EQ), that parallels the human courtship process of finding and falling in love and building a trust-based relationship.
The noted author of A Sale is a Love Affair: Seduce, Engage & Win Customers’ Hearts admits that product knowledge is always crucial. But he stresses that great salespeople instinctively and tactically manage the psychology of their customers. And they know how to earn a customer’s love and return it.
Orit Tykocinski, The Risk of Insurance
Insurance agents know how to identify and quantify risk and propose the right insurance product(s) to neutralize it. Straightforward, right? But Professor Tykocinski studies a phenomenon that exists below the surface: wielding insurance magically to ward off harmful events. This involves viewing insurance “as a vaccine, not an antidote.”
This tendency has a long history. In her TEDxInnsbruck talk, Tykocinski asserted that the 19th-century Czech writer Frank Kafka, a lawyer who worked for an insurance company, compared insurance to the religions of primitive peoples, “…who believe they can ward off evil by all kinds of manipulations.”
Tykocinski has witnessed this phenomenon in various contexts. For example, one of her studies revealed people with health insurance rated their future risk of needing an operation, physiotherapy or nursing care as lower than those without insurance. Oddly, those with insurance also underestimated their chance of losing money in the stock market, even though health insurance has nothing to do with investing.
“We buy insurance against the events we fear the most,” said Tykocinski. “But armed with insurance, we somehow feel we are no longer at risk.”
Selling based on this tendency is illegal since insurance is only a risk transfer mechanism, not a vaccine against life’s hazards. Still, it’s a reminder to agents to continually stress the psychological comforts of being fully insured against unforeseen losses. Playing to that benefit has incredible closing power.
Kelly McGonigal, How to Make Stress Your Friend
Doctors, nurses and health educators agree that too much stress can make you sick. Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist, agrees— but only to a point. “For years, I’ve been telling people that stress increases the risk of everything from the common cold to cardiovascular disease,” she says. “But I have changed my mind about stress.” In her TED Talk, she tries to convince the audience that stress can make them healthier.
McGonigal rethought her entire approach after reading a research study. It tracked 30,000 U.S. adults for eight years, first asking how much stress they experienced in the last year. Researchers then asked subjects if they believed stress was harmful to their health.
At the end of the tracking period, scientists looked up who died in the study. They found that people who reported having a lot of stress had a 43% higher risk of dying, but this was only true for people who thought stress was harmful. Those who had much stress, but didn’t view stress negatively, didn’t die in large numbers. They were the least likely to die of all the study subjects, including those with low stress.
McGonigal’s takeaway was that changing how you think about stress can improve how your body responds to it. In another study, Harvard researchers told subjects that stress was a sign their body was getting ready to meet a challenge. In a social anxiety exercise, the people who heard this had less physical stress than people who had a traditional view of stress.
This and other research changed McGonigal’s goals as a health psychologist. “I no longer want to get rid of your stress,” she said. “I want to make you better at stress.”
Patrick Renvoise, Neuromarketing: Is There a Buy Button Inside the Brain?
Insurance agents universally want to shorten the buyer’s journey to the close. According to neuromarketing expert Patrick Renvoise, the best way to do that is to understand the workings of the human brain, specifically the reptilian brain, its oldest structure.
In his TEDxBend talk, Renvoise lays out the respective roles of each brain part. The newest structure, the neocortex, controls rational thought. The next oldest part, the middle brain, manages emotions. Finally, the oldest element, the deep-seated reptilian brain, sparks instinctive behaviors.
Since the reptilian brain exerts more control over human actions than the two other parts, salespeople should understand the six stimuli that trigger instinctive responses. Then they should appeal to human instincts using Renvoise’s four-step marketing process.
If you’ve enjoyed these motivational videos for insurance agents, visit TED for more. And, when you find engaging, thought-leadership content, especially if it contains sales tips for insurance agents, please share it with your colleagues.
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