A Proven Way to Differentiate Your Insurance Practice

Successful insurance agents are those who constantly watch for ways to differentiate themselves from the competition. Expanding the types of products you offer is a good way to do this because the more eclectic your portfolio, the more solutions you’ll be able to offer. Consequently, you’ll be able to serve a wider base of clientele and increase your value to consumers.

Expanding into the ancillary markets is a relatively easy way to enlarge your product offering. What are ancillary products? How can you use them to gain sales? This article strives to answer these questions.

Ancillary Products Include:

• Dental, Vision and Hearing (DVH) – Represents some of the most common types of ancillary insurance plans. Unfortunately, Original Medicare does not provide coverage for most DVH procedures other than some specific dental, vision, and hearing costs.
• Hospital Indemnity (HI) – This is a supplemental insurance plan designed to pay for the costs of hospital admission that may not be covered by other insurance.
• Short-Term Recovery Care (STRC) – Plans designed to provide short-term coverage for additional care needed in a nursing home, assisted living, or home health care environments.
• Final Expense (FE) – These are policies that help reimburse for expenses surrounding a policyholder’s death.
• Critical Illness (CI) – is a type of supplemental insurance that pays out a one-time lump sum cash benefit if diagnosed with a covered condition.
• Cancer Heart Attack and Stroke (CHAS) – offers additional protection against unexpected health care events.
• Disability Income (DI) - provides income in the event a policyholder is unable to earn an income due to disability.

Using ancillary products to increase sales:

• DVH – works well as a door-opener. From there, you can transition to Medicare, retirement, etc. Also, DVH is an easy cross-sell and a great opportunity to revisit your existing clients and determine if there’s a need for this type of coverage.
• HI – Revisit your existing Medicare Advantage clients to explore the HI cross-sell opportunity. Once you identify what their maximum out-of-pocket expenses are for things such as hospitalizations and outpatient procedures, you should have their interest.
• STRC – Cross-sell to current long-term care (LTC) insurance clients for coverage during the LTC policy elimination period. Also, STRC plans appeal to those who may not be ready to commit to LTC insurance but want some coverage for an unexpected accident or illness.
• FE – is suitable for those nearing retirement. FE offers fast turnaround times on issued policies and works well for those who don’t have a large budget to allocate for premiums.
• CI, CHAS and DI – Selling CI, CHAS and DI together may provide more complete coverage. Policyholders can receive payouts for medical bills if they fall under the CI and CHAS umbrella while the DI elimination period is being satisfied. Then, once the elimination period has been satisfied, the DI benefits kick in.

By now, you should have an idea regarding the role ancillary products plays and how to incur additional sales by adding them to your business mix. The value that these products add to one’s practice is self-evident. But how do you get started?

Getting Started

If you’re interested in utilizing this information to increase production by adding ancillary products to your practice, then there’s good news. You don’t have to go it alone. Senior Market Sales^® (SMS) is here to help.

SMS is a national insurance marketing organization, representing top Medicare Supplement, Medicare Advantage, annuity, life, long-term care and travel insurance carriers in all 50 states. More than 70,000 independent insurance agents rely on Senior Market Sales for proprietary technology, competitive insurance products, expert training and service to help them leverage their time, make more money and put their business in a position of distinction. Founded in 1982, Senior Market Sales is headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska. In 2020, SMS joined the Alliant Insurance Services family of companies.

Specific to helping you build your ancillary production, SMS has compiled the information in this article into a user-friendly, agent-facing brochure. The brochure is available at no cost to you.

A Bonus Takeaway

In addition to the brochure, SMS has developed an entire client-facing marketing library for your use in prospecting for qualified ancillary product clients. This library includes templates for letters, emails, flyers and more. If you are interested in gaining access to this library at no cost, then please call 1.800.786.5566 and speak with an SMS marketing consultant.