People ask me all the time, “David, how do I set myself up to get agent of record letters?” And you know what? The process itself is not that difficult. It does require some practice, but you can’t practice what you don’t know, right? So today, we’re going to talk about four things you need to do to get yourself set up for an agent of record letter.
The very first thing that you have to do is you have to understand how to sell a value proposition. If you don’t know how to sell a value proposition, it may be because you don’t have one. If your value proposition is:Â Â I’m going to go to 50 carriers to get quotes for you, it’s not a value proposition, folks. That’s a price play, and it’s not going to work. So take some time, develop a value proposition.Â
Here’s another thing, this isn’t one of the main four, but it’s a little bonus I’m going to give you today. Put an elevator pitch around that. Anytime you walk in to meet with a prospect, the decision-maker is not going to want to hear the 50,000-minute version of everything you can do. But if you have a concise elevator pitch, that may lead your prospect to ask you probing questions and allow you to expand on what you can do for them. So, develop your value proposition, know it, and be able to deliver it succinctly.
The next thing you have to be able to do is you have to be able to create doubt. And you don’t need to go in and create uncertainty by trashing your competition. That doesn’t do anything except make you look back. But what you can do is you can ask questions that you already know the answers to that are going to demonstrate that perhaps your firm would have handled the situation differently than the current representation.
Once you create that doubt, you have to be able to do number three, and that is show solutions. It’s one thing to create a doubt. It’s another thing to very fluidly explain to your prospect that you can fix the problem that they may not even have known existed when you walk in the room. And it’s not a matter of you going deep-diving into all of the ways that you can solve their problems. It’s a matter of you just very, again, fluidly explaining to them something that your firm typically would do.
The answer that I use a lot of the time when I talk about this is the experience mod because, for workers’ compensation, it’s effortless to predict that. So a way that I create doubt is to say something like this. “So when your agent came out to talk to you around the time your preliminary mod came out and did a midyear claims review, what advice did they give you to help you get the open claims closed from the prior policy year to be sure that your mod is accurate as a result?”
Now, I know that most of the time, there’s never a midyear claims review, and there’s not a consultation about the preliminary experience mod. So my followup to that would be, “When my firm comes out and handles this with our clients, we typically spend time talking to them about the top loss drivers and the contributing factors to what caused their mod to go up this year. Many times, it’s a result of claims that are still open or perhaps have closed but have closed lower than what the initial reserves are that the carrier reported on the unit stat cards to NCCI. Because the claims are total incurred when reported, the mod is inflated. We typically identify this, negotiate to get the correct values reported, and file the proper paperwork with NCCI to bring the mod down, resulting in current cash recovery many times, but also future savings because the mod is now accurate.”
See what we did? We created doubt by asking about something that we would have done, that they now feel like, “Hey, I never get that. I should have that.” And then, we gave them a solution and showed them tangible results for what happens if they comply with that.
The number four thing that you have to do is the most important. It’s the most common sense, and it’s the one nobody ever wants to do, right? People, you got to ask for the order. You got to throw the hammer down and say, “I’d love to do business with you.” Now, listen, this doesn’t need to be abrasive, right? You can lead them into making that decision, and that’s always the best thing to do. I like to get two to three yeses before I get their buy in to hire me as their agent and give me the agent of record letter.
Typically, I’ll say something like this. “Can you agree that maybe you haven’t necessarily been getting good advice when it comes to getting claims closed out, and that’s contributed to your mod factor being higher than it should? Can you agree that the steps that we’ve talked about today are something that you would benefit from that would help you control those costs going forward? Can you agree that I’ve demonstrated that this is something that my firm has specific expertise in and would be able to help your company? Then, can you agree that it would be a good next step for you to allow my firm to represent you in the insurance transaction going forward so that you can have the benefit of the value proposition that we’ve laid out today?”
People, if you don’t ask for the order, you’re not going to get it. Put that coffee down and ask for the order, or you’re never going to kill it in commercial insurance. And keep in mind, coffee’s for closers. Closers ask for the order.
Until next time: Kill or get killed!
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