We’re currently in-between open enrollment periods in the individual market, so brokers are receiving a lot of advice—from AHCP and elsewhere—to sell other products that their clients need. It’s not a bad idea considering the number of products our license allows us to sell; indeed, there are insurance products to protect almost anything that’s important to our clients and prospects. Plus, it’s a good time to diversify, to place our eggs in a few other baskets, especially with the current uncertainty surrounding individual health insurance commissions.

But there’s a problem. Actually, there are three problems:

1. our clients’ time is valuable, and they can only devote so much to learning about their insurance options;
2. they have short attention spans
3. they have limited insurance budgets.

As brokers, we have to be both diligent and creative to continue writing business in spite of these constraints.

Selling Seasons

The first two problems require you to be efficient in the way you explain the various coverage options you have to offer. People seem to learn best in bite-sized chunks, becoming easily overwhelmed by important insurance and financial matters. A trick many successful agents use is to sell different products throughout the year. The open enrollment period in the individual market has given us a “selling season” for health insurance products, but agents can create their own artificial selling seasons for other products as well.

For instance, perhaps you could select the springtime to sell life and disability products. With the weather improving and flowers starting to bloom, it’s easy to point out how precious life is and why it’s important to make sure we’re protecting the people we love. The summer might be a good time to talk with your clients about filling in some of the holes in their health coverage. By then, they’ve likely used their health insurance and realized there are some significant gaps in their coverage. Fortunately, there are a lot of products that can help fill these gaps, such as accident and critical illness policies, hospital indemnity plans and cancer insurance. While they’re thinking about their health needs, they may also want to discuss dental and vision insurance.

You get the point. By picking specific times of the year to focus on different types of insurance coverage, you’ll be able to fine-tune your sales pitch and keep your clients’ attention long enough to get a buying decision. This approach also gives you justification for getting in front of your clients three or four times a year, which is good not only for new sales but also for retention.

The Annual Review

If the “selling season” strategy doesn’t appeal to you, another option is to let your clients that you’re very busy during the individual health open enrollment period and focused almost exclusively on health insurance. However, they probably have a number of other insurance needs, so—after the chaos of open enrollment has ended—inform them that you’d like to sit down to ensure they’re protecting the people and things that are most important to them.

It’s really not too difficult to schedule this sort of appointment. While empathizing with how boring insurance can be (it’s about as fun as doing your taxes or getting a root canal) try to remind them how critically important it is. And insurance needs do change over the course of a year: people get married, have babies, change jobs, get raises, buy a home or a car, get sick and, yes, eventually die. As life changes, so do the types and levels of coverage they may need. By scheduling one non-health insurance visit a year, you can take care of these needs all at once, eliminating the need to think about them for another twelve months.

Once you’ve scheduled an annual review with your clients, it’s easy to schedule the next one because, well, it’s annual. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that every June you’ll be sitting down with John and Sally to review all of their insurance needs?

Educate or Guide?

Once you’re in front of a client or prospect, you have a choice to make: is it better to A) tell them about all the different types of coverage you offer in hopes that they’ll recognize a need that they have or B) conduct a “needs analysis” and recommend only those products that you think are a fit? There are advantages to each approach.

The first strategy—explaining the different types of exposure they may have and the solutions you sell to reduce those risks—can be a great approach for clients who aren’t very open about their personal situation. Without a thorough understanding of their needs, risk tolerance level and budget, it’s difficult to make a solid recommendation. In this case, your best bet might be to tell them what you have to offer and see if they recognize the need. A side benefit of educating clients about a wide range of coverage options is that they may think of someone else who needs your product; it’s a great way to get referrals.

The second strategy is to ask the right questions, uncover your clients’ specific needs and recommend the products that are right for them. This customized recommendation will be valuable to your clients and will spare them the details of all of those products that they’re unlikely to buy.

Make Trade-Offs

The biggest challenge brokers are facing these days, though, is working with your clients’ very limited budgets. If your clients are already struggling to make ends meet, how can they afford another insurance product, even if they know they need it? It’s a good question.

You can only stretch a dollar so far, and some types of coverage are higher on the priority list than others. People with a house need homeowner’s insurance. Everyone who drives is required to have auto insurance. Most people, especially those with families, need life insurance. And the government is now mandating that we have health insurance. So how do you split up what little money is left, if any?

Obviously, our clients are going to have to make trade-offs, and if they’re the ones making the coverage decisions, they may choose the wrong products. Your job as a broker is to understand both their needs and their budget and put together the most comprehensive and cost-effective recommendation that you can, recognizing that this is a difficult task.

For example, maybe your clients think they need dental and vision insurance, but they might do better to purchase a discount plan instead, pay for their dental and vision expenses with HSA dollars and use the premium savings to purchase an accident or critical illness policy. Someone who needs additional life insurance might fund it by purchasing a less comprehensive health insurance plan.

The point is this: some people have the money but just need to understand why they should spend more on insurance coverage; other people, though, have a very limited budget, and for those folks we may need to “find” the money for the coverage they really need by shifting it away from coverage they can do without. They’ll appreciate your being sensitive to their financial constraints.

Your Product Portfolio

Putting together the right package of insurance products for your clients starts with having those products in your portfolio and understanding when they’re a good fit. If there are some gaps in the solutions you’re currently offering to your clients, we’d love to help. Contact AHCP today to learn about all of the different product lines we represent and get some free tips on how to maximize your sales. Remember, you can find everything you’re looking for to support your clients’ needs right here on our site after logging in.