Worksite LTCI: How technology can help you close the sale

September 15, 2010 at 08:00 PM
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Those of you who have attended my training know how strongly I feel about using a visual so the client can hear the information and see it. This is especially true if you are working with a couple. Chances are that one is auditory and one is visual. For a few years, it became more difficult to sit down with clients and do a full presentation with busy baby boomers. Now there are ways to show a presentation in the "Go to Meeting" format, and I'm hearing from the field that this approach is working very well with tech-savvy prospects. I also had my first Skype call recently and aside from having to have more hair appointments, I'm going to love this technology as well!

My company has had the wonderful opportunity to do worksite sales just in Tennessee through the Blue Cross health insurance brokers for the last five years, which has provided the perfect laboratory for me to test all my worksite ideas to perfection. Now I'm anxious to share these ideas with you. One of the many reasons I love LTCI worksite sales so much is because you can set the expectation for the employees to sign up for a personal consultation so you get the opportunity to work with them with a visual. Invariably, the employee starts to sit across from me, and the first thing I do is have the person sit right next to me so he or she can see my computer. I do it with an excited tone like I don't want them to miss anything.

That way, if the employee wasn't able to attend an employee meeting, I have my laptop and can do a mini-presentation to get the common objections out of the way before explaining the plan. When I get to the plan design, I work with the employee to determine which of the four sample plans that we handed out in the meeting is a good starting place. I enter the benefits of that one into my rate software and let the employee watch the entire process. Sometimes the spouse is there as well and that's even better. I turn the screen so they can both see the impact of the cost for each option I've decided to show them. That way they can decide quickly what works for them.

Of course, personal consultations for the companies with multiple locations may present a challenge, but now we have the technology to smooth out this crucial process. With the "Go to Meeting" approach, the client hundreds of miles away can see your computer – everything just like you were together in a conference room. If you are working with a company that allows an agent-assisted online enrollment process, it's easy to move right into the application in the same media-meeting. A big reason why we enroll so many spouses is that from the beginning, I set the tone that the spouse will apply. I don't ask if the spouse is interested – I just assume that of course he or she is and gather his or her information as well as the entire family situation. The very next question is, "Why are you interested in long-term care insurance?" Most of the time it's the "we don't want to be a burden on our children" reason so by having the children's names and ages, I can come back to that and make it really personal in the closing.

Phyllis Shelton is president of LTC Consultants and LTCiTraining.com, based in Hendersonville, Tenn. She has just published a new book, Phyllis Shelton's WORKSITE Long-Term Care Insurance TOOLBOX, and is in the midst of her 2010 LTCI Worksite and Combo Products Fall Tour, continuing through early November. For more information, visit www.phyllisshelton.com.

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