Sell All Insurance Coverages to All Your Clients

The best way to increase client retention is to make sure you provide all the insurance products your customer wants and needs. Most agencies do a good job of selling the traditional personal lines coverage like home, auto and, perhaps, an umbrella.

On average, consumers purchase up to seven (7) different types of insurance coverage. According to the latest information I have, the average number of policies per personal lines account in a typical P&C agency is only 1.4.

This low average count means your clients are purchasing some (most) of their insurance products from someone else. There is an extensive list of insurance coverage people buy which many insurance agents are not actively selling. This includes:

• Pet Insurance (still the fastest growing insurance product)
• Life Insurance
• Accident Insurance
• Individual Health Insurance (on and off exchange)
• Short-Term Medical
• Dental and Vision Insurance
• Critical Illness Insurance (high deductible plans make this attractive)
• Medicare Supplement Coverage
• Travel Insurance
• Rental Car Collision Damage Waiver (why do agents tell their clients to buy from the rental car company?)
• Wedding Insurance (I purchased two policies when my two daughters were married)

For most insurance agents, the problem with selling these coverages is you cannot afford to market and promote them. It is simply too expensive. Your staff does not have the time to take these calls and educate your clients on the coverages. You don’t make enough commission to justify the time.

Add to this problem the slimming commissions and carrier fluxes, and it is hard to provide a comprehensive market solution to your individual clients efficiently. At least that is what agency owners think.

Fortunately, there is a solution.

There are practical online solutions that streamline the marketing and sales process for every product mentioned above. Is your agency taking full advantage of the options? Effectively using the Internet as your marketing tool and outsourcing the sales process allows you to help your client by selling them what they want to buy. The best way to retain clients is to make sure you provide all the coverages they want to buy.

Today, I want to highlight one option for outsourcing individual medical and voluntary insurance products. While there are multiple outsourcing options, after some detailed research I have come across a company I am comfortable recommending that will take over this process for you at a very reasonable cost.

The Health Partners Solution

The goal of Health Partners America (HPA) is to simplify the individual insurance market for their insurance agency partners.

HPA provides a streamlined, customizable online platform for you to handle all aspects of the individual insurance market efficiently. Their platform includes a professional call center that is licensed in all 50 states, securing the best rates and commissions from over 100 carriers. They handle the entire process from carrier appointments to customer enrollment.

Here is how this service can work for your agency:

• Your agency signs up as an HPA Partner.
• You select a website URL you will use as your agency-branded individual insurance marketing and sales portal.
• HPA creates your website portal based on your brand requirements.
• You choose the specific products you want to offer to your existing clients and prospects that find you online.
• An 800 phone number is included on the website and is answered with your agency name.

The cost to the agency for the customized website portal and monthly maintenance (including the call center services) is $100 per month.

If the agency has a life and health license, you will receive a share of the revenue generated from HPA. If you are not licensed, you will receive a referral fee.

HPA created a demo website for me so you can see what your agency site might look like.

 

In case you are wondering, the Auto & Home button can send anyone interested directly to your agency website to get more information or a quote. Check out the full description of the solution.

Here are some ideas on ways your agency could take advantage of this type of outsourcing solution.

Pick and choose coverages: If you already have a process to sell some of the coverages available, continue to use your same process and just select the specific products you want to offer through the portal. I might suggest you look at the current cost for handling the sales process yourself. It may be more cost effective to outsource this part of your agency.

Individual health: Only choose the individual health line of coverage to provide access to those people needing individual health coverage. It is hard to keep up to date with carrier appointments and the expertise required to sell individual health insurance market.

Cross sell: Internally market the availability of these additional coverages to your existing clients in newsletters, outgoing emails and on your website by providing a link to your portal.

Supplement group business: You sell the group benefits to businesses and then use the HPA portal as an outlet to pick up all of the non-benefit eligible employees. Alternatively, add a voluntary insurance option for employees to your overall plan. It would be a good way of providing voluntary insurance coverages to all employees easily maximizing your revenue.

Maximizing agency revenue and increasing client retention will benefit your agency. Using an outsourcing solution like HPA just makes sense.

What tools has your agency found to help you sell all types of insurance to your clients? Let me know in the Comment Section below.