Tag: insurance leads

How To Build Value and Attract the Right Leads

Posted on by Cassandra Love

You’ve probably spent a long time planning to start your agency and are finally ready to reap the rewards. Actually, jumping in and getting started building your business can be quite scary. Especially since you’re entering a pretty competitive environment. To stand out from the competition, you’ll have to find ways to build your business’s value and attract leads that are ready to buy. Easier said than done, right? So how should you go about doing this?

Building Your Business’s Value

As we’ve already said, it’s important to build the value of your insurance agency so you can stand out from the competition. To do this, focus on your:

  • Location– Make sure you’ve chosen the right location for your agency. Is there a large pool of potential customers? Remember, most people prefer working with someone local. And are often unwilling to travel very far to meet with an agent. Being involved in your local community can also be an attractive selling point for customers, and it helps get your name out there.  a scale with quantity on one side and quality on the other showing quality weighing more than quantity
  • Happy customers– The best way to add value to your business is to have a wide field of happy customers. They will not only continuously bring in revenue for your business. But they will also help you to gain new customers if you ask them for referrals and reviews.
  • Unique selling point- Because there are many insurance agents out there that you’re competing with, you have to show that you bring something unique to the table. This can be anything from how you approach doing business, to your brand, your webpage, your social media accounts, and your content. 

Attracting Leads

Of course, the most important thing when it comes to bringing more value to your business is attracting more leads. There are many different ways to do this, like:

  • Personalized email marketing– Email marketing is a great way to drive leads, especially when your emails are personalized to the person that is receiving them. A study by  Experian found that personalized emails generate up to 6 times higher revenue than non-personalized emails and campaigns.
  • High-value content– To get your agency noticed on the internet, you’ll have to work on search engine optimization (SEO) when building your website and your presence on social media. Focusing on SEO will bump you up in search engine results – and producing high-quality content is a great way to boost your SEO. So great content will not only show that you know your business, but it will also help to generate leads. 

What does great content include?  Write about topics that are most important to your customers, answer their most-asked questions, and touch on their pain points while offering solutions. Try a mixture of entertaining and informing. And don’t forget to try various platforms and media, including text, audio, and video.

  • Referrals– Studies show that most people do their shopping based on recommendations and looking for an insurance agent is no different. Always ask for referrals from satisfied customers (as well as from family and friends). So, you can expand and generate leads. illustration of a man and a woman with speech bubbles above their heads

 

How Benepath Can Help You Succeed

There’s one more way you can find great, ready-to-buy leads: work with Benepath! Not only can Benepath save you time and money, but we can also help you nurture your leads and improve your customer service skills. By providing you with helpful content guides and emails, you are sure to succeed! 

When you work with Benepath, receiving reliable, exclusive leads is the easy part. We provide you with real-time leads through a secured process. And give you a customized thank-you page so your leads will be ready for your call. This thank-you page assures leads that they won’t be bounced around between agents. And gives them a feeling of connection with you right from the start. We offer the leads, and, while it is up to you to properly nurture the leads, we are behind you every step of the way. You’ll find, though, that our leads don’t need much nurturing because they are ready to speak with you and buy your product!  To get more information, fill out the form below or call 866-368-0377.

Keeping the Lines of Communication Open With Your Customers

Posted on by Cassandra Love

As an insurance agent, you need to know that communicating with your clients is vital to the success of your business. You have to communicate their options to them, explain their coverage, answer any questions they have, and check up on them from time to time to make sure they’re happy, or see if they need a new policy. But when it comes to maintaining ongoing communication with customers, many agents fall a little short: they begin to think that because they’ve already landed a customer, all they have to do is fire off an email now and then to check on them and that’s it. 

So it’s no wonder that 60% of customers don’t believe they get any additional value from agents after they’ve purchased a plan, or that a whopping 86% think that communication with their agent is lacking! Don’t fall victim to one of these statistics: there are simple ways to keep communication going with your customers, so they feel that they’ve made the right choice to work with you.

Educate Your Customersbook open with the pages creating a heart

It’s always important to remind your customers just how important their insurance coverage is. Offer them the benefit of your knowledge of the industry, and at the same time, you’ll give them a feeling of security that you know your stuff. Just remember to avoid jargon and technical terms, which can be off-putting to many people; you’re better off explaining concepts with terms everyone will understand. 

If your customers feel secure with you as their agent, they’re more likely to become loyal customers, and nothing is better than a loyal customer. A loyal customer delivers more than 250% more referrals than your average less-than-satisfied customer; not only that, but a loyal customer renews at a rate of 97%, and buys 25% more insurance.

Be Consistent

As we stated earlier, many insurance customers feel like they aren’t getting any additional value after they’ve purchased an insurance plan, and more than 44% of customers say they haven’t received communication from their agent within the last 18 months. Leaving your customers hanging like this can spell disaster for your business! The best way to retain and grow your customer base is by being consistent with your communications. Don’t rely on simply remembering to check up on your customers, though: set reminders in your calendar on your computer or phone, so you’re sure to contact your customers every month or two.illustration of communication methods

You can also streamline communication, such as email, phone calls, and direct mailing by adopting a client portal that centralizes your client communication in one place. You can ask which form of communication each of your customers prefers, and make sure to contact them through that specific channel. Communicating with your customers in the way they prefer will make them feel like they have an easy way to communicate with you, and will also make them more comfortable and satisfied with you. 

If you are looking for more prospects, or to grow your business, Benepath can help. We offer exclusive leads who are ready to buy – all you have to do is tell us when you are available to work with them. Benepath will provide you with better tools, more guidance, unsurpassed sales training, and techniques from the most successful agents and trainers in the industry, not to mention the best leads available. To get more information, fill out the form above, or call 866-368-0377.

Selling to seniors via video conferencing

Posted on by Benepath Blogger

The unaddressed truth behind Covid-19 is that until we get a vaccine, those of us who have an increased risk of serious health problems are going to need to remain socially distant even after the spike subsides.  While a therapy for the virus could be found as early as June, a vaccine is much further away, with most experts looking at the end of 2020.

Adjusting to the times

For a variety of reasons, many of you prefer to sell face to face, and right now you can’t, for the safety of yourself and your clients.

You are left with one of three choices:

  • Stop selling
  • Sell over the phone
  • Sell over video

Why Video Conferencing

Seniors are not as tech-illiterate as many people think.  In a study done by Amwell Health Solutions, data showed that 45% of American seniors have participated in video calls using FaceTime, Skype, and/or Google Hangout.  Some seniors are even catching up to the new Zoom movement, using it to talk to their family and friends.

73% of seniors claim that faster health related services, such as insurance consultation, are the driving reason for their willingness to use video conferencing.  Seniors have the will to participate, you just have to add this to your toolkit.

While calling could get the job done, you are missing an important layer – the visual cues.  With phone calls we miss 50% of the conversation because you can’t see how the person you are talking to is responding.  Video conferencing eliminates that limitation.

How do you do it?

So, how do you get seniors on the screen, not just on the phone?  The first secret is that you have to make it easy.  Best practice is to just have them click on a link you emailed them.  You’ll probably need to include instructions on how to find the link, but the more simple you make the process, the more success you will have.

Ask the senior if they have used to using Hangouts, FaceTime or Skype.  These popular systems are the most common, and you should adapt to their preferences.  By adapting to their preference, the success rate of your calls will be significantly higher.  While this may involve more flexibility on your end, it will undoubtedly benefit you in the long run.

The question “why you are taking meetings this way?” will come up, and be honest with them. Tell them it is to keep them safe in today’s environment.  This expresses that you care about them as a person, not just a client, helping your overall rapport.

In conclusion

By incorporating live video into your sales process you’ll be able to:

  • See your customer’s visual cues
  • Share and go over your quality presentation materials
  • Build a deeper relationship with your customer
  • Make more sales!

And if you need help matching with Medicare insurance prospects, don’t hesitate to give us a call at 866-368-0377.

5 Outbound Sales Cadence Insights Every Insurance Agent Should Know

Posted on by Benepath Blogger

5 Outbound Sales Cadence Insights Every Insurance Agent Should Know

Sales cadences are about more than just the frequency and content of your emails, they’re about engaging your prospects enough to begin a valuable conversation. How you interact with your leads should vary from segment to segment to maximize effectiveness. A good sales cadence filters out any undesirable prospects, but a great sales cadence will get meetings. One of the biggest differentiators between the two is our first insight: The importance of a timely follow up.

The Art of the Follow Up

The speed of your first response to a prospect is crucial to converting smaller opportunities into revenue. The Harvard Business Review found that businesses that attempted to reach leads within an hour were nearly seven times likelier to have meaningful conversations with decision makers than those who waited even an hour.¹ If you can follow-up directly after a prospect engages your cadence, you’ve got the best chance to move them further through your pipeline while they’ve still got you at the top of their mind.

If your prospects are in the market, they’re already eyeing the competition and likely reaching out to them as well. The longer you wait to follow up after a response, the more likely someone else is to. Conversely, the shorter your response time is, the faster you can get through the opening stages of your funnel to qualify a prospect because a quick response every time makes the sales process easier for your customer. Staying on top of your follow-ups doesn’t only create more conversions more quickly, it creates happy customers.

Don’t Lose Sight of the Big Picture

This tip may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s easy to get lost in the process of following a sales cadence. The point of the cadence is assuming that the prospect has not seen the previous contact, the only goal is to elicit a response. Each new touch point should be treated like a cold call or email: Stay consistent with the frequency and content of your touch points to make sure you’re being seen.

Sales cadences work to organize your outreach attempts to enable you to reach a higher volume of leads without getting disorganized. That being said, it’s your job to be using all the relevant platforms available to engage your prospects and improve the quality of your outreach. Your goal is to make contact, use all the methods available to get your prospect’s attention. Sales development reps who didn’t engage their prospects on social media only filled their pipelines 47% of the time, compared to 65% of the time for salespeople who use social selling.²

As time goes on you should also be creating new cadences to succeed where others have failed. You’ll learn more about your audience through both your positive and negative responses as you keep track of what brings the most success over time and form valuable insights into your sales process.

Know How to Switch It Up

If you’re executing a sales cadence correctly, your leads will have to at least see your efforts, so avoid being boring and using the exact same approach every time. Sales cadences are still cold outreach attempts and need to have variation to maximize your chances of engagement. Thanks to the internet, the biggest obstacle for many cold calls and emails is providing value. Buyers do their own research now and are already at least somewhat informed on your offering as well as your competitors.

Two 2018 studies have found not only that 70% of B2B and 79% of B2C customers in the US do research online before they make a purchase, but also that 44% of B2B buyers prefer to identify potential solutions themselves before reaching out to sales.³,⁴ As such, the job of the insurance agent has evolved into one more similar to an advisor in order to address the questions and needs of more informed buyers. In order to separate yourself from the rest you need to really understand the problems of your leads and provide the buyer with the solution they’re looking for.

By centering your target customers’ pain points in your outreach, you’ll retain relevance no matter how many times you pivot topics or approaches. Your subjects will stay fresh as you approach leads with different topics, but your focus will remain consistent as each topic will be related by what’s most important: the customer’s needs. Instead of putting your whole value proposition in an email, break it down to create a concise sequence of attention grabbing topics. With a well crafted cadence, you’ll be able to not only generate opportunities, but also gain insight into which topics get the most engagement.

No One is as Productive as They Think

In a survey of how much sales reps thought they engaged prospects, the average number of perceived touch points per lead was 15.⁵ However, most reps actually only use 8 touch points per outbound sales prospect. Even top performers only use as many as 12 per prospect,⁶ meaning that it’s very easy to lose track of your relationships with each lead. The beauty of a well planned cadence is its ability to create a schedule for your messaging and keep your outbound prospecting efforts organized. Equipped with a strong cadence, a good insurance agent will be chugging through their pre-organized tasks each day as they go through their schedule, but even that can only go so far.

Besides minimizing distractions, one of the best ways to increase productivity is to improve the efficiency of how you spend the most time: working. To accomplish this, the average sales rep will use an average of 6 tools to help manage their load: A CRM, a data-list feed, a tool for social prospecting, an email engagement tool, and a tool for their sales cadence.⁷ Insurance agents typically don’t have such a busy sales stack, but they can learn a thing or two from these savvy inside sales reps about sales tools and automation.

Choose the Right Tools for the Job

When you’ve hit a wall in your productivity, utilizing a tool to help automate your workflow can take you to the next level. But between sending emails, making calls, creating and assigning buyer personas, and keeping track of your performance and tasks, the consistency and organization of a sales cadence can come at a cost of the time invested into upkeep. Without the proper tool or service, you would need to do lists and excel sheets to manage your cadences with various leads and incorporate them into your busy workflow.

Of course every insurance producer has tools at their disposal, but while your CRM may help you keep track of your prospects and your emailing tool will help cut the number of emails you need to write, the best tool for managing your cadences is a sales engagement platform like 20 Miles. Most sales engagement platforms manage workflow sequences, automate and track emails, create buyer personas, integrate with your CRM, and analyze data on the whole process to optimize, but 20 Miles takes it a step further: In addition to a feature-packed platform and award winning integrations, With robust analytics and a suite of sales tools, 20 Miles lets you get more work done while providing the data you need to perfect your process.

Takeaways

The usefulness of a sales cadence goes so much further than organizing your workflow or helping to ensure continued follow through on your outreach attempts. With the right approach, your cadences can become sources of data on your prospects and help to build loyalty with them through reliability; With the right tools, you can increase productivity and separate yourself from the rest. As you prepare to prospect your next group of leads, consider these insights to take your sales cadences to the next level.

Sources:
The Harvard Business Review: The Short Life of Online Sales Leads
Sales for Life: Social Selling 2017 Trends Report [Via Hubspot]
CSO Insights: 2018 Buyer Preferences Study
Netsertive: 2018 Local Consumer Survey
InsideSales: How to Build a Sales Cadence to Rule Them All
The Bridge Group: SDR Metrics and Compensation Report [Via Sales for Life]
InsideSales: How 900 Companies Build and Execute Successful Sales Development Teams [In partnership with Sales for Life and others]

Should You Buy Leads or Work For Someone Who Provides Them?

Posted on by Benepath Blogger

How you choose to handle insurance leads is strictly a personal choice. While you may follow the suggestions of others when you first get started, chances are that over time you discover that some methods of getting leads do not work for you. That means you can choose what works and fine-tune those methods as you grow your agency.

Mostly the choice of which way to obtain your Medicare supplement leads has two options: 1) buy your leads directly through a reputable lead generation company or 2) join with or work for someone that offers its agents leads. While the second options sounds good, keep in mind that you do not have control over the leads you receive. You can not control for their quality.

On the other hand, if you buy quality leads from a lead generation company you have complete control over what you want. For instance, you can specify demographics, locations, ages, how many leads you want per day or week, right down to choosing exclusive leads versus shared leads. Ultimately, it is your choice.

To determine what strategy works best for your style, test out both options. There is no doubt you will find what works for you and kick-starts your conversions.

Benepath Agent Success Series Webinar – Calling Like a Professional

Posted on by Benepath Blogger

How do your phone communication skills size up according to your clients? Closing sales for insurance agents on the phone is hard enough, but if your phone call delivery is lacking in even one aspect, your efforts could be . We at Benepath want to help ensure your phone calls are as effective as possible, for this reason we are thrilled to announce our first Agent Success Series Webinar.

In this 30 minute webinar hosted by Benepath President, Clelland Green, and Revity Sales Consulting Partner, Morgan Smith, we will coach you in effectively calling your consumer leads to make the most of every second on the phone with them. Clelland and Morgan get right to the point, coaching you topics including:

  • The importance of tone throughout your call
  • Effective messaging to guide a consumer into a sale
  • Proper contact etiquette

We also give you the ability to ask your specific questions to the professionals that will be answered at the end of the webinar!

Sign up here.

Other creative ways to appeal to a broad market needing insurance

Posted on by Benepath Blogger

Let us say you buy insurance leads from a lead generation company and you like how they work. You like the higher rate of conversions and the fact the leads are pre-qualified. It is a nice way to do business – but – you feel like you are missing out on the in person one-on-one leads you source yourself. With a bit of creative thinking this is easy enough.

For instance, new homeowners are always in the market for insurance and often other insurance policies relating to their new purchase. New homeowners are easy to find as the information is public and easily accessible. A simple Google search for new homeowners in your area should deliver results. Additionally, you can request this type of information when you purchase leads from a lead generation company.

Furthermore, you should periodically revisit your company books and recheck all your existing customers, as they tend to be a good source of repeat business. Also, existing customers may bring in new customers in the form of their friends and family members.

While auditing your books look for old customers that can be targeted with other insurance policies. Identify milestone life events, in your files. These can include: the birth of a child or grandchild, milestone birthdays (like turning 65), new vehicles purchases, the anniversary of a policy or even a change of employment, etc.

All of this information is available at your fingertips. With careful research and due diligence you can obtain good results.

Treat Your Insurance Leads Like They Are Your Job

Posted on by Benepath Blogger

Insurance leads “are” your job. Work them like they are and expect success.

Whether you are just starting out selling insurance or are an old hand at selling policies, you have likely tried the delicate art of cold calling. It is not for everyone and many agents would rather not have to deal with picking up the phone and calling complete strangers.

Since the advent of the computer, social media and other new innovations, including insurance lead generation, you no longer need to cold call. However, you still need to be a decent phone marketer because in reality, calling leads is still a form of cold calling that just happens to include a name, address, phone number and some other possibly useful information to initiate a chat.

How to succeed with phone marketing is a bit of an art, but it is one that can indeed be mastered with a bit of work. The first thing you need to have in your toolbox is the belief that calling leads is going to work. If you go into it with the attitude that it’s going to fail, that you’re going to be nervous and blow it and no one is going to buy anything from you then that is precisely what is going to happen.

Yes, it’s true, what you think, you manifest into reality because that is the kind of energy you send out. Put another way, “belief” is a real thing and it must be a part of your attitude to succeed. Without belief, phone-marketing accomplishments, even with solid leads that have requested information, your success may not manifest itself.

Always be wary of the first excited rush you get when you have new leads to call and people to connect with to talk about insurance. You need to have the mindset that working leads is a long-term, repetitive task, because that is how you grow your agency. It is not something you do just one day a month. Phone marketing and calling insurance leads needs to become a habit that becomes a part of your every day business life.

Run into glitches when calling? Not surprising. Everyone you are going to call is going to react in a different manner. Even if they asked for information about insurance, they may be rude, hang up, say they changed their minds or they do not want to buy right now. What do you do? Tweak your calling routine a little bit each time you run into a “situation.” Keep track of what works and what does not. Be prepared for just about anything to happen because leads are anything but predictable.

Insurance leads “are” your job. Do them often, with diligence, care and enthusiasm. A job you enjoy and work hard at is a job that leads to success.

Content Marketing and Social Media Are Insurance Agents’ Best Friends

Posted on by Benepath Blogger

You may have heard this already, but it never hurts to hear it again. Social media and content marketing are still big. It’s just the way you use them that changes. Do you keep up with the changes?

It’s no secret that if you want to grow an insurance agency you need the tools and the ability to achieve success. Of course, tools alone do not guarantee that you will succeed, but tools combined with smart choices and a solid grasp of how to grow a business will get you where you want to go.

One of the first things you need to learn and do consistently is to write good copy. Can’t write to save your soul? Hire it out. Your business depends on it. Good writing has the ability to generate leads. Everything is connected when you are growing and running an insurance agency. Writing good content helps you on social media, online, in blogs, for speeches and even for presentations for prospective clients. Social media use and content marketing are crucial. Do not treat them like separate “tasks.”

There are some marketing gurus out there who insist that you need not spend money to get leads. While that may be a route you are tempted to take, here is one very good reason why that is not a good idea: lead quality. If you don’t get good leads, you waste more time on the phone trying to connect and sell than if you spent strategic marketing dollars to get pre-qualified solid leads from a lead generation company. You’re familiar with the old axiom that goes: “Time is money.” This is particularly true when it comes to working insurance leads.

This is not to say you cannot find your own leads. By all means, try that if you feel moved to attempt it. It might be worth comparing your results at the end of the day. But if you want to kickstart your business and keep it growing, buying exclusive insurance leads is the guaranteed way to go, provided you do the work to convert the lead. Remember, good leads alone do not mean business for you. However, good leads along with excellent sales skills ups the ante on being successful sooner.

Just remember that the core skill you must have is the ability to write (or hire out) content and market it skillfully in places such as your blog (you do have one don’t you?), on your website, in writing articles, news releases, in brochures and even in ad mail campaigns. The power of the well written word is something that still moves people to action. Combine smart marketing with a wicked ability to handle and source good, solid leads, and success will be yours.

New to Calling Insurance Leads? Go Slow

Posted on by Benepath Blogger

If you’re in the business of selling insurance, go slow. That may sound counterintuitive in a competitive market, but it makes sense if you’re new to the business. By going slow you’ll avoid costly mistakes.

When new insurance agents get out on their own and have a chance to prove to themselves and the world that they have a good product that everyone wants, they’re bound to make a few blunders. Totally understandable, but completely avoidable.

When you have finished training, don’t rush out and do everything all at once and don’t order as many leads as you can and expect to get through every last one of them in a hurry. Life just does not work that way. Take your time. Learn as you go. Learn from those who have gone before you and learn that calling leads is an art and not an automatic sale for every call. Learn also that despite being told you can make sales doing cold calls, this is a practice that is best left to later in your career and only if you are so inclined to try it. Many are not, and rightfully so.

Cold calls give even seasoned insurance agents some serious pause for thought for the very simple reason that there is zero information for the agent to establish a rapport with the person on the other end of the phone line. Using leads from a reputable lead generation company is a wise move when first starting out because they are pre-screened and pre-qualified. You have basic information to work with as a starting point, such as what kind of insurance they may be looking for, where they live, their age and possibly what they do for a living.

Calling someone cold turkey does not offer you even a faint snapshot of who you may be dealing with on the other end of the phone. So, to avoid the pitfalls of calling leads too fast and blowing them off due to inexperience or a lack of understanding on how to properly work leads. go slow. Learn what you need to know from others. Try it. Then learn something new and try it. Never try calling leads without having some training under your belt and a good mentor who has “been there, done that”.

Being new to calling insurance leads is only a disadvantage and may cost you more money and time than you thought if you do not learn as you go and take care doing it. This is your career. Do it the right way for a long-lived and rewarding one.

Testimonials

What Our Clients Say!

Benepath is a 1st class organization, with excellent customer service. The only reason an agent would not make money with Benepath is simply because the agent did not try. They are THE BEST INTERNET LEAD PROVIDER that I have worked with by far!
Cody A Springfield, MO
Judy, I just wanted to say that the Group Leads you have sent me have been great leads.
Aaron Moody Basic Healthcare
I have to say that out of all the lead companies I have worked with, Benepath has been number one for my business. Your staff is very professional and I want to thank you for your service.
Tim Lippert Independent Broker Diversified Health Group

Get Your Free Guide to Selling Exclusive Insurance Leads!

Contact Us

4663 W Chester Pike
Newtown Square, PA 19073

866-368-0377
contact@benepath.net

Hey there, I’m Ben, your personal assistant. What brings you to Benepath’s website today?