I grew up in a small town on the Ohio River called East Liverpool. It is found in Ohio at the junction of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. When I was a child it had a population of about 22,000. Today the population is down to just over 13,000. However, some very unique and remarkable people have come from my city. I want to tell you about one of them who learned the meaning of providing value to his clients so well that he became the greatest life insurance salesman of all time.
His name was Ben Feldman (1912 – 1993) and during his 50-year career selling insurance for one company, his sales volume exceeded $1.8 billion, with more than a third after his 65th birthday. And he did it by selling his office in East Liverpool and not in a major financial capital like New York.
Ben Feldman came from the sleepy little town of Salineville, Ohio, where he began his business career selling chicken and eggs for $5 a week. As an aspiring entrepreneur, he wanted to enter the insurance field, but was unable to pass the Equitable Life Insurance Company’s basic aptitude test.
In typical Feldman fashion, he sold himself to Equitable and began collecting premiums on meager nickel-and-dime policies. In 1942, he joined New York Life and opened a small office in the Little Building on Diamond in central East Liverpool. It was from this place that he began a relentless quest to become a member of the prestigious Million Dollar Round Table. He did it in 1946.
No one suspected that he would far exceed the million dollar mark, yet in 1955, he sold $10 million worth of coverage. Then he started selling a million a month, then a million a week, and in 1971 he signed contracts for more than $65 million. He then fetched $10 million a month and in 1983, with the help of his two sons, Marvin and Richard, he sold $148 million of insurance.
Feldman was an innovator who made it easy for his clients to understand the intricacies of federal estate tax law, which defiled the fortunes of vast numbers of wealthy individuals in the post-World War II period. Long before computer graphics, he created clever hand-drawn graphics illustrating the need for life insurance to protect an individual’s assets from the government. He would book plane flights with a potential client, where he would open his briefcase, filled with $100, $500 and $1,000 bills, along with his charts and graphs. The idea was to entice his neighbor to notice the money and comment, “Is it real money?” “Yes,” Ben would reply, “but I’m not afraid to take it, because it’s insured.” With such an opening, a sales presentation was a trap.
A lover of luxury cars, Feldman was often seen racing down the highways between Pittsburgh and Youngstown in his Cadillac Eldorado. It was within this 50-mile corridor that he sold most of his policies. Often equipped with a CB radio and car phone, long before anyone had heard of such a device, he handled rejection like no other.
One of Feldman’s favorite methods was to walk into a busy executive’s office and make an appointment. The response of an exhausted secretary is usually: “Sorry, her time is too valuable.” Ben would ask, “Is it worth $100 a minute?” “At least!” would be the reply, to which the reply (accompanied by five new hundred-dollar bills) would be, “Well, I’d like to buy five minutes.”
Even when Ben Feldman went deep sea fishing, he spent his time developing new sales techniques, memorizing the entire New York Life Insurance rate book. And he would arm himself with short, pithy sentences designed to overcome the most difficult challenge. To the potential client he said, “I believe in term insurance.” Ben would reply, “Term insurance is temporary, but your problem is permanent.” “I can’t pay the premium,” he would invoke, “You’re already broke and you don’t even know it.”
Following in the footsteps of such a legend was not easy for Marv and Rich Feldman, but they handled the challenge well when Marv became president of the Million Dollar Table in 2001, and Rich excelled in a number of activities, including “drag races.” . of all things.
Now you might be thinking that Ben must have been some kind of superstar, good-looking, fast-talking, kind of guy, but you’d be wrong. Ben was short, stocky, bald, and spoke slowly with a distinctive lisp. He never finished high school. He was so shy that years later, when asked to speak at insurance industry meetings, he would only agree if a screen was erected between him and the audience.
But, he was a legend when he got to know all the business owners in his region. He first did his homework and learned as much as he could about potential clients from him, so that when he met with them (often on a “cold call”) he was ready with the right Value Development Questions. . He didn’t always sell right away, but he never gave up. I once heard him say that for years he didn’t stop working for a day until he made at least one sale, no matter how late it was.
One of Ben’s favorite stories is about a prominent real estate developer. Ben tried for weeks to get in to see the busy man, but was never successful. One day, Ben stopped in his tracks and handed the developer assistant the envelope containing five $100 bills and asked her to give it to his boss. He told her, “If I don’t have a good idea for him, he can keep the money.” He went in and sold a $14 million policy. Years later, when Ben realized the man needed additional insurance due to the unprecedented growth of his business; He was once again frustrated by the man’s insistence that he was too busy to get a physical. Undaunted, Ben rented a fully equipped mobile hospital van, hired a doctor, and sent them to the industrialist. The man is rumored to have ended up with more than $50 million in coverage.
In 1992, New York Life marked Ben’s 50th year with the company by proclaiming “Feldman’s February,” a national sales competition. Ben took this as a personal challenge. The winner of the contest (at age 80) was Ben Feldman.
Ben was famous for his sayings that used to inspire both customers and himself. My favorite is:
“Doing something costs something.
Doing nothing costs something.
And very often, doing nothing costs much more.”
Ben Feldman died in 1993 at the age of 81. A few years before his death, he was asked about the largest policy he had ever written. “I can’t say. I haven’t written it yet.”