Successful entrepreneurs know that what separates them from the competition is doing a few things of value really well. Often, one of these is a task that others ignore. In the life insurance industry, some producers either ignore the field underwriting piece of the case development, i.e. they simply don’t do it, or they delegate this task to staff that are not trained in this area. Life insurance company carriers have well trained professionals, underwriters, who make a risk assessment based upon the financial and medical data they see and this determines how much your client will be asked to pay for the product you sell. This simple concept should provide incentive to apply some of the sales energy into case management. What do I mean “case management”? This in part means to gather the necessary financial and medical data, ask the questions and record the answers on the insurance application (to gain first-hand knowledge and to cement the producer-client relationship), anticipate what the underwriting issues are or might be and take necessary steps to preempt underwriting problems. Any underwriter would say, “the devil is in the details”. This characteristic as it relates to medical underwriting is often outside the producer’s comfort zone. Because it is, any producer has an opportunity do standout from the others and to provide the kind of expertise your clients expect.

Jack Cotlar, M.D.
Strategic Medical Consulting, Inc.
Phone: 317-536-2603