Cross-selling in the insurance market is a very simple and straightforward strategy. Yet it is the most effective one. Cross-selling is a sales strategy that consists of offering a complementary product along with the main sale.
For example, recommending car insurance when selling life insurance where life insurance is the main sale and car insurance is the complementary product. To convince your potential customer to buy additional policy need some skill and expertise. You can say cross-selling a kind of art: simple yet complicated.
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There are many ways that you can put in practice to cross-sell when selling life insurance plan. However, you may have some doubts at the beginning. In this post, we have specified some tips to help you cross-selling life insurance. Check it out!
- Identify the situation when cross-selling
Did you know that there are two types of situations to generate cross-sells? First, you can meet the potential customers who already own the product. These people have already purchased coverage from a competitor, but you are trying to get the business.
The key with them is repetition, consistency, good follow-up and selling the benefits of your agency.
Second, you may meet those customers who do not yet have the product. These people do not currently have the type of coverage you are trying to sell. The key with them is to raise awareness and educate them about the products, create a need, identify interests and then the sale.
These situations are not completely opposite, but they require different sales approaches and tactics. If you’re currently using every cross-selling tactic you know in the same way, take a few moments to think about how each one requires a different approach and how you can best approach it.
- Know your customer’s profile
The most important thing before starting to use cross-selling is to understand the type of customer you are serving and what their pain points are. For an insurance seller, the task is usually easier.
As you normally work with consultative sales and recording information on an ongoing basis. If you are a professional who is in direct contact with the client, it is easy to ask what their demands are. Begin by identofying your client’s profile, their needs, their marital status, number of children, their age, and so on. You also need to be more active and periodically contact your clients always with a value proposition.
Still, doing market research and tracking changes in your target audience is still important. This helps prepare you to better serve customers and offer the right product.
- Educate customers
In the field of insurance, still many people are ignorant about its benefits. People take it as a waste of money. Some people may realize taking out life insurance policy is important but they may be unknowledegable about the detail benefits of the policy they purchased.
By educating clients, the insurance company can illustrate the benefits of each policy and how they might address the client’s needs. Sending them brochures, related blog posts, or placing them in an email course are some proven ways to showcase your expertise and educate customers. Once they see how each service can benefit their needs, they will be more likely to take on additional policies.
- Thorough knowledge of all insurance products
For cross-selling to be successful, you need to have a thorough knowledge of all types of insurance products. Situations may arise when the buyer is dissatisfied with the amount or timing of payment of insurance compensation.
Such cases occur due to the fact that you did not properly explain all the nuances of the contract or the client himself did not read it carefully. In some cases, it may be you who fail to offer a suitable product.
As a result, due to lack of professionalism, the client may remain dissatisfied and lose confidence in the company. The way out of this situation is the thorough knowledge of all types of insurance products that the company sells.
- Choose relevant products
One of the key characteristics in cross-selling is that the secondary product must always be complementary and relevant to the main one. You could offer a health insurance for a life insurance and vice versa. But it is unlikely that the customer looking for one of these products will be interested in the second.
Lets take an example, if a client comes to our company looking for a life insurance, offering property or mortgage insurance is not necessarily the best idea. As it has no correlation with the previous product. It might work, but the chances are lower.
- Identify the right time
If you are cross-selling your product, you should be able to recognize the right time to offer your complimentary product. The correct time for offering the complimentary insurance policies to clients’ is when their main product is about to expire.
However, it must be you who based on your knowledge on your clients should detect when you will have the best chance of successfully completing the transaction for a complementary product. For example, if during a conservation the issue of the need to secure their family’s financial future arises, it may be a clear signal to offer, or expand, life insurance.
In any case, in a cross-selling action plan it is important to determine what the needs of your clients are in terms of risk coverage through consultation and analysis of the data collected.
- Make use of your website and opt for online cross-selling
The great thing about cross-selling online is that you have a lot of data to work with. You can even automate cross-selling using data from what other customers have bought. Suppose, one customer is looking for life insurance, then health insurance, sickness insurance, child insurance should be offered together.
Use the Site Data Overlay feature in Google Analytics to see which products work best together (based on how customers move from one to the other). you can then use the sales data – it shows what products customers are buying at the same time.
Make sure it’s easy for clients to find out the information they need to make additional purchases without clicking through. Each page should encourage cross-selling as much as possible.
- Make the use of social networks
Today, digital platforms are the favorite channel to generate marketing strategies. Because more than 80% of people trust what they see on social networks when making a purchasing decision and close to half of buyers depend of influencer purchase recommendations.
Using these media to promote your brand can be an excellent strategy to approach younger audiences. By advertising a significant range of your products, you will generate greater interest from the public who will want to discover the value of what you offer. Everything will depend on how you socialize your offers and present them to the client.
For example, using a You might also be interested in… or This insurance will suit your need… phrases. This action can also be retroactive. For example, you can send an email after a purchase to suggest other policies that the customer might be interested in.
- Offer discounts on second purchase
Add-ons is gaining popularity among insurance companies as well. As they can offer desirable yet non-essential additional products by making them even more attractive and slightly discounted. Clients can feel they are getting two services rather than one, and they probably would never have bought the second item if it weren’t so nice: one for two.
In addition, you offer something to your customer at a discount, but this does not eliminate your profit. You may only double your sales per transaction especially during slow sales periods.
If they are not interested in your offer the first time, you can use the direct mail method to follow up with sales that offer similar incentives and repeat purchases. Just place everything a little differently since you’re offering it to the client as an added bonus.
- Insurance seller must be prepared
Most of the customers today like to get as much information they can online. But when it comes to purchasing life insurance, they always prefer face to face meeting with insurance agent or company representative. Therefore, the insurance agents and sellers should use this opportunity to collect customer data.
The information you collected today may not be relevant immediately. But you can use this data later to form proposals for purchasing another insurance products via cross-selling. Thus, the insurance agents or companies after collecting customer data should set aside which they can use later.
For example, if you come to know when conversing with the client, they are planning to buy car or home in the near future. You can offer them car or home insurance at the time o purchasing. The key is to keep on visiting and contacting your clients.
- Identify gaps in client’s life insurance policy
Analyze your customers’ life insurance policies, identify what benefits or coverage they are missing in their policy. What gaps they have in their insurance coverage? This way you can then offer them the complementary coverage.
For example, if in their life insurance policy, the clients have not covered the illness coverage but has only covered the death benefits. You can convince them to add illness coverage. It is also worth paying attention to the effective date of the coverage.Based on this information, you can offer updated policies before the product’s validity period expires.
- Don’t force the sale
The biggest mistake that many businesses make when cross-selling is trying to sell too aggressively. Considering the previous example, let’s say that you insists on offering life and car insurance in the same package, even though it is not in the customer’s best interest. It is likely that the customer will give up on the purchase just because of the inconvenience.
The objective of each cross-sell is to close more deals, yes. But to do this, you need to add more value to the customer. Without this, you will lose more sales than you gain with this strategy.
- Expand your portfolio
It is necessary for any company be it insurance or any other commercial companies to know the changing demands of their targeted customer and expand their service accordingly.
Similarly, as a seller, you must always familiarize with new products introduced in the market. This, among other things, allows us to achieve one of the most important objectives of brands: that customers are loyal to it. So we must encourage them to consume as many of the company’s products as possible.
- Creativity
Integrate creativity in your cross-selling strategy. It means generate policies that is something new that hasn’t been in the market yet. For example, pet insurance that can be something new in Nepalese market.
Since people are now intrigued to keep different pets at their homes, they will be more attracted to purchase pet insurance from you. Keep in mind that the policies or plan you sell must be such that other cannot possible imitate. This way, clients will be forced to purchase that plan only from you.
- Create a brand ecosystem
When choosing a life insurance policy that client need, they usually face a wide variety of offers. Generally, they lean towards the option that at that moment attracts them the most. May be because of its cost, its presentation or even because someone has recommended it to them.
Although this may indicate that in the future they will continue buying that same product, it is very likely that over time they will decide to try other alternatives or change their choice.
Therefore, creating a brand ecosystem plays a vital role. What this cross-selling strategy allows is to invite consumers to repeatedly choose our brand (and the other products we offer) as the best solution to their purchasing needs.
This strategy facilitates customer retention and enhances the feeling of belonging to a group of followers. By offering a closed ecosystem, people will tend not to leave this circle and continue consuming the products we offer.
What to avoid in cross-selling?
Regardless what method you use to cross-sell your insurance policy, you must obtain the results. For the success of the process, you need to have strategy to analyze your anticline;s purchasing profile. So your sales will increase else you will loose sales and will have a poor customer experience. Therefore, avoid:
- Offering products that are unrelated to the customer’s purchasing interest
- Implement strategies without data basis or support
- Starting the process without preparing the sales team in relation to the products and services that will be worked on
- Insisting too much on an up-sell strategy
- Offering dozens of items at a time, confusing the lead, causing them to rethink the entire purchase
- Apply strategies with customers who are not suitable or who do not fit the interest profile of the suggested products.
Conclusion
In conclusion, cross-selling life insurance is the key tool that will allow you to place new policies based on attention to the personal needs of each insured clients. For this reason, we recommend that you focus your sales efforts on recognizing that it is in your hands to solve the problems and satisfy the security needs of your clients.
Therefore, we suggest you personalize and enable the appropriate strategies to place new policies and for this, cross-selling will always be your best allies.