With the urgency to buy insurance weighing on your prospect, your ability to get them to trust you, your expertise, and your empathy over the phone is vital to your success as an insurance agent.
While there are unique challenges in selling anything over the phone, insurance is a distinctly personal product that can impact the consumer’s life profoundly. The right insurance coverage can affect the health and financial well-being of the consumer and their loved ones.
With that in mind, selling insurance over the phone is much different from selling face-to-face. You don’t have the same non-verbal clues like body language and facial expressions, which can often be used as indicators to adjust your sales approach.
So, what can you do to ensure your sales calls go swimmingly? Keep reading to discover seven industry-tested techniques to help you sell insurance over the phone!
7 Techniques for Selling Insurance Over the Phone
Insurance agents need any effective method available to maximize their sales now more than ever; the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services reports that there are “16.3 million consumers (76% of total) who have active 2023 coverage and returned to their respective Marketplaces to renew or select a new plan for 2024.”
The time to prioritize marketing is now for insurance agents, including focusing on selling insurance over the phone. Selling health insurance over the phone may seem daunting at first, but it’s one of the top methods for generating more leads and retaining current clients. In fact, callers convert 30% faster than web leads.
Here are our top seven techniques the most successful insurance agents use for turning sales calls into one of your biggest channels for conversions.
1. Be Empathetic
You want to sell health insurance, but the consumer’s needs and interests should come first. Additionally, while you may be the insurance expert, you have to remember not to talk down to the person on the other end of the call. Each prospect has varying knowledge of insurance and what’s best for them.
It’s important to be both personable and take the time to understand their circumstances sincerely. After all, these are prospects that could result in quick sales and ones that could become loyal clients for a long time.
2. Have a Call To Action
At the end of the call, be ready to close the sale. You can use numerous techniques – including directly asking for the sale – but the key is to be ready to nudge your prospect in the right direction with concrete actionability.
The more you engage your prospect/client to talk about the real reasons they need insurance, the better your connection and the more likely you are to close the sale. Invest in the time it takes to understand their health, family, and how much they care about helping their loved ones prepare for the future.
Knowing more than just your client’s basic needs opens the door to more personalized calls to action that resonate with each prospect.
3. Prepare for Objections
Choosing insurance can be stressful – and your client will likely have valid concerns you’ll need to address. Some may hesitate to make important decisions and offer excuses for why they aren’t ready to commit.
Either way, overcoming health insurance sales objections is just the nature of selling to clients. That’s why you must be prepared to handle objections.
Interested in learning the best methods for handling objections? Our industry experts have created a guide for helping insurance agents just like you handle sales objections with ease.
4. Customize Your Conversation
Every conversation you have with your clients/prospects should be tailored to them. It’s important to use your client’s name throughout your conversation, and if you’ve spoken before, review your notes from your last conversation before you pick up the phone.
When appropriate, mention what you talked about and follow up on any concerns or questions they had mentioned previously. No one wants to feel like they are just another sale, and you should make your clients feel as important as they truly are. Each client can help you expand your business, boost your reputation, increase referrals to you, and generate more sales. So let them know just how much you value their business by tailoring your conversation to them.
5. Memorize and Practice Your Opening and Your Closing
Some calls will require a variation to your openings, but if you have a general sense of how you’d like to introduce yourself, practice it until it sounds natural, confident, and sincere. You need a prospect to stay on the phone to make the sale, so test your opening with someone you trust to give you honest feedback.
Once you are making calls, evaluate the success of certain approaches and determine which ones work best for you and appeal to your clientele.
You also want to transition to your closing during your conversation seamlessly. Whether your client is ready to choose a plan and enroll or needs a follow-up meeting, ensure you are prepared to handle their choice to best position your conversation toward the next step in the sales process.
6. Automate Follow-Ups
Once you make a sales call, you must continue cultivating your relationship with the client/prospect. Furthermore, the timeliness of the follow-up is crucial, but we all know how busy a day in the life of an insurance agent can be. This can result in follow-up emails getting lost in the shuffle. That’s where automation can help.
CRM tools that include auto-response technology are game-changers for insurance agents and brokers who want to maximize their time and streamline sales efforts. Insurance software platforms like Quotit allow insurance agents to automate follow-up communications, build their business, and provide the level of customer service that will appeal to prospects, retain clients, and encourage referrals.
7. Be A Great Listener
Listening skills are not as easy to master as you may think. Most of us listen to respond instead of listening to learn. As an insurance agent, your job is to learn what products and services your prospect will value. It can be challenging to sift through a prospect’s concerns and hesitations to figure out exactly what they need, but listening effectively can help you close the sale.
Remain focused on the call and try your best to eliminate distractions. Truly listen to what they’re saying, not just wait for what you will say next. Don’t just hear the words; listen for the meaning behind the words. Keep them engaged during the call by asking questions and taking notes.
The Next Step? Build on What You’ve Learned Here
As you can see, selling health insurance over the phone doesn’t have to be as daunting as it may initially seem. Plus, the payoff of learning how to sell insurance over the phone via the mentioned techniques will net you one of your best methods for generating more leads and retaining clients.
If you enjoyed these seven techniques, we have many more to build on what we’ve provided here. Get your copy of our Phone Prospecting Checklist to take the next step toward mastering your sales abilities over the phone!
