When building out an agency marketing strategy, you have to ask: Is a consumer who is shopping around going to stumble upon your site and fill out a form? Do you have people who are trained to call that consumer, engage the prospect and convince them to buy insurance from you? Does that happen 10 to 20 times a day? If it does, stop reading because you are one of the few that's making it work.
As an agency owner, ask yourself if part of your marketing investment should be invested in vendors that have more experience in search, search engine optimization, search engine marketing and navigating lead generation than you do. Traditionalist producers say they want customers that are referred to their agency — and for them to appreciate the value you provide. However, today's business owner knows that they need to capture prospects online that we used to find through traditional means. They believe that it's their job to build a relationship, identify needs for the client and solve their pain points.
Ideally, your strategy contains several forms of marketing, including: Building a local presence, lead buying, referral sources, e-mail marketing, event marketing and any other way you can get prospects into your sales funnel. Remember, we need to run our agencies like sales and marketing organizations that happen to sell insurance products. If you think like a marketer, you'll transform your agency.
Regardless of your marketing strategy, most potential buyers conduct their initial research online. These four tips for quote conversion apply to most of the prospects that call, e-mail or fill out an online form requesting a quote from you.
1. People: Historically, agents are inbound phone sales people, meaning that prospects called in for quotes and were converted into a client. Can your employees adapt to calling out? Are they unable to hear rejection? Do they have call reluctance?
Depending on the size of your agency, should you have a dedicated “Internet department,” or specific people to manage all online lead campaigns? Should you focus your internal training efforts on how to work with the connected consumer? As you hire new people, are you hiring more of the same? Should you target sales people instead of experienced insurance people?
It's not uncommon for agencies having success with online leads to have people that make more than 50 outbound calls a day. Try to make that your next hire.
Your sales process is only as good as the people executing it. (Photo: Shutterstock)
2. Sales process: Time and time again, research shows that the No. 1 driver of conversion is speed.
Taking data from more than four million converted leads, Velocify, a provider of cloud-based sales software, determined that calling leads in under one minute results in a 391% greater chance of conversion. This is science, not guesswork.
When you build a sales process, the first focus should be on speed. Figuring out a specific cadence for your contact strategy is of equal importance. When you don't contact a lead on the first call, determine how many times you call, e-mail or even send snail mail. Making just one call is a recipe for failure, so make sure there's a documented sales process in the agency that everyone follows and you can manage.
Do you have scripts for overcoming the initial objection “I already bought insurance,” “I'm busy right now” and other blow-off techniques consumers use? This should be documented, tested, taught and enforced on every lead you buy. Test different techniques, see what works, then replicate it and make it a process. There are also some great tools out there to help you automate your contact strategy, email marketing and sales process. Agencies that take a scientific, data-driven approach to their sales process have the most success with online leads. Remember: Your sales process is only as good as the people executing it.
3. Attitude: If you walk around the office discussing how “bad” the leads are, your employees are doing the same. If you're the leader who doesn't follow the sales process, then your people are doing the same. Let's face it, if we believe a segment of leads are poor quality, we wouldn't know when a good lead hit us on the side of the head. Granted, there can be quality issues, but there are agencies building empires with online leads — and you can, too.
Make sure you don't look at the initial sale as the end of your experience. Sell other lines of business and ask for referrals. (Photo: Thinkstock)
4. Maximize value: You can't invest a small sum of money and throw in the towel if you don't see immediate results. A mentor of mine used to say, “Stuart, people don't go online and fill out insurance request forms for fun.” How true is that statement? You're not going to close more than 80% of online leads like you do with referrals, but once an online lead becomes a client, they'll refer people that will close at 80% or better.
Make sure you don't look at the initial sale as the end of your experience. Sell other lines of business, ask for referrals, get clients to follow you on social, add them to drip campaigns and turn that one sale into two, three or 10.
If you invest $1,000 a month in marketing and gross $800 in first term commissions, is that a success? If your retention is just 90%, the $800 in commissions will compound over time and your ROI will catapult after a couple of terms with no increase in marketing cost. Or maybe you'll decide to increase the investment since it's house money at that point.
Your ability to grow is directly correlated to marketing and capturing consumers online. Finding the right people, sales process and tools to manage your online lead campaigns will help your team embrace online client acquisition and grow your business.
There's a formula that works for your agency. It's just a matter of applying your entrepreneurial spirit to make it work. Keep pushing and don't let anything stop you from success.
Stuart Ganis is the Founder of Ganis Consulting, an insurance consultancy specializing in helping agents in areas of sales, marketing, operations and M&A best practices. Follow Stuart on Twitter @StuartGanis.
Check us out on Facebook and give us a Like
Want to continue reading?
Become a Free PropertyCasualty360 Digital Reader
Your access to unlimited PropertyCasualty360 content isn’t changing.
Once you are an ALM digital member, you’ll receive:
- Breaking insurance news and analysis, on-site and via our newsletters and custom alerts
- Weekly Insurance Speak podcast featuring exclusive interviews with industry leaders
- Educational webcasts, white papers, and ebooks from industry thought leaders
- Critical converage of the employee benefits and financial advisory markets on our other ALM sites, BenefitsPRO and ThinkAdvisor
Already have an account? Sign In Now
© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
