WHY YOU CAN’T SELL MORE INSURANCE AND HOW TO OVERCOME IT

In the insurance industry, it’s no secret that the name of the game has always been connections trust, and service. Most successful agents belong to many associations, committees, networking groups, referral groups, country clubs, etc.. They work like crazy and become the respected insurance guy/gal that everybody loves to do business with.

Let’s go over a few fundamental issues with this approach.

Time
In the example stated above, you are constrained by the number of hours in a day. You can only go to so many events, shake so many hands, and kiss so many babies. Not only that, but the sales cycle for this type of client acquisition can take weeks, months, or even years.

Productivity
If let’s say our desire output is sales and renewals, how much of our day do we actually spend pursuing that directly? I’m not talking about networking, setting up booths, passing out business cards, or organizing your files, I’m talking about sales calls. How many hours per day do you spend trying to close new sales?

Capacity If you look at the chart above, you’ll see an illustration of the law od diminishing returns. You see, the thing about working is that we all have a limit. This limit is not just how many hours we can stay at the office, or how many phone calls we can make, Its how many hours we can get actual work done before our results start diminishing.

Results
What ultimately happens is you hit a ceiling and either continue to overwork while your returns continue to diminish or you accept the fact that this is the most you can squeeze out.

Efficiency The only way to overcome this barrier is by becoming more efficient with the prime time you have. One of the fundamental problems with the scenario above is that there is little room to become more efficient. What are your options to become more efficient? Fly private to these events to save time? Buy a Tesla so you can send emails while on the road? None of these things will have a large impact on your output.
The only way to fix a fundamentally flawed system is to scratch it all together and engineer something new from scratch.

REIMAGINE THE WHEEL

if the most productive thing you can do is make sales calls and keep existing clients happy, let’s fabricate a system that would allow you to spend as much time doing the things that get you your outcome.

Objective #1: Get you on the phone will red hot leads you can close on the first call.
Objective #2: Free up time for you to spend managing existing clients & your business.

The first thing we’re going to do is set up your automated marketing funnel. The goal here is to find your target market, introduce them to you, your agency, and your product. Then we will build rapport and establish you as the authority in your niche.

Drive traffic
When driving traffic it’s important you know exactly who your target audience is. When paid traffic campaigns get expensive is when you are sending the wrong traffic to the wrong content. It’s important you understand who you’re going after and what their needs are.

Give Them Value (Build Trust & Rapport)
Insurance sales is a game of trust and rapport. The reason why referrals networks are the top lead source for agents is that those prospects already have a level of trust with you through whoever referred them to you. The way you build that trust with a stranger, who’s never heard of you before, is to solve a portion of a problem they’re experiencing. Through market research, you should be able to define exactly what that problem is and be an absolute expert at solving it. This could come out in the form of video training, ebooks, cheat sheets, blueprints, etc.. The point is, if people know you understand their problem and are the best person to solve that problem, they will give you a shot.

Qualify
Once they’ve seen your content, they’ll be prompted to fill out a survey. The primary use of the survey is the filtration of unqualified and non-serious buyers. If the point of this system is efficiency, then we want to avoid people wasting your time on sales calls. Statistically, people who fill out multi-page surveys are 87% more likely to attend a scheduled call in comparison to those who just enter their basic contact info.
Not only that, but It’s also important that you’re qualifying the people you’re jumping on the phone with. Are they your target market? Do they have the ability/authority to make this purchase? Is it possible for you to get a soft close on your sales call?

Close the deal
As mentioned before, one of the biggest inefficiencies in insurance sales is the sales process. Sure, now with our marketing system we aren’t spending months prospecting at local events. We’ve got qualified sales calls booked solid for months. Nonetheless, we still need to fill out applications, quote coverage, and present them options. Regardless of what steps need to be taken on the backend, it’s absolutely imperative you close the prospect on the first call. If you don’t close a prospect on the first call your close rate will continue to drop with each additional contact. Lucky for you we have well-refined sales scripts and approaches to help you with this.

AOR
The good ol Agent of Record letter! This is a tactic that is well underutilized and for this funnel, it’s the first close we will use (if applicable). The key to an AOR is understanding that we are not selling policies, we are selling ourselves as advisors. The sale is an agreement to partner with you and take care of all their insurance needs. This can be signified by them signing over an AOR. Afterward, you can shop their policies, change their coverage, or do whatever it is you need to do to serve them best.

Soft-Close
For those instances where an AOR doesn’t make sense, what we need to do is get a firm commitment. Some people are “tire-kickers” or just flat out too polite to state their objections. For those you cannot hard close on the spot you will need to be absolutely confident that if you spend the time putting together options for them that you will earn their business regardless of pricing. This is where the magic of a good sales script comes in. You not only want to surface any possible objection they may have, but you also want to get them to a place where they are committed to doing business with you.

Conclusion
The name of the game is sales and retention. The key to those divers is efficency. The bottleneck for most people & businesses lays within their systems and processes.
By implementing a fully automated marketing system, you can cut your sales cycle time by 90%, reach peak productivity, and increase your overall capacity exponentially. The result of all these improvements can be seen in 6, 7, and even 8-figure net revenue gains.
In my opinion, the absolute best part of a well-defined marketing system is the ease of mind. No more running around like a chicken with its head cut off. You know exactly what you need to do to get your outcome and you can quickly and easily outsource the sales process you don’t need to be involved at all.
Let me know in the comments what your marketing system and sales process looks like!