Soft Selling Hardened Claims Adjusters: How to Expand Your Marketing to the Insurance Claims Industry By Peter Crosa, Peter J. Crosa & Company, Atlanta, GA, pp. 119.
If you are an independent adjuster or work for a TPA and are interested in getting more business and referrals, you owe it to yourself to read and heed Peter Crosa’s book, Soft Selling Hardened Claims Adjusters. This very practical guidebook gives dozens of kernels of wisdom in a highly readable, hands-on style. Author Peter Crosa has extensive experience in the insurance claims business, operates his own claims company and conducts extensive training for adjusters. A recent reading of a review copy of the book impressed me with Crosa’s ability to pack a lot of real world insights and tips into a very concise format. A slim volume that packs a big wallop.
The book tracks very closely with a multi-hour seminar that author Peter Crosa conducts regularly. Having said that, you need not have attended the seminar to derive genuine value from the book. The book has five major sections:
Section 1 – How to know Your Market
Section 2 – How to Make Them Know What’s in it for Them
Section 3 – How to get their Business and Keep it
Section 4 – The Fourth Hour
Section 5 – Closing Remarks
In addition to the five sections, there are nine appendices – including worksheets, checklists, regional/national claim associations — that provide extremely useful and practical resources for independent adjusters looking to gain additional clients and market share.
The target market for Crosa’s book is independent adjusting companies and third-party administrators who seek more referrals both from insurance companies and self insureds such as risk managers. Crosa’s book is the best and perhaps the only such resource on this topic I have seen. Any independent adjuster who reads and heeds the advice in soft selling will deliver a double espresso caffeine shot to business development efforts.
What Crosa offers is a hunting guide. We’ve all heard the expression, “less is more.” Crosa seems to be embracing that philosophy in suggesting that most claims people, by the time they are in positions of authority to make assignments, are pretty hard-bitten folks. It is going to be difficult to pull one over on them, blow smoke up their proverbial derrieres or bamboozle them. As a result, a hard sell is not going to work with this kind of audience.
Rather, marketing approaches must instead focus on soft selling and building relationships. This is difficult and it takes time. It is labor intensive. For all of these reasons, it is probably often overlooked. Those adjusters willing to invest time and honing the skills, however, will competitively positioned themselves and their companies to gain market share in a very competitive environment. Crosa understands that it’s not about you, it’s about the customer and the more ways you can shut up and listen and be as useful service to prospective clients, the better chance you have of making more money
Crosa’s book is probably more important in a tough economy then and any other time. More and more companies are looking to internalize claim functions, not outsourced. Those companies in the independent adjusting business find themselves under of cost pressure on billings and counteracting the hunger for clients to control their own fate by internalizing the claims handling function. These two parallel trends make for an extremely challenging and competitive business environment for those who try to make a living out of doing independent claims adjusting work. This is not an easy business, and Peter Crosa does not sugarcoat the challenges.
There may be little in “Soft Selling” that is revelatory or totally unheard of before. Rather, Crosa’s gift is in extracting insights from his own experience usable tactics and strategies that can turbo-charge an effective marketing and business development program.
Forget the old soft-shoe-shuffle when it comes to marketing. Instead, get out there and start soft selling.
It may lead to hard cash!!
February 25, 2010 at 2:58 pm |
This is exactly what I expected to find out after reading the title . Thanks for educational article.