Keeping Your Medicare Agents Motivated

Tips to keep your medicare agents motivated!

The key to a successful Medicare brokerage is not just great leads and carriers – it is keeping your team motivated. The people you employ are a powerful part of the equation that sometimes gets overlooked. Everyone has slip-ups and gets down from time to time. It’s important to be there for your employees to keep them motivated!

• Be encouraging and careful with criticism

Some employees are more sensitive than others / may take things more personally. It’s important to not only tell them what they do wrong but also lift them up when on the good things they do. If an employee is dropping in sales, pull them aside and ask “How can we improve your close rate?” rather than “YOUR SALES HAVE DROPPED WHAT ARE YOU DOING OVER THERE?!”

• Make sure you’re open-minded and available

Employees aren’t mind-readers (we’ll save that for the physic hotlines) and don’t always know the answer or how to do something. You should encourage employees to ask for help as ultimately it’s your business. And you will only grow by tackling issues quickly.

• Provide great leads!

There are many medicare lead generators out there, so it’s a good idea to test and monitor who converts/where. Agent Sally with her sweet southern twang may do best with leads from company A, while Agent John may crush from company B. Keep a close eye on your cost per acquisition. In addition, scripting is so important and we’ll go over that in the next paragraph

• Scripting

Your agents should certainly use their best judgment and make their own personal tweaks. But you can only get better with a tried and tested script. This will make them more confident with prospects as I even sometimes stutter when I’m winging my words!

• Objection Handling

Part of being successful is handling objections and sharing information. Your team will only benefit from sharing what worked closing prospects or what didn’t work. Some objections include

1. Not interested – “Totally understand, but if you have just 5 minutes I can potentially save you a good amount of money”
2. Be able to talk about something besides insurance – you’ll connect with prospects on a personal level and gain trust if you show your human side (personally, I’m an alien but I have human traits). Chat about your 5 cats, the weather, where the prospect is from, etc.
3. Address the objection – Make sure you sympathize with the consumer “I know how you feel”, and “I totally understand.”

“I’m not on Medicare yet.” – “No problem. I want to make sure you know about the penalties for enrolling in Medicare too late. Are you still working? When are you planning to retire?”

If the prospect has a retirement date set, ask if you can call them on a certain date to get them enrolled and make it a seamless transition from employer coverage.

• Understand what motivates each individual

As I said above, we’re all different and have our own wants/goals/emotions. Figure out what works for each employee to help them flourish and shine!