As a producing life and health insurance agent for over 10 years, and someone who has personally worked over 10,000 internet leads(including my own), I've learned a lot about what you can expect when embarking on an internet lead program. What I write hear may surprise you. If you decide to start reading, please finish. Its long, but its worthwhile.
First of all, let me say that internet leads are a great way to supplement your business. For an agent that knows how to sell, and is willing to put in the effort needed to sell fresh prospects, it is a great way to go from "making it" to "making it big." However, any lead program be it internet or otherwise, is not a magical panacea for making easy sales.
I dont want to disappoint anyone, but the reality is that even with a supply of fresh leads the insurance business is still the insurance business. Insurance is not a fun product to buy. The result is that people are rarely "chomping at the bit" to talk to an insurance agent. Combine this with the fact that people are hard to get in touch with these days and the result is a hard work. How hard is hard? Unless you can call within a few minutes of getting the lead, you need to be prepared to play telephone tag at least a few times, The agents that are most successful with us report that it is a "bell curve of seriousness" when it comes to leads. The top 20% are pretty hot, the bottom 20% are like ghosts. The middle 60% it really depends on how good a salesman you are. A good salesman can push some into the top 20% the rest will fall into the bottom 20%. The good news is that as time goes on, shopping for insurance on the internet and finding insurance agents through the internet has gained great popularity. The people who you talk to will largely want to talk.
Again, I dont want to disappoint anyone. I'm not trying to scare anyone away. I just want the expectations set properly. Buying leads is not a "magic bullet." Even if it was you are still going to have to shoot alot of them and aim correctly. There's just no such thing as a free lunch. The good news is, You really can build your business with internet leads. Nowadays, there are thousands of agents that work internet leads almost exclusively. That's a big change from when we started MostChoice.com.
If you have a good system for working the leads and put in the work, the odds that you will be successful are high. In fact the question of success is more of "how successful?" than "will you be successful?"
When I worked leads, I had a good follow-up system for tracking my leads. This was critical, because I knew I might be calling a lead many times. I also knew I would be asking for referrals, regardless of whether or not I sold or even met that particular person. Many of my sales actually didn't come from the lead itself. It came from someone the lead knew. As a former Northwestern Mutual agent I was an expert at gathering referrals and secondary business. In my opinion, all insurance agents must have this type of expertise in order to survive, not just succeed. The referrals and secondary business that I got from each new client made each new client worth over a thousand dollars to me. I may have only made around $650 on the initial sale, but on average I sold a second policy to either that client or someone they referred more than half of the time. That made each new client I got worth anywhere from $1000 or more as referrals lead to other referrals and more new business.
I do believe that internet leads require a different approach than many other types of leads. The internet user is more fast-paced than most other demographics. This is not so much a factor of age as what the internet has come to represent. The internet tends to be a lot about instant gratification. In the insurance business, we cannot provide instant gratification. However, we can be fast about getting some sort of answer to the user. At Northwestern Mutual, we were trained to get the appointment before selling. That works great with a referred lead. I found it does not work as well with the internet, although some agents are good at making it work. It was my experience that I needed to take about 5 minutes to do a quick interview and give a quote to someone over the phone before going out to see them. I also found that actually filling out the application over the phone, and then just dropping by for a quick signature and a check was the best way to complete the sale. Granted, you can't do this with all products and in all states. Most important, I found it was absolutely critical to ask a person if I could follow up with them later when they didn't want to do anything right then. The answer is usually "yes." I would follow up with these people once a month and I found within a year over half of these people bought.
In fact, one of the biggest obstacles to overcome is not the quality of the lead but rather what we face every day in the insurance business itself: Procrastination.
Whenever it comes to doing something unpleasant, people procrastinate. Lets face it, buying insurance is not fun. No matter how hard we try to make it easy and painless, no one looks forward to buying insurance. However, we can make the process as painless as possible. Whenever I would leave a message I would stress that I could make the process as quick as possible. I never simply said "call me." I always stressed that I just needed 5 minutes of their time and I specialized in making the process of getting insurance "quick and easy." This was critical to getting call-backs. Lastly, my tone of voice was appropriately paced, professional, and conveyed that I was not the type of person that would waste there time. Once I had spoken to the client, I always built the sense of urgency. I stressed the importance of getting things taken care of immediately. From that point forward, it is just the insurance business as usual. All good agents must know how to build a sense of urgency. If you don't know how to do this. I suggest you change professions. Related to procrastination is a problem that I like to call "cool down."
Cool down is what happens in the time between when the person submits the lead, and when you actually talk to them. Cool down is the silent killer of internet leads, as well as all other types of leads. Cool down is why a full 20% of leads are never going to call you back no matter what you do. We have no way to know which of our leads are the 20% that will die a premature death do to cool down. Trust me, we've tried everything. Keep in mind, before we were a lead service we were producing agents selling these leads. ( If you are curious as to why we don't sell insurance anymore the answer is simple: We believe Local Insurance Agents will always own the end customer. We can't be "local" all over the country working out of one office in Atlanta and we don't care to open multiple offices. We'd rather just be a lead service for local agents.)
So whats the best way to handle cool-down? Always keep in mind that the client submitted the lead for some reason. You must remind them of this reason. Whenever I had to leave a message I always used to slip in something to the effect of: "I know this is something important to you. I'll try hard to get in touch with you so we can get this taken care of as quickly and easily as possible." Also, when I talked to them for the first time, I always asked why it was they were looking for insurance. Sometimes it's obvious. Sometimes it's not. How obvious it is depends a lot on the product but any product can have it's surprises. I tried to reinforce as quickly as possible how important it was to get whatever they were asking for. If anyone told me they had changed there mind, my immediate response was: "Why?"
The most powerful word in the English language is "Why?" You'd be surprised how many people don't have a good answer for this simple one word question. Obviously, they would have never submitted the lead to start with if they didn't have a good reason (I am speaking of an Search Engine Generate Lead Only.)
Lets face it, people don't just go onto the internet, do a search for insurance, find it, fill out a form with a bunch of personal information, and all for the fun of it for no reason. When I was at Northwestern Mutual we were taught that insurance was not just a job, it was a mission, a crusade to help people. I suggest you adopt this principal. It is true.
The fact is: when people procrastinate buying the insurance they need they hurt themselves. It's your job as an agent not to let people hurt themselves! Any objection you get to talking to you is just a smokescreen. They know they need it. They are just looking for a way out after cooling down. Occasionally, people may tell you they have changed their mind, etc. You can not let this stop you without a fight. Remember, you have nothing to lose. Very few people will hang up on you when pressed on this if you press correctly. Most will engage in a dialog that will lead you back around to the original reason they submitted the lead. Once you know that, you can easily get back on track. Lastly, never forget the last tool in your toolbox. When worst comes to worst, ask them if you can follow up at a later time. Insurance is not always quick sale. As you continue to follow up with them a relationship will build. The barriers will slowly come down. Eventually you will gain a client. Insurance is not always a one-call-close business, especially the bigger sales.
In fact, it is just this reason that we ask every new agent with us to try a minimum of 30 leads before deciding whether this is something for them. Statistics 101 says that 30 is a statistically relevant sample. You must be willing to work this number of leads to get an accurate understanding of how successful you will be at working your leads. Please do not expect instant sales and easy success. You will only be disappointed. Like anything else in life, being successful in anything worth doing takes time and effort. This is no different.
Lastly, what most agents want to know when it comes to what to expect, the number one question we get, drumroll please: "How many will I sell?" The truth is, I dont know how many you will sell. I can tell you what my experience was when I was actually selling these leads. If you will recall, I said that each new client was worth upwards of $1000 to me. Even at $650 a lead(my first sale commission) That meant that at $24 a lead I could sell 1 in 10 and nearly triple my money. If I sold 1 in 20 I was still making money. It was hard for me not to make money on my leads. My closing percentage varied as my work ethic did. I like doubling my money so I worked about as hard as I needed to accomplish this. This meant about 1 in 15 leads. Could I have done better? Yes. We have agents that do better, we have agents that do worse. We don't really know what the average is because our agents rarely report to us when they make a sale. They either keep buying or they don't. We hear all sorts of anedoctal stories as to how agents do. We hear the ones that claim they sell as many as 1 in 3. We also hear from those that sell nothing. Most agents renew, so I know they must be selling enough to make it worth their while. Thats the best answer I can give you.
I hope this has helped you make a decision. I strongly suggest that you give it a fair try. In the end, that is the only way you can really know if this will work for you.
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