How to Find Potential Candidates for Veterans Benefits
March 20, 2018 | by the National Care Planning Council
The Successful Senior Marketing System from the National Care Planning Council is designed to help you promote and market your services to the senior community. In particular the system is designed to enable you to find appropriate planning candidates for Life Resource Planning.
Two modules in the system are also designed to help you focus on finding veterans through educating on veterans benefits in the community. Here are descriptions of those 2 PowerPoint presentations that you can use to educate families in the community about veterans benefits.
The PowerPoint Presentation – "Government Benefits for Aging Seniors"
The presentation "Government Benefits for Aging Seniors" and its slide copy workbook was designed to appeal to residents and the family members of residents in retirement care communities. These families are experiencing some of the challenges of aging and many are looking towards needing long term care services if they aren’t already receiving them. The government benefits workshop includes the following subjects
- Medicare
- Medicaid
- 12 different benefits for senior veterans and their survivors
Had we focused the workshop entirely on veterans, statistically we would only draw a potential maximum of 25% of the residents which is never achievable. The likely outcome of focusing only on veterans would probably only draw 10% or 15% of the residents and their family members. The other residents and family would not show up. That is why we came up with the title "Government Benefits for Aging Seniors" and why we added the other benefits to veterans benefits in the presentation. Virtually all seniors are interested in Medicare and how it works and most are vitally interested in Medicaid if they still have some assets remaining that they want to preserve.
The PowerPoint Presentation – "12 Little-Known Benefits for Senior Veterans and Their Survivors"
Focusing on veterans benefits is a great marketing tool. Veterans and their survivors are anxious to find out about the "free" benefits and disability income programs that they can receive from the government and they will come flocking to any presentation that explains it to them. This ensures a high attendance rate.
Ours is a unique approach to attracting senior veterans, their family members and their survivors to a community workshop. Roughly 25% of all seniors age 65 and older are veterans or survivors. There is a pretty sizable group of insurance agents across the country who focus on educating veterans and survivors about their benefits. Without exception, these agents think that the only benefits available to senior veterans are the so-called aid and attendance Pension and the so-called aid and attendance Death Pension. There is no such veterans benefit as "aid and attendance." This is a misnomer that is derived from a special allowance available with a number of veterans or survivors disability benefits which include Pension and Death Pension.
These two non-service-connected Pension disability incomes are only 2 of the 12 benefits that could be available to aging seniors. We educate on all 12 benefits. The insurance agents who are focusing on seniors and their families for presentations have no clue of how to get these other benefits. This puts us in a unique position. When we approach a workshop sponsor, we may run into these insurance agents who are educating about veterans benefits. Rarely the sponsors say that they already have someone working with them for veterans benefits, because our approach does not focus on the so-called aid and attendance benefit.
Even if the director or salesperson objects, we just tell them that they should continue to use those "aid and attendance" people and we are going to talk about veterans benefits other than aid and attendance pension that could be extremely valuable to their community of seniors.
Because of our broader application to all veterans benefits, we will be able to meet with many more people in the community who are veterans or survivors and talk to them intelligently about benefits that the aid and attendance pension orientated agents have virtually no knowledge of. Individuals who are eligible for these other benefits likely will get more income from VA. Income they were totally unaware of, since the aid and attendance agents had no clue of these benefits.
They Sign up for Planning and Not Products
It is important to note that individuals who attend our workshops, are not interested in purchasing products or services. As a result, if we contact them and meet with them and try and sell them products and services, not only will they refuse to deal with us, but they could provide negative feedback to the organizations sponsoring our presentations that we did not live up to our word of not selling anything.
This is not a problem. This is a decided advantage. Attendees are looking for direction and advice. In most cases, we approach them with an offer to do fee-based planning to help them find solutions. In some cases, they will not pay us a fee, but we will provide advice anyway. In other cases, we will insist on the fee planning – especially for veterans benefits – because of how we have to integrate incomes and assets and other issues together in order for them to find the proper strategies to obtain those benefits.
It should also be noted that this planning approach actually does result in the sale of products and services, but only after the planning has been applied. In fact, our experience is that we can double or triple the amount of product sales through a planning approach instead of trying to push products as part of our first encounter.
There Are Various Strategies for Getting Sign-Ups to Meet with Us
We don’t want to leave sign-up respondents waiting too long. When we requested that they sign the evaluation and information request form after the presentation, we asked not only for a phone number but also for an email. We are not particularly anxious to meet with each and every one of these people until we find out a little more about what they want. Definitely, the evaluation and information request form will give us some of that information. But we want to query them first – either on the phone or through an email – before we decide to drive over and meet with them at the retirement community. In most cases, they will want their children to meet with us as well and this has to be arranged.
Finding out more about people before a meeting is in direct contradiction to the training that most insurance agents receive on selling. They are always told to go for the meeting first with the idea that a face-to-face encounter will result in the sale whereas a phone encounter could kill a sale. Our experience is just the opposite. We have found that developing a relationship over the phone or through an email can actually result in greater attraction between the parties if there is indeed a need for direction and advice. Remember, we are not selling product and we don’t have to meet with them to force them to buy something from us.
We have developed a questionnaire that works in almost all cases. In other cases we simply chat over the phone and talk about some of their issues. We are careful not to provide complete answers to these issues as it would kill an eventual meeting. But we can offer some encouragement as to what can be done and then ask for the meeting.
