August 04, 2016
The 3rd quarter of the year is upon us and it is now time to kick things in gear to accelerate your home and auto insurance sales. This will help you hit your end of year bonus targets and revenue plan. The following are 8 tips to help you accelerate your insurance sales in the 3rd quarter and throughout the year.
1. Contact your single policy clients to see if you can offer them additional products. These are usually easy sales. You can offer bundled policy discounts and consolidated billing to save them money and make their lives easier. The best way to contact your clients is by phone and if they are busy, you can schedule a future time to talk. This should be done at a minimum of once a year with all your clients. This is also provide an opportunity for you to deepen your relationship with your clients and will help improve your retention rates.
2. Hold weekly “lead marathon”. A lead marathon is an all-day focused day of working leads and making sales. This focus will enable you to build your sales funnel and generate sales not only on that day, but over the course of several weeks. You should purchase auto insurance and home insurance leads and calls to maximize your opportunities. The more lead marathons you can hold a month, the more sales you will make.
3.Expand your geographic target. Traditionally agents have been taught to sell insurance within 5-10 miles of their office. This paradigm is outdated and agents should be selling statewide to maximize their potential clients. Today home and auto insurance buyers are willing to work with insurance agents regardless of where they are located, as long as they receive superior service.
4. Establish sales contest for yourself and your team. Whether you have multiple producers or work alone, having a sales contest or reward will provide some extra motivation to achieve higher results. The contest should be achievable while at the same time a number that everyone would need to push to achieve. Report on your progress towards achieving these goals on a regular basis, as it will help you stay focused on the end goal.
5. Change your focus from auto to home insurance or from home to auto insurance. Some agents tend to focus on one product and limit their sales of others. Agents will do this for a number of reasons, one of the most significant being their comfort level. Agents who want to build a sustainable book, should have a portfolio of policyholders with both home and auto policies. Breaking out of your comfort zone will allow you to grow faster and have a more diverse portfolio of clients.
6. Increase lead budget. Auto and home insurance leads work! Insurance leads have been proven to provide the highest ROI compared to other marketing programs. If you are spending your limited resources on direct mail, yellow pages ads, online advertising, and other mass marketing, you should shift these dollars to leads. If you not spending money on leads, now is a good time to start, as you will obtain a positive return on your investment.
7. Contact everyone you quoted during the last year and didn’t sell. Once you purchase a lead and provide a quote to that prospect, it doesn’t cost you anything to contact that person again. To help kickstart your 3rd quarter sales, you should contact all the people you quoted during the past year to see if you can update their quote. Some agents will try to this via email, to save time, however, nothing works better than a phone call.
8. Establish daily, weekly and monthly goals for the remainder of the year. To achieve your end of year revenue and sales objectives, it is important to have a plan. You should establish monthly, weekly and daily goals, and reset those goals at the beginning of every month, if you have not achieved your goal in the previous month. Having a goal will be a regular reminder of what you need to do to finish the year strong.
July 29, 2016
The newest insurance marketing strategy, that is being utilized by many insurance agencies to grow their book of business, is a insurance Lead Marathon. The insurance Lead Marathon is an effort to put 100% of your efforts into prospecting, quoting and writing business for an entire day. During the normal course of business, we get distracted, pulled away and have to deal with many “urgent” needs of our clients and business colleagues. During an insurance lead marathon, you have a singular focus. Like in a running marathon, your single objective, the finish line or writing more business.
The following are the keys elements or things you should do to make your insurance lead marathon a success.
1. Decide on when the lead marathon is going to be held. The biggest and most successful agencies hold lead marathons on a weekly basis, if you are new to this strategy, you should initially hold once a month or bi-weekly. Once you have successfully held a few, you should schedule them weekly going forward.
2. Work with your home, life, health or auto insurance lead vendor to request an increase in leads for the day you are holding your marathon. You should order as many auto and home insurance leads and calls as possible. This will help you to be as productive as possible. Your rule of thumb should be 20-25 per person. There is no reason you shouldn’t be able to quote a minimum of two leads per hour.
3. Notify your staff of the lead marathon and let them know they should plan on being in the office early and staying late. You should plan on holding the marathon from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm to maximize your activity and results. You should tell your producers that they should not have any meetings or calls scheduled. 100% of everyone's time should be focused on the activities related to the marathon. If you are an agent that works alone, while you can do a marathon on your own, you might want to consider asking others in your office or colleagues to participate with you.
4. Have food brought in and plenty of snacks. This is a marathon, which means no breaks. You should have plenty of food, snacks and drinks available so that you can be 100% focused on working your home, life and auto insurance calls and leads. The fewer breaks or distractions you have means you will have more time to be talking with more prospects, quoting and writing more business.
5. Stay focused. Do not answer emails, voicemails and other requests unless they are related to the lead marathon and the insurance buyers you are quoting. The more you can be focused on your sales activities, the more successful you will be during the marathon.
6. While your objective is to quote and write as many auto and home insurance policies as possible during the day, you should expect that some of the leads will require you to follow up or nurture until they close. Some of the leads may also not be available when you call, so you will need to call back another time. In addition to calling the leads, you should email and text, to maximize your contact during the day.
7. Set a marathon goal or target, with team and individual goals and associated rewards. Salespeople do better when there is public recognition and rewards. Make sure you take pictures and celebrate your results that day and after the marathon.
8. Plan to move quick. Real-time internet leads are just that, they are sent to you within seconds of being submitted online. You need to call quickly and make sure you are the first person the lead speaks with . If it is an insurance live transfer, you need to realize the person is on the go and needs to be helped immediately. The benefit of moving quick is it will allow you to quote and write more policies throughout the day.
9. Track your performance and activities. Track how many leads and calls come in, how many emails you send out, how many calls go out, how many people you quote and how many policies you write. The more you track, the more you can make each marathon better than the one before.
10. Provide feedback to your home and auto insurance lead provider with the specific and detailed results. Each time you have a lead marathon in your office you should let your insurance lead vendor know what the results were. You should work with them to continuously improve your results each time you hold a marathon event.
Agent Ethan Kosmin Generated over $200,000 in premiums during first year in business thanks to Contact Concierge.
A look at some surprising facts and shocking statistics from the insurance lead industry.
