Establish a Successful Life & Health Insurance Sales Process with These 3 Tips

A Successful Sales & Lead Follow-Up Process for Life & Health Insurance Agents

When it comes to closing deals, a critical component is the follow-up. 

It’s no secret that sales follow-ups can involve several touches—it varies from person to person and group to group. However, tenacity will be your best asset as an insurance agent in any sales follow-up process to improve your chances of connection and conversion. 

This blog focuses on the follow-up. We will cover:

• How to increase speed-to-contact
• Establishing a process behind continued sales contact follow-ups
• How to follow up and what to say
• Lead and sales management in AgencyBloc

First Contact With a Health and Life Insurance Lead

The first contact, the big kahuna, is your first step in the process and your best chance for conversion. 

• 50% of sales go to the first sales rep to reach out
• There is a 400% decrease in odds of qualifying a lead when reps waited 10 minutes or more to follow up
• Following up with a lead within 5 minutes means you’re 9x more likely to convert them

Source | InsideSales

There are many, many more statistics we could include, but the fact of the matter is: speed-to-contact is the differentiator and can mean the difference between lost and won.

So, how do you do it?

To achieve speed-to-contact, you have to know immediately about the lead. That’s where workflow automation becomes a significant component. 

Workflow automation is defined as: “A created series of automated actions for the steps in a business process. It is used to improve everyday business processes because when your work flows, you can concentrate on getting more done and focusing on the things that matter. It allows teams to spend more time on the actual work itself and less time on the processes that support them.”

Combining workflow automation with your industry-specific agency management system (AMS) gives you the power to ensure timely follow-ups happen in your sales process.

In AgencyBloc, our workflow automation component is called Automated Workflow. Using Automated Workflow, you can create alerts that notify you instantly when a new lead comes in, whether it’s:

• A walk-in/call-in
• Referral
• Website lead form submission
• Purchased lead

Once someone is marked as a lead in your AgencyBloc account, you will be notified. This allows you to act sooner and be the first agent to call them and make contact. 

That, in a nutshell, is speed-to-contact.

After that, it’s maintaining the connection to give yourself the edge and improve your chances of ultimately winning that lead. 

Establishing a Process Behind Continued Contact Attempts

The worst thing a life and health insurance agent can do after the first contact attempt is to stop trying. Following that method almost guarantees you will lose the lead, and they will partner with a different agent. 

Even if you don’t make contact right away, keep going. Invesp found that 48% of salespeople never make a single follow-up attempt. This is where your tenacity and dedication can pay off in the end. 

• Reps experience up to a 70% increase in contact rates by making more call attempts
• Calling three times is 68% more effective than calling once
• Calling six times is 94% better than calling once
• 60% of customers say no four times before they say yes

Check out more stats in the following infographic for more on the benefits of repeated attempts. 

Source | InsideSales

To help you find success, LeadSimple outlined these nine ways to improve your follow-up results:

1. Use a follow-up schedule
2. Use different contact formats
3. Time your follow up for maximum impact
4. Leverage email templates
5. Track ACTUAL contact attempts
6. Always get agreement on next steps
7. Use content to expand the range of potential touchpoints
8. Track email opens and click-throughs
9. Use call down lists

Putting a process behind your sales follow-up efforts helps you be efficient and consistent. LeadSimple’s #1 tip for improving your follow-up results is to create a schedule. 

Again, this is where workflow automation can help.

Things happen, and it’s easy to forget to follow up. Use workflow automation to your benefit by building out your schedule and letting it help you stay on track. 

Automated Workflow in AgencyBloc lets you create your schedule, then alerts you via task assignment or email when something needs to be done. You can take it a step further, too, and create email notifications that will be sent to the insurance lead. 

If you’re not sure where to start, here’s a sample schedule you can follow:

• Attempt 1: As soon as the lead comes in — call 
• 2: Same day, follow-up with an email reminding them of your contact info
• 3: 3 days after attempt 1, email
• 4: 1 week after attempt 1, call
• 5: 2 weeks after attempt 1, letter in the mail arrives for lead (if possible)
• 6: 18 days after attempt 1, call
• 7: 3 weeks after attempt 1, email
• 8: 25 days after attempt 1, call
• 9: 4 weeks after attempt 1, break up email

Research shows that 80% of clients require 5+ touchpoints. Having more attempts in place to connect isn’t always a bad thing. It gives you the framework to communicate with the lead and improve your chances of ultimately converting that sale.

Of course, each life and health insurance lead will be different. The point is to have the process so every agent in your agency has the framework to find success with their sales follow-ups. Again, you know what works best for your clients and your leads. When crafting your schedule for continued contact, look at what you’ve done in the past. 

Knowing what works and what doesn’t for your agency is crucial to creating a sales follow-up schedule that is right for you. 

What to Say & How to Say It

The hardest step can be knowing what to say, how to say it, and when. Again, the best process for you will be unique, so take the ideas from this blog to help create the follow-up schedule that your insurance agency can adopt. 

Calls

Calling is one of the top ways to connect with a lead. Calls give you a chance to create more of a connection since you’re speaking together and can start to form an agent-client relationship. 

HubSpot shared The Lead Management Study, which found the following:

• The best times of the day to call a lead is between 8:00 and 10:00 am and 4:00 and 5:00 pm of the lead’s local time zone
• The worst time to call is between 11:00 am and 2:30 pm of the lead’s local time zone
• Absolutely stay away from the hour of 1:00 to 2:00 pm as multiple sources marked that as the least successful time
• The best days of the week to call are Wednesdays and Thursdays—in fact, there is a 46% difference in success between calls made on Wednesdays and those made on Mondays
• Fridays remain the worst day on which to call a lead or prospect

Emails

Although calls can be more personal, it’s essential to mix in emails, too. Create templates that your sales reps can use and follow to keep your schedule and messaging consistent.

The other significant benefit of email is that you can incorporate other relevant content. Here at AgencyBloc, our marketing team works directly with our sales team to provide the necessary content to include in every step of the sales journey. Whether it be case studies, testimonials, guides, charts, etc., the whole sales team has access to the content. 

HubSpot put together these 11 things to do after you’ve created your templates and incorporated related content:

1. Create powerful, engaging subject lines
2. Include visuals
3. Be persistent
4. Include action-based buttons and calls to action
5. Send emails on the best performing days and times
6. Keep your email as brief as possible
7. Personalize as much as you can (never send a generic "just checking in" follow-up email)
8. Set up the next step but acknowledge that your prospect is free to take it or not
9. Take a customer-centric approach, rather than pushing your product or service
10. Proofread before hitting “send”
11. Include a professional signature

As you’re creating your templates, writing your emails, and making your schedule, here are some tips to keep in mind:

• 33% of email recipients open emails based on the subject line alone
• Personalized subject lines get 26% more opens
• One of the largest spikes in email reading and interest is between 5:00 and 6:00 am
• Avoid known spam-sounding keywords in your subject line and email body as much as possible
• An email written at a third-grade reading level is 36% more likely to get a reply than one written at a college reading level

The biggest takeaway is: your leads and prospects are bombarded with emails every day, so make sure your email stands apart from the masses.

What To Say

When it comes to what to say, it really boils down to neuromarketing. 

From our blog, How to Use Neuromarketing to Improve Your Conversions & Retention, we define neuromarketing as: “a style of marketing designed to sell specifically to the brain. It studies how the brain works and crafts specially designed messages that target the brain’s decision-making region.”

Neuromarketing takes sales to the next level by understanding the core basics of your leads and prospects and speaking to those needs. It’s not selling to sell; it’s understanding, then selling. 

You know your clients. You know your leads and prospects. Look intuitively at who they are and what they need, then tailor your messaging accordingly. 

For more ideas on how to make each connection attempt unique, HubSpot shared the following:

• Successful salespeople spend 54% of the call talking
• Successful calls saw 70% more five-second monologues from salespeople than unsuccessful calls
• Using "Did I catch you at a bad time" makes you 40% less likely to book a meeting
• Asking "How are you?" correlates with a 3.4 times higher likelihood of booking a meeting
• Beginning your call with "The reason I'm calling is…" increases your success rate by 2.1 times
• Asking "How have you been?" increases success rates by 6.6 times
• Using "We" instead of "I" increased success rates by 35%

Lead & Sales Management in AgencyBloc

We’ve talked a lot about using workflow automation to nurture your leads and prospects and maintain consistent communication. Using an agency management system (AMS) with built-in workflow automation and sales management tools can help you create a repeatable, sustainable, and effective lead journey process to help you take your prospects from interested to invested.

Remember, the early bird usually gets the worm. But for those that need a bit more time, consistent, timely follow-ups can pay off. 

Capture your leads at their peak level of interest by integrating AgencyBloc’s Lead Forms with Automated Workflow. Once you’ve brought them in, create a process to keep you on track and continuously working your leads.

Source | AgencyBloc

Then, once you’ve qualified them as an opportunity, you can move them through AgencyBloc’s Sales Pipeline to track their entire process, document their journey, and use the insight to help fuel future lead conversion success. To learn more about what a sales pipeline is and how to build one in your agency, check out our blog How to Create an Effective, Repeatable Sales Process at Your Insurance Agency.

Putting a process behind your sales and lead management efforts gives you more visibility to make your efforts effective, efficient, and profitable. Integrating these efforts and centralizing them in your AMS means you’re more organized, you’re better able to prepare for the future, and you’re working smarter overall.