Trying to drum up new business this month? Here are four prospecting tips for insurance agents who are ready to try something different.

Prospecting is a touchy subject for insurance agents. You’ve probably heard things like, “prospecting is so much harder nowadays!” or “I’m not a marketer; I’m an insurance agent!”

Meanwhile, many of the prospecting tips for insurance agents available online are outdated, ineffective or poorly communicated.

But the naysayers are (partly) right; prospecting has changed. Years ago, people got started selling insurance door-to-door. Or they made 100 cold calls. Or they sent out letters. Now we use LinkedIn, email campaigns and search engine optimization (SEO). Whether or not the old strategies still work is widely debated, but it’s likely that we’re missing the point entirely.

The issue isn’t the usefulness of this tactic or that one. It’s that the buying process and psychology for the average American has changed. And it’s time for insurance professionals to re-think prospecting and where certain actions fit into the puzzle.

4 Prospecting tips for insurance agents who are ready to sell

1. Understand when to use specific prospecting methods in your sales funnel

First off, do you have a defined sales funnel? Does it fully map out your lead generation sources, networks, and affiliates? If so, then it’s likely you understand that businesses and consumers have “stages” to buying products these days. Millennials, for instance, seek out insurance solutions in a different way than their parents did.

That’s where many prospecting tips for insurance agents fail: understanding the subtle changes in customer behavior and how to take advantage of them.

The quicker you understand how your target audience behaves and what events in their lives trigger specific needs relative to your services, the easier your prospecting becomes. And, depending on where a prospect falls in the “buyer’s journey,” it will become evident what method you should use to contact them.

Here’s a look at five different stages you can target:

1. Awareness of a problem, pain or frustration
2. Interest in finding a solution
3. Information gathering online and offline
4. Comparing options for different products/service providers
5. Making a purchase decision and weighing pros and cons

2. Research your prospects and use targeting services to your advantage

It’s a little amusing that salespeople complain about the difficulty of prospecting today. Given the tools available to us, closing new business, in many respects, should be easier now.

Never before has the average insurance agent had more access to their prospects’ social, business and personal information. Information that salespeople twenty years ago would kill for. Plus, you have CRM tools to manage all of that info, keep it organized and used to optimal efficiency.

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Build a targeted prospect list. Find emails. Get phone numbers. Connect with them on social platforms. Meet them at events.

Show every prospect that you’ve put in the time to research their needs and how you can help them achieve their coverage goals.

3. Include a referral strategy in your close-out process with clients

Of course, you know that having a referral program is important. But let’s be honest: if your referral business were steady, you probably wouldn’t be looking up prospecting tips for insurance agents. You’d be sending out follow-up emails and calling your referrals right now.

So how can you strengthen your approach, so clients actively refer you to friends, family, and colleagues?

• Automate the process. Write emails to send automatically after you close a sale and include a simple method for sending referrals to you.
• Add a referral page on your website which details how it works, and a form clients can fill out with their reference’s information.

4. Convert invisible traffic on your website to visible leads with inbound marketing

When people are searching for different insurance agents, they scour the internet for websites, reviews, and information. How do you greet these web visitors?

Picture your website as a digital storefront. Do you let people walk in, browse through your goods and let them leave without saying a word? That’s a silly business approach. You have to greet people. Find out what they’re looking for. Ask questions. Share information that they consider valuable.

You want to put a face and name on your “visitors” by obtaining their email addresses and gaining permission to market to them. You’re creating leads automatically.

Here is a small sample of prospecting tips for insurance agents to capture emails through a website:

• Email newsletter sign-ups
• Downloadable information packets (whitepapers, case studies, etc.)
• Downloadable content packages that offer useful and valuable advice (ebooks, infographics, blog articles, etc.)

Try these prospecting tips, and before you know it, new clients will be knocking on your door.

If you’re serious about phone sales and want to triple the number of sales calls you make in an hour, give Call Logic a try. Sign up for our free trial now!