3 Ways To Close More Insurance Leads

If you’ve spent any time here on our site, you know we talk a lot about SEO, website development, and generating insurance leads. But in today’s post, we’re not talking about how to generate leads, but rather, how to close those leads.

The truth is, closing leads isn’t always easy. You really need to be good at multiple things, and have a good process in place to make things much easier.

Let’s dive in!

The first tactic is your follow-up.

Call Leads Back In Under 5 Minutes

This may seem like common sense, but follow-up time is absolutely critical in generating a positive ROI with incoming insurance leads, especially when you’re dealing with cold internet traffic.

If you’ve ever heard someone say, “the money is in the follow-up”, it’s 100% true.

While more and more agencies are utilizing automation tools and CRMs to follow-up with leads and clients, the fact remains, when it comes to closing leads, the phone is still the most powerful sales tool in existence.

There is a lot of data that shows if you don’t call the lead back within 5 minutes, your contact rate and thus ability to close that sale drops by 80%…! That’s a big deal!

Basically, if you don’t call the lead back almost immediately, you’re not closing the sale.

That is a big problem for a lot of insurance agencies because a vast majority of agencies are simply not staffed to be able to respond to leads that fast.

What’s more, if the lead actually calls you first, which will happen, someone needs to be there to answer.

All too often incoming leads will call in only to get some long-winded phone tree machine that takes 30 seconds or longer to get through all the menu options.

If leads are hitting a phone tree, your chances of closing them are slim to none unfortunately.

So the lesson learned here is, pick up the damn phone, and don’t JUST rely on text messages or emails.

Use Your CRM For SMS Follow-Up

I get it, sometimes you’re just too busy to pick up the phone right away. In those cases, and really all other cases, you should be using automation to communicate quickly with your leads.

There are a lot of really solid insurance CRM options today that make this very easy to accomplish, and if your website is with Advisor Evolved, integrating your CRM with your web-forms couldn’t be easier.

You need to have a few automations in place that will send out SMS (and emails) to the lead within the first 60 seconds of them opting in to your form(s).

SMS specifically can help increase contact rates by over 50% vs. just email alone. Use a combination of both to really double down on that initial communication.

A quick intro message should go out immediately, introducing yourself and thanking them for the opportunity. Next, tell them how you can help them and ask if they’re available to chat on the phone.

Again, get to a phone conversation as fast as possible. Don’t rely only on automation for communication. You need to build rapport and relationships if you want to close the sale.

Speaking of which…

Be Good At Sales

Again, captain obvious here, but your ability to sell insurance is only as good as your sales skills.

If you (or your team) aren’t good at sales, you’re going to lose a lot of business to other agencies. The truth is, there are a lot of agencies who are bad at sales.

Sales is both a talent and a skill.

Some people are born with it, while others have to work at it, but at the end of the day, you need to be convincing or your ROI is going to suffer.

Get right to the pain point of the prospect as fast as possible, and use that to present your solution.

Conclusion

While these may seem like very obvious points, there are still so many agencies out there who are failing at one, or all three of them.

Closing leads it really a combination of a few different things, that all need to be working together for maximum results.

So remember. Pick up the phone. Text your leads. And be good at sales.

If you can master these three things, you’ll close significantly more insurance leads!