Dig into employee benefits to expand your market
It’s so obvious it’s a little embarrassing: pitching life insurance to individual employees with group plans and seeing where it takes you.
All you need to do is start asking your contacts who are still working about the pros and cons of their existing benefit package through their employer. Doing so will lead you down a path of detailed conversations.
Sounds simple—and it can be—but having the capabilities of Redbird’s value based “Services Offered” approach was the difference in our agent making a significant sale and setting up future business.
Client Profile and IUL Scenario
Mike, our top agent in the Boston area, had contacts in the public school system and recently found an excellent prospect (now client) and bigger opportunity. Here are the highlights with comments from Mike below:
Who: Principal of a public school
What: Prospect had budget of $2,500 to fund any type of life insurance. He had been turned down because of prescription used to treat pre-diabetes.
Where: Greater Boston Area
Agent’s approach: Utilized Redbird’s “Services Offered” concept first to introduce the prospect to our range of capabilities, all the while knowing life insurance was the purpose of the call.
Long-term opportunity: More business with the prospect and opportunity to compete for the school’s benefit’s business.
The prospect initially asked for whole life in the first phone call with Mike as additional cash for retirement was a major objective.
Learn more about running IUL illustrations.
Presenting Services Offered Helps Your Clients Think Differently
“When I met with the prospect I gave him a copy of Services Offered knowing I was only there to speak about life insurance,” Mike said. “Quickly going over the services, I mentioned tax-free retirement and how it can be combined with life insurance to fill multiple purposes.
“After my first face-to-face with the client, I called Drew (Drew Gurley, Redbird’s EVP) and we dissected the prospect’s needs.
Drew explained that permanent life insurance is almost always thought to be traditional whole life and that was the thought-process of most prospective insurance policy owners and agents.
He further reinforced the importance of continuing education and put in a way I never thought about, “Mike, you don’t know what you don’t know.”
The prospect wanted a death benefit to cover the needs of his six children as well as growth in the investment as he approached retirement. Universal Life with Allianz provided the client with a higher death benefit than typical whole life, built a tax-free retirement to supplement his pension and currently maximize 403b, and took advantage of the ratchet and reset function that exists only in indexed life insurance and indexed annuities.
“The services offered sheet also helped me enter the conversation as the school’s benefits agent/ rep,” Mike said. “The agent that has that business today is responsible for all insurance with school faculty and additional retirement plans.”
