I grew up in a small town on the Ohio River called East Liverpool. It is located in Ohio at the crossroads of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. When I was little, it had a population of about 22,000. Today the population has dropped 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 so well the meaning of delivering value to his clients that he became the greatest life insurance salesperson of all time.

His name was Ben Feldman (1912-1993) and during his 50-year career selling insurance for a company, his sales volume exceeded $ 1.8 billion, and more than a third came after he turned 65. And he did so by selling from his office in East Liverpool and not in a major financial capital like New York.

Ben Feldman came from the quiet little town of Salineville, Ohio, where he began his business career selling chicken and eggs for $ 5 a week. As an aspiring entrepreneur, you wanted to enter the insurance field but failed to pass the Equitable Life Insurance Company Basic Aptitude Test.

In typical Feldman fashion, he sold himself to Equitable and began charging premiums for nickel-and-dime policies. In 1942, he joined New York Life and opened a small office in the Little Building at the Diamond in the center of East Liverpool. It was from this place that he began an incessant quest to become a member of the prestigious Million Dollar Roundtable. He did it in 1946.

No one suspected that it would far exceed the million dollar mark, yet in 1955, it sold $ 10 million in coverage. Then he began selling a million a month, then a million a week, and in 1971 he signed contracts for more than $ 65 million. He then made $ 10 million a month and in 1983, with the help of his two sons, Marvin and Richard, he sold $ 148 million in insurance.

Feldman was an innovator, making it easier for his clients to understand the complexities of federal estate tax law, which desecrated the fortunes of large numbers of wealthy people in the period after World War II. Long before computer graphics, he created ingenious hand-drawn graphics, illustrating the need for life insurance to protect a person’s assets from the government. He booked himself on airline flights, along with a potential client, where he opened his briefcase, full of $ 100, $ 500 and $ 1,000 bills, along with his charts and graphs. The idea was to entice your neighbor to notice the money and comment, “Is it real money?” “Yes”, answered Ben, “but I am not afraid to take it because it is insured.” With such an opening, a sales presentation was a tray.

A lover of luxury cars, Feldman was often seen racing up and down the highways linking 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 in-car phone, long before anyone had ever heard of such a device, it handled rejection like no other.

One of Feldman’s favorite methods was to walk up to a busy executive’s office and make an appointment. The response of an exhausted secretary would normally be, “Sorry, your time is too precious.” Ben would ask, “Is it worth $ 100 a minute?” “At least!” would be the answer, to which the answer (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 it was armed with short, concise phrases, designed to overcome the most difficult challenge. To the prospect who said, “I believe in term insurance.” Ben replied, “Term insurance is temporary, but your problem is permanent.” “I can’t pay the premium,” he invoked, “he’s already broke and he doesn’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 endeavors, including “drag racing. “, of all things.

Now you might be thinking to yourself that Ben must have been some kind of superstar, I bet, fast talker, some kind of man, but you’d be wrong. Ben was a short, stocky, bald man who 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 placed between him and the audience.

But, he was a legend when it came to making it a point to meet all the business owners in his region. You did your homework first and learned everything you could about your prospects, so when you met with them (often on a “cold call”) you were ready with the right Value Development Questions. It didn’t always sell right away, but it never gave up. I once heard him say that for years he did not stop working 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 inside to see the busy man, but he always failed. One day Ben stopped in his tracks and handed the developer’s assistant the envelope with five $ 100 bills and asked her to give it to his boss. He said, “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 that the man needed additional insurance due to the unprecedented growth of his company; once again he was hampered by the man’s insistence that he was too busy to take 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 end up with more than $ 50 million in coverage.

In 1992, New York Life marked Ben’s fiftieth anniversary 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 clients and himself. My favorite is:

“Doing something costs something.

Doing nothing costs something.

And very often, doing nothing costs a lot more. “

Ben Feldman died in 1993 at the age of 81. A few years before his death he was asked about the most important policy he had ever written. “I can’t say. I haven’t written it yet.”