The meaning of life

IMMS delivers a turnkey life insurance solution for P-C agents

By Elisabeth Boone, CPCU

If you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times: As a property/casualty agent, you're sitting on your own personal gold mine of eager prospects for life, health, and annuity products, not to mention long term care and disability insurance, retirement and estate planning, and employee benefits.

Most agents realize they have this mother lode of life insurance prospects, but many don't have the knowledge, tools, or confidence to mine it successfully, and they don't know where to find the guidance they need. Other agencies may have a life and health operation but aren't achieving the results they want.

One solution is a turnkey life insurance program offered by Orange County, California-based Insurance Marketing & Management Services (IMMS) to property/casualty agents who are VIP members of IMMS. The IMMS name may be familiar to agents who remember its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s; under new ownership, the organization has been re-engineered and re-energized to meet the demands of today's agents.

Driving that transformation are Adrian Holloway and Jeffrey Vann, the co-owners of INSOMIS Corporation, which in 2009 acquired IMMS from its founder, George Nordhaus.Holloway, who is president of INSOMIS, draws on his strong background in information technology to develop strategies and solutions for agents on a sophisticated Web-based platform.

Vann is the founder of MVP Insurance Marketing, Inc., which designs and implements marketing initiatives and systems for life insurance professionals, including agents and brokerage general agencies. In 2009 Vann merged his firm with INSOMIS, the new parent of IMMS.

As executive vice president and a principal of INSOMIS, Vann directs the company's research, strategy, and marketing teams and also spearheads the IMMS life insurance initiative, called the VIP Client Optimizer.

The heart of the matter

"The one thing that life insurance advisors are always looking for is the opportunity to get in front of qualified prospects," Vann says. "They're licensed, they're passionate, they love helping people—but they always face the challenge of getting in front of enough people to consistently build a great practice."

The other side of the equation, of course, is the challenge that confronts property/casualty agencies that are sitting on that proverbial gold mine of life insurance prospects but aren't sure how to exploit it.

"For 100 years, property/casualty agencies have tried to figure out how to cross-sell life insurance successfully," Vann says. "They've tried everything, but few have been able to make it work on a sustained, profitable basis.

"Often a life advisor will go into a P-C shop and both sides will be excited about the synergy between them—but when there's no system, nothing really happens. The intentions are good, but the results don't measure up," Vann comments.

Why not? "The main reasons are lack of a plan for cross-selling, lack of an infrastructure, and lack of efficient time management," he declares. "These are all human issues, and they are the real roadblocks to successful cross-selling of all products."

Most agency owners, Vann points out, are highly successful producers who became owners or managers as a result of their excellent sales performance. "They were great salespeople who decided to become agency owners or who became managers by default," he says.

"Most of them don't have formal management or marketing training or education, and when it comes to cross-selling, they tend to try something to see if it works instead of developing a methodical plan and system that make the best use of their time and skills," Vann continues. "Those are the main reasons why many agency owners haven't been able to capitalize on the obvious opportunities for powerful cross-selling."

Partnership project

As life insurance marketing consultants to IMMS before the merger, Vann says, "MVP Insurance Marketing worked with IMMS to develop a partnership concept, putting a life insurance professional into a property/casualty agency and surrounding that relationship with a combination of services and software that enabled both parties to accomplish the goal of generating more revenue.

"Through a year-long pilot program with two agencies, we figured out how to bring a fully turnkey life insurance system to the property/casualty space. As a result, we were able to tell agency principals that we could deliver a cost-effective, time-effective life insurance system that we actively managed, that would enable them to increase revenue, retention, and referrals by cross-selling their current clients," Vann says.

The system is called the IMMS VIP Client Optimizer, he explains, because it is designed to help property/casualty agencies optimize their relationships with existing clients by offering them life insurance products and services that complement their current P-C coverages.

In 2009, after merging with MVP Insurance Marketing, IMMS began to offer the VIP Client Optimizer to IMMS members. MVP functions as a general agency and has relationships with some 50 insurers that offer life, health, disability, long term care, and retirement and estate planning products and services. IMMS receives an override on the business that is placed through the general agency by its members who use the VIP Client Optimizer.

Choices for agents

IMMS has three membership categories: Silver, Gold, and VIP. "Only VIP members can add the VIP Client Optimizer to the services they receive from IMMS, but any member can use the general agency as a back office," Vann explains. "For example, a VIP member may already have a successful in-house life operation and just wants to use the general agency to obtain quotes, design a case, or order medical exams.

"Other VIP members do choose to add the VIP Client Optimizer, because it's a complete system that allows them to present a sophisticated life insurance proposal to a client who already trusts them to handle his or her business and personal insurance," he says.

Being a VIP member of IMMS, however, doesn't guarantee that an agency will be able to subscribe to the VIP Client Optimizer program.

"Our program isn't appropriate for every agency," Vann says. "It won't work for agencies that don't have face-to-face relationships with their clients, where the agency is in one location but its clients are based in other parts of the country. We're looking for agencies that have close relationships with their clients, because we're building a long-term, dependable profit center for them. The VIP Optimizer program is not about doing a couple of life cases a year; it's about leveraging your book of business to deliver valuable services that your clients need and would like you to provide.

"We need to reshape the client's perception of the agency, so the client realizes that the agency is a full-service resource center, not just a P-C shop," Vann asserts.

The life advisor: finding the right fit

The biggest gold mine isn't worth anything until its owner finds a way to extract its wealth skillfully and profitably. The same thing is true for agencies that want to mine their client base for life insurance opportunities.

Some VIP members of IMMS who subscribe to the VIP Client Optimizer program already have a life insurance professional who works with their property/casualty clients, Vann says. "If that's the case, we will vet the life advisor to make sure he or she is qualified to handle the kinds of sales opportunities that we're going to generate.

"A lot of the life professionals in P-C agencies are offering very elementary products like 20-year term. Our goal with the VIP Client Optimizer program is to put a qualified life advisor in front of business owners who have issues like buy/sell agreements, key-person coverage, and succession planning and estate planning," Vann explains.

"If the agency's current life advisor is qualified to operate at this level, we can work with that person," he continues. "If not, we politely tell the agency principals that their life advisor will be overmatched in terms of the kinds of opportunities we'll be generating for the agency."

For these agencies, and for VIP agencies that don't currently have a relationship with a life advisor, Vann says, "IMMS can put three vetted, highly qualified, trained professionals in front of them to interview. These are stable, successful life advisors who are already doing business with our general agency, so the principals of the agency can choose the advisor with whom they have the best chemistry and have confidence that he or she will interact productively with the agency's clients. The principals should be able to say, 'I feel very comfortable with this person and believe he or she will represent our agency the way we deserve to be represented,'" Vann says.

Getting started

Once a VIP member of IMMS has met the criteria for the VIP Client Optimizer program, Vann and his team go into action.

"We like to start with the agency owner, because if the owner comes into the office with a big life insurance commission check and shows it to the producers, he or she instantly has their full attention. The owner then tells the producers: 'If you'd like to earn this kind of money, be at the meeting on Friday at 3:00,'" Vann says.

"You can bet that those producers will be at that meeting. We learned the hard way that producers are very protective of their clients, as they should be, and they've had a million life people promise them the world and never make good. We all know that actions speak louder than words, and nothing speaks louder to producers than a commission check," he says.

"We start by asking the agency owner for a list of his or her VIP clients," Vann continues. "These are normally business owners who pay large premiums, and they're people with whom the agency has had a relationship for years, and who were referred to the agency by someone that they and the agency owner mutually respect."

Next, Vann says, "We and the agency owner select a couple of days per month and a couple of hours per day, and IMMS books appointments with those VIP clients on behalf of the agency so that the agency owner, and eventually his or her producers, can systematically visit each client, accompanied by their life advisor.

"We purposely schedule the appointments so they don't take place at renewal times," Vann emphasizes. "Every agency owner and producer knows that getting face to face with their VIP clients during nonrenewal times is very healthy for the relationship. They know that this approach enhances the client relationship and that it insulates that upcoming renewal that is so important to them."

What's more, he says, "This approach has the advantage of being systematic. Everyone knows when these meetings are going to take place, so they can plan their schedules around these guaranteed, pre-set appointments. All the agency owner or producer has to do is present themselves to their client in a professional manner, introduce their qualified life advisor, and let the advisor take the lead. In the case management phase of the VIP Client Optimizer program, Vann explains, experienced professionals use information that the life advisor has gathered about the client to conduct a fact-finding analysis. Next, case designers prepare case illustrations and discuss them with the life advisor. Quotes and applications are generated, and medical exams are ordered and followed up on until they are completed. At closing, policies are issued and delivered to the client.

The thrill of success

High praise for the VIP Client Optimizer comes from Ron Norton of ISU Insurance Services in Irvine, California.

"Over the course of my career, I had tried many different ways to tap into the gold mine of life and health insurance commissions that I knew existed within my clientele.In the first 60 days of starting the VIP Client Optimizer program and with very little time and money invested on my part, the program began to deliver on its promise of revenues, retention, and referrals," Norton says."The momentum and positive results have continued.My clients have found the program very helpful, and it gives me an easy way to stay in front of them.I highly recommend this turnkey system."

That's music to the ears of Jeffrey Vann, because he sees it as evidence that the VIP Client Optimizer is delivering results for the IMMS members who use it.

"Our goal is to build a long-term, dependable life insurance profit center for our member agencies—but we also know that we have to make them believers pretty quickly," Vann says. "Once they cash that first commission check and hear the client say, 'Thank you! If I'd only known that you do this, I wouldn't have been working with the guy down the street,' then the momentum and excitement start to build.

"All of a sudden, the agency principals and producers become the best bird doggers in the world," Vann continues. "They may have 10 set life appointments during the month, but in addition they start talking about it with other clients in meetings and on the phone. Some principals ask us to set up life appointments every week instead of just two days a month. All of a sudden the life advisor is calling us and saying, 'I don't know what's going on here, but these people are sending me more leads than I can handle.'

"That's a good problem—and it's one we can solve," he declares.