Cross-Selling Insurance Products to Make Bigger Sales

To make the big sales, you need to learn how to effectively cross sell your insurance products. Building a large portfolio of products can be very rewarding when it comes time to close a sale. It’s a lot easier then it may seem to pick up an additional sale as long as you have the customers trust and your knowledge of your products is exemplary.

If someone owns a car, they probably aren’t homeless. If they aren’t homeless they probably need renters or home owners insurance. So then why wouldn’t you offer a home insurance quote to an auto insurance shopper as well? The answer is, you should always offer additional supplementary insurance products to your customers by effective cross selling.

How Cross-Selling Benefits Your Agency

Besides the obvious profitability aspects, cross selling will allow you to diversify your clientele, build in new lines of revenue to replace old, and provide better service to your clients. If you have a large book of clients, your starting off, or your anywhere in between, you will have the opportunity to cross sell.

Cross selling is one of the easiest ways for your agency to grow. You have already sold the customer on one product line. That hardest part is over. Now, you have the opportunity to offer up more of your product lines to the same customer which will build a much stronger bond between you both. Insurance industry studies have shown that customers who carry more then one line of insurance with the same agent are less likely to leave that agent. The more broad and deep your product lines extend into your customer’s life, the more your agency will prosper.

How to Get the Process Going

First off I would like to point out that cross selling existing clients is much easier then cross selling someone on the first sale. After getting their initial policy, you won’t find a lot of customers are willing to tack on supplemental policies from day one.

The most common approach for cross selling is to call up existing customers and attempt to sell them additional products. There are a variety of reasons to call up existing policy holders such as: asking them to update their information, asking to see if they need to adjust their coverage, checking in to see how things are going, etc… Any of these reasons will work fine, the point is to get them on the phone and talking.

Set Goals and Build Relationships

Half the battle in cross selling is knowing who to sell to and when. Keeping track of your customers is very important for knowing when to offer new products to them. As their insurance agent you will have access to lots of valuable information such as new car or home purchases, the birth of children, or other major life changes. Use these to your advantage to offer new product lines.

Also, setup a timeline for each client based off of their needs. For example, if you are a health insurance agent and you know a client is hitting 60 in 8 months, remember to call them up to cross sell a long term care insurance policy. This is just one example of hundreds of potential cross selling opportunities you may be faced with.

Part of setting goals may include your own personal goals. You may need to take additional courses and acquire a new license to sell the products you want to offer in the future. In order to cross sell effectively, the wider the range of products you can offer, the better chance you have of getting the sales. So, make sure you are properly qualified to give yourself the best chance possible.

The whole point of building your product line, setting goals, making the calls, and cross selling is to accomplish one critical goal for every insurance agent: build life long trust. I know agents who have had the same insurance agent for 20 years. You want to be that agent obviously. To get there you need to build trust through offering your clients the best service and making sure they are always properly covered. If a customer feels like you are watching out for them, they will stick with you even when offered lower prices elsewhere. To build trust, cross selling is a fantastic tool.

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