How to Sell Commercial Insurance Successfully

Selling commercial insurance successfully requires agents to develop specific knowledge around the industry they want to serve. While it may seem attractive and lucrative to go after every lead that comes your way, the key to commercial insurance is simple: Specialize.

There are four key reasons you need to specialize if you want to succeed in commercial sales: reputation, coverage, efficiency and conversion. We’ll look more closely at each, but first a story to set the stage.

The Power of Specialization

Imagine your daughter is hit by a stray tennis ball. When you take her to the family doctor, you are told that the impact of the tennis ball ruptured her eardrum. Fortunately, the doctor refers you to a physician in a neighboring state who specializes in ear injuries and has performed eardrum surgery many times before.

You follow the advice and discover your doctor was right; the specialist knew exactly what he was doing and fixed your daughter’s eardrum better than any general practitioner could have.

What made the specialist successful? Wouldn’t the fact that he specializes reduce the number of patients he gets, and consequently reduce his income?

You might think so, but the opposite is true. Even though family physicians have the largest population of potential patients, they are among the lowest paid doctors. Specialists tend to make significantly more despite having far fewer potential patients. In reality, a specialist can do most, if not all, of what a family doctor does, yet a specialist has good reasons to stick to his or her area of expertise.

Why Specialists Succeed:

• Specialists have a reputation of being good at their specialty.
• The excellent reputation generates referrals and keeps them busy.
• When they treat the same thing over and over, they become extremely skilled in their area of expertise, which strengthens their confidence and further builds their reputation.
• If they did something outside of their specialty, their reputation would be on the line.
• It would take them longer to treat something else because they would need to refresh their knowledge of the general condition they would be treating.

4 Benefits of Specializing When Selling Commercial Insurance

The example above easily translates to the insurance industry. By declaring your area of expertise and establishing a client base around it, you become the go-to resource for that niche.

Let’s look at the four ways you stand to benefit as a commercial insurance agent:

1. You Establish a Reputation

The key is to become the first person that comes to mind when people think about insurance. Even if you don’t hear it first hand, you want your customers to mention you when talking with other people in their industry. You become an expert in your community and gain more prospects than you would as a generalist.

Connect with other P&C agents to see how they have established a strong reputation in the community.

2. You Become Comfortable with Coverage

Gaining confidence will make you a much more effective salesperson. You will not only speak the language of your prospects during the sales presentation, but you’ll speak it when you are field underwriting. Over time, you’ll find that the people calling you are doing so because they know you are “the person” who understands their specific challenges.

3. You Increase Efficiency

Knowing your field inside and out makes it easy to quote prospects more quickly. You won’t get bogged down trying to find carriers who match or are willing to provide coverage.

Trying to write for a variety of businesses leads you into being a jack of all trades and a master of none. Every class has coverage and underwriting nuances, along with different needs. If you give in to the desire to write it all, you’ll spend more time learning about how to cover a business than you will growing yours.

For instance, in the time you could have written 5 home/auto accounts, you write one $5,000 commercial account instead (which may be more service intense and will probably want to be shopped more often). For some agents, getting a commercial lead, learning the underwriting and nuances, issuing the policy, and doing the heavy service load takes more time and effort than completing 5+ home and auto leads.

For specialized agents, they can turn around quotes as fast as a home and auto quote. To be successful in commercial sales, this is the avenue to take.

4. You Attain Higher Lead Conversion

As a specialist, you build better risk management skills. You’ll know which carriers want to write certain accounts and which coverage pitfalls pertain to the account. Better yet, you will know which questions to ask so that you don’t spend hours quoting only to discover that an incidental part of their business makes your prospect ineligible.As a specialist, you build better risk management skills. You’ll know which carriers want to write certain accounts and which coverage pitfalls pertain to the account. Better yet, you will know which questions to ask so that you don’t spend hours quoting only to discover that an incidental part of their business makes your prospect ineligible.

Determine and Stick to Your Specialty

We’ve seen it time and again. Agents understand the above concepts. They know that specialization is the path to success, and they commit to it. Then, they get that call from someone outside of their industry.

Random businesses that ask you for a quote are like the gum on the street.

Leave it there. It may feel like free business but commercial agents know that’s not the case. When you’re a new agent, and someone calls in for a quote, you want to make money and write to as many clients as you can. Unfortunately, prospects that appear at random rarely turn into quality leads. Learning to say “no” and staying in your lane will serve you well in the long run, even if it feels like you’re losing business in the short term.

Choose Your Industry Before You Prospect

The time to decide you want to be a commercial agent is BEFORE you have a prospect. It takes a deliberate decision and dedicated discipline to launch your career. Agents need to choose business types they are comfortable with and have carrier appetites. Then, just as with personal lines, they’ll need to develop a marketing plan.

The Best Way to Sell Commercial Insurance is with Firefly

Specializing in commercial insurance isn’t easy. But the benefits are worth it, and Firefly can give you the carriers and support you need to succeed. Learn more about working with Firefly. Our learning center offers a number of resources to get you started.

When you’re ready to launch your career in commercial insurance, contact us. We’re excited to set new agents on the path to success.