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

A Successful 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, persistence will be your most valuable asset in any sales follow-up process to improve chances of connection and conversion. 

This blog focuses on helping your agency create a conversion-focused follow-up strategy. We will cover:

• How to increase speed-to-contact
• Establishing a process behind continued sales contact follow-ups
• When to follow up and what to say
• A reliable follow-up timeline
• Lead and sales management tools within the AgencyBloc platform

How to Maximize the First Contact With a Health and Life Insurance Lead

The first step in the follow-up process is contacting the lead for the first time. Your highest chance of conversion lies here, which makes this step even more crucial:

• 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 an hour means you're 7x more likely to have meaningful conversations with decision-makers

Source | InsideSales

There are many, many more statistics we could include. However, 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?

If you want to achieve speed-to-contact, you have to know about the lead as soon as possible. That’s why workflow automation is so important. 

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.

AgencyBloc’s insurance 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 can be notified. You can also add in automated messaging that is sent to the new lead immediately when they fill out a form. Both of these allow you to act sooner and be the first agent to make contact. 

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

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

Establishing a Process Behind Continued Contact Attempts

The most detrimental 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 trying. Invesp found that 48% of salespeople never follow up. 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 saying yes

To help you succeed, 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 from the prospect on the 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 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 so it can 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 
• Attempt 2: Same day, follow-up with an email reminding them of your contact info
• Attempt 3: 1 week after attempt 1, call
• Attempt 4: 18 days after attempt 1, call
• Attempt 5: 3 weeks after attempt 1, email
• Attempt 6: 25 days after attempt 1, call
• Attempt 7: 4 weeks after attempt 1, break up email

Research shows that it takes 7 interactions with your brand before a purchase occurs, on average. Having more attempts in place to connect isn’t always a bad thing. It gives you the framework to communicate with the lead and improves your chances of converting that sale.

Of course, each life and health insurance lead will be different. The point is to have a process so every agent in your agency has the framework to succeed with their sales follow-ups. Again, you know what works best for your clients and 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.

What to Say & How to Say It

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

Calls

Calling is one of the best 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 most effective times of the day to call a lead are between 8:00 and 10:00 am and 4:00 and 5:00 pm in the lead’s local time zone
• The worst time to call is between 11:00 am and 2:30 pm in 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 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 at every step of the sales journey. Whether it be case studies, testimonials, guides, charts, etc., the whole sales team has access to the content.

Dooly put together these 5 things to do after creating your templates and incorporating related content:

1. Create powerful, engaging subject lines
2. Personalize as much as you can (never send a generic "just checking in" follow-up email)
3. Get to the point quickly
4. Include valuable and relevant information and resources
5. Have action-based buttons and calls to action

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

• 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, the proven methods of neuromarketing can help! 

In 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 their 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 Tools 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, sales management, and quoting and proposal tools can help you create a repeatable, sustainable, and effective lead journey process to take your prospects from interested to invested.

Remember, the early bird usually gets the worm. But for those who need 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.

Source | AgencyBloc

Plus, if you’re working with groups, you can use a quoting and proposal tool, like Quote+, an AgencyBloc solution, to streamline even more of your process. Instead of spending crucial time manually comparing all sorts of plans and putting together a proposal for your leads, you can do so in less time, all in one place.

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 makes you more organized, more efficient, and better able to prepare for the future.

This blog was originally published on June 23, 2021, and has been most recently updated and republished on June 20, 2023.

Posted by Sarah Rosonke on Tuesday, June 20, 2023 in Sales Enablement

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