If you have a customer that expects you to pull off a miracle and get them the best rate out there without providing you every single piece of information you need to accomplish that, you’re in a bad relationship.
Before I will shop a case I want to know that everything I present to Special Risk Services is accurate and complete. If a person doesn’t remember their last A1c, or, and we’ve all run into this, doesn’t even know what an A1c is, I ask them to get me their last two sets of quarterly labs and send them to me. If they balk at that little bit of leg work, which can usually be done over the phone, I tell them I can’t shop it without the information and to call me when they get it. You’ll always have some that will say they can get a quote without it, and they can, so I explain how that likely won’t work out for them and if and when it doesn’t, get their last two sets of labs and call me.
If your client wants to succeed as much as you do for them, they will cough up pathology reports, stress tests, complete sets of records, labs, etc. If you are willing to do everything it takes to find them the best rate, they need to be ready to do everything it takes to arm you for battle.
And then you need to get good at providing a synopsis of the information you’ve gathered. Companies all used to accept attachments of things like pathology and stress test reports. Now most of them won’t, so you have to find the meat in what your client provided and spell it out in an email to Tim. If you get lazy and just attach the information to an email and hope, you might get one quarter of the underwriting opinions that you would if you provided a word for word synopsis of the important points. That’s not good enough for your customer. You need to learn how to dissect and present the information so your client has every company coming back with a quote.
If you don’t do the extra work, someone like me is going to beat you. If you don’t have a team like Special Risk Services to help you fine tune your shopping technique, you’ll be losing to agents like me and general agents like SRS. If you have any questions or don’t know what to ask for to get the best quotes on an impairment, call Tim or Rich directly at 800-933-5491 or email them at tjfuller@srsinc.com or rfuller@srsinc.com.
-By Ed Hinerman, manager of Risk Life Insurance and Hinerman Group.