Top-selling professional insurance agents know–and employ–their recognizable advantages. If you don't know how you differ from your competitors, your prospects won't, either. How does asking a potential client for a meeting "to see if I can save you money on your insurance" separate you from any other agent or broker? Instead, the top sellers develop advantages that capture a buyer's attention and earn his or her interest. When you market your recognizable advantages, you sell value, not price.

That said, how do you identify your recognizable advantages?First, look in the mirror at the professional insurance agent or broker you are or want to be. What particular knowledge, skills or traits do you possess–or can acquire–that provide buyers material benefit? Do you have technical coverage expertise or niche industry insight?Find additional recognizable advantages in the ideas and actions of agency team members. What does your agency do well? How does it help solve problems, decrease expense or increase profitability for clients?Look to your insurance companies for still more advantages. Agents can discover unexpected benefits by daring to actually read insurance contracts, or by exploring all the options and services insurers offer.Finally, a recognizable advantage need not produce material results. People prefer to do business with people they like and trust. An unpleasant personality or suspect reputation usually negates anything else an agent has to offer. Displaying superior "people skills" gives you an automatic leg up on the competition.The matrixConsider this three-step method for identifying and recording your specific selling advantages:1) Create a list of your strengths. Examine the reasons that your prospects turned into clients. List problems that you, your agency team or insurance company solved. Be specific! Did you correct an audit, experience modification or misclassified code that was causing your buyer unnecessary expense? Perhaps you identified critical coverage missing from a prospect's insurance program that threatened the survival of his or her business. Have you found a better way to serve, get along or simply communicate with a prospect? Rediscover and document why your clients fired their current agent and hired you.Add to this list problems you've solved for active clients. What risk-management or common-sense solutions have you offered? What steps did you take to build an insurance program that provides security for a client's operations and lifestyle? Find out what situations your CSRs and account managers successfully deal with every day. These are the benefits that you, your agency and insurers deliver to keep clients and prospects buying year after year!2) Create a matrix of costs, coverages, services and relationships to correlate with you, your agency and the insurance companies you represent. Devise a matrix with columns labeled You, Agency and Insurer across the top, and with rows titled Cost, Coverage and Service down the left side. Enter the strengths, solutions and advantages from your list. For instance, if you're an expert in a line of coverage, record it at the intersection of You and Coverage. Perhaps your agency has been in business for over 50 years. Note this selling point in the box formed by Agency and Relationship. You may represent many insurance companies that provide value-added products for your clients. Note your insurers' advantages in the Insurer and Service or Coverage boxes.3) Expand. You've applied your list and plotted the advantages in your matrix. Now the real work begins. The matrix is organic and needs to grow. Look at each box as an opportunity to create a drop-down menu of additional recognizable advantages. Work one box at a time to identify as many strengths as possible.Harvesting recognizable advantagesNow, let's consider these cost, coverage, service and relationship advantages in a little more detail.Cost advantages. Having cost advantages doesn't mean selling cheap insurance. Anyone can do that. What other ways have you, the agency team or insurer reduced expense or increased profitability for a buyer? Have you ever corrected a workers compensation experience modification factor? By doing so, you eliminated unnecessary premium for years. That's a cost advantage of working with you.If time is money (and it most assuredly is), have you ever solved a problem for your clients that saved them a lot of time? Often, deciphering an insurance bill, monitoring an open claim or implementing loss-control recommendations eats into your client's time. How do you and your team assist clients in handling time-consuming service or coverage issues? By doing so, you help your customer stay focused on revenue-generating activities, instead of burning hours dealing with complex insurance problems.You can prevent a buyer from wasting money. How? Have you ever heard of crews being unable to get on a job site because no certificate of insurance was available? Well, offer certificates of insurance online. Know the things your customer knows: Salaries, benefits, insurance and other employee costs accrue whether the crew is working or not. Your cost advantage is being on top of these things, allowing your client to avoid unnecessary expense.When you identify cost advantages, don't think that the only time cost matters is when you have the lowest quote on the buyer's desk. Rather, find ways to enhance your client's cash flow, decrease wasted time and increase profitability. That will save your client infinitely more money than any premium decrease ever could.Coverage advantages. Coverage advantages can be extensive, due to the various policy types, differences among insurers and the depth of technical understanding you and your team possess. Start by positioning yourself as an insurance expert–then become one! Study your coverage products and know their strengths and weaknesses inside and out.Compare the coverages, exclusions and conditions of insurance companies you represent. Note variances in internal limits, policy enhancements and critical policy wording. When competing, determine where your coverage is superior and how your protection package is a better value.Service advantages. Service advantages are crucial. CSRs and account managers spend a great deal of their working day solving problems for buyers, and that service too often goes unnoticed. Find out what problems your team solves for your accounts, and track their solutions. Find out if prospects you're working on have the same problems your team solves routinely. If so, your service advantages will help identify prospects with the highest probability of turning into clients.Relationship advantages. Document occasions when you were trusted at a critical moment or when you delivered exceptional service. Listen to stories you hear at the end of the workday. When you find yourself talking about how you really took care of a customer, you've discovered a powerful relationship advantage.Here's a personal example. A client was selling one of several private schools she operated. The buyer assured everyone he had insurance placed for the building he was buying. The evening before the closing, my customer called. Her buyer had posed one hurdle after another during the negotiations, and now they'd come to the grand finale: He was unable to arrange coverage. Our team stepped in and provided the necessary protection. The closing went on as scheduled. My client was greatly relieved and extremely appreciative. The relationship advantages of trust and the ability to get the job done were clearly evident.The benefitsWhen you identify your recognizable advantages, you separate yourself from the competition. The benefits are numerous. Expect higher closing ratios when proposing new business. Expect higher retention rates when renewing active clients. Expect more referrals as word gets out of your ability to solve problems and provide outstanding value. When you present your recognizable advantages as solutions to the insurance and risk-management challenges clients and prospects face, you sell value, not price, and position yourself as a consummate professional and trusted adviser.Ed Lamont, CIC, CRM, leads Dynamics of Selling seminars and teaches at The National Alliance School for Producer Development. He's the author of "Street Smart Selling: The Beliefs, Strategies, and Management Ideas of Successful Insurance Professionals." Ed can be reached at (561) 737-7388 or by e-mail at [email protected]. For more information about Dynamics of Selling, The National Alliance Producer School and "Street Smart Selling," call (800) 633-2165 or visit www.TheNationalAlliance.com.