Renewal season is always the most uncertain period for an insurance agent, especially as rates continue to be unstable in recent years. A client may be facing unhappy news about their insurance costs, at the same time as countless other agents are clamoring for the employer’s attention and talking about all of your supposed shortcomings.
One of the best ways to strategically attack renewal season, get clients thinking about all the great things you’ve done, and ward off hungry competitors is conducting a strong pre-renewal meeting. In this blog, we’ll show you how it’s done.
Key Objectives of a Pre-Renewal Meeting
- Emphasize Your Value: This meeting is designed to preempt the (often challenging) renewal meeting with an opportunity to connect positively with your client. You want your value as an agent and all the ways you support their business to be fresh in their minds before you start talking dollars.
- Preempt the Competition: As you know, the 90 days pre-renewal is the most common time other agents will come calling, and it’s hard to blame an employer for listening. You want to give your client a good reason to ignore those inevitable competitor cold calls, because they’re happy with you and most importantly, tangibly understand the value you bring.
- Address Client Concerns: Clients often have questions or concerns about their insurance program, especially as renewal approaches. The pre-renewal meeting is an ideal time to address these issues, ensuring that the client feels confident and well-prepared.
How to Execute
90-120 days out from the renewal is the perfect time to hold this meeting, before the competition starts showing up. Here’s how to nail it:
- Prove your value as tangibly as possible: Now is the time to pull out reports, statistics and hard data to show exactly how you’ve improved your client’s business. If you provide value-add software to the client, pull adoption and other metrics to show the value you delivered. Look at incident rates, year-over-year trends, and other data to show how you’ve helped their business.
- Bring impactful examples: If you’re talking to the owner or CFO of a business, they may be aware of the day-to-day ways you support them. Aim to bring at least one anecdote or example of how you made a difference in the past year. For instance, perhaps you helped manage an injury to minimize lost time. Remind them and hammer home the financial impact of that action. Or perhaps their HR leader was struggling with a compliance issue and you provided support or software to help out.
- Prepare them logically for the upcoming renewal: You may want to discuss market trends you’re seeing to set a rough expectation for what renewal rates may look like. You should also review their own claims and incidents from the past year. If incident rates were high, discuss why that was and how you can address it in the future (and note that will affect their work comp premiums).
