New Medicare beneficiaries may enter your office and be speaking with someone for the first time about this incredibly challenging program. Many retirees have used employer group health insurance their whole lives, transitioning from their parents’ coverage to their first jobs’ plans. The employer chooses an insurance carrier, which narrows the employee’s pick down to three choices. The highest element of difficulty is checking whether their favorite doctors or prescriptions are covered in the plans’ networks, then choosing how much they are willing to pay each month to lower their deductible. Minimal decision-making and subsidized coverage simplify this process; unfortunately, Medicare involves learning a new system, cost breakdown, plan types, and more.
Your clients may not know the right questions to ask. By contextualizing their challenges with a story, licensed insurance agents can bring Medicare to life in a way that allows the beneficiaries to make decisions more confidently about their next year of coverage.
Help Your Clients Visualize
Storytelling has long been a powerful tool in sales and marketing.
Stories in a sales context do not always mean sharing an example of another person’s experience with your insurance product. It can also paint a picture for your Medicare client through statistics, usually relevant to the area, the person’s age, health status, budget, or plan type. When you can expand the concept by giving the client a picture in their mind’s eye, you have made the situation much more tangible and easier to deal with. This method might bring out the questions your client didn’t know to ask: What kind of results does someone in my situation expect? How likely am I to be approved at my age with my pre-existing conditions? How much can someone my age really save with this plan type?
Speak to Client Emotions
Appeals to emotions are why we see puppies in car commercials. The technique is slightly more nuanced when we sell health insurance plans as third-party marketers. It helps to think of both the sad or disappointing examples and the uplifting stories when you first start to add to your arsenal. Both of these emotions are recognizable and readily felt, so you have a good chance that your example of someone being denied coverage or saving thousands of dollars and getting to cross something off their bucket list will get the client’s attention.
Make the Benefits Relatable
Another tangible way to sell insurance with storytelling is to encourage clients to share their stories in testimonials and reviews. Highlight positive, helpful reviews on your website, and the leads which come to your landing page will instantly see their neighbors reinforce the good impression you made through other marketing channels.
Boost Your Sales with Storytelling
A successful insurance agent gets to know their audience and uses strong communication skills to find the lens to help the client understand and encourage their trust to enroll with your help. Agents become successful with more tools in their belts, so consider making room for or sharpening your storytelling talents.
Magellan Healthcare supports agents with tools and resources to build successful, compliant businesses. Contact us today to learn more.
