Success is The Result of More than Hard Work
5 Keys to Success - Make Goal Setting a Priority in 2017
Like many of you, I’ve been blessed with great field managers, mentors and home office trainers. Many lessons were learned through their experiences saving me time and money because I didn’t have to repeat them in my career. I want to spotlight one of these lessons with you in this month’s newsletter.
Here’s the story. I was consulting with a representative of another company to help his small business client lower their health insurance costs. They decided to move the employees of their small group health plan to individual policies. Turns out that 3 of the insureds were eligible for Medicare coverage. The others were eligible for special enrollment in individual health plans. The premium savings realized by changing strategies were significant totaling over $20,000 per year. As you can imagine both the representative and business owners were thrilled with the strategy.
Unfortunately things hit a snag right before the new coverage was to take effect. Someone at the Social Security office made a mistake when entering the effective date for Medicare coverage for one of the family members. The result was Social Security said coverage would begin 2 months after requested date.
You would think this would be easily fixed but you’d be wrong. Social Security said their policy for dealing with matters like this was for the recipient to make a written appeal and then wait up to 2 months for a response. Worse yet they said they might not change coverage to match the requested date.
To make matters worse, this mistake was made on a person who was diagnosed with breast cancer between the time applications for new coverage were submitted and the anticipated effective dates. The client was backed into a corner because the Group coverage was dissolved so there was no way to put the person back on group coverage.
Now, surgery was pending that could now potentially cost the client tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket instead of virtually nothing if the mistake not been made at Social Security. As you can imagine the client was both furious and frantic.
This is where the representative stepped in and saved the day. He didn’t accept the first answer he got from Social Security or the second. He persisted by contacting CMS and arranging a conference call with a Social Security representative. Before the end of the series of telephone calls that lasted nearly 4 hours both the client and the agent got the answer they wanted from the government officials. Both Part A and B Medicare will be effective on the date the client originally requested.
This means Medicare and the Medicare Supplement will pay virtually all of the out-of-pocket costs for the surgery. The client was thrilled at the outcome and even more impressed with their agent.
The agent could have let the client call Social Security and CMS on their own. But he didn’t. He invested hours in serving his client and building the relationship. The client couldn’t thank him enough and is already talking to him about using some of the premium savings to purchase long-term care and life insurance coverage for the healthy members of the business.
This representative is living proof of a lesson I learned from a short story told by one of my early mentors and it seems appropriate to share it with you.
A group of financial representatives were gathered after a meeting when some of the newer ones asked a wise and successful veteran to share his keys to success. He said there was no real magic but that he’d be willing to share the 5 keys to his success.
He said the first key to his success was hard work. This was met with affirmations by some in the group and groans from others who insisted he go on to the second key. He said the second key to his success was hard work. Now a few more of the representatives groaned and asked, “What’s the third key?” He replied, “the third key to my success is hard work.”
By now at least half of the representatives started side conversations but a few of them persisted and asked about the 4th key to his success. He responded that the 4th key to his success was setting goals. Now a couple more of the representatives dropped out of the conversation leaving just a few of them to hear his 5th key to success.
He explained the 5th key to his success was forgetting about himself. He said that he tried not to prejudge his client’s expectations, needs or motives. He also went out of his way to provide service that most representatives would consider a waste of their time. He made a point to ask the difficult questions that most clients don’t like to think about and most financial representatives are reluctant to ask… and then listened to their answers.
Hard work, setting goals and forgetting about yourself was good advice then and is good advice now. The representative you’ve learned about worked hard, had the goal of helping his client confirm medical coverage when they needed it. He forgot about himself to serve the needs of his client and not surprisingly he will be richly rewarded by providing additional insurance protection to these clients.
