Insurance Lead Management: An Asset or a Cost?

Lead management is a vital part of the insurance business. As an insurance broker, you probably receive emails offering to sell you leads to help you boost your insurance business. Managing leads, prospecting for new business, and providing service to your existing customers is a big job – and you might be doing many things manually.

You don’t have to!

You can gain a significant advantage by using Internet technology and online software to make the lead management process easier for yourself and others in your office.

What is Lead Management? It’s using an automated method to collect and capture insurance leads, keeping those leads for yourself and/or sharing them with others in your agency (based on previously established criteria), and tracking the follow-up and sales resulting from those leads.

Where should you start?

Evaluate what you’re doing now. Review your processes. How many separate programs are you using to manage your insurance leads and handle the related follow-up?

Are you using Excel? ACT? Outlook? Salesforce? Another program? What about for quoting?

What about follow up – are you using a customer relationship management (CRM) tool? That can really add up – in software costs and use of your time.

Are all – or any – of your programs integrated and working well together? Or, is it mostly a manual integration? Are you still importing and exporting lists? If so, you’re likely wasting time – which means you could be wasting money, too.

Ask yourself these questions:

• When a lead comes in, do you follow a checklist for how it’s handled?
• Do you track the progress of the lead?
• Do you contact new leads via email or telephone – or both?
• Are your records electronic or manual (and on paper)?
• Are you re-entering the same information in multiple places – using several programs?
• Do you have task reminders?
• Is any of your process automated?
• How is it set up? Is it complicated?
• How do you follow up with lost contacts?
• How do you collect referrals from your existing customers?
• How do you track and analyze your sales progress and success?
• Once a lead goes cold, do you have a plan for continuous follow up?
• How do you deliver a proposal? Can prospects get quotes directly on your website without you or someone else generating a quote?
• How do you get fresh leads? Do you buy them? Do you use an insurance specialist?
• Can you sell leads you can’t handle? (Like those from outside of your service area, or from individuals who want a product you don’t sell?)
• Do you know how your website is performing?

By taking the time necessary to answer these questions, you’ll identify your pain points and potential areas for improvement. Selecting an insurance lead management partner can save you both time and money.

Quotit, for example, offers a range of services to help brokers market, quote, enroll, and better manage your business, including CRM, real-time quoting from your website, on-exchange quoting and enrollment, and tracking of your business from lead to proposal to enrollment.