Archive for the ‘insurance prospecting’ Category

Insurance Marketing – Does Your Method Make Sense?

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

financial advisor scratching headYou don’t have to find a guru to get answers for increasing your insurance marketing results. You just need to concentrate on the three critical factors that determine sales prosperity:

1) The caliber of the prospects you speak to
2) The variety of prospects you talk with
3) How good of a sales presentation you provide

Let’s take these in order over three posts. Today, let’s cover your insurance prospecting method–how you locate quality insurance prospects.

Your way of prospecting will be the main determinant of the number of prospects who purchase.

Make certain that your insurance marketing process only produces appointments with interested and qualified insurance leads. Here’s the contrast of two prospecting approaches. The initial approach produces results while the next alternative saps your spirit.

Cold-calling, a conventional way of insurance marketing, produces insurance prospects that must be persuaded. You could be “twisting his arm” to some degree to get the appointment. Is it any surprise that 30% of the time, your insurance lead is not present when he had scheduled to meet or they are not interested?

What would occur if rather, you took out an advertisement offering a free pamphlet about a specific topic in which you had expertise, such as annuities as a source of retirement income? Those people that respond to the advertisement for that pamphlet would be self-motivated annuity leads and have an interest in your topic. And isn’t this the sort of prospect you want from your insurance prospecting, a prospect that takes action?

A young lady who a short time ago entered the occupations of real estate asked me about the best way to gain clients. I had her create a pamphlet, “Ten Mistakes to Avoid When you Sell Your Million Dollar Home.” We ran the ad within the food section of the Wednesday newspaper, the day that has all of the food discount promotions. The ad was $250. The agent received 62 orders for her pamphlet.

If she had cold called, how long would it have taken her to identify 62 qualified prospects? This prospecting system we have just described allows you to make much better use of your time because your initial call is a warm call to her receptive motivated prospect.

Now you can see the difference and how you’re insurance marketing method determines the caliber of prospects you attract. Therefore, to make your life easy, use the model of offering an item to your targeted prospect (e.g. by age, revenue, profession, zip code, phase of life,etc) and you ONLY contact those individuals who want your package. The supplied item can be:

a) a pamphlet or totally free report
2) an offer to attend a seminar presentation
3) a free quotation
4) a free analysis

Then, once you contact the insurance prospect, you get in touch with them simply because they requested something of you. You are not asking for their business and you are not making the initial approach.  You are getting in touch with them to figure out how you can serve them. This places you in the position of a professional, the control position, and starts the relationship on the proper foot with an appropriate and valuable prospect.

Now that you have an insight into insurance prospecting that is effective,  I’ll talk about how to acquire high numbers of inquiries from these high quality prospects in the next post.

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Insurance Prospecting – Not for Insurance Professionals

Friday, August 6th, 2010

young professionalThis article on prospecting applies to any type of financial sale.

Your first boss told you that insurance prospecting is the life blood of your business.  We say don’t do it. Insurance prospecting is the activity of a sales laborer and not an insurance sales professional.  As an insurance sales professional, your time is far too valuable for this administrative, clerical activity.

Know that insurance prospecting is the boring activity of separating the insurance prospects (those people with an interest and with money) from suspects, e.g. names on a list or often called insurance leads.  Imagine you had a list of all residents in Beverly Hills zip code 90210; you can reasonably assume that most of these people have money.  However, most are not interested in your product or service.  How do you locate the few that are viable insurance prospects?  You let a sales laborer do the insurance prospecting.

Here are four scenarios:

1. You delegate insurance prospecting to an outside firm that will design and print a mailer for you.  That company and the post office employees become your sales laborers to deliver your thousands of pieces of insurance direct mail. The few recipients that respond ( say 100 people) are “insurance prospects” and these are the individuals you should speak to now that the insurance prospecting has been done.

2.  You hire a telemarketer or telemarketing firm to call those Beverly Hill residents with your offer (might be an invitation to a workshop, offer for a white paper, etc).  You only talk to the people who express interest, the insurance prospects.

3.  You place an ad in the Beverly Hills section of the LA Times offering your report “The Six Things Agents Never Tell you About Insurance.”  You talk to the 50 individuals that order your report.  The newspaper becomes your sales laborer to locate insurance prospects.

4. You hire an insurance lead generation company to run ads for you on the Internet and find insurance prospects that meet your criteria. You pay the insurance lead provider per Internet lead.

All of these tactics cost money.  They are all an investment. If you prefer not to invest in your insurance agency, then find a position as an employee working for an insurance company or another insurance agent, as clearly you’re not cut out to own a business.  You can be a sales laborer for someone else and do their insurance prospecting and let them make most of the money.

Sure, insurance prospecting is the lifeblood of any insurance practice but you, the sales professional, shouldn’t be doing it.

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Insurance Leads are Jeckyll and Hyde

Monday, February 1st, 2010

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is about strange occurrences between Dr Henry Jekyll, and the misanthropic Mr Edward Hyde. The work is known for its vivid portrayal of a split personality, split in the sense that within the same person there is both an apparently good and an evil personality each being quite distinct from the other.

Your insurance prospects may be the same way.  On your first encounter, the insurance prospect expresses interest in your products and services.  Two weeks later, the prospect won’t return your calls.  This strikes you as strange but this behavior should not.  Don’t expect insurance prospects to be consistent or unchanging over time.  Their priorities and outlook are in flux and easily influenced by external events and topics in the news.

Because your insurance prospects have changing interests, you must stay exposed to them so when their interest and your services align, you do business.  Most insurance agents and financial advisors use the “hit and run model,” i.e. sell the prospect today if he’s interested and if not, move on.  The rich advisor maintains contact because he knows what may be a low priority for his prospect today, for example estate planning, might be a high priority next week when the prospect’s brother dies.

Because you cannot know the right time to strike, when your prospect is Jeckyll or Hyde, an insurance newsletter or investment newsletter is an easy way to maintain top-of-mind awareness with prospects.  Make sure they get your newsletter monthly, as less frequently is too infrequent to build up the top-of-mind awareness you want.

Brokerville

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Insurance Prospecting Gone Wrong

Friday, January 29th, 2010

It continually shocks us that so many people (insurance agents, stockbrokers, financial planners) are recruited into financial services with no sense of how to grow a large business.  We think this is due to the short term orientation of the people or companies that recruit them.  These new recruits may be looked at as merely “commission generating” or “asset gathering” machines.

An example is the insurance agent who is encouraged to get his securities license, specifically, the series 6 license.  If one is taking time to study, why not study for the series 7 and gain a broader exposure to the securities markets?  This is not in the insurance company’s best interest as the insurance company only wants their agent to sell the products they offer (mutual funds, variable annuities) and not have the flexibility to branch out or pursue other investment or insurance marketing and sales opportunities.  In an ideal world, what’s good for your employer is good for you but many times, this is not the case.  Your employer’s short term interest may be adverse to your long term career.

As a consequence, many recruits into financial sales are taught the caveman method of insurance prospecting, to hunt and kill: find a prospect and make a sale.  This approach will not result in maximum long term earnings. To maximize career earnings, you must evolve your insurance prospecting as the caveman did from hunter to farmer. To grow a big business, use the farmer formula: plant, cultivate, nurture.  In other words, you have a method of prospecting or method to generate or buy life insurance leads which produce insurance prospects who meet your criteria.  These prospects enter your pipeline as they may not be ready to buy today.  They are cultivated in the pipeline (e.g. invitations to seminars, receipt of your newsletter) and they are nurtured into new clients.  These insurance prospects are then further nurtured to produce repeat business and referrals.

Insurance marketing and insurance prospecting is for the purpose of placing a prospect into your pipeline.  While some insurance prospects may be ready to do business today, the majority will not.  But how can you make a living while you fill your pipeline and convert these cultivated prospects into clients?  You need to enter the business with a 90 day financial cushion while you pack your pipeline.  Again, your first employer may not have told you this because this would have dissuaded your entry into the business. Rather, the employer may have opted for some fast-turn system for insurance leads that you call and close that day.  The long term result is similar to the drug addict looking for today’s fix.  You spend each day looking for a hot insurance lead while the true professional is continually and easily gaining new clients from the prospects in his pipeline.  You may have become an insurance  huckster rather than the professional you had envisioned.

If you want to build the large business that has eluded you, it’s time to change your model from hunt and kill to plant, cultivate, nurture.

Insurance prospecting

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