10 Strategies you can use to close more Auto Insurance Leads

March 28, 2016

1. Don’t sell on price alone. If you ever hear the phrase, ‘I can’t afford that’, ‘it is more than I am paying now’ or ‘that is too much’, stop, and start asking questions to see if you have any available discounts to offer client. Find out if there is an opportunity to bundle policies. Ask if you can bundle their policy with someone else in their family. You should also go back and compare coverages to see if you are comparable with what they currently have. It is important to find out how much you are off, so that you can sell the value of yourself and your carrier. Never ever give up the sale until you have exhausted every alternative to sell the auto insurance lead.

2. Follow-up, follow-up and follow-up. Once you present a quote to an auto insurance lead or prospect, it is important to follow-up. You may need to call a few times, email or even text the prospect. Sometimes it will require persistent follow-up work. There are some agents that let it go after presenting the quote, ‘they will call me if they are interested’. Insurance today is a competitive industry, it requires that you work hard for every sale and sometimes follow-up multiple times. Having the attitude that you are not chasing someone down is self-defeating.

3. Get to know the lead. There are multiple reasons for doing this. This will help you to close more sales and bundle more policies. If an insurance lead likes you and feels that you care about them, they will be more inclined to want to do business with you. If you know that they have a family and rent their home, you can offer to bundle life insurance and a renter policy. The more you know about a lead, the more you can help them with the insurance products you offer.

4. Find out how they like to be communicated with. There are multiple ways to communicate with auto insurance lead and you should be prepared to use the form of communication that your lead or prospect prefers. The more options you are able to use, the more successful you will be. Don’t get bogged down in what you like to use, be flexible and accommodate your insurance prospect.

5. Utilize a CRM system. To help you with your follow-up and lead nurturing, you should employ a CRM system to help automate the process. It can sometimes be hard to remember everyone you need to follow-up with, if you don’t have a good tracking tool. Once you invest in a CRM it is also critical that you make everyone use it diligently. You will close more sales if you use the CRM actively with every lead.

6. Make every lead feel like a priority. When you get a call with a lead on the phone, don’t say you are busy and ask to call them back. It is important to drop everything and focus on that lead and make them feel like you care. If someone has dedicated time to shop for insurance, they want to be helped then. If you are not able to help them, in all likelihood, they will attempt to find someone else to provide them with an auto insurance quote.

7. Work with a sense of urgency. When selling auto insurance, it is important to move quickly. When you purchase a real time internet lead, you need to be the first person to reach the consumer. You should endeavor to call a lead within a few seconds of receiving it. If it is a transferred call, you should drop everything and help the person and not let the call go missed or to voicemail. The faster you move, the more likely it will be that you will write the policy after providing the quote.

8. Offer available discounts. By offering available discounts to a prospect or auto insurance lead, you will close more deals because they will feel you are working for them. Since some agents are paid on a percentage of the premium, they always seek to sell the most expensive policy rather than the one that will work best for the lead. While you may make a few less dollars offering the best low cost coverage, you will gain more in the long run with a happy client that will remain with you for years.

9. Make it easy to buy policy. Some agents will require the auto insurance lead to do all the work to get a policy written. Whenever possible, an agent should have their process be very easy and simple to get a new policy. The easier that an agent can make it, the easier it will be to get the auto insurance lead to buy a new policy with you.

10. Thank the lead, ask for referrals and follow-up . For many agents, the sales process ends when they get a form of payment. This is really the start of the process of keeping the client happy for many years and getting additional sales through referrals. On every sale, you should thank the client and ask for referrals. You should also periodically check in with the client to see how the new policy is going. Every time you connect with a client, you can offer additional policies and ask for referrals.

6 Reasons why you should purchase both insurance leads and calls

March 23, 2016

Insurance leads and calls are the same product, the only difference between the two is delivery method. An insurance lead is the contact information that was submitted online by someone looking for an insurance quote and then emailed to an agent. The agent must contact the lead via email and/or phone to quote and write the insurance business. UnitedStatesInsurance.com is an example of one such site where consumers enter their information to recieve an insurance quote.

An insurance call is someone who either completes an online request, is called and then transferred to you or someone who initiates a call to obtain a quote over the phone. Once you receive the call, you just need to quote the lead and write the business. Regardless of the delivery method, all insurance leads are consumer initiated and guaranteed to want a quote.

Many successful agencies are taking both insurance leads and calls to grow their business. The following are 6 reasons why the strategy is used by the most successful insurance agencies.

1. Sales staff have different skills. The sales staff in your office all have different skills. Some might be great on the phone, others might be better responding to emails and other sales staff might be better in face-to-face interactions. When you buy both insurance leads and calls, you will be able to identify what delivery method works best for your agents and route those leads to the person with the best chance of closing the sale. As much as you can customize the marketing lead program to the skill level of your team, the better your close ratio and sales will be.

2. Allows you to maximize opportunities. Internet insurance leads and calls can vary day-to-day and hour-to-hour. Some consumers like to fill out a form online and others just like to search on their mobile phone and call to obtain a quote. By taking both insurance calls and leads, you can maximize the number of sales opportunities that come into your sales team. The more people you talk with, the more people you will quote and the more people you will write. It is generally recommended that agents buy a minimum of one call or lead for every hour an insurance producer works. The best way to make sure you get that amount, is to take a combination of calls and leads in the largest geographic area possible.

3. Helps keep sales staff busy throughout the day. Staffing is one of the biggest expenses that an agency can have. It is important to keep your producers busy throughout the day to maximize your return on that investment. When you purchase both insurance leads and calls your probability of doing that increases since you should be able to get more opportunities coming into your office.

4. Consumers initiate process. With both insurance calls and leads, consumers initiate the process. They are making an effort to receive a quote. When they do that it is a much higher quality consumer experience and will usually result in a higher close ratio. The more of these opportunities you talk with, the faster your agency and book of business will grow.

5. Consumers are guaranteed to want a quote. One of the best elements of both insurance leads and calls is the fact that they are guaranteed to want a quote. All callers or leads are consumer initiated and the consumer must take active steps to obtain a quote. Customer service calls and requests for assistance are weeded out so you can spend all your time building relationships and quoting.

6. You get consumer information to speed quoting process. When a consumer goes online to request a quote, they will usually provide all the information necessary to obtain a quote. This significantly speeds the quoting process and allows you to quote more leads and write more policies. While you won’t get a lot of detailed information when someone initiates a phone call, the consumer will be of very high intent since they want a quote while on the phone call.