Lead Management Best Practices for Insurance Organizations

Boost Productivity & Conversions With These Highly Effective Lead Management Tips

Effective lead management is one of the most effective ways to grow your business; however, it can often prove complicated and time-consuming. Besides creating a successful lead generation and capture strategy, your teams must track every interaction a prospect has with your business and actively engage with the customer to improve chances of conversion. 

Streamline the lead acquisition, nurturing, and conversion processes at your insurance agency, GA, IMO/FMO, or call center with these lead management best practices.

Organize Your Leads 

Lead organization is essential to effective and efficient lead management. A great way to keep your company’s leads well organized from the start is by implementing lead forms on your website. 

Lead forms allow a lead to request more information by filling out a contact form on your website. Create additional fields to get information about the lead, such as its source or the product or service they are looking for. These insights are also helpful when it comes to creating and executing automated communication tactics and will help you keep your leads organized while they move through your sales process.

Communicate Effectively

Effective communication is a powerful lead conversion strategy, but it can often be challenging. You already have your sales pitch down, but what about communication? Here are some tips that your sales teams can use. 

Ensure a Quick Response Time

The basis of effective communication starts with your follow-up, which is your best chance for a conversion. The key? Speed-to-contact. 

According to LeadSimple, calling a lead within five minutes of their submission is 21 times more effective than calling after 30 minutes. In fact, the likelihood of qualifying a lead decreases by 400% when your response time increases from five minutes to 10 minutes. To put it simply: The longer your response time, the lower your chances are of winning the lead.

One effective way to increase your organization’s speed-to-contact is to utilize automated lead routing rules and assignments so that every lead is immediately assigned to the right agent based on whatever criteria you’d like to specify. This speeds up the sales process and allows your agents to start working their leads right away. You can base the lead routing rules on data like location, lead source, product, and more.

Once the lead is assigned, reach out!

We recommend calling as soon as a lead comes in, during regular business hours. If they don’t answer, be sure to leave a voicemail with your contact information. After you’ve called, send a same-day follow-up email that also includes your contact information.

Optimize Your Organization's Phone System

If you are a GA, IMO/FMO, call center, or an independent agency, it is crucial to make sure your phone system is helping your business become more efficient.

Odds are you might be using a phone or VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) provider that is separate from your CRM or AMS. By implementing an agency management solution that has VoIP capabilities within the system, making, tracking, and recording calls becomes significantly easier. Plus, you have one less solution in your tech stack!

Depending on the phone or VoIP provider you adopt, features like call queues and ring groups can be important things to consider. Ring groups allow you to set up groups of agents or employees whose phones all ring when a client calls a number you designate. This can be incredibly helpful in making sure your clients are assisted promptly.

If your agents spend a significant amount of time prospecting and calling leads, a feature like call queues can be a huge time saver. Instead of manually calling each prospect individually, call queues allow your team to create a list in your management platform that will automatically call each prospect. Simply add the prospect to a call queue and go.

Stay Consistent 

After you’ve established a connection with a lead, you want to keep that connection alive until they convert — this is known as lead nurturing. While they may not be ready to convert immediately, lead nurturing enables consistent communication that keeps your organization top of mind until they are ready to make a decision. 

Create a strategy behind continued contact attempts to ensure you’re maximizing every valuable interaction throughout the process. Use your sales enablement tools to indicate when and how to communicate with each lead. 

You may include a variety of contact methods such as calls, texting, emails, and regular mail — this will vary depending on where they are in the sales process.

Provide Value 

Your leads are regularly bombarded with sales attempts. As part of your lead nurturing strategy, you need to communicate in a way that is relevant and provides value. Whether you’re calling them or sending an email, keep your prospect’s problems in mind. Then, craft your message so that it speaks to those pain points. Not only does this establish your expertise and help you stand out, but it provides an opportunity to offer your product or service as a solution.

Implement Lead Management Software Like AgencyBloc's AMS+ Solution

Lead management software can help you boost productivity, increase conversions, and optimize the sales process; however, you want to choose one that has the right capabilities for your agency.

AgencyBloc is the #1 Recommended Insurance Industry Growth Platform serving the health, benefits, and senior insurance space. Our insurance-specific, comprehensive agency management system AMS+ enables you to streamline your lead management process and enhance current client relationships with ease.

Intuitive Lead Form Builder 

Use our intuitive lead form builder to build and incorporate custom forms on your website where leads can request more information. Upon submitting a form, the lead’s information is saved in AMS+ and the lead is automatically assigned to an agent to encourage a timely follow-up.

Insurance-Specific VoIP

Our insurance-specific VoIP technology is built directly into AMS+, so there’s no need to pay another phone or VoIP provider on top of your AMS. Not only does the click-to-call dialer make your business more efficient, but it also is designed specifically for your industry. Unlike generic providers, the phone system in AMS+ offers insurance compliance-specific functionality for the insurance industry.

Workflow Automation 

With managing the vast demands of your job and clients’ needs, it can be easy to miss a new lead notification or forget to follow up with a prospective client. However, this is a valuable touchpoint that shouldn’t be overlooked. Workflow automation can make this process more efficient.

The automation capabilities in AgencyBloc’s AMS+ solution enable you to create different workflows that run automatically when a specific event occurs. For example, you can create an automated follow-up email for lead form submissions, text a prospect, or stay top of mind with email marketing automation. In addition, our workflow automation software can automatically assign tasks to agents or advisors and send alerts when you need to complete a task.

Posted by Sarah Rosonke on Tuesday, January 23, 2024 in Sales Enablement

1. lead nurturing
2. selling