DJWilliams
Expert
- 27
I have been reading this forum for sometime now and have found many great ideas. I myself have been having some success in the P & C half of my agency and as one of my first posts I wanted to share our best practices for working leads.
I am an exclusive agent and our agency has made our yearly goals set by the company within the first few months of this year on the P & C side of things. I figured by sharing our successes here someone may be able to shed some insight and best pratices around getting results with financial products and life insurance in my particular situation.
This is the only area of our business we have not cracked the code on yet. My agency is paired with a financial specialist that we try to set as many appointments for as possible by cross selling our P & C customers. We just have not perfected a process that is getting us the results we want thus far. (We set about 5 appointments a weeks for him now)
I have heard alot of mixed emotions and opinons about internet leads on this forum and thought I would share my 2 cents
Here is our process we use for working internet leads that gets us great results.
My 2 Cents
With internet leads ( P&C ) yes you will run into allot of bad info mainly from affiliates of the lead companies submitting bogus info in hopes of getting paid and that’s what the credit back process if for. I get anywhere from 30-50% of my leads credited back for being a bad lead by having a process in place for it. We have a lead management system in place that allows us to audit by bad lead so we can credit them all at week end. You just need to have a system in place for following up on bad leads to ensure you re-coop your investment.
I believe the sole reason internet leads do not work for agents is the same exact reason any other lead does not. They do not work the leads or do not have a solid process in place for working them properly. I do almost all my new business from internet leads. I purchase anywhere from 700 - 1000 internet leads per month. I am currently the auto line leader for my territory and run a 94% retention and a 27% loss ratio. Last month alone we wrote 158 items (100k In Annual Premium ) mainly all from internet leads.
So yes I completely disagree with the fact that they “just don’t work”. It is a new age and statistics show that 80% of customers shop online before making an insurance choice. There is also that impression out there that with internet leads you will have "retention and loss ratio issues" I also believe by having a dynamic process in place to provide breakthrough customer service that you can control your own destiny when it comes to retention. Usually when an agent has a retention problem its nothing to do whether it was an internet lead, it usually stems more from lack of customer engagement. Give your customer an education and an experience that they would tell a friend or family member about and you will have a loyal customer till the end.
When it comes to the internet 5 years ago it may have been just price shoppers that resulted in poor retention. Everyone is online these days whether looking for insurance, buying a new car or a flat panel TV. I have 4 sales producers in my office that do nothing but work internet leads. The key to internet leads is "actually working the lead ". We have a process in place where soon as the lead comes in it goes into our lead management system . This allows us to keep all our leads in one place and update their status where we can conduct daily audits for pending sales and customers that we are awaiting a decision from. Another thing we did is got a group of agents together that were currently buying leads and started purchasing them as a group getting us all a significant discount and group rate.
We have a system set up where as soon as the lead comes into our lead management data base and the system calls and conferences us to the customer within seconds of the lead coming in. It connects you to the customer in real time forcing your staff to connect to each lead within the first minute of them filling it out. It then sends out a drip email campaign to the customer with our custom emails we wrote enticing them to contact us creating a great deal of inbound call traffic. We are then linked with automated quote software that takes the string of lead data and auto quotes the customer and sends them a quote based off the info they provided. This way when we are making calls to customers there are no manual entries of quotes causing loss productivity. We just call the customer to finalize their existing quote that was auto generated into our system.
We opened our office scratch and starting things at first on a small scale. Once we perfected a process that worked we just scaled it and replicated it and then scaled it again and replicated it again. This business can be a simple business once you crack whatever code that works best for you and your team. The key is there are many things that work and once you find something that works even on a small level just scale it and replicate it over and over. At the end of the day as much as others may disagree like any business you need to spend money to make money and just ensure not spend it blindly. Find something that works for you on a small level then invest what is needed to execute it on a larger scale.
David Williams
Exclusive Agent
I am an exclusive agent and our agency has made our yearly goals set by the company within the first few months of this year on the P & C side of things. I figured by sharing our successes here someone may be able to shed some insight and best pratices around getting results with financial products and life insurance in my particular situation.
This is the only area of our business we have not cracked the code on yet. My agency is paired with a financial specialist that we try to set as many appointments for as possible by cross selling our P & C customers. We just have not perfected a process that is getting us the results we want thus far. (We set about 5 appointments a weeks for him now)
I have heard alot of mixed emotions and opinons about internet leads on this forum and thought I would share my 2 cents
Here is our process we use for working internet leads that gets us great results.
My 2 Cents
With internet leads ( P&C ) yes you will run into allot of bad info mainly from affiliates of the lead companies submitting bogus info in hopes of getting paid and that’s what the credit back process if for. I get anywhere from 30-50% of my leads credited back for being a bad lead by having a process in place for it. We have a lead management system in place that allows us to audit by bad lead so we can credit them all at week end. You just need to have a system in place for following up on bad leads to ensure you re-coop your investment.
I believe the sole reason internet leads do not work for agents is the same exact reason any other lead does not. They do not work the leads or do not have a solid process in place for working them properly. I do almost all my new business from internet leads. I purchase anywhere from 700 - 1000 internet leads per month. I am currently the auto line leader for my territory and run a 94% retention and a 27% loss ratio. Last month alone we wrote 158 items (100k In Annual Premium ) mainly all from internet leads.
So yes I completely disagree with the fact that they “just don’t work”. It is a new age and statistics show that 80% of customers shop online before making an insurance choice. There is also that impression out there that with internet leads you will have "retention and loss ratio issues" I also believe by having a dynamic process in place to provide breakthrough customer service that you can control your own destiny when it comes to retention. Usually when an agent has a retention problem its nothing to do whether it was an internet lead, it usually stems more from lack of customer engagement. Give your customer an education and an experience that they would tell a friend or family member about and you will have a loyal customer till the end.
When it comes to the internet 5 years ago it may have been just price shoppers that resulted in poor retention. Everyone is online these days whether looking for insurance, buying a new car or a flat panel TV. I have 4 sales producers in my office that do nothing but work internet leads. The key to internet leads is "actually working the lead ". We have a process in place where soon as the lead comes in it goes into our lead management system . This allows us to keep all our leads in one place and update their status where we can conduct daily audits for pending sales and customers that we are awaiting a decision from. Another thing we did is got a group of agents together that were currently buying leads and started purchasing them as a group getting us all a significant discount and group rate.
We have a system set up where as soon as the lead comes into our lead management data base and the system calls and conferences us to the customer within seconds of the lead coming in. It connects you to the customer in real time forcing your staff to connect to each lead within the first minute of them filling it out. It then sends out a drip email campaign to the customer with our custom emails we wrote enticing them to contact us creating a great deal of inbound call traffic. We are then linked with automated quote software that takes the string of lead data and auto quotes the customer and sends them a quote based off the info they provided. This way when we are making calls to customers there are no manual entries of quotes causing loss productivity. We just call the customer to finalize their existing quote that was auto generated into our system.
We opened our office scratch and starting things at first on a small scale. Once we perfected a process that worked we just scaled it and replicated it and then scaled it again and replicated it again. This business can be a simple business once you crack whatever code that works best for you and your team. The key is there are many things that work and once you find something that works even on a small level just scale it and replicate it over and over. At the end of the day as much as others may disagree like any business you need to spend money to make money and just ensure not spend it blindly. Find something that works for you on a small level then invest what is needed to execute it on a larger scale.
David Williams
Exclusive Agent
