Effective Prospecting Tips for Insurance Agents

Effective prospecting is the centerpiece of insurance agent success. When done correctly, it can become an engine that pumps out consistent insurance sales. However, effective prospecting usually doesn’t happen naturally, and learning to perfect prospecting can lay the groundwork for more sales, higher revenue, and more long-term customers.

Wondering how to be better at insurance prospecting? 

Insurance Prospecting Tips to Lift Sales

We’ve pinned down the most effective prospecting tips to utilize today to start boosting your insurance sales:

Focus on Lead Generation

If you want to grow sales, it takes diligent lead generation and lead nurturing. By creating an ongoing pipeline that feeds your leads, you make it easier to convert prospecting efforts into sales. 

However, if insurance agents are trying to generate and manage leads on their own, it can add heaps of responsibility to their plates. That is why it’s important to implement technology that simplifies lead management, such as an end-to-end insurance CRM. 

In addition to unveiling exactly what prospecting messages leads are responding to, advanced CRMs also make it easier to route the right leads to the right agent. This technology allows you to match leads to agents based on certifications, proximity, or skills, so that agents are always sent the leads they’re most qualified to handle.

Solidify Your Web Presence

Your prospects are spending more time online than ever. In fact, a Hootsuite report found the average internet user now spends nearly 7 hours online every day. That is why it is critical to polish your web reputation if you want to spark better prospecting and increase insurance sales. Here are a few ways to improve your web presence and set the table for better insurance prospecting:

• Use social proof: By sprinkling testimonials, positive customer reviews, case studies, and other social proof throughout your website and social media profiles, you’ll show potential clients that people trust your work. That can quickly build your reputation and open the door to more sales. 
  
  
• Clean up online reviews: Online reviews are extremely important to the modern consumer. You can clean up your online reviews by asking happy clients to leave a review and showing them exactly how to do it. Plus, responding to those reviews will further show potential customers you care. 
  
  
• Use SEO: What if every time someone searched for your insurance services you showed up as number one? Local Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the process of optimizing your website to show up at the top of search engine results, is a fundamental piece to your marketing strategy. If your potential clients can find you easier, you’ll have more opportunities to sell.
  
  
• Make buying insurance 24/7 easy: Your prospective clients are busy, and restricted business hours can hold some customers back from following through on a sale. That’s why it can be a big sales booster to include a client-driven shopping cart on your website. In addition to letting clients sort through and purchase insurance policies on their own, these tools also give them suggestions based on their needs—paving a clear path to cross-selling opportunities.  

Identify the Niches in Your Market

Insurance agents typically offer more than one type of coverage. However, by emphasizing the needs of your ideal client and matching those needs to the things you excel at, you can make prospecting easier for yourself.

To help turn prospecting into additional sales, get a clear breakdown of your mission, vision, and biggest advantages. These messages will propel prospecting forward, help focus your messages, and make it easier to reach the clients that fit into your niche. 

Implement a Referral and Rewards Program

When used with finesse, a referral program can bring in new leads on a daily basis. Here’s why building a masterful referral and rewards program both improves prospecting and creates extra benefits to you and your insurance business:

• Money savings: Referral and rewards programs lift much of the marketing and lead generation tasks off your agents’ shoulders. You essentially turn loyal customers into walking billboards for your business, and in turn, your business saves money on marketing and you free up time for agents to perfect their prospecting skills. 
  
  
• Brand boost: As your customers recommend you to their friends, it broadcasts your brand across social circles. Due to this, your prospects are more likely to know about and trust your insurance business when agents send them prospecting or marketing messages. 
  
  
• Long-term loyalty: When your current customers refer your services to others, it can spark new long-term business relationships. Because they’re getting information from the people they trust, those referred leads can often be more trusting of your insurance business from the start. 

Conduct Training on Effective Insurance Prospecting Methods

Do you have several agents working at your insurance business? Focusing on training to improve prospecting methods may increase work in the short term, but in the long run it can dramatically improve your agents’ prospecting efforts. Here are some ways to use training to help your agents master prospecting:

• Set aside time for prospecting: Just as you would for formal meetings, encourage your agents to block off time to focus on prospecting. That can include everything from going over messages and reaching out to clients, to coaching agents to be better at insurance prospecting. 
  
  
• Prepare for objections: To increase sales, take time to conduct mock calls or walk through scenarios with agents. Be sure to cover common insurance sales objections that can derail deals, and lay out advice on overcoming these objections.
  
  
• Encourage agents to follow up: Constant communication is essential to building relationships and closing insurance sales. That is why it’s important to encourage agents to follow up with clients frequently and consistently.

Embrace Insurance Technology

Prospect targeting and data management used to be a time-intensive task that bogged down insurance agents. Now, there is insurance technology that can chisel out more time for you to improve your prospecting and reach additional potential clients. That is why one of the easiest ways to ignite more effective prospecting is to implement automation tools. Here are some examples:

Insurance CRMs

With sophisticated CRM software, agents can complete otherwise daunting tasks in seconds. These tools organize leads for you, clearly detail the best policies, and make it easy to keep track of a prospect’s personal information. That way, you have everything you need to connect with prospects quickly—without putting in the extra effort. 

Automated Email Marketing

By getting advanced software for email marketing, you can automate customer relationship follow-ups, quoting, and data management. This will allow you to focus on what is most important: pleasing your clients.

Better Prospecting to Spark More Sales

Technology can help remove work from your plate and promote greater prospecting efforts. Quotit software is built specifically to help insurance agents stay organized, be more efficient, and land more sales. 

Want to see how Quotit software can help you hit your goals? Schedule a demo now for an inside look at how Quotit insurance software works.