Looking for ways to incorporate upselling techniques into your sales strategies? Check out these five tips for upselling insurance.
For fifty cents more you can upgrade your movie popcorn to a jumbo. For an additional fifteen dollars a month you can upgrade your cable package to include all the sports channels. For an extra forty dollars a month you can enjoy a moon roof and heated seats. Upselling techniques are used in nearly every sales industry and consumers have come to expect them. In fact, many companies aim for 30% of their sales to come from upselling, cross-selling, and bundling. The insurance industry is no different.
The challenge with using insurance upselling techniques is to not come off as a pushy salesperson. That kind of behavior can be a real turn-off to customers and counterproductive to your sales numbers. The goal is to share insurance policy information and features while demonstrating the overall benefits. In a perfect situation, your customer opts for the upsell themselves. If you’re looking for more tips, take a look at these five insurance upselling techniques and test them out with your customers.
Collect Information
Your biggest asset for using insurance upselling techniques is information. The more detailed information you collect about your customers, the more you can tailor your upselling pitches. From your first email or phone call, you should be taking thorough notes about your customers. Learn about their living situation. Do they have a family? Are they planning on buying a home or car in the next few years? What type of vacations do they go on? Do they have any pets? It may not always be obviously useful information when you begin to collect it. Over time, however, this information helps identify potential policy upgrades.
Highlight Features and Benefits that Match Your Client’s Needs
Once you’ve learned about your customers, pick the top two or three benefits you think match their needs and use those as your main highlights. It’s easy to want to rattle off every insurance policy feature, but too much information can be overwhelming at once. Instead, a great upselling technique is to identify the benefits that directly relate to your customer. Show examples of how your customer would benefit from these specific policy features. This technique works two-fold by highlighting how great the policy is and by building rapport with your client and showing them you are keeping track of their needs.
Play the Long Game
Not all upselling opportunities will happen at the point of the original sale. Oftentimes, it’s an agent’s long-term customers who provide multiple upselling opportunities over the course of several months and even years. A yearly review just before renewal deadlines is a great opportunity to check in with clients, assess their insurance needs, and offer a more robust policy package. Keep following up with your clients periodically to assess their satisfaction and learn more about how they are (or aren’t) taking advantage of their policy benefits.
Identify Customers Who’ve Made Previous Claims
By targeting customers who’ve already made claims on their insurance policies, you can use their own experiences to illustrate their additional needs. Using a client’s previous claim, demonstrate how additional coverage could have saved them additional money or added benefits to make their situation easier. If a customer has already experienced an incident where they needed to make a claim, there’s likely some emotions attached to that incident. Whether it was a car accident, fire, or a bad storm, a customer will have first-hand experience and understand how add-ons to their policy could have helped them.
Do the Math for Your Customers Ahead of Time
Money talks. But don’t expect everyone to have a calculator handy. Before getting on the phone or meeting with a client to upsell them, do your homework. Demonstrate monthly savings and tally what that would be year over year. Tell your customers, “You can save $89 a month which comes out to $1068 a year.” A larger annual saving is oftentimes more impressive than a monthly savings amount.
Use your calculations in your upselling techniques to tell a story. Based on your context clues and other information you’ve collected, tell the customer how they could use those savings. If you know they’re going on a big vacation soon, tell them they could spend that money toward the vacation. If a child will be starting college soon, the savings can go toward buying books and supplies for school. This is where knowing about your client’s life is essential.
Looking to carve out more time in your schedule to use upselling techniques with current customers? Leave the cold-calling to HBW Leads. Let their team of insurance and technology experts find you double-verified leads so you can focus your energy on relationship-building and growing your business.