Interview: How Shop & Enroll Helps You Sell Ancillary Products

Shop & Enroll is a CMS-compliant, consumer-facing website that we put together for all of our agents to use. You can use it to run Medicare Advantage, prescription drug plan, and Medicare Supplement quotes and plan comparisons. You can also use it to collect electronic Scopes of Appointment, take online Medicare enrollments, and market yourself. Each agent gets their own unique URL, which can then be used for marketing and more — like those things I just mentioned.

You should use Shop & Enroll for three main reasons:

1. It provides a compliant website that you can use for marketing purposes. A lot of carriers are cracking down on lead-generating websites that aren’t filed with CMS, so this is a very easy alternative for you to use.
2. It really saves you a lot of time with the online Scopes of Appointment and online enrollment. It makes those processes a snap.
3. You can use it for some really cool marketing strategies with affinity partners and the Shop & Enroll Blog. There’s also the really great built-in plan comparison tool, which is another awesome feature!

The Shop & Enroll Blog has some great educational posts about the importance of ancillary products, like dental, vision, and hearing and hospital indemnity, which you can share with your clients. If you copy a post’s link and then add /?agent= and your unique agent slug to the end of it, your name and phone number will show up on the blog post and the “FIND YOUR PLAN” buttons will link to your Shop & Enroll page (ex. Blog.ShopandEnroll.com/?agent=craigritter). On your Shop & Enroll page, the online Scope of Appointment form has boxes for dental, vision, hearing and hospital indemnity. If your clients are looking for information about these products, they can check off those boxes on the form, and you can go right into talking about them with the client.

Ancillary products primarily create a more well-rounded coverage for your clients. And, they’re also a great way to increase your revenue within your current book of business, especially if you’re primarily selling Medicare or working with Medicare beneficiaries. Ancillary products pair really well with Medicare products, and cross-selling them could increase your profit almost exponentially just within your book of business. But first and foremost, selling ancillary products creates that more well-rounded insurance for your clients.

Original Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans have different coverage gaps within them. For example, for hospital inpatient stays, there are certain costs they will and will not cover. Hospital indemnity plans can cover the course of the days that you’re paying a copay or that your specific plan won’t pay. So, in that sense, it’s creating that holistic insurance experience to help your clients cover the out-of-pocket costs that come from traditional Medicare or Medicare Advantage plans.

Ancillary plans, like hospital indemnity insurance, are a pretty natural fit for Medicare clients. With any Medicare Advantage plan, you should consider writing a hospital indemnity plan. And one other thing just about why hospital indemnity and MA plans work so well together, if you get two policies with a client, they’re basically your client for life. If you get the one policy, maybe they shop around. But if you get two policies, they will likely come back to you for everything.

Dental, vision, and hearing is a very big one. Traditional Medicare simply doesn’t cover routine dental, vision, and hearing services. Medicare Supplements don’t either. And Medicare Advantage plans don’t have comprehensive dental, vision, hearing coverage. Ancillary coverage can be cross-sold across the board to create and give your clients more coverage where it’s needed. These kinds of services can get expensive and, as costs continue to rise, clients are going to need more coverage year to year, especially as they get older.

You can use Shop & Enroll to increase your ancillary sales by one, using the Shop & Enroll Blog. And two, ancillary products pair really well with Medicare products, so it’s pretty natural to try to convert the extra business that you generate through your Shop & Enroll page to ancillary sales. It’s sort of the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats. The more Medicare business you get through Shop & Enroll, the more ancillary business you should be writing as well.

As Shop & Enroll grows, I think the opportunities are just endless, especially from a cross-selling and marketing standpoint. Since it’s a consumer-facing website designed by Ritter, everything on there is going to be compliant and useful to consumers. With the blog, they can read information on Medicare and ancillary products on their own, then click to go to your Shop & Enroll site for help finding a plan. Remember, hospital indemnity and dental, vision, and hearing products are right on Shop & Enroll’s online Scope of Appointment (and permission-to-contact) form that pops up when somebody clicks on the Contact us link. As soon as you see those boxes checked off, it should be a sign that you need to be talking about these products with those clients. Those conversations are going to lead to increased sales.

Try getting the Shop & Enroll Blog posts in front of the clients prior to AEP or before you meet with them, to get them educated before you sit down and have that Medicare talk. Also, take advantage of the online Scope of Appointment — that’s probably the biggest one. It gives you and your clients the opportunity to talk about these products at the first meeting — as long as the right boxes are checked off — so there’s no waiting around. Keeping that mind prior to your appointments will help you to sell better during AEP and cross-sell Medicare clients these plans.