Tag: Insurance Agency

America’s Best Insurance Agencies to Work For

Posted on by Benepath Blogger

Competition between workplaces means good things for employees. Not only are the best agencies more visible, but they’re also having to step up their game to keep their staff. For insurance agents just now coming to the field, we have a comprehensive list of the best agencies to seek employment from, and exactly why you’d want to work for them.

For an overview, this list reflects the working conditions in these agencies. Overall, they scored high because they focused on benefits, wellness programs, and flexible work hours.

person playing chess for the best insurance
Choosing the right place to work is a strategic career move.

Higginbotham

This agency features an employee-first attitude, which probably was the biggest factor in Higginbotham topping the list. The company started 70 years ago, and since then has grown into one of the most influential independent insurance agencies in the US.

They also have a robust charity, with $1.8 million donated so far. Their CEO, Rusty Reid, emphasizes the service quality of the insurance industry, and that people should always be put first.

Ironside Insurance Group

While younger than the previous agency, Ironside has a reputation for growth. Employees pushed this company forward on the list through anonymous surveys. From the start, Ironside is a company focused on filling a need. The founders, Ryan Kent and Joshua Shotts, saw an opportunity in the insurance industry and leaped on it.

Prioritization here comes from two things: empowering employees and encouraging feedback. Without them, the company founders don’t think they would have gotten very far.

The Bulow Group

The Bulow Group believes in going against the grain. With a small group of 13 employees, every person can get their voice heard. Besides this, the company puts emphasis on communication so that every person gets a chance to succeed. These values are also encouraged with their customer interactions.

The Bulow Group has a reputation for thinking outside the box and strong teamwork. Stemming from a work/life balance and a focus on support, all the employees here feel the community. 

team of coworkers at best insurance agency
You want to work with a team that supports you. Don’t stop looking until you find that.

Hotchkiss Insurance

Hotchkiss’ employees enthusiastically nominated their company. These positive thoughts center on the agency’s focus on career growth and providing an engaging atmosphere.

“When our employees grow, we grow,” is the sentiment felt from the CEO’s words. They even have their own structure for employee behavior called “The Hotchkiss Way.” Employees have a weekly meeting, and they all address concerns and update their behavior to provide a solid system for interaction. 

Acentria Insurance

Like most of the other agencies on this list, Acentria works hard to have the employees feel like family. Most employees cite that their managing team members show genuine care for them as people.

This is amazing considering how large the company is, with over 500 employees in 50 locations. With a commitment to growth and open doors, it’s no wonder Acentria claims its “small business” feel. 

Snapp & Associates Insurance Services

The people at Snapp & Associates don’t mess around when it comes to excellent benefits. The company provides full education reimbursement and medical assistance. 

This agency’s claim to a top spot is hiring fresh eyes to the industry and one hundred percent supporting their growth as agents. Agents claim they had no experience before, and within a few years, became competent, successful employees

All of these places had a few things in common: support, encouragement, and most had community service. It goes to show that supporting your employees and communication truly sets a company apart. When one succeeds, all succeed.

 

Commercial Insurance Rates are Rising. Here’s Why

Posted on by Benepath Blogger

No one wants to pay more for insurance, but it is our unfortunate reality. Commercial insurance rates are rising, meaning higher premiums across the board for many businesses. Coverage affected ranges from Business Owner’s Policy to Worker’s Compensation. It is projected that prices will continue to rise throughout the rest of 2019. From underwriting to pricing, these changes come from two major sources: cars and catastrophes.

Vehicles

Auto insurance aside, vehicles have become a major factor in the rise of our commercial insurance rates. You may think “why does this matter to me?” It matters because vehicles are our main source of transportation, influencing our economic structure deeply. Everything you have as a business owner is brought to you by some type of vehicle.  With more production and vehicles on the road come more opportunities for accidents to occur. This involves more than just passenger cars. 

With our economic boost, we see an increase in areas like construction. Motorized vehicles operate in these zones, causing more concern for insurance companies. More work means more workers are needed to operate these vehicles. It only leads to an upward climb in insurance rates.

There is no easy solution for the car aspect contributing to this climb. We can only wait for legislation to step in.

Catastrophes

We’ve recently experienced a lot of natural disasters. In November 2018, California was ravaged by wildfires. While it is accustomed to fires, these were the worst in years, affecting areas as far north as San Francisco, and areas as richly populated as Malibu. The Woolsey Fire destroyed over 1600 structures (including most of Paradise, CA) and caused the death of three individuals.

Besides fires, hurricanes are a force to be reckoned with annually. In 2017, Texas’ southeastern area, including Houston’s almost 6 million people, were decimated by Harvey.  This storm solely caused $125 billion worth of damage. Not to mention the opioid epidemic, which is heavily affecting our medical industry with 60,000 people dying from it in 2016. All of these things only scratch the surface of the disasters our country is experiencing. 

This is causing rates to climb between 1-5% for insurance deductibles depending on how close you are to at-risk areas. As people scramble to make sure they are covered more for potential disasters, insurance companies raise their rates. At the same time, claim payouts are in the billions of dollars, forcing the capital in insurance companies to deteriorate. It’s simple supply and demand affecting the market.

While it may not provide much comfort, the reality is that an increase in productivity added to the disaster influx is causing inflation for commercial insurance prices. While it’s mostly liability markets that are affected, the results can be felt by everyone. 

How to Maximize Your Productivity

Posted on by Benepath Blogger

As an agent, time management skills have a direct impact on your performance and sales. It goes unsaid that they are necessary to excel in your industry. However, even though everyone has the same amount of hours in a day, some people are able to accomplish so much more than others. Wondering how to maximize your productivity like some others do?

Perfectly organized planners and spreadsheets could explain smoothly handling a flood of tasks. But there are other solutions for the rest of us to navigate a variety of commitments and optimize our time effortlessly.

We have an answer to this dilemma – in a career where missing deadlines is not an option, the Covey time management grid is guaranteed to help you to manage your available time more efficiently.

Covey’s 4 Quadrant Theory offers a simple format to organize your tasks. Covey, an American keynote speaker and author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People , uses four quadrants that allow you to prioritize tasks in relation to their importance and urgency. This helps you to decide whether you need to address a task immediately or if you can postpone it.

Responsibilities are grouped into four categories: Important, Urgent, Not Important, and Not Urgent.

Quadrant I – Urgent and Important

In this section, we find tasks that have skipped out of the non-urgent category and have a significant time sensitivity associated with their completion. Urgent responsibilities require immediate attention. These activities are often tightly linked to the accomplishment of someone else’s goal. Not dealing with these issues will cause immediate consequences. While careful planning can help avoid tasks entering this quadrant, tasks will pop up or increase in urgency to land themselves here.

The real skill is to commit time to processes that enable you to work on tasks more quickly and with ease. It also ensures that they get done more efficiently.

Examples: Crises, deadline-driven work, medical/other emergencies, last-minute preparations.

Quadrant II – Not Urgent but Important

Covey’s time management system proposes creating time to focus on important tasks before they become urgent. Quadrant II activities are not urgent, but they are important.

These tasks are your long-term strategies and goals.  Staying on top of these in a consistent manner will ensure that you are always one step ahead of where you need to be.  This prevents you from ending up in Quadrant I on a frequent basis.

In addition, there are important activities that fall in this category including relationship building and recreation. We often read about organizing our professional lives, but personal lives need to be weighed into the equation as well. To avoid burnout, we need to focus on ourselves, family and friends as part of the equation rather than an afterthought, and Covey realizes this as part of his structure.

Examples: Preparation and planning, relationship-building, exercise, nutrition, and regular doctor checkups to prevent urgent health emergencies.

Quadrant III – Urgent but Not Important

The third quadrant is reserved for tasks that are urgent, without being important. Covey recommends minimizing or even eliminating these tasks as they do not contribute to your output. Delegation is also an option here. At best, these are distractions with high urgency.

Tasks that land in this quadrant often come from sources that regard the task as urgent and important (Quadrant I).  Because of emotion, they fail to delineate between the two. When approached with tasks in this quadrant, it is best to delegate, as previously stated, but do so in a way to subside the crisis-level emotion and guide the task into its true “not-important” category.

Examples: Emails, calls, meeting other people’s priorities instead of completing one’s own tasks.

Quadrant IV – Not Urgent and Not Important

The fourth and last quadrant focuses on tasks and responsibilities that do not yield any value—items that are unimportant and not urgent. These time wasters should be eliminated in designated work time as they have little to no value. However, this quadrant can be used as a reward.

While you want to remain out of this quadrant while trying to drive results, some tasks in this quadrant do have there time and place. An effective use of your time would help you operate in this quadrant by choice rather than venturing into it as part of a by-product of aimlessly wandering through your day.

Examples: Busywork, mindlessly watching tv, scrolling through social media, procrastinating important responsibilities.

How Does This Apply To My Career?

If you’re like most people, you probably spend most of your time on activities that either fall into Quadrant 1 or Quadrant 3 because they’re urgent. And, as an insurance agent, you cannot afford to be scrambling to complete a never-ending list of urgent tasks because they weren’t addressed when they fell into the second quadrant – important, but not urgent.

You must manage promoting and selling insurance products and services to your customers above all. But you also have to balance doing your own research on the plans so you can give sound financial advisory services and customer support to your clients. Marketing strategies must be drawn and redrawn from time to time, keeping in mind your customers’ preferences.

If you sell a variety of insurances, such as health, life, commercial, or medicare – you must complete these objectives for each vertical. Long story short, you have your work cut out for you. But through implementing this model, your load will become significantly less daunting.

So, How Are Your Writing Skills When It Comes to Marketing Campaigns?

Posted on by Benepath Blogger

If you’re groaning out loud at this question, then writing is likely something you struggle with every time you go to write a blog or marketing piece. The words seem wooden or they are too big and jargon-like. The end result is “you” understand what you wrote, because you sell insurance, but those who are going to receive and try to read it won’t “get it.”

Put yourself into the position of your customer who knows nothing about Medicare or isn’t familiar with Medigap or final expense insurance – whatever the product is you want to promote. Now write in the simplest manner possible and explain what they need to know – leaving out the legalese – as you can explain more in detail when they call or meet with you.

It’s not always an easy thing to do, thinking like a potential customer, but if you want customers to buy insurance, they have to understand what you are selling and how it directly benefits them. Straight, clean, simple concepts using points or short sentences to get across the benefits of supplemental insurance or Medicare.

Can’t do it? Comes out not making sense? Then, hire a writer to do it for you. How you communicate with your existing and potential clients is one of the “foundation” must-dos in building your insurance agency. Hiring a good writer is well worth the investment of marketing dollars to attract more business.

The Difference Between AEP and OEP

Posted on by Benepath Blogger

Medicare Supplement, Medicare Advantage, Medigap, Open Enrollment, Annual Enrollment.  There are so many buzz words associated with Medicare insurance sales that it is often difficult to differentiate what it all means.  One of the most confusing things to understand as an agent, let alone as a consumer, is what the difference between AEP and OEP is.

We are quickly approaching Annual Enrollment Period (AEP) for Medicare Advantage plans, not to be confused with Open Enrollment Period (OEP) that is correlated with Medicare Supplement plans.  AEP is an 8 week period from October 15th through December 7th where consumers can sign up for Medicare Part D and/or Medicare Advantage plans.  

OEP and Medicare Supplement plans (aka Medigap) is a little more complicated than AEP. OEP is a six month period from the beginning of a consumer’s Part B effective date. This is when a consumer can receive coverage without any health questions being asked.  There are a few circumstances that would begin an OEP including:

  • -Particular circumstances for someone on disability before their 65th birthday
  • -An individual’s 65th birthday
  • -Retirement and therefore loss of current group health plan after the age of 65

Once an individual has timed out of the six month period, they forfeit the opportunity to buy a Medicare Supplement plan without any medical questions being asked.  A consumer can sign up for a Medicare Supplement plan after that six month period, but they will be subject to health questions that could disqualify them for coverage by some insurance companies.

This graphic from boomerbenefits.com easily explains the differences we have explained above.  We recommend using this to help engage and explain the difference with your clients searching for information on their Medicare options.

Medicare insurance is an incredible investment for new agents or agents looking to expand their product portfolio, but it is exactly that; an investment.

Through our research and discoveries with our long term clients, we have found that Medicare consumers are likely to remain on an agent’s books for upwards of 8 years.  Though forming a client book will happen over time, lead services are a great way to guide consumers your way over a local competitor. While the marketing costs may be higher than referrals, the volume of potential clients is immediate, and the return over that consumer lifecycle pays for itself. 

When you are ready to increase your typical Medicare Supplement volume with exclusive leads, give us a call, because together we succeed!

Benepath Agent Success Series Webinar – Calling Like a Professional

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How do your phone communication skills size up according to your clients? Closing sales for insurance agents on the phone is hard enough, but if your phone call delivery is lacking in even one aspect, your efforts could be . We at Benepath want to help ensure your phone calls are as effective as possible, for this reason we are thrilled to announce our first Agent Success Series Webinar.

In this 30 minute webinar hosted by Benepath President, Clelland Green, and Revity Sales Consulting Partner, Morgan Smith, we will coach you in effectively calling your consumer leads to make the most of every second on the phone with them. Clelland and Morgan get right to the point, coaching you topics including:

  • The importance of tone throughout your call
  • Effective messaging to guide a consumer into a sale
  • Proper contact etiquette

We also give you the ability to ask your specific questions to the professionals that will be answered at the end of the webinar!

Sign up here.

Check Out The Competition

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Yes, check out what the competition is doing. Do they offer something you could improve upon? Are they leading your insurance agency in rankings? Do they sell more of policy X than you do? Find out what they are doing that makes them a leading competitor in your market space. Once you have a good idea of what they are doing that may be different or innovative, figure out how you can one-up the deal.

Could you offer different benefits? Offer a better discount? Sell a better insurance policy than their top selling policy for a lower price or with added benefits? There is always a way to make what you offer look, sound and sell better. You just have to pay attention to market analytics to figure out where and how you can improve your ranking in the marketplace.

Don’t do analytics? You don’t need to be doing them yourself if they seem like Greek to you. Hire a good SEO firm with expertise in analytics and have them tell you what you need to know to develop a superior health insurance marketing campaign. It’s worth the money.

Keep Things Simple When Designing an Email Marketing Campaign

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Email marketing campaigns are valuable to both the insurance agency and their clients or potential leads. Through such a campaign, an agency can provide useful and essential information about various insurance topics. However, the topic of insurance can get complicated and complex. Therefore, it is important to remember to keep these campaigns simple and easy to understand.

Sometimes an insurance topic needs to be boiled down into something simple and easy to digest. This is the time for agents to ensure that the information in the email marketing campaign is understandable to just about everyone. Make sure that the information in the email is easy to comprehend and is consistent with the information in the subject line of the email.

The relationship between the subject line and the content of the email marketing campaign is important to any successful email campaign. A subject line that does not correspond with the information within the email is an annoyance to readers. Therefore, the subject line is no place for promises of something and then have the email body content say something entirely different.

In other words, the intention of the subject line should match the content of the body of your email and vice versa, the content of the body of your email should match the subject line. Congruity is important. The subject line should be the lead to your email content.

Leverage timely topics in the insurance industry and make sure the subject line is your lead. Remember to measure the results of your campaigns for opens, click-throughs and opt-outs. Testing is an essential part of all email campaigns and once you get used to it, your campaigns are going to be more successful.

Email Marketing Campaigns Need to be Relevant

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Email marketing campaigns are essential growing any insurance agency. When done right, email marketing can trigger new leads to express interest in getting insurance. Here are some tips on creating relevant email marketing campaigns.

The first thing to consider when creating an email marketing campaign, is the information put in it. The first goal of any insurance agent is to educate their potential and existing leads on insurance policies. Email marketing is about education and not as much about selling. This is because the recipients need to know about a product or policy before they buy it, hence educational marketing is very valuable in making sales. To educate is to build a rapport with those reading the emails, a crucial element in any email marketing campaign. In fact, rapport, or relationship marketing, is one of the key elements in gaining new leads and eventually selling insurance. Any agency that sends out blanket emails about a new product or new pricing faces greater numbers of opt-outs and complaints about spam from recipients and the recipients’ ISP.

Once you have composed a relevant and well-informed email marketing campaign, you need to think about crafting the subject line for the email. Most emails, are left unread therefore, it is important to pique interest in email marketing campaign recipients. A captivating email subject line should ensure that the open and click-through rates increase.

Lastly, email frequency is an important factor to consider. Frequent emails will be regarded as nuisance emails or spam. Instead construct marketing campaigns that provide useful and new information. Limit the number of campaigns to one a quarter. The focus of you campaign is to build a reputation as an informational and educational agency. That is the ticket to more sales and building a solid customer base.

Frantic to Get Large Numbers of Leads?

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Leads are the uncontested lifeblood of your insurance agency – the best way to grow. So what are some of the best ways to attract new customers?

Most agents will often focus on attempting to obtain as many leads as possible. However, hasty connections are not likely to produce the results expected. Part of insurance marketing is forming lasting relationships with leads.

To find and keep the best leads, agents need to develop the right offers for the appropriate groups of leads. For example, developing the most well suited pricing and policy combination for seniors in need of Medicare/Medigap coverage.

Creating a strategy that is well suited to every group of leads, pays off by getting your agency new leads and creating lasting relationships. Developing a focused strategy, rather than running frantically trying to sell just about everything to anyone, will grow your agency as a trusted source of insurance.

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