Attention Retirees: Don’t Fall For These 2 Medicare Sales Tactics
Before the Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act passed in July of 2008, Medicare Supplement salespeople had the upper hand. They could call you as much as they wished and show up at your doorstep uninvited. Medicare sales were practically a warzone.
Now, however, they have to be a little bit more clever about their sales tactics. Since they can’t contact you (except by mail) without your consent, they have to find some way to get permission from you—whether you realize what you are asking for or not. Here are two key strategies they use.
Online Quote Generators
It seems like an easy way to shop and compare Medicare Supplement prices in your area, but it may lead to a bombardment of unwanted calls and emails. Here’s how it works: When you put in your personal information like phone number or email, you consent to being contacted. You are essentially (but unknowingly) saying “hit me with your best shot!”
This is when the owner of these quote generators can sell your information to as many agents who care to buy. If you are one of the unlucky few whose contact is sold widely, you are in for an Armageddon of sales calls just like the barrage a client of ours so nobly braved. He claimed that within one minute of plugging in his phone number, the calls stormed in. To spare you the details, let’s just say he stopped picking up after 30 calls.
Tear and Return Reply Cards
I’ll bet your mailbox is practically bursting with Medicare literature. And I’ll bet a lot of them have a tear off reply card that asks for your contact information. Although it may seem official with its big “Do Not Destroy” stamps or fancy seals, this can be a ploy as well. If you can’t tell by the other content, there is a dead give away at the bottom of the mail in fine print where it says that an insurance representative may contact you.
“No. I’m not interested.”
I hope you don’t read this as “everything I get in the mail is bad” or “I should never give anyone my contact information” because this is simply not the case. There are wonderfully helpful people in the Medicare business who ask for your personal information. In fact, although we don’t ask for personal information, we send out mailers every month and have a quoting tool on our website!
The purpose of this post is to help you understand the difference between someone who trying to assist you and someone who is trying to badger you. No one wants his inbox overrun with spam. No one wants to answer a firing squad of phone calls a day with a sighing “I’m not interested.”
We know you don’t either.
If you would like to shop Medicare Supplements safely, click here to access our quoting tool. We don’t ask for any personal information!
About the Author
Ready to retire and unsure what to do next? Get our "Introduction to Medicare” eBook to start to make sense of Medicare and your options.