What do accountants and health insurance agents have in common every January?

You won’t find either one at home.

November to January brings hordes of prospects for health insurance, but how do you get them to stick around?

Don’t allow anxiety to overwhelm your results during the busiest time of the year. Make a plan for how to sell health insurance during open enrollment today.

Plan Early, Plan Often

You know that open enrollment won’t wait, so why should you? Contact your prospects right now. Policies take time to write, and you want to give yourself the time to trade emails with potential customers.

In a perfect world, you’ve already been talking to your leads all year. Work hard and be a known-quantity that your customers feel like they can trust. If you wait until the open enrollment deadline approaches, you’ve waited too long.

It doesn’t matter what type of insurance you may have sold in the past – do not wait! The market has only become more competitive since the elimination of the individual mandate. The Affordable Care Act doesn’t provide an automatic “must buy” trigger for your customers anymore.

As a result, there are fewer people interested in buying health insurance. You have to act now and create an expansion plan.

Comb through your emails and client lists. Contact everyone to ensure they know what type of healthcare plans you have to offer.

Even if they don’t buy from you this year, you’ve placed clients in your sales pipeline for later.

How to Sell Health Insurance: Keep It Simple

When people buy health insurance, they’re activating fight or flight functions in their bodies. When you deal with health, life, and death, it’s going to happen. To make matters worse, the complexities of what will or won’t be covered makes everyone anxious.

Selling insurance may be a process, but it doesn’t have to be a difficult one. Most customers feel tortured by the experience before they reach you. It’s your job to make finding the right insurance simple and straightforward.

Health insurance has its own language that can alienate prospects. Explain everything in plain terms that demonstrate transparency.

Find the Real Pain

Your prospect continues to talk to you for a reason. Are you confident that you know why?

Solution selling requires that you know what your customer experiences in the marketplace. Every customer is different, but you can’t ignore what they have in common.

Take five minutes to write down the questions your customers ask the most. Do you notice a pattern? What feelings do you think your prospect is going through for each question?

You can group pain points into these four types:

  • Financial Pain: your customer needs to reduce their spending, and they’re tired of spending too much.
  • Process Pain: your customer can’t stand any more annoyances getting to the solution they want.
  • Support Pain: Your customer didn’t receive the support they expected from a previous salesperson or company.
  • Productivity Pain: your customer doesn’t like wasting their time trying to make a solution work for them.

Ask the Right Questions

Now that you have a list of frequently asked questions, it’s time to learn how to use them. Don’t allow your previous experience to get in the way of improving how you talk to your prospects.

How does an insurance salesman get the sale by asking questions? Your goal must be to keep the prospect talking.

Start by asking open-ended questions. For example: “What do you want your health insurance to provide for you?”

Imagine that you ask a customer, “Do you want a plan that covers chiropractic?”

What choice do they have but to give you a yes or no answer? Have you expanded or narrowed the subject?

Now, go back to that list you wrote and turn the closed questions into open ones. You’ll thank yourself later.

Health Insurance Leads

Wouldn’t it be nice if people raised their hands to let you know they want to buy the plans that you offer? There’s good news: customers do tell people what they want, but it’s not likely that they’re talking to an agent.

Competition for healthcare insurance reached an all-time high in 2020. More potential customers want to see what you have, but they have more options than they have the time to understand what’s in them.

You don’t have to be an experienced insurance salesperson to know that most people don’t buy after the first phone call. It’s nice when you’re the last person they’re going to call for the day, but you can’t bank on that happening. Active shoppers for health insurance hop from quote to quote like a frog jumping from lily pad to lily pad.

With this level of competition, it’s crucial to offer solutions to specific concerns. Customers who want a plan that works for a preferred doctor means you have an opportunity to shine as an insurance rep. If you make yourself into a useful resource for prospects, they will be grateful and return for more help.

It’s never been more critical to find a customer first and wow them with your knowledge. If you’re not buying health insurance leads, you can guarantee that your competition talked to whoever you see first. Focused representatives across the country find their edge this way.

Don’t hesitate to buy leads because you have questions and concerns. Speak to an account manager who answers specific questions about your target demographic. Make a plan, but don’t make it during your peak season.

Next Steps

First, you’re going to make a plan. Second, you’re going to refine the questions you ask and how you ask them. Finally, you’re going to buy leads to keep up with the competition.

If you want to know more about how to sell health insurance, there’s no better resource than our blog. Bookmark it today or give us a call at 1-888-242-6989 to have an in-depth conversation about how we can help.