RiskProNet Members Offer Tips for Successful Cross-Selling
Giving lip service to the benefits of cross-selling is easy. Executing the strategy is quite a bit harder. What are key ingredients in successfully cross-selling property/casualty and employee benefits?
At RiskProNet International Inc., a network of 29 leading independent insurance brokers, member firm J. W. Terrill has sold an estimated 65 percent of its clients both P/C and benefits coverage. The key, believes Cottrell Fox, senior executive vice president of the Chesterton, Mo. firm, is for senior producers to have confidence in other departments.
Fox and executives of two RiskProNet members that have long been successful in this arena—Mortenson, Matzelle & Meldrum Inc., in Madison, Wis.; and SullivanCurtisMonroe in Irvine, Calif.—offer these tips:
1. Give producers a financial incentive to cross-sell.
2. Make sure that senior executives on both sides of the house trust and know each other well. This goes a long way toward eliminating the natural fear that a team member’s mistake could erode a client’s trust in a producer.
3. Appeal to producers’ self-preservation instincts. Remind producers that if a competing broker has part of the client’s business, that broker is probably looking at ways to get the entire account, too.
Unlike many agencies, Mortenson, Matzelle & Meldrum Inc. started as a benefits agency in 1968. It began offering property/casualty in 1985. Before that, there was a referral relationship with a P/C agency, said Rick Kekula, executive vice president, strategic planning.
“Typically we used to hear a P/C producer ask a client if they would like a quote on employee benefits, and the client would say, ‘No, thank you, I’m very happy with my current carrier.’ In the last two years our emphasis has been to send teams, rather than a single producer, to introduce all of our products and services to our current clients and new prospects,” he added.
The team can include as many as four people, including specialists in risk management, safety and health care management. A compliance unit also is available to answer questions about state and federal regulations.
“We’ve learned that we cannot really predict what a client or prospect needs until we sit down and talk with them. The more people we have working with a client, the more we learn about our client’s plans and problem areas.
“For property/casualty we typically deal with the finance department or chief financial officer and perhaps the president of the company. In the employee benefits side, we usually deal with the human resources manager with perhaps some feedback from the president and chief financial officer. Both sides face different sets of issues,” Kekula said.
“When an employee has to take time off because of a disability, it’s an issue for the employer whether or not the injury is work-related. Clients need return-to-work problems that are based on disabilities, rather than just on workers’ comp claims. This synergy can be very helpful to a client,” he added.
J.W. Terrill also has been offering both P/C and benefits for almost two decades. Like most agencies, it, too, has found that more referrals come in from the P/C side than the benefits side.
“For whatever reason, P/C people seem to be more sales-oriented and benefits people seem to be more oriented to the service and technical side of the business,” Fox said. “Nevertheless, we had one benefits manager who brought in a large manufacturer, and she received a very nice reward for that.”
At SullivanCurtisMonroe, employee benefits accounts for 10 to 12 percent of revenues, compared to zero when the department started with a single employee 10 years ago.
“Instead of just asking producers to give us leads, we’ve made cross-selling part of our producers’ annual goals,” said Ed Shumaker, executive vice president. “We ask them to take an employee benefits producer to lunch with a client and introduce them. If the introduction is successful, part of the commission will go to the P/C producer, and he can continue to be the key person in charge of the account. But the most important reason we’ve been successful is that we’ve worked very hard at it.”
The biggest advantage is the comfort factor to clients, Kekula said. “They know they’re dealing with an agency that can meet all of their needs, and that there is an open flow of communication between the P/C and employee benefits sides. From an agency perspective, we know that the more pieces of business you write for a client, the more likely you are to retain the client.”