Interview: The Importance of Cross-Selling During AEP

It’s moving along, but it looks a little bit different for our team. We’re gearing up our agents to get ready for cross-selling so that they have the opportunity for more sales during the busiest time of the season, because why not cross-sell while your clients are already in front of you?

Like I had mentioned, our AEP looks a little bit different than most of what Ritter does because we focus on things outside of the Medicare field. We’re working on a training for our agents to discuss cross-selling opportunities and how to make sure that your portfolio is fully equipped for AEP.

If you haven’t thought about who the MTM team is or any of our products, I want to explain who we are. We are the part of Ritter that deals exclusively outside of the Medicare space. We deal with life products, final expense, fixed annuities, term life, and then also the ancillary health products. Pretty much everything that complements the Medicare products that Medicare probably doesn’t cover.

We have over 50 carriers in just our MTM portfolio between all of those products, and we also have a strategic partner on the life and annuities side. With all of their products, we have over 80 carriers.

We’re here to assist all of our agents in figuring out what products might be the best option for their client, and what carrier might be the best option.

We have field underwriting assistants on our team and a case manager who deals with case setup. She will follow the application, send it over to the carrier for you, make sure everything is in good order, and get that put in force. We also have different product knowledge.

We have both ancillary and life knowledge. If any agents have questions about those specific products, we’re here to help. We can answer questions about any kind of carrier information that agents might need or any materials like brochures, applications, any other forms. Different trainings are also available that teach different methods and approaches to selling with our products and any industry updates that happen just to keep our agents informed.

First and foremost, we are here to answer any questions that the agents might have about different products or carriers that might benefit their clients.

We have a lot of tools available for agents like quote tools for life products and final expense term products. We also have fact finders to uncover any gaps in their current coverage, product comparisons, and some cheat sheets and worksheets just to figure out the different specs of the carriers and what they offer.

We’re working on a quote tool for hospital indemnity (HI) and dental vision, and hearing (DVH). We have forms available so we can figure out the underwriting side of things for what would be the best thing for a specific client.

First, some of our bigger carriers actually make it really simple to cross-sell with different products across the board. Some of our bigger carriers will have the Medicare products, but also have the ancillary health and life products. As you’re writing one product, you can also write several others within the same sale and sometimes on the same application, but it could also be on the scope of appointments.

Some of our carriers do offer Medicare products, but they’re more limited in their portfolio on the More Than Medicare side. We do have a lot of other carriers that can be paired with those carriers that offer the Medicare products to kind of fill those gaps in.

Say you’re selling a Medicare Advantage (MA) product and that carrier doesn’t have a hospital indemnity product. We do have other hospital indemnity products available that could match with that pretty well through a different carrier. It really can be easy to cross-sell. You just have to kind of know how to approach it. Then, we’re there to help you along the way.

So the biggest thing that we push on why our agents should be cross selling is it makes you a full-service agent.

You’re able to offer more than one product to your clients, and they’re more likely to come back to you for their other insurance needs. You’re also going to get higher persistency with those clients, so they’re not going to you for just the Medicare products.

That also means more income for the agents because if you’re offering more products, you’re making more money.

Our products can be sold year round, so it gives agents an opportunity to have more sales throughout the year. They’re not waiting on AEP. Another thing that we really push with our agents is it’s very easy to cross-sell with our products. A lot of carriers offer more than one product themselves, sometimes on the same application.

A lot of carriers actually do have client facing links that you can just send to the clients and they can enroll themselves in products and it’s under you as the agent.

The MTM team is here to guide all of our agents through any issues that might arise. We are the full-service, back-office operation to make sure that you’re able to make the sale as efficiently as possible.