Promoting pet health insurance: The team approach

Dr. Wooten: Bash, when you’re thinking about the veterinary team, which team members should be involved in the client conversation about pet insurance?

Mr. Halow: Everybody. Everybody. I’m serious. Everybody should be doing that. Everybody should believe in the value of the products and the services that are at that practice, and if they feel that there’s anything that’s getting in the way of them making the recommendations for that, they should try to be proactive about clearing those out of the way. Money is an issue. As a veterinary hospital team, we should be talking about the value of pet insurance and how that could help pet owners, and then all of us should be given the freedom to talk about that with our clients.

Dr. Wooten: If I was hiring you as a consultant to come to my practice and I say, ‘Bash, I really want to get more of my team working together on recommending veterinary pet health insurance. How can I get my team to work together?’ What would be the tips that you would share with me?

Mr. Halow: I don’t know about working together so much as, how can I get the individuals inspired to talk about it on their own. That, I believe, I would go back to that, look, on a regular basis we’re faced with clients who are upset about how much we cost for our services and products. Is it possible for us to get proactive about recommending something like pet insurance to alleviate that?

And then I would just let them talk about the wisdom of that. That’s how I would get them inspired. Then certainly I would bring a rep in or I would start, at meetings, start talking about success stories like your success story. As you pointed out, those stories are what really drive everybody’s source of inspiration.I would share those. Those are the tactics I would get to inspire individuals.

I don’t know with pet insurance whether or not I would have a full team-on way of marketing that to the clients because I worry about all the things that we’re asking our team members to sell and I don’t know if that necessarily sits right with me that I would have a team approach to selling veterinary pet insurance. I would prefer the discussion to come out more organically with individual team members that are relating to the client and the patient, that specific client and patient. That would be my thing.

Dr. Wooten: We have definitely talked about the fact that there is a shared pain point with these many discussions and it makes it difficult for us to do our job, so if we can talk about that and then get inspired as a solution as veterinary health insurance being part of that solution, that would probably be very motivating for our teams. Do you think?

Mr. Halow: I think so, yes.