From years of helping contractors and business owners
negotiate with insurance brokers, I've developed some
useful methods you can use in your own cost control
efforts. For example, you may have experienced as your
business insurance policy expiration date approaches, your
insurance broker(s) want to schedule sales interviews with
you to deliver their quotations. Some may also try the
asleep-at-the-wheel method of renewal to see if they can
get away with it; which is to simply mail you a renewal
billing and hope that you pay it without comment or further
action on their part. (Don't let this be you!)
Since, as an commercial insurance buyer, you are destined
to experience one or more of these interviews, here's a bit
of counsel to help minimize your suffering, and save you
valuable time. When you follow these procedures, the need
for traditional sales interview is largely negated.
Furthermore, the farther ahead of policy renewal time these
procedures are executed, the easier your renewals will
become. When renewals are properly managed, such meetings
become more celebrations of a job already well done over
the phone, email, and fax machine, rather than a
high-pressure last-minute negotiation session.
When a broker calls to announce a quotation is ready for
delivery and asks to schedule a meeting, consider the
following response in lieu of what you might normally say:
"Great. Thank you. Please (email/fax/mail) me the proposal
so I have time to absorb it in preparation for your visit."
If you make that your standard response, brokers will come
to expect you want information transmitted in advance. This
single request is very powerful, and goes a long way
towards protecting you from manipulative broker sales
tactics. It does so because it helps to separate the
commodity of insurance policies (the quotes, and their
associated quality and pricing factors) from the
professional relationship you have with your broker (the
meeting, your broker relationship, the servicing of your
account, etc.).
Insisting on getting proposals sent to you in advance, and
even asking the broker to include an agenda for the
meeting, will do you a great deal of good. You will have
time to understand your options and prepare your questions.
The meetings will be more professional and productive. And,
in some case you may even end up canceling a meeting
because the proposals sent proved unworthy of further
consideration (saving you from wasting your valuable time,
or worse - agreeing to a bad deal in a meeting due to the
pressure of the moment or a sense of obligation).
Eventually, professional insurance advice may be given,
and purchased, separately from the financial commodity that
we call business insurance. I think that paying for advice
via commissions is a dangerously flawed structure, and also
represents one of the worst conflicts of interest in
existence in the world of business today.
But that, as they say, is a topic for another day...
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Get help from the author of The Buyers Guide To Business
Insurance (1993), and founder of Insurance Cost Reduction
Services. Over $20 million in measurable savings delivered
by helping buyers negotiate with their brokers.
http://www.contractorinsurancetoohigh.com
Don Bury
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