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Learning how to become a successful insurance agent is not easy. At the end of the day, your insurance sales success in comes down to your daily habits. By emulating the qualities of successful insurance agents, you can establish a winning sales routine and get closer to joining the 7 figure club.
1. Attention to Detail
If you’re not paying attention you’re bound to miss something, and in the world of sales ‘something’ is usually an opportunity. Because insurance sales are highly relationship-based, having an eye (and an ear) for detail is key to building up long term clientele and increasing your numbers year after year. Coverage from agency A isn’t going to look very different than Agency B’s coverage day to day. This means that a big part of the sale comes down to how well you can relate to your prospect before they ever get to the dotted line. Your prospects aren’t buying a product, they’re buying you.
So how can you bring more detail to your sales process? Learn to identify the information you can bring up later to impress a prospect. Beyond just taking notes on a prospect during phone calls, you should be profiling your leads to get an idea of how your product fits into their needs. Look for a mixture of professional and personal insights to not only identify the company’s culture and needs but also figure out how best to relate to your points of contact.
2. Successful Agents are Always Learning
The first step to improvement is measurement. Without it, you would never know how far you’ve come or just how well you’re really doing. The only metrics many salespeople worry about are how many leads they’re reaching each month and how many sales they’re making. And while sales is a great metric to track success, its not the best for tracking your learning if you don’t have a tried and proven way to reliably close opportunities. To iron out your sales approach, you should look at engagement metrics like email clicks and opens, how long prospects stay on the phone, how interested they seem, and how quickly they move through the sales process.
20 Miles provides detailed engagement analytics at the contact and account levels to show you exactly how your prospects are interacting with your outreach. Beyond email opens, we capture page-by-page content and presentation analytics to show you the features your leads are most interested in.
In order to hold yourself accountable for improving your process and not just hitting quotas, you need to measure changes in your sales metrics over time. You will need to be consistent with your sales process and methodical with changing it to see what works and what doesn’t. For example, let’s say you approach prospects with process A for a month. In the end, you see that you did okay with a portion of your leads but really missed the mark with another. By staying consistent with your approach long enough to see where it doesn’t perform well, you’ve created a learning opportunity. Upon closer inspection of your well kept CRM, you may realize that many of the leads you didn’t resonate with belonged to smaller companies. Going forward, you’re now informed enough to try to either split test and optimize process A for larger companies, tweak the process to cater to smaller companies or both! Over time, you’ll be able to form and optimize unique approaches for every buyer you encounter
3. Proactive
Being proactive is a defining trait of anyone who stays ahead of the game. If you’re just keeping up and waiting for an opportunity, you will always be waiting. Whether you’re selling insurance or cars, going the extra mile to identify potential clients will almost always set you apart from the rest.
When it comes to prospecting, working smarter and not harder will keep you from wasting time pursuing disinterested leads. Prospecting shouldn’t just be a phase in your monthly sales cycle to avoid running out of leads and bringing your sales to a standstill. Instead, identifying new business should be done regularly to constantly replenish the prospects that you’re closing and disqualifying. Setting time aside at least once or twice a week and staying consistent will ensure you always have opportunities to pursue.
Actively prospecting isn’t the only way to keep ahead of the curve. Building relationships and pursuing referrals enables the work you put into prospecting to compound on itself by letting your network do the heavy lifting for you. Just like prospecting, you should have some time dedicated each week to nurture your relationships with past clients. Even though managing relationships is so important, oftentimes it can be as simple as periodically engaging with their LinkedIn posts, sending them informational articles pertaining to their industry, and sending birthday emails and discounts. When the time to ask for a referral comes, you’ll have been in at least semi-regular contact and be much more comfortable making the request.
At the end of the day, being proactive isn’t just putting extra effort in, its a shift in time management and mindset to see the sales process holistically and do what you need to keep it running optimally
4. Organized
If you’re already a proactive Insurance agent, you likely know the importance of organization too. With leads and contacts entering and exiting the funnel every day, relationships to manage, emails to send, and calls to make, a high volume of prospects can quickly become overwhelming, especially if you’re properly conducting segmented outreach. In order to prevent your process and schedule from falling apart, a framework needs to be established for you to work within.
Organization yields the creation of a process, and a process opens up the possibilities of both automation and optimization as you begin to recognize trends in your clientele and outreach. 20 Miles makes ironing out your process easy by organizing your contacts and automating your emailing tasks. Our automated workflow sequences are quick to set up, allowing you to send personalized outreach at scale for niche marketing and relationship nurturing.
5. Team Player
Acquiring and keeping a client is not a one-person job. Without solid communication between those responsible for acquisitions, sales and upsell opportunities will be missed and quality of service will suffer. As an agent, you are the first point of contact and source of information on a client. Not only should you have detailed notes on the needs and concerns of your prospects, but you should also be able to communicate them with underwriters and account managers, including any additional useful information that might help to profile a customer. While this is easily said, there is often overlap in the roles of those involved in the sales process.
The difficulty of teamwork is making sure everyone is on the same page and not stepping on any toes. This is why developing an understanding with your team is so important. Don’t be afraid to ask questions to better profile your prospects, and make sure there is a clear understanding of what your responsibilities are and aren’t. The other people involved in the sale can be valuable sources of information due to the different nature of their relationship with the client, so put effort into building relationships with them and being open and available.
If you can instill these qualities into your sales process, you can become a successful insurance agent with diligence and strong effort. Healthy competition in the office is a fantastic way to stay hungry and challenge yourself to do better. It can be a great method to stay motivated for longer periods of time.