The Buzz At NAILBAs Annual: Tuning In To Senior Needs

The advantage is that this training helps marketers and carriers study and analyze the needs of the market, adds William McGrory, sales director at Brokers Insurance/LifeMark, Jenkintown, Pa.

For instance, such knowledge can help carriers design niche programs and promote them to brokers, showing how the product or program meets a certain need.

The brokers then can help producers focus on which solution will best meet the clients needs, says McLaughlin.

“Agents do better this way,” says McGrory. “They are more planning focused and not concentrating on the product.”

Thats good “because you have no idea what product is the right one when the person first calls,” says McLaughlin. In the course of planning, “the right product will surface,” he says.

But this way of doing business means that brokerage general agents need more education than they did in the pastmore education about the senior market, more education about how to sell and more insurance education in general, says McLaughlin.

They need this education for their own shops and also so they can better inform the agents who call them, he continues.

This point has not been lost upon NAILBAs leadership. In making his convention address, this years president, Jack Dewald, president of Agency Services Inc., Memphis, Tenn., announced that the association is moving forward on its plan to offer online continuing education programs to members.

Brokers increasingly are seeking the kind of education that used to be provided by the career agency shops in former eras, he explained.

Christi M. Ashwill, who is chair of NAILBAs education committee, says this demand is rising rapidly. Every week, since taking on her NAILBA education committee role, “Ive received tons of calls from BGAs who are looking for help with training,” she says.

The co-director of annuities and long term care for Borden-Hamman, Dallas, Ashwill can appreciate their predicament. When she decided to become a LTC specialist four years ago, she says she had to obtain the training on her own. She now holds the Certified in Long Term Care designation, and her LTC book grows every year.

Training is essential, she contends. “There is a huge learning curve.”

Sometimes, Ashwill says, she has encountered people who want to go into the senior market “because theyve heard its a goldmine. But no one has told them that it can take six to 12 months for a senior client to, say, decide to move on a long term care decision. No one has told them that half their applicants might be declined. And no one has told them they might be close to starving in the first couple of years.”

Those are only a few of the details that can emerge in the course of training, Ashwill says.

Brokers need all sorts training and education, not just for the senior market, she adds. This includes the basics of agency operations and staffing, middle management in a brokerage, and advanced training for leaders.

NAILBA is responding by developing its own NAILBA University, Ashwill says. It will make various training programs available to its members, starting with Phase I (now in initial stages of development), which will cover basics. Phase II (an intermediate program) and Phase III (an advanced program) will come later.

This is a three- to five-year vision, she says, and its implementation will entail sacrifice of time and effort. But she says NAILBA leaders believe the need for education and training is so pronounced that it has become a priority.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Life & Health/Financial Services Edition, November 14, 2003. Copyright 2003 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.