Adding ancillary insurance to your selling repertoire can be a rewarding move. It’s the perfect way to add more value to your clients and boost your commissions. But when it comes time to pull quotes and enroll clients, it’s easy to start panicking and thinking about the extra work.
After all, you’re picking up new insurance plans, sorting through a stack of providers, and adding extra tasks to your daily routine. Luckily, if you’re selling ancillary insurance products, you don’t have to be overwhelmed.
In this article, we’ll outline the simple steps to pulling in clients, preparing quotes, and enrolling participants in ancillary insurance products.
Types of Ancillary Insurance You Should Consider Selling
If a primary health insurance program doesn’t account for specific costs or expenses, your clients can pick up ancillary insurance to cover the costs. Before you start enrolling clients, it’s important to understand what ancillary insurance types you could sell. Here are some common examples of ancillary insurance:
- Vision insurance
- Dental insurance
- Life insurance
- Accident coverage
- Critical illness coverage
- Short-term health insurance
Regardless of which ancillary insurance products you decide to sell, there are straightforward ways to quote and enroll clients in the best program for them. Here’s how:
1. Understand the Benefits of Ancillary Insurance
The first step in quoting and enrolling clients in ancillary insurance programs is making sure you and your clients have a firm grasp on the benefits. By educating clients about the benefits, you can turn on the light bulb and drive enthusiasm for participation.
Here are some benefits for your clients:
-
Preventative coverage: Many ancillary insurance programs may cover the costs of preventative care procedures, such as dental checkups and eye exams. In turn, these preventative measures can help clients avoid even higher costs in the future.
-
Catastrophic events: In many instances, ancillary insurance could give clients an added level of coverage for accidents or large, unexpected costs. Ultimately, ancillary insurance can provide peace of mind in the face of uncertainty and will help to protect clients from life-changing financial disasters.
-
Personalized benefits: Oftentimes, ancillary insurance will provide specialized coverage in niche markets. For instance, people who wear glasses may be interested in picking up vision insurance. In some instances, they’ll benefit from free checkups or even coverage for larger procedures such as eye surgery.
In addition to providing wide-ranging benefits for clients, ancillary insurance also sparks broad benefits for you as a seller. Here are a few to keep in mind:
- It’s a whole new source of income.
- It opens up a wide range of cross-selling opportunities.
- It turns your operation into a one-stop shop for insurance.
- It encourages clients to come to you for all of their insurance needs.
2. Use Automation to Streamline Processes
Once upon a time, brokers had to follow a tedious process to quote and enroll clients. Here’s a look at how the process looked in the old days:
- You draw in leads.
- You schedule a client meeting.
- You gather carrier information and compare plans.
- You meet with your client.
- You fill out forms and applications.
- You return to your office and submit forms.
- You receive the final quotes.
- You finally enroll your client.
As you can imagine, this process is painful when you’re facing a range of ancillary providers and programs. That’s why it’s crucial to streamline processes and embrace automation.
By trimming your quote and enrollment process, you’ll have more time to focus on building out stronger client relationships. Here are some tools that can help lighten your load:
- Customer relationship management software: The more ancillary products you offer, the more difficult it will be to stay organized on your own. That’s where customer relationship management (CRM) software becomes a lifesaver. CRMs let you keep track of leads, hand out proposals, store customer information, and set task reminders on one simple platform.
- Automated email alerts: Another way to free up time is to use email automation. The more you keep in contact with your clients, the more likely they’ll be to come to you for ancillary insurance products. Email automation lets you stay in touch with clients without adding an extra to-do to your plate. Plus, some CRM software lets you trigger email follow-ups from the same program you use to organize and manage your client information.
3. Use Software to Quote and Enroll Ancillary Clients
There was a time when agents had to dig through plans, compare them, find the best plan for clients, and send quotes. If you’re adding ancillary insurance products to your offerings, that process will bog you down fast.
However, quote and enroll software has emerged in recent years to make quoting and enrolling clients much easier. Here’s what quote and enroll software lets you do:
Real-time price comparisons: Quote and enroll technology will let you see a real-time price comparison right away. Rather than forcing you to sift through droves of carrier websites and sort through the pricing on your own, the software will do the heavy lifting for you.
-
Easily crafted proposals: Rather than pulling quotes and writing proposals to relay to your clients, you can use technology to empower your clients. With the right software, they’ll be able to see all of their documents, applications, and proposals on one platform—all on their own time.
-
Easy enrollment: With the right quote and enrollment software, your clients will be able to enroll themselves online. In most cases, their applications will go directly to the carrier without requiring you to pull together or send the documents.
-
Ongoing access to quotes: Some software programs will let you or your clients pull quotes on demand, which keeps your clients happy and engaged.
4. Focus on Cross-Selling
Cross-selling lifts the pressure of generating new leads off you, so you can spend more time answering clients’ questions during the quote and enrollment process. And it’s essential for ancillary insurance sales. Here are some ways to use cross-selling and upselling to drive ancillary enrollment:
-
Build deep relationships: If you want existing clients to enroll in ancillary insurance, start by getting to know them on a deeper level. Maybe they have family bonds that make life insurance appealing. Perhaps they’re risk-takers and could use extra accident coverage. In all cases, by getting to know your clients, you’ll sniff out opportunities to drive higher ancillary enrollment.
-
Communicate constantly: Keep all of your services fresh in your clients’ minds. When it comes time to enroll, be sure to check in and address their questions. Every positive experience will encourage them to come to you for their additional insurance needs.
-
Keep an open mind: When asking interview questions, keep all of your ancillary products in mind. You never know when a window will open. For instance, if a client decides to buy a high-deductible healthcare plan, they may also be interested in critical illness coverage. In any case, being aware of everything you offer will open up new opportunities to enroll clients in ancillary insurance products.
-
Stay persistent: Remember, your clients’ and leads’ circumstances can change on a dime. Keep searching for that perfect fit for them. As you start offering a wider range of ancillary products, keep those past clients and leads at the top of your mind.
Start Streamlining Quotes and Enrollment for Ancillary Products
With so many tools available, now’s the perfect time to streamline quotes and enrollment for all of your ancillary programs. These tools can shoot you ahead of the competition and give you more time to focus on those client relationships that pay off the most.
Want to see how advanced quote and enrollment software looks in action? Schedule a demo and try out our quote and enrollment software today.
