The Rule of Seven

Published by Eric Hemati on March 21, 2017

Seven is such a powerful number. Stop any person in the street and ask them to choose an odd number between 1 and 10. More often not, they will say the number 7.

‘Lucky 7’ is the world’s favorite number. There are seven days of the week, seven colors of the rainbow, seven notes on a musical scale, seven seas, seven deadly sins and seven continents.

Snow White ran off to live with seven dwarfs, there were seven brides for seven brothers, Shakespeare described the seven ages of man, Sinbad had seven voyages. And when Ian Fleming was looking for a code for James Bond, he didn’t go for 006 or 008. Only 007 had the right ring.

A recent poll of 30,000 people confirmed that 7 is overwhelmingly our favorite number — with 3 in second place. A remarkable ten per cent of those surveyed gave 7 — from the infinite choice of numbers available — as their lucky number.

When structuring your interaction with a prospect, use this to your advantage.

1. Ask for just “seven minutes” when asking for a sit-down conversation, and keep to it. That’s more than enough time to grab their cancer story and walk through the direct/indirect costs, a couple of claims, and arrive at the Buying Atmosphere. The only way you’re going to spend more than seven minutes is if they ask you to.
2. Once you’ve qualified a prospect through your Buying Atmosphere, it shouldn’t take you more than seven minutes to walk through the benefits that are going to map most closely to their needs, cover the return of premium, do a price-buildup and ask for a decision.
3. Once they’ve given you a decision, take only seven minutes to fill out their personal and banking information on one application, collect their signatures on all applications, and setup a Policy Review.

That makes your entire business interaction just 21 minutes with the person once they agree to sit down with you.

The only thing you don’t want to limit your time on is getting referrals – that can take as long as you want. And they’re much more likely to give you a LOT of referrals when they know they’re not referring a Cathy Chatterbox to visit with their friends.