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Life Health > Life Insurance

Automated client management prevents lost sales

By Paul Winandy, CFA

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As a life insurance agent, you face the same challenge that many other small business owners face on a regular basis: balancing your efforts to generate new leads with serving your existing clients.

It can be a daunting task to keep up with your in-force policies, especially when it comes to performing annual reviews.

That’s no reason to skip annual reviews. If you aren’t performing them, you are missing out on an opportunity to resell or cross sell products to generate more revenue.

Related: Your lead generation ‘prospects’ are improving with this tip

Bridge coverage gap to push business forward

In 2016, LIMRA’s Life Insurance Needs model estimated that 48 percent of U.S. households lack adequate life insurance coverage to meet their needs in an emergency. When surveying households with children under 18:

        • Four in 10 respondents said they would be in immediate financial trouble if the primary wage earner died.
        • Another three out of 10 estimated their basic needs would not be covered after only a few months.

Many households do not purchase or review their life insurance because they are uninformed, or they simply fail to realize the value of working consistently with a financial advisor.

More than half of the respondents to LIMRA’s survey said they would be inclined to buy or increase their coverage if approached by a trusted financial advisor. So why aren’t agents knocking down their doors?

Your clients look to you for recommendations on how to best take care of themselves and their families. (Photo: iStock)Your clients look to you for recommendations on how they can best care for themselves and their families. (Photo: iStock)

Managing your book manually is difficult, less efficient

Agents often miss the opportunity to revisit coverage with their clients because they do not have a centralized, easy way to manage their in-force block. Many clients let their policies lapse or remain at insufficient coverage levels not because they don’t care, but because their agent has not contacted them for an annual review. The client just assumes everything is fine.  

In a recent analysis, InforcePRO learned that when agents managed their in-force block of term life insurance clients through traditional means such as spreadsheets and client files, they let more than 15 percent of their book lapse each year.

In contrast, when using automated in-force policy management, agents saw their lapse rates drop to only 5 percent. This difference is ultimately a result of more proactive client communications.

Automated policy management helps agents identify and sell new opportunities or additional coverage much more easily. Agents without it tend to see only a 5 percent increase in revenue from their term life in-force block while agents with it increase their revenue by over 20 percent.

Annual policy reviews produce happier clients and advisors

As you may know, increased revenue is often a product of the annual review meeting that agents schedule with their clients. After sitting down for an annual meeting:

        • More than half of clients rewrite their term life insurance policy.
        • One in five convert to a permanent life insurance policy.
        • Fifteen percent uncover new needs and products they didn’t know about before.
        • Only 10 percent leave the meeting and take no action.

Your clients look to you as a trusted financial advisor, and they want to hear your recommendations on how to best take care of themselves and their families. You could be missing out on thousands of dollars a month by simply not picking up the phone and giving your existing clients a call. Automated in-force policy management makes it easy.

Editor’s Note: The original version of this blog post was co-written by Rick Stevens, and first appeared in the InforcePro blog.

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