Gear up for your insurance agency success
With the holidays fast approaching, you may find that your cold calls are…cold. Downright frigid and unproductive, in fact. Few prospects want to make business decisions such as insurance purchases while they’re in holiday mode. Use this slow time more productively to gear up for your insurance agency success in the new year. Here are a few ideas to get you started with your preparation time.
1. Insurance sales tools: provide, train and hold accountable
Now’s the time to assess how effective your sales tools are, from your prospecting tools to your CRM. When you are cold-calling, are you armed with the right prospect information? If you’re providing leads via your website, are you able to see how those leads have been followed up? Are all the touch points, from phone calls and emails to visits, logged appropriately?
To CRM or not to CRM? According to a recent survey on successful sales teams by Hubspot, an integrated marketing platform and marketing industry thought leader, unsuccessful teams (meaning the team size is stagnant or shrinking) are more than twice as likely to use Excel, Outlook, and/or physical files to store lead and customer data than their successful counterparts (teams that are actively hiring). These same teams labeled unsuccessful were nine times as likely to report that they weren’t sure where leads or customer information is stored.
That means if a sales person from your team leaves, they might be taking all their leads with them – because you have no record of them. No record that John Doe at Acme Co. was finally ready to talk about his commercial BOP needs. No tickler file on Jane Doe at Western Widget asked to be contacted in July, before their current workers’ compensation policy expires, because she’s fed up with their current provider. That equals business lost.
The same Hubspot study showed that nearly half of all salespeople don’t exclusively use dedicated technology to store lead and customer data; instead, they’re relying on spreadsheets, Google docs and so forth. They’re not being held accountable to log all information into that CRM you’re paying for.
Related: Five business goals to grow your insurance agency
Prospecting Tools. Whether or not you choose to provide these tools, all insurance agents have at their disposal LinkedIn and Facebook. You might just need a little help in utilizing them fully, and there are plenty of online helps for them.
Why use these social media tools? According to a recent International Data Corporation study, 75 percent of B2B buyers use social media to help them make buying decisions and 76 percent choose to consider recommendations from their professional network. And half of them use LinkedIn as a source when making buying decisions. So if your agency specializes in commercial insurance coverages, LinkedIn is a crucial prospecting tool that will help ensure greater insurance agency success. Here are a couple of other articles that will give additional tips on using LinkedIn to uncover more commercial property and casualty insurance prospects from Salesforce and from Hubspot, one of our favorite marketing experts.
You’ll also want to take advantage of Facebook’s Audience Insights, allowing you to dig deeper and find more of the specific prospects you’re looking for. Hubspot has produced a beginner’s guide that can help you get started.
2. Set new goals for the New Year
Rather than just setting, say, an overall sales goal of increasing insurance sales by 10 percent over last year, and then adjust your sales team’s goals accordingly, ruminate on this a little more. What will truly help you boost your insurance agency success? If you increase your goal to 11 percent, will that allow you to purchase that CRM upgrade, or that web prospecting tool, that your team has been asking for? Then set that goal and dangle it as a carrot in front of your insurance agents. Is there a particular property and casualty insurance program or product that your producers have been asking for, or that your competition offers, that will allow you to extend your business more profitably? Include that in your sales goals.
Consider tying other actions and results to compensation as well, such as CRM data entry, uncovering intel on the competition, attending association / industry / community events to extend your brand’s reach. Don’t forget to publicize monthly sales goal results because, as you know, insurance agents thrive on competition and kudos.
3. Other ways to gear up for your insurance agency success
- Provide coaching and training. Accompany your agents on sales calls, and if you’re good at coaching, pinpoint areas of improvement. Provide training help and plenty of “attaboys.”
- Assess your marketing. Ensure your insurance agency marketing is sufficient to bring in new leads to disperse to the sales team. Be sure your website is completely up-to-date, including that it’s mobile-enabled. Have you claimed your Google Places spot? Are you regularly updating your insurance agency’s social media pages with new offers plus posting tips and other information from other authoritative sources that your target audience will find beneficial? What marketing campaigns can you run in the first quarter to highlight certain products, that may include a new webpage and offer, social media posts, a local ad, mailers and emails, all geared to drive new leads to your website and/or your agency. Base your commission structure on whether your agents create their own leads or whether it was a lead brought in by your marketing.
- Scrutinize your sales process. How easy is your quoting and binding process? How long does it take to add an endorsement? Do you have the capability for clients to pay online? Arrowhead’s producers have 24/7 access to our secure web portal, where they can quote and submit new business and service existing policies. This easy-to-use online facility helps streamline new business and post-sales tasks. Learn more about Arrowhead Exchange.
4. Finally, strengthen the ties that bind.
You have a good team. You’ve worked hard to train them, break bad habits and teach new ones. In return, your team has taught you a few new tricks, and has proved invaluable in your agency’s growth. Now make sure they’re tied to you. How? Well, that same Hubspot successful sales teams survey we mentioned at the top of this article also questioned salespeople as to what’s most important in their jobs. Here’s the resulting ranking:
Opportunities for growth: 27%
Work-life balance: 15%
Compensation: 14%
Company culture: 13%
Company performance: 11%
Quality of leadership: 6%
Although growth opportunities ranks number one on the list, don’t automatically assume that just means your property & casualty sales team wants bigger goals and rewards. Instead, consider providing other opportunities for them to try on, such as assuming additional responsibility, becoming the lead agent on a new product or launching a new geographic territory, becoming the agency’s SME (subject matter expert) and trainer on specific product lines or mentoring a new agent.
Related: How important is employee appreciation for your insurance agency?
In a recent producer development article for PropertyCasualty 360, Barry Seigerman (who founded his Long Island agency 40 years ago) wrote, “Every producer must have an individual annual business plan establishing goals and objectives for revenue, professional development, community or charitable organization participation, joint work with senior producers/principals and multi-line sales.”
Your job as the insurance broker, agency owner or sales manager is to collaborate with each agent to create an individual annual sales plan that includes a list of activities they need to do continually (such as uploading all data to the CRM, not to beat a dead horse). If you’re not already doing so, consider meeting with each agent monthly to talk about their cold calls, follow-up calls and activities, and other actions, along with wins and losses.
During this lull before the holidays, it’s the perfect time to lay out your plan for next year’s growth and success with these important steps, with the help of your team.
Wishing you and your team Happy Holidays – and a very successful New Year!