Selling insurance is different from selling everything else.

Insurance is one of the most expensive things people buy and they can’t see it, touch it, or hold it.

You’re selling ideas. You’re selling trust. You’re selling promises.

You’re selling yourself.

This is such a huge challenge that most insurance salespeople quit in the first 2 years and many agents are afraid to hire inexperienced salespeople.

I hate to see young producers fail and even more, I hate seeing agents miss out on the largest pool of cheap, passionate, and open-minded talent.

What do computers, monkeys, and my 3 year old daughter all have in common?

They can all sell insurance on price alone.

A professional insurance salesperson (like you) must be able to connect with prospects and help them understand and internalize the value of the insurance you’re selling.

If you only sell insurance on price, you will eventually be replaced because:

1. There will always be another company with lower rates.
2. When people buy from you just to save money, they’ll leave just as fast.
3. A call center employee can quote more people faster and cheaper than you.
4. A website can give millions of quotes per second even faster and cheaper.

Sometimes cross-sales fall in your lap.

“Do you guys also do life insurance?”

Beautiful thing, huh?

Most of the time though, you have to work hard to make it happen.

I’ll assume you’re already good with the ones that fall in your lap, today I want to give you a bunch of ideas for making cross-sales happen.

So I did a little “brain-dump” and came up with 29 different ways you can cross-sell more in your insurance agency.

If you get an idea or two please share this resource with a colleague and if you have ideas to add let me know in the comments below.

I’m no relationship expert.

Just ask my wife.

But I know you need to go out of your way to show appreciation for the other person in any relationship, otherwise it will deteriorate and eventually die.

But you don’t want relationship advice from me. (trust me)

Let’s talk about your agency instead.

• How healthy are your customer relationships?
• Do they know how much you appreciate them?
• Do you go out of your way to make sure they know how you really feel?
• What are you doing to make them feel all warm and fuzzy inside?

Client relationships are just like personal ones – they require work.

And if your business strategy doesn’t include processes to go out of your way to say “thank you” to your customers, they will eventually leave you.

With Thanksgiving coming up later this week, I thought it’d be a good time to explore ways to say “Thanks!” to your insurance customers. I already started by giving travel tips to those planning vacation. As for the rest – here they are:

Retention is necessary to build and maintain a successful insurance agency.

Every agent knows that.

You know small boosts in retention will grow long term profit immensely.

You know it costs more to get new customers than to keep current ones.

And you probably know the pain of losing more policies than you wrote in a week.

You don’t hear as much about these two things:

1. Retention is a sales strategy – Every single thing you do to improve retention makes customers more likely to refer you.
2. Retention requires established processes –  Unless you decide exactly which methods in this article are going to work for you and establish formal procedures in your office to follow through, you will not see results.

I wrote this article so you couldn’t say, “I don’t know how to effect our retention.”

Here’s 34 ways to improve your insurance agency’s customer retention. No excuses, decide which retention strategies you like and take action!

Selling insurance is hard.

Really hard!

In fact, making a sale is so hard that agents often forget the most important part of building a successful insurance agency:

Developing a ROCK-SOLID relationship with every client.

There’s no better time forge that relationship and boost the lifespan of your clients than immediately after the intital sale, but it’s easy to miss because it’s so exciting just to close the deal.

That’s why I recommend creating a formal Welcome Kit for new clients.

I’ve worked with hundreds of ridiculously successful insurance agents.

I’ve also worked with lots of bad ones.

For years, I struggled to find one unifying characteristic – one trait or skill that was shared by all the successful agents and absent in the others.

Every time I thought I found it I’d meet another agent who, by his success or failure, would disprove my latest theory.

Until I finally figured it out…

Every successful insurance agent is not a great marketer. They’re not all good conversationalists. They’re not all organized, interesting, or hard-working. They’re not all well-written, well-read, well-mannered or well-spoken.

Insurance agents live and die by the quality of their employees.

Nothing is more important.

Not your location, your office, your marketing, your products, your search rankings, your signage, your website, your community, your networking, nothing!

You need the best people.

Good processes are the key to success in your insurance agency.

That’s why I put together a resource with the most important processes for successful insurance agencies.

I’ve included important considerations and helpful resources for each process below.

There’s a lot of information on this page so I also made a few links to help you get around:

Insurance Agency Processes featured on this page:

Where were you on Y2K?

I’m not sure where I was (which I’m sure is related to whatever I was drinking) but that’s not important.

I bring it up because that 22 year-old “kid” you just hired at your agency was asleep in bed.

He was in 3rd grade!

He grew up in a different world with different parents instilling different values and expectations. And if you want to get the most out of him, you need to understand how.