Compete against your best self this year selling auto insurance by finding better leads, leaving better voicemails, learning how to nurture leads, and more.
In the words of the late, great William Faulkner, “Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.” When you’re selling auto insurance, there are no words more true.
If you’re an independent agent, you’re truly only competing against yourself, so are you keeping track of your own metrics? It’s one thing to look at your bank account and see how much you made this year and what you hope to make next year. But what other areas are there for improvement so that you can reach those goals?
There are plenty, from where you source your leads, to leaving voicemails, to nurturing leads. If you want to step up your game next year, try these 10 tips.
10 Ways to make this year your best yet selling auto insurance
1. Find a better source of phone leads. It can be easy to get stuck in a routine using the same resources for securing the best auto insurance leads, but it’s good to break out of your usual patterns every once in a while. With new online communities and networking opportunities popping up daily, it’s important to take time and review what resources you might be missing. Read How to Find The Best Auto Insurance Leads to discover more resources.
2. Write better cold-calling scripts. Even when you have qualified leads, it may feel a whole lot like cold-calling, and sometimes the response can feel that way too. Read The Best Auto Insurance Cold Calling Scripts Have These 5 Things In Common and learn how to write better cold calling scripts.
3. Nurture your leads. The goal of lead nurturing campaigns is to engage with potential customers. Introduce them to your agency and show them the good work you do. You want to use lead nurturing campaigns as a way of differentiating yourself from other insurance agents and building a personal connection with your lead. Lead nurturing campaigns come in different shapes and sizes and can be tailored to your agency’s needs. Read 5 Insurance Lead Nurturing Campaigns to Try and get five insurance lead nurturing campaigns to try this year.
4. Find your zen with crabby potential clients. Even when you have verified leads of people who have asked to be contacted, it won’t always be smooth sailing. Maybe the lead feels like you took too long to contact them, or perhaps their expectations were different. Read 8 Steps for Dealing with an Angry Customer Over the Phone to discover a few good ways to handle calls that aren’t going in the direction you expect.
5. Seek out red flags and learning opportunities. Every sales objection is an opportunity to learn. Sometimes you’ll learn something about your lead, while other times, you’ll gain better insight into your own sales strategies. Read These 4 Common Objections in Sales are Actually a Blessing in Disguise to discover more about these types of learning opportunities.
6. Emulate your favorite salespeople. Understanding your strengths and weaknesses is essential in the insurance sales industry. It helps a salesperson lean into their talents while finding growth opportunities. Self-awareness is the key to improving your qualities. When looking at the qualities of a great salesperson, which ones do you notice first? Consider our list of 15 Qualities of a Great Salesperson to Emulate Now. How many of these qualities do you already have? Which ones do you want to work on? Keep a running list of qualities you possess and ones you’d like to harness better.
7. Leave better voicemails. Why do business voicemail greeting scripts make folks feel awkward? There’s something unnatural about having a conversation with yourself as you record a greeting message for the first (or hundred and first time). Rather than waste time recording, playing back, then re-recording your business voicemail greeting, pick a script to follow. Create a script that will work with your company’s style and structure. Read 10 Business Voicemail Greeting Scripts You Can Copy and Use Today for lots of ideas.
8. Ask better open-ended questions. Asking open-ended questions in sales calls is a valuable technique for insurance agents. Whether part of your cold call strategy or a method used in follow-up communications, open-ended questions provide many benefits, like offering a path to gathering additional information about your potential customer or client. Read 7 Benefits of Asking Open-Ended Questions in Sales for more ways to glean information through open-ended questions.
9. Work on your sales closing techniques. You’ve worked hard to secure and nurture your insurance leads, and you’re at the home stretch. Deciding which auto insurance sales closing techniques to use requires a mix of intuition, science, and alchemy. Many factors come into play when determining which closing strategy to use, like personality and communication style. Even if you think you have a firm grasp on closing techniques for selling auto insurance, it’s a good idea to test out new methods from time to time. Read 5 Auto Insurance Sales Closing Techniques to Try This Year for a few strategies you can use.
10. Avoid burnout. Sales burnout is a very real problem within any industry. It can happen at any time in one’s career, though it typically crops up after periods of intense work stress. The first key in avoiding, preventing, and recovering from sales burnout is knowing what it looks like. Read 5 Ways to Avoid Sales Burnout and How to Recover From It to find out.
One of the most crucial aspects of the insurance sales business is having a reputable source of leads. Allow HBW Leads to help your company grow one lead at a time.