No matter how successful your health insurance agency or brokerage has been in recent years, you can always do better.
You’re reading these words, so you’re interested in learning how to be a better insurance agent. The good news is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to achieve stronger outcomes.
To be sure, you might have to change the way you do things a bit. But you probably don’t need to drastically overhaul your entire business. In fact, a few relatively minor changes can go a long way toward helping your insurance business get to the next level.
If you’re wondering how to be the best health insurance agent, you’ve come to the right place. Keep reading to learn five tips that should help you deliver even better services to your clients—and grow your agency or brokerage because of it.
When it comes to buying health insurance, many clients are interested in simply finding a plan that meets their needs (e.g., their doctors are in-network) at a price point they can afford. These preferences can make it difficult for agencies and brokerages to sell more plans.
The best insurance salespeople understand this perfectly—which is why they go the extra mile by positioning themselves as strategic advisers.
To do that, they anticipate clients’ needs, stay on top of industry trends and developments, and are continuously focused on finding new ways to increase their efficiency and deliver more value (e.g., investing in new technology to streamline client outreach).
Strategic consultants are also always available to answer clients’ questions and respond to their concerns.
Becoming a better health insurance agent starts with listening to what your clients are saying and putting yourself in their shoes. Leading agents and brokers possess a high level of emotional intelligence and are empathetic to their clients’ needs.
Don’t treat all of your clients as mere accounts to sell insurance to. Get to know them on a personal basis by listening to what they are saying and adjusting your approach based on that information.
If, for example, a client tells you that they are unhappy with their current coverage, you can suggest that they switch to a different provider next year.
The needs of every health insurance client are different. Some clients might be looking to buy insurance for their families, whereas others might be looking to buy insurance for their small businesses—or on behalf of a massive global organization.
Because every one of your clients has different needs and requirements, you need to position yourself as an agile partner who creates custom solutions for each client.
Beyond simply connecting clients with the best plans, you need to meet their expectations in other ways, too.
For example, one client might prefer chatting over the phone, and another might prefer communicating via email. By using a modern customer relationship management (CRM) solution (more on that later), you can easily keep tabs on how clients like to communicate—and be sure that you reach out to them via their preferred medium every time.
If your desk is messy, you keep confusing clients, and you have a hard time staying on top of the health insurance industry in general, it’s time for a new approach.
The best insurance salespeople are incredibly organized. They know where to find all the information they need quickly.
In large part, that’s because they use tools such as CRM systems that enable them to consolidate all client-specific information in one central repository.
Chances are that you don’t solve incredibly complicated math equations by hand. You use a calculator because it saves time and removes human error from the equation.
The same holds true for health insurance technology. With the right platforms in place, you can automate many tasks—enabling you to reclaim time that you can then invest in other important areas of operations.
Although automating might sound complicated, it’s actually not. Chances are that you already use automation in your everyday life. If you set a pot of coffee to brew before you wake up every morning, have set up recurring payments on certain bills, or record shows on a DVR each week, you’ve automated certain parts of your life.
As an insurance agent, you can seamlessly take advantage of automation in a similar way by investing in the right tools to help you sell insurance products—like a CRM system.
Very basically, a CRM solution enables you to keep track of all client-specific information—such as names, contact information, family composition, pre-existing health conditions, long-term goals, policy renewal dates, preferred method of communication, and date of last contact. With the right CRM in place, you can automate much of your client outreach—by sending an email to all of your clients to let them know that the open enrollment period starts in two months, for example.
To learn more about the transformative nature of CRM solutions for health insurance agents like you, check out our new e-book, CRM Productivity Report: Taking Your Insurance Agency to the Next Level with a CRM Solution.