How Brokers Can Expand Sales by Offering Ancillary Products

Don’t miss out on the benefits that come with selling ancillary products–here are some strategic ways to start offering them.

Primary health insurance is a necessity for the vast majority of Americans. However, people often need more than the care that general health insurance covers to stay healthy–for example, dental and vision care. Thankfully, ancillary products can help support these needs. 

Because of these care necessities, ancillary products are a powerful sales opportunity that shouldn’t be overlooked by insurance agencies. Offering these products is a smart way to retain and grow your book of business, as well as maximize revenue.

What Are Ancillary Products?

Ancillary products, also known as ancillary benefits, are a secondary type of insurance that you can sell on top of your primary insurance offerings. Ancillary products can include coverages like:

• Life insurance 
• Dental insurance 
• Vision insurance
• Critical illness insurance 
• Short- and long-term disability insurance 
• Pet insurance 
• Accident insurance 
• Healthcare spending or reimbursement accounts (FSAs, HRAs, and HSAs)
• Wellness programs 
• Identity theft protection
• Dependent care for adults and/or children

These products can enhance your insurance and benefits packages by fulfilling the gaps in your current coverage options.

The Benefits of Selling Ancillary Products As An Insurance Agency

Offering ancillary products is beneficial to both you and your clients.

It’s beneficial to your clients for a few reasons. Both individuals and groups (or employers) place high importance on benefits, and many people are looking for benefits beyond basic health insurance. Ancillary products can supplement your client’s health insurance, giving them the coverage and peace of mind they’re looking for. 

Employers specifically are facing a highly competitive job market. A strong benefits package can differentiate them from other companies and help them attract and retain top talent. Plus, since the workforce is composed of people of many different generations, versatile insurance offerings are becoming more of a necessity.

Offering ancillary insurance products is beneficial to you as an insurance broker, too. 

Improved Client Relationships and Retention

By providing a selection of sought-after benefits to your clients, you’ve effectively made it easier for them to get the coverage they need. Not only does this build trust and loyalty, but it also prevents them from shopping around for additional coverage, keeping them in your book of business.

Growing Your Client Base and Revenue 

Offering ancillary products in addition to primary insurance is a natural way to cross-sell products with your current clients and entice them to do more business with you. In addition to cross-selling to current clients, offering ancillary products opens the door to new prospects who are searching for these products to supplement their current insurance offerings.

Build a Good Reputation

Referrals and reviews are powerful marketing tools that don’t require a lot of time and effort on your part. Providing great customer service through your vast product offerings and expertise can generate testimonials and referrals that you can use to win more business

Ways To Expand Your Business To Include Ancillary Products

Between trying to grow your agency, managing client needs, and staying on track with daily tasks, it may feel overwhelming to think of ways to add ancillary products to your offerings. This process requires a good amount of research and prep-work, and could also entail copious amounts of time collecting this information, gathering quotes from carriers, compiling paperwork, and sorting through your options. 

Thankfully, the right technology can simplify this process. AgencyBloc solutions, Quote+ and AMS+, for example, work together to manage your ancillary insurance product sales and make many other aspects of your agency more efficient!

Quote+, an AgencyBloc solution, is an all-in-one quoting and proposal tool that brokers use to seamlessly manage the quoting, proposal creation, and enrollment processes for each of their employer groups. Gather quotes for medically underwritten, community rated, and ancillary products from a variety of carriers in one location. Capture group employee and dependent health data through our secure online medical health questionnaire and easily send that data to the carriers.

Centralizing these efforts allows brokers to save valuable time and focus more on growing and retaining their book of business. 

Every agent can benefit from using tools that make quoting and selling insurance easier, but you also need a way to manage and organize your entire book of business. This is where AgencyBloc solutions can help. As the #1 Recommended Insurance Industry Growth Platform, AgencyBloc has a vast selection of industry-specific solutions that can help streamline the many aspects of your agency.

• Sales enablement and automation. With the sales automation capabilities available in AMS+, create set-it-and-forget-it workflows for lead distribution rules, round robin lead assignment, and assigned tasks, as well as connect with prospects via email or text messaging, leaving your team with more time to write business and increase speed-to-contact.
• Policy management. The policy management tools in AMS+ help you manage your client’s coverages, like health insurance or ancillary products, at the individual and group levels in one centralized location. By tying policies to carriers, agents, clients, and commissions, you get a clear, holistic, and detailed view of each policy, saving you the time (and headache) of sorting through tons of records.
• Cross-selling. Our cross-selling reports help you easily identify gaps in your client’s coverage. For example, you can run a report that generates a list of clients that have health insurance but are lacking specific ancillary coverages. With this clear view of their coverage gaps, you’re able to better advise them on what coverages they need, effectively providing them with top-notch customer service while also generating more revenue. 

With the many benefits that selling ancillary products can bring, it’s clear to see why you should start offering them as soon as possible–and with the right tools, you can do so seamlessly. Take the next step by scheduling a live, one-on-one demo with AgencyBloc today. We will walk you through how AMS+ works and how you can leverage additional solutions, like Quote+, to streamline your selling processes.

Posted by Allison Babberl on Friday, May 5, 2023 in Sales Enablement

1. prospecting
2. quoting
3. selling