The 90-Day DI Challenge (Part 2)
Spurred-on by social media and business marketing platforms, personal-growth “challenges” are all the craze in recent years. Examples like the “ice bucket challenge” that successfully raised public awareness for ALS foundations as well as individual fitness and weight-loss challenges that have helped private boot camps and gyms bolster membership numbers. These highly-publicized self-help programs have proven to be effective marketing strategies that aim to influence paying demographics and expand societal awareness.
Petersen International Underwriters has jumped on that bandwagon and has decreed a “90-Day DI Challenge” to all licensed life and health insurance agents across the country in hopes of raising awareness of the great American disability insurance industry in association with Disability Insurance Awareness Month. Beginning May 1st, 2019, we challenge you to challenge yourself to sell 15 new, non-renewal DI policies over the next three months. The placements can come from either or both personal and business coverage. That is only five policies a month which will assist you in expanding your product portfolio and protect the most important of assets of your clientele – their ability to earn a paycheck.
To help you along your way to meeting this opportune sales goal for disability insurance awareness, we have devised several strategies that will not only find you success in this challenge, but will also provide you with meaningful marketing guidelines that you can apply to your future DI sales as well as to much of the rest of your insurance dealings.
Now we all know that cold-calling and even reaching out on so-called “hot” leads can be daunting and an unfortunate uphill battle for the most confident of sales professionals. Better yet is word-of-mouth advertising and business referrals that come directly from trusted clients. But in your client files dwell the real advantages to making more DI sales.
Your greatest marketing resource is your own book of business. Your current and previous clients trust you as you have worked diligently in the past to protect their financial interests through advisement and worthwhile product sales. Experience has shown they will be open to new, fresh ideas that you bring to the table to protect their families from financial ruin in the way of disability insurance. Contact your life clients. Call your annuity clients. If they are working professionals, earning regular paychecks, they need disability insurance and appropriate levels of coverage at that.
After you have run through their personal disability options, turn your attention to their businesses. Another great DI sales strategy is to use business coverage to open the doors to further cross-selling opportunities.
Those of your clients that are business owners of any corporate structure and size face greater loss potential than most, considering their assets and the responsibilities and liabilities that come with owning and running companies with multiple employees. Business owners not only need personal disability insurance for themselves and their employees, but also for the continuity of their corporate entities.
Products like key person insurance, business overhead expense coverage, buy/sell platforms as well as business loan indemnification are all quite important protection facets when it comes to the prosperity of a corporation and its employees that rely on the success and continuation of such a business.
In addition to business insurances, don’t hesitate to upsell your clients on additional personal disability coverage. Most Americans that have some form of income protection insurance don’t usually have sufficient levels as suggested by disability experts across the country. Sixty-five percent is the magic number. If a client isn’t covered to sixty-five percent of their income by some responsible form of personal disability insurance, that client is simply underinsured.
The remedy to such a grievous problem is to prescribe additional layers or tiers of income protection by way of group long-term disability, individual DI as well as excess, high-limit DI. You may also want to turn your attention to the DI industry’s hottest commodity – multi-life guaranteed-issue (GSI) coverage. This product line in general provides excess disability insurance with substantial discounts on a guaranteed-issue basis (no exams or labs or lengthy applications), and can be acquired on groups with minimal participation requirements. GSI has become quite a lucrative tool and the new standard among agents focused on the medical, accounting and legal profession marketplaces.
The previously suggested strategies, your own lifetime of experience as well as your usual sales repertoire should make the “90-Day DI Challenge” an easily surmountable opportunity that will help raise disability insurance awareness throughout our own industry as well as to prospects that are probably naïve to the real and formidable economic disasters brought about by one’s unforeseen disablement. Millions of Americans become disabled every year due to accident or illness, and they all need to be properly protected with multiple, high levels of disability insurance. Take part in this year’s important challenge not only for the commissions, but also to provide your clientele with peace of mind and financial assurances into the future.
–Published with permission from Perspectives, a NAILBA magazine