5 Steps to Take Your Lead From Interested to Invested

Make Your Health Insurance Sales Process More Effective.

Do you have an effective process guiding your sales initiatives? For many health insurance agencies, establishing a repeatable process and leveraging the right tools are key to finding success.

Having a process in place gives your sales team peace of mind and direction on what they’re doing, when, and why. These crucial insights will help your agents find success and convert more leads and opportunities. Leveraging the right tools will also make a difference in your agency, even if your goal is not to grow but instead find efficiencies or streamline workflows.

This blog will discuss the five steps your sales teams should be following to take your leads from interested to invested.

Step 1: Bring in the Lead (Interested)

There are generally six ways health insurance agencies gather leads:

• Referrals
• Lead Vendors
• Website
• Word of Mouth
• Advertisements (social media, digital, print)
• Personal Leads (cold calling, door-to-door, meet and greets, etc.)

In this section, we will briefly review the first three of these lead generation techniques.

Referrals

Let’s talk statistics first:

• When referred by a friend, people are 4x more likely to make a purchase
• Customers acquired through referrals have a 37% higher retention rate
• Referred customers have an 18% lower churn than customers acquired by other means

Referral marketing can be one of your organization’s most lucrative marketing efforts to drive lead generation, grow your business, and increase your client base. Plus, they are personal and trustworthy. 

Buying Leads from Insurance Lead Vendors

Using lead vendors and partners is a tried and true option for many insurance agencies — but not every lead vendor provides the same quality. When using lead vendors, track success, quality, and cost to ensure you’re partnering with a reputable vendor that makes a difference for your bottom line. 

After you get the leads, work through them as quickly as possible. Speed to contact is the name of the game in insurance sales. Similar to the saying “the early bird gets the worm,” 50% of sales go to the first salesperson to make contact.

Contact leads early and often. For more ideas on how often, when, and with what methods to contact insurance leads, download our Lead Nurturing Email & Workflow Recipes.

Online Leads

It’s critically important your insurance agency has a digital presence like a website. It’s extra important that it’s user-friendly and up-to-date.

Your website is an excellent opportunity to start the sales process. First, ensure your site has a lead form.

Then, take your efforts to the next level and connect your lead form to your industry-specific agency management system (AMS), giving you more opportunities to add automation, streamline efforts, and ensure speed-to-contact.

In AMS+, an AgencyBloc solution, your sales team can use built-in Lead Forms and connect them to Automated Workflows to send notifications and task assignments, emails, and text messages instantly. Send these communications to internal agents and employees, policyholders, or prospects to ensure a smooth sales process.

We cannot stress enough how vital speed-to-contact is during the interested stage. The faster you move, the more impressed the lead will be and the more likely you’ll be to close the deal.

Step 2: Nurture the Lead (Interested)

Once you have the lead in your funnel, your team must nurture them. Remember, if your agents are not courting their leads, then another agent will. Put a process behind your sales efforts to ensure consistency throughout your agency and increase the chances of conversion. 

The keys to an effective sales process:

1. Have a documented sales process
2. Get buy-in from your agents
3. Thoroughly train all of your agents (new and old) on the process
4. Use sales-focused software

An agency management system, like AMS+, can help your organization document and streamline its sales processes. It can also help agents keep track of their notes and nurture leads.

Looking for more ways to improve your sales process? Here are some articles that will help:

• [Blog] Establish a Successful Life & Health Insurance Sales Process with These 3 Tips
• [Blog] How to Create an Effective, Repeatable Sales Process at Your Insurance Agency
• [Blog] Lead Management Best Practices for Insurance Agencies
• [Guide] The Insurance Agency’s Guide to Lead & Sales Management: Methodologies, processes, and tools that work

Step 3: Convert the Prospect (Invested)

Just because the lead becomes a client doesn’t mean you stop keeping tabs on them. Once they enroll, make sure they’re escorted through their onboarding.

Employ automation to nurture the new client and ensure they have all of the support they need. You can build workflow automation that:

• Monitors policy submissions
• Alerts agents and clients of approved policies
• Provides regular and meaningful check-ins
• Tasks the agent with necessary to-dos for continued nurturing
• Updates agents and clients when policies are coming up for renewal

These are policy-based automation ideas, but there are a lot of other ways your team can use automation to stay in touch with clients and deepen the relationship.

Here are some resources that can help your organization create these processes:

• [Free PDF] Steps to Onboarding a New Client
• [Free Templates] Policy-Related Email Templates for Agents & Advisors
• [Templates] Insurance Client Newsletter Email Templates

Step 4: Retain the Client (Invested)

Make the relationships you form valuable to your clients. In Step 3, we listed a few policy-based automation ideas your teams could leverage, but there are other ways to make your clients feel “seen.”

• Remember their birthday. Send a handwritten card, make a call, or send an email to help them celebrate their day. Use automation to streamline this process. Pro tip: Have more fun with it and celebrate their half birthday to take them by surprise. 
• Take notes and actually read them. In AMS+, your team can pin important notes to the client’s profile to keep that information top of mind. Then, leverage Activities to create an inalterable trail of information, conversations, decisions, files, phone recordings, signed documents, and more to maintain compliance and support E&O.
• Use a Client Needs Assessment (CNA). Take a moment during your client renewal meetings to discuss how they’re using their current coverage, gaps in coverage, and potential future needs. Using a CNA at each renewal meeting helps create consistency throughout your agency and ensure opportunities aren’t missed.
• Run cross-sell reports. Similar to a CNA, also be sure to encourage agents to keep an updated list of cross-sell opportunities. Cross-sells can deepen a relationship with a client by adding more lines of coverage to their profile. Don’t know where to start? Here are some templates your team can use: Cross-Sell Email Templates for Agents & Advisors.
• Segment communications appropriately. We all get many, many communications. Ensure the messages (automated and email marketing) you teams are both relevant and timely. Create segments in your audience and employ automation to make sure you’re sending the right message to the right person at the right time.

Choosing the right agency management system can also help in your agency’s overall client retention efforts. The most powerful tools on the market, such as AMS+, support all the above initiatives and more.

Want more ideas on improving client retention? Here are some resources:

• [Free Templates] Client Retention Emails & Workflow Recipes
• [Free PDF] Ways to Improve Client Retention
• [Guide] Ways Your Life & Health Agency Can Improve Client Retention

Step 5: Gain Referrals (Invested)

We’re right back at the beginning.

An insurance agency’s book of business is cyclical. Use your current book to bring in new business, work that new business, then use your new clients to bring in more new business. This process allows your team to constantly have a fresh source of referrals.

The best way to get referrals? Just ask.

Ask at the end of renewal meetings, print out cards, start an email campaign — the sky’s the limit. As my mother always says, “It never hurts to ask.”

If you’re not using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) email, it's something your organization could consider. As a quick refresh, the NPS sends your clients a one-sentence email:

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“How likely is it that you would recommend [ABC Insurance Organization] to a friend or colleagues?”

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The client then rates your agency on a scale of 1 - 10, with one being the least likely. The answers are then separated into three groups:

• Promoters (9 or 10): These clients are your loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and refer others.
• Passives (7 or 8): These clients are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who are vulnerable to competitive offerings.
• Detractors (0 - 6): These clients are unhappy customers who can damage your brand and impede growth through negative word-of-mouth.

Two significant insights can come from sending the NPS:

1. Referrals
2. Increased client knowledge and awareness

Just because a client responds as a passive or detractor does not mean they have to be one forever. Your teams now have the opportunity to turn them into promoters.

Reach out to clients with lower NPS scores, learn where their unhappiness stems from, and figure out how your agency can improve their overall experience. Remember, you did all that work to bring them on; now, you want to keep them. You may not be able to make every client a promoter, but you will be able to learn why they’re unhappy and make changes to overcome that in the future.

All it takes is a simple ask, and you could have a wealth of new business waiting at your door.

Manage your book of business using AgencyBloc’s Plus Suite.

Managing your client lists is often easier said than done. An investment in the right tools, like AgencyBloc’s Plus Suite can help. The Plus Suite combines the power of our AMS+ (agency management system and compliance management), Commissions+ (commissions processing and management), and Quote+ (small group quoting and enrollment) solutions together to help grow your business.

This blog was originally published on September 4, 2018, and most recently updated on July 31, 2024.

Posted by Allison Babberl on Wednesday, July 31, 2024 in Lead Nurturing & Automation Software

1. client retention
2. lead nurturing
3. selling