Selling health insurance via the internet is rapidly becoming a necessity for new health insurance agents to become and remain competitive in this industry. The next series of articles will address how to get started selling health insurance online, the various tools you will need, organizing the various portals and online resources for your health insurance presentations, actual new call scripts that lead directly into presentations (rather than just setting appointments), and a set of sales tips you can use to become more effective in online health sales.
I haven’t posted in awhile because I have been working hard to get this new process down to a workable system since August. This has been a long and drawn out process for me because I have always done face to face sales, but gas prices were killing my profits and this seemed like the logical way to go with my business.
Selling health insurance online has a lot of potholes to fall in for a newbie and I fell into about every one of them. On the outside it seemed like it would be much easier (and after you get to know what you are doing it actually is) but it comes with its own set of challenges. My purpose of writing these articles is to save you some of the pain I had to experience. I am going to start with a list of pros and cons so that you will have a good idea of what is involved with internet based health insurance sales v/s face to face sales:
Pros:
1. Saves a lot of gas.
2. Saves a lot of driving time.
3. Because of the above factors you are more inclined to write those smaller policies (that add up especially for your renewals) that you might of considered a waste of time and gas money.
4. If someone puts you off or refuses to buy you havn’t had to plan your whole day around them, it is easy to just say “NEXT!” and move on.
5. You can get to your real time leads much quicker, and edge out those that still rely solely on face to face appointments.
6. MY FAVORITE: You can go to the fridge when you are hungry or thirsty, (not to mention the toilet, one of my whacko friends actually sold a policy while sitting on the throne, is that nuts or what?) After a few years of riding all over my state it is nice not having to find some hole in the wall to get something to eat, not to mention that fast food and mountain dew was killing me (and costing me quite a bit also.)
7. Aged leads become much more profitable. (More on this later)
Cons:
1. Attrition can be fairly high, especially if you are used to only setting appointments via the phone.
2. Competiton is intense on fresh leads, you have to focus on being first in line and convert the conversation into a presentation and sale for those who are ready to make a decision.
3. Some people are still scared to business online.
4. You have to have your presentation well organized on your computer.
5. Technical difficulties (on your or the customers end, that last Facebook virus screwed up two of my customer’s computers and I had to put off presentations, two other agents got it on their computers the same week and almost crippled them for a few days)
6. Your potential client is more likely to lie to you or hang up on you. Just think about it, you can’t see if they weigh a lot, smell if they smoke, or see their pill bottles. It is also a lot harder for someone to tell you to get of their house that to just hang up a phone.
Don’t worry though. In the next few posts I will show you how to set up everything right, show you the strategies I have come up with to overcome the obvious problems, and give you some interesting tips that my mentor has come up with so that you can hit the ground running.
So with that, I am wrapping up this first post, Internet Health Insurance Sales 101 for New Health Insurance Agents, and hope to see you back as I get the other articles published for you.
