How to Increase Your Monthly Premiums

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You’ve heard me say “we’ve all fallen victim to instant everything.” With all the ups and downs across the country of COVID-19 has only exacerbated this situation as more people are home spending more time online.

The lack of sales in our personal life insurance business has made most of desperate to make a sale. We want to complete a sale using the shortest possible path in the shortest amount of time so we can move on to the next sale. In life insurance that path starts with making appointments, moving on to giving presentations, field underwriting, writing up applications, and closing.

On the surface this seems fine after all our time is money, right? The more appointments we make - the more presentations we give - the more money we make. Those are all true statements, however, if we don’t take the time to better our craft and add to our product knowledge we are missing out, leaving money on the table.

Insurance carriers, overall, do a poor job on marketing. They depend on agents like us to find out what they offer and understand new products as they roll those out. If you’re working with an IMO that provides good commissions in the Mortgage Protection and Final Expense markets, then they too hold the expectation of the agent learning products and new offerings and rightly so.

Regardless of how many days we spend in the field or setting our selves up for 10 to 15 appointments in a week, we also must spend time learning. This is where owning your own life insurance business separates the committed from the dabblers.

Dabblers learn one or two products and fit every prospect in those offerings with a goal of setting as many appointments as they can in a given week. Their time is split into working in the field and personal obligations. This is where the term one-and-done was born.

The committed, on the other hand, realize there is no time limit to a work day or number of work days in a week. We sometimes wish there was 30 hours in a day and 8 days in work week.

We realize that every prospect’s situation is different with different goals, thereby needing unique solutions. We understand that bettering our craft means providing solutions that prospects may not have ever realized existed.

For example, working with a forty-something prospect with an immediate need of protecting a $225,000 outstanding mortgage will also need to hedge their bet on needing final expense coverage at 60-something. The one-size fits all philosophy of buy term and invest the rest, doesn’t work everyone. Sometimes life gets in the way and using savings and investments become necessary to overcome life’s obstacles.

This pandemic is one such event. Rules were changed on early withdrawals of retirement savings to forgive penalties so people could tap those monies to overcome job loss.

The cost of retirement alone these days is another such obstacle that may leave a family exposed when they pass away. Instead of relying on the stock market casino wouldn’t it be a better bet to have something in place to cover final expense costs then not having it and needing it?

Committed agents know which products can solve this issue. For example, Americo’s new HMS Continuation product does just that for only a few premium dollars more. American National has whole life plans were a prospect can add up to 4 times the whole life face amount into a 20-year term rider.

Committed agents know that ROP riders and Universal Life Insurance products can provide large sums of cash at the end, of filling the need for protecting a mortgage, that can be used to cover final expenses. Bettering our craft provides opportunities of articulating this while meeting with clients. Learning what life insurance products, we have to offer provides us with higher premium sales and better protected clients.

Which one are you…dabbler or committed life insurance agent? If you’re like me and it’s the later, then learning never ends. While we’ll never know everything our ability to articulate solutions and by increasing our product knowledge we are rewarded with higher premium sales and a strong client base.