 
By Chuck Jones
Please, no food or drinks allowed in the auditorium.
There are plenty of seats up front, so sit down and make yourselves comfortable
because you're going to be here a long time. Did you bring a pen and paper?
No? Well, you really don't have to because there's not much here to take
notes on.
Oh! I'm sorry. I'm not really in a lecture hall. I just
felt like I was as I read The 50+ Boomer: Your Key to 76 Million Consumers
by Donald L. Potter. I presumed that this book was a how-to guide on selling
consumer products, including insurance, to Baby Boomers. What I got was
a lot of profiling, a lot of theory, but almost no practical advice.
|
| The author finally gets around
to mentioning insurance on page 147 when he gives an example that
mentions Allstate Insurance. He gives it two sentences. |
|
It's clear that the author likes to turn a phrase. According
to him, Boomers are "free thinking, free spending consumers."
He says that Boomers "were not part of the World War II effort to
defend freedom; they were only a byproduct of its aftermath. They did
not cause the post-war growth, but they did taste its fruits." Boomers
also "eventually brought their activism closer to home; to their
families and communities. As a result, it became more important to learn
how to be part of the World Wide Web than to get involved in worldwide
issues." You can almost see the author smirking at his word processor.
Where’s the advice?
For a book about selling to the over-50 crowd, the sales advice is sparse.
In fact, The 50+ Boomer doesn't even mention sales until page 31,
and even then it's in the form of a rhetorical question: "Realizing
this situation exists is a marketer's dream. Do you have products and
services that can appeal to these basic egocentric and emotional needs
that can be bridged from the late 40s into the 50s and beyond?" A
few pages later, the author alludes to financial services, but only with
a throwaway line: "[E]ducation in financial matters is big these
days . . ." We don't get a sustained discussion of financial needs
until page 141, and even then it centers around banks.
The author finally gets around to mentioning insurance
on page 147 when he gives an example of television advertising that mentions
Allstate Insurance. He gives it two sentences. The only other time he
mentions insurance is his discussion of long-term care insurance, to which
he generously devotes three paragraphs.
Maybe I'm just grouchy, but it rankles me to see sloppiness
in a published manuscript. Here's an example: "Avis was an 'also
ran' in the car rental business [when] along came the 'we're only #2,
so we try harder' campaign and sales soared." Doesn't he mean "rentals
soared"?
OK, so The 50+ Boomer was not written with the
financial services professional in mind. But apparently it wasn't written
with any sales professional in mind. What you want to read is a sales
book on how to reach Baby Boomers and sell them insurance, but what you
get is a generic overview that could have been summarized in 512 words.
In fact, it just was.
 |
ADVISOR TODAY
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Break the Rules Selling:
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By John R. Graham
Superior Books
800-659-0069
$12.95, paperback
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