Salespeople often are advised not to talk about politics or religion, and for good reason. People have strong opinions about these two issues, and being too open about our views is a good way to run off potential customers. Brokers seem to take the “mum's the word” approach on two other subjects as well: COBRA and taxes. The difference is that, in this case, it's our silence that could cost us the business.

So why would an advisor steer clear of these topics in particular? The reason we give our clients is that they fall under the category of employer or tax law, not insurance law, and any advice we provide is not covered by our errors & omissions insurance. The real reason, of course, is that we sometimes don't know the correct answer. If we did, we wouldn't be so worried about misadvising them. Unfortunately, health reform is a game changer that's forcing brokers to redefine themselves as consultants.

Going forward, we'll need to do a much better job of proving our value to our clients; in this new role, “pass” is not an appropriate answer when they ask us a difficult question. Does that mean we need to become experts on everything? Of course not. But we do need to know the basics and be able to point our clients in the right direction. With COBRA that's fairly easy — a number of reputable third party administrators provide COBRA administration services for a very reasonable price.