Insurance cross selling is one of the easiest and most effective ways to grow and scale your insurance agency, and as we go through some insurance cross selling examples, keep in mind how you can implement it at your firm.
It all starts with trust. Your clients trust you with at least one very important part of their financial situation. If you’ve already earned their trust, they will likely trust you in other areas of their business or personal life.
Now, most of the time, when agents think about insurance cross selling examples, they think of selling an additional umbrella policy or life insurance to personal lines clients or cyber insurance to commercial clients.
While those are certainly products you should be evaluating for your clients, they are not our focus here. You likely already do a great job of placing the right insurance products for your client’s situation.
What I’m covering is how you can broaden the scope of the business you handle for a client into another impact area. A product and an impact area are completely different, and we’ve covered the impact areas that we use in LAUNCH previously. By broadening your client relationship into other impact areas, you gain more of the wallet share from your client and, in doing so, build a deeper relationship with them.
I understand that you might be saying to yourself: “That’s great but I am not a benefits producer – I don’t know how to sell it.” Well, you don’t need to be able to sell it. You do need to have the ability to identify when a client has a potential risk in their benefits program and recommend the right solution for them. This is just one simple example, but it doesn’t mean you need to be an expert.
You can build a solid network of advisors that specialize in benefits but do not directly compete with you. They can bring value just by being a solution for your clients. You can also negotiate a revenue share deal where you can take a percentage of the revenue for just referring them (assuming you have the proper licensure). At the end of the day, even if you don’t get paid a dime, you are bringing value to your client, solidifying your relationship, and keeping that business away from a direct competitor.
With that in mind, let’s cover some insurance cross selling examples that can help you deepen your relationships.
Insurance Cross Selling Example: Key Personnel Planning
The first area I want to discuss is key personnel planning for your commercial clients. This is a fantastic way to grow personal lines with what are typically high net worth individuals. Any business has key people that it relies on day-to-day. This could be the CEO, CFO or high-level managers and supervisors. It is important that the risks these key people face in their personal life are well managed to avoid disruption in the business.
What do I mean by disruption in the business? Well, let’s assume that a highly paid CFO didn’t have the appropriate auto liability limits with an umbrella over the top. If that CFO’s 16-year-old son gets into a car accident and is liable for damages that exceed their limits, it is going to be very taxing on the CFO to work through that incident. It will certainly cause him or her to be pulled away from the business and not be entirely focused like they would if they had the proper insurance coverage in place. Not to mention the impact on them personally!
This is just a simple example, but you can see how many other scenarios could impact these key people personally and spill over into work performance. This is where you can come in and offer a very valuable service: key person risk reviews.
Offer to review each key person’s insurance program as well as any other areas of risk they are concerned about. Do a full review and provide your feedback based on your findings. You won’t even need to press them for the sale. Once they realize that their current insurance relationship has never done an in-depth review and connected it to the impact on the business, you will win the deal every time!
Insurance Cross Selling Example: HR & Benefits
Now, let’s discuss what I would consider a pretty obvious one but it is often made out to be more complicated than it needs to be. Most of your target commercial clients will have a need for benefits, specifically health insurance. Now, I can already see all of you P&C producers rolling your eyes and thinking: I don’t do benefits and I don’t want to! Remember though, you don’t need to write the health insurance. There are many solid agencies out there that would love to build a referral relationship with you.
If you were one of those that was thinking that, consider a bigger issue facing businesses. Attracting and retaining talent is often the No. 1 concern for business owners. If you are not opening up conversations around how they can find and keep their people, you are missing a massive opportunity.
One of the best ways I like to bring this up is to connect the conversation to work comp (assuming you handle the comp for them). Work comp provides insurance coverage for on-the-job injuries to their employees. Well, what happens if the employee gets injured or sick off the job? How well will they be taken care of?
This is a great way to open the conversation and then transition it to how well the company’s benefits program allows them to attract and retain the talent they want. If you are good, you will connect the work comp and the benefits as one “benefits program” that provides coverage for injuries on and off the job. This creates synergies between different solutions and can be pure magic when it comes to insurance cross selling.
Insurance Cross Selling Example: Perpetuation Planning
The last insurance cross selling example I want to offer is perpetuation planning for your commercial clients.
Most producers run for the hills when this topic comes up, but I encourage you to have this conversation with every one of your clients. It could be their single biggest risk in and outside their business. If they do not have a solid plan for how they will exit the business (whether voluntarily or involuntarily) it will cost them dearly.
This is a great cross-selling opportunity because any business not only needs to have a solid plan for exiting their business, but they also need to have a plan in place if they can no longer come to work unexpectedly. In most businesses, this is in the form of a buy/sell agreement and will typically be funded by large life insurance policies.
This is a great revenue opportunity, but I would argue there is way more value than just the revenue you would receive doing a deal like that. By opening this conversation with your client and bringing in a partner firm that does exit planning, you will be bringing far more value to that client than you could realize.
You will also learn absolutely everything about their business. If you think you have a deep relationship with them now, just wait until you are sitting at their kitchen table helping them decide how to perpetuate their business and estate to their kids. It gets deep fast.
The Bottom Line
These are only a few of the examples of how you can build deeper relationships with your clients. You don’t have to be the expert in all things to bring value to your client in different areas. The best thing you can do is to identify those areas where they have unseen risk and open their eyes to it.
Once you have done that, simply put a collaborative plan in place to work together in solving it and you will be well on your way to sitting in the risk advisor seat for your clients!
