Too many agencies are missing out on this key marketing opportunity.
The income potential from cross-line selling, including the sale of Life and Financial Services, to your clients is enormous.
On average, each household in your client base owns seven policies. Unfortunately, the independent agent has written less than two policies per household. Why is there such a discrepancy between how much business independent agents have written and how much they could write?
This question has serious implications for the survival of the Independent Agency System. Here’s an example: Studies have shown that 15% of your clients will buy some form of Life and Financial Service product in the next 12 months from someone. This means that during the next seven years 100% of your clients will purchase a Life or Financial Services product from someone else — unless you find a way of soliciting their business first. If you don’t go after that business, you can bet that someone else will!
This fact of life means that the independent agent is slowly dying and doesn’t, or won’t, realize it because the process is so slow. Here’s an analogy: If you place a frog in a pot of water and turn up the heat very slowly, the frog will slowly die because it didn’t realize how hot the water had gotten until it was too late to react. Take the same pot of water, bring it to a boil, and then drop the frog into the pot. As soon as the frog hits the water, it will feel such severe pain that it will hop right out.
If you feel the pain, why haven’t you acted? Agents usually give one or more of three reasons for not cross-selling their client base: No time, no money, or no staff. In my experience, none of these three perceptions holds water: You can easily develop a cross-selling process that’s cost effective, requires little time, will be easy for your staff to implement — and can turn your business around within 30 days.
Act now to penetrate your client base for additional policies by creating a relationship in which clients tell you what they want to buy. Create a game plan that you can live with. Simple is OK: You don’t need to reinvent the wheel or come up with a high-tech solution. If you bite off more than you can chew or easily live with at once, your commitment will fail. So make the process easy enough for everyone in the agency to understand and implement.
One last question: How hot has the water gotten? The answer: Hotter than you think!