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.
Agent Ethan Kosmin Generated over $200,000 in premiums during first year in business thanks to Contact Concierge.
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