Official Organ Of The Sla vonic Benevolent Order Of The State Of Texas. Founded 1897. iSENEVOLENCE
VOLUME 54
NO. 35 •
HUMANITY
BROTHERHOOD
Postmaster: Please Send Form 3579 with Undeliverable Copies to: SUPRERIE LODGE, SPJST, POD 100, TEMPLE, TEX. 76501
AUGUST 31. 1966
FROM THE EDITOR'S DESK GOOD SERVICE . . . GOOD PRODUCT Somebody said a long time ago that success was "90 per cent perspiration and 10 per cent inspiration." Someone else added, "where there's a will, there's a way." There's a lot of logic and common sense wrapped up in both sayings. A life insurance firm can't afford to use a lot of cheap sales gimmicks in order to get business. If you really want to get business and keep it you have to offer good services along with a good product. Someone recently said that you have to be like good ole' "plain vanilla, but that you have to offer good service. We may have to work twice as hard as a competitor to get the business, but we'll get it if we give above-average service along with our excellent product. By giving the best service, we have people coming back for more. Not too many years back, somebody figured that life insurance companies should offer customers a policy that insures two or more lives under one policy. The SPJST has such a policy. We call it, appropriately enough, the Family Plan. When companies first started selling this type of coverage, it didn't sell like hot cakes because the whole policy terminated at the death of one of the insured, and usually added increased costs as the family grew. Not so today. Now this plan is offered for one premium cost and
THINK IT OVER .. . "If America is to grow great, we must stop gagging at the word `spiritual.' Our task is to re-discover and re-assert our faith in the nonutilitarian values on which American life has rested from its beginning." —Laurence M. Gould • • A rural area is one of those backward places that uses money instead of credit cards. does not increase, regardless of the number of children added or adopted into the family. But again, no matter how sound and favorable the features of your insurance plans are, they are no better than the service that goes with them. In the SPJST, this service feature involves everyone from the officers of the local lodge, (most often the financial secretary), to the officers of the Supreme Lodge. If someone along the service chain falls down on the job, payment of a claim or other settlement is delayed, sometimes for weeks. This rarely happens in the SPJST. We have an enviable reputation for quick settlement of claims. That's service. When a prospect lets it be known, either personally or through a friend, that he or she is interested in additional insurance, or in new insurance,
and the organizer involved sees that person within 24 hours, that's service. If you wait, someone else is going to make the sale. The policy may not be an SPJST policy. Every organizer knows that selling insurance (and service) is not the easiest job in the world. A lot of shoe leather takes a beating. Beating the by-ways for the type of members that we want is a painstaking process, but when a prospect is handed to the organizer on the proverbial "silver platter," then it certainly behooves him to see the prospect with great haste. That is also service. It must be the prime function of man to aspire, to reach a higher level, to get a clearer view, to rise to something nobler, purer, and better. There comes to every man at times a sense•of something above him, something great, beautiful, and good, something that wins him and draws him to himself. It is this quality of aspiration that keeps the nature fresh, that renews the faculties and makes them keen and strong for opening paths into the higher realms of life and truth. Without this quality, one plods along on the same dusty level, labor turns into drudgery, or worse still, one becomes contented with things as they are. • And Benjamin Franklin passed this on to future generations: "Friends and