LIFE/HEALTH E&O AVOIDANCE by Sheri Pontolillo These guidelines for managing Life/Health E&O exposures also apply to any independent agency. Offering Life and Health insurance in...

LIFE/HEALTH PROSPECTING & SALES TIPS Here's a sampling of several sterling selling tips from some of the country's greatest Life/Health salespeople: At the close of a session with a friend w...

The Long-term Care (LTC) family of products includes coverages for nursing homes, adult day care, home health care, assisted living facilities, and other related benefits. LTC has unique qualities, and there are many variations among the carriers.
LTC isn't a new concept. The coverage has been around for decades, but only recently has it been widely discussed. With the new wave of interest in LTC, sales took off slowly, built up, and then leveled off. All of this activity adds up to this picture: A large number of LTC prospects have heard about the product but haven't yet bought it. Why not?

PEOS: DO THEY HAVE YOU COMING, OR GOING? by Eric Moberg Is your agency equipped to handle the additional responsibilities of administering PEOs to your Commercial clients? This doc...

PRIMER ON INSURER/AGENCY RELATIONSHIPS The following illustrates some of the common practices that many Life/Health carriers follow, why such practices are troublesome to P/C agencies, and the simple...

Take a plain telephone-message note, check the 'please call' box, write a brief message, and send it to 100 P/C insureds for whom you don't yet write any...

SECURE CONSISTENCY! PROTECT YOUR AGENCY! by Grace Bauer A year has passed since I began talking full-time to agencies nationwide. I found the main concern of 99.9% of the agencies to b...

Here's a letter I received recently:
Dear Dave:
I work for a $3.5 million P/C agency with about 60% Commercial and 40% Personal in premium volume. One in-house Life producer handles Commercial and Personal lines, sometimes with outside help. But she doesn't write any Disability policies at all; she considers Disability insurance a specialty that she doesn't want to sell. Should I try to talk her into it, pressure her into it, or just let it go? I don't want to add another full-time Life agent unless he/she would become profitable early on; it took two years for my present Life agent to reach profitability. What are my alternatives?

Situation: Our agency has several thousand personal lines insureds, and we have written mortgage reduction life insurance-reducing term-on many. But we're not writing much of anything else in personal lines Life or Health, partly because our life producer is uncomfortable with that market.
I know there's more to life than reducing term, but what can I as agency president-not a Life expert at all-do about developing more business from that potential? (Our commercial accounts are handled well by other life producers.)

THE AGENCY MISSION STATEMENT An agency mission statement is a simple outline of the agency's overall goal. It should be phrased in terms of meeting the needs of current and potential cl...