If you sell insurance, and are always on the hot pursuit of fresh new qualified leads have I got a deal for you… We all want more referrals yet many of us fail to ask. If you are looking for a blog on generating referrals we aren’t going there in this blog but you can check out some of our other referral blogs:
- Ask Dave: “What are your top reasons to ask for referrals”
- The Key to Getting Consistent Insurance Referrals
- Foolproof Way to Generate Insurance Referrals
- How To Make a Killer Referral Program (That Gets Referrals)
Nope, this blog will be talking about much geekier fun filled ideas to get qualified leads. It’s targeting the warm lead in your agency. For many agencies there are cold leads and hot leads, but we neglect the warm leads.
What are warm leads?
Warm leads are the leads in your agency that are right under the surface. They know who you are but haven’t had the reason, time or thought process to pick up the phone and connect with you. For many agencies they are terrified of cold leads. I mean, who wants to call strangers and get hung up on? Not many people. Generally agencies do well with hot leads, people who call in, stop in or web form in requesting a quote. When someone raises their hands and wants a quote we generally rise to the occasion! However, most agencies have an under nurtured warm lead database.
Here are some examples of warm leads:
- Lost customers who were pleased with the agency
- Unsold quotes from the past
- Your networking contacts that need a nudge
- Your community contacts that need an invite
Warm leads are familiar with the business and just need a warm welcome to be invited in and get a quote.
At our firm we use Hubspot and have identified the following as warm leads:
- Agencies that have been to our website 10+ times in 6 months that are owners or managers and have 5+ employees
- People who have given us their cards at speaking events and trade shows
- Contacts that have visited our pricing page
- Agencies that are within 100 miles of a client that have 5+ employees and visited our site 5 times in 6 months
- Agencies that are in states with our state grant program and have visited our site 5 times in 6 months
Now you make think, “Ohhh Kelly it’s so much easier for your business than ours.” It’s actually not! This has taken 3 years to test and refine but we have been committed to making it work!
How do you identify warm leads?
To really maximize what you can see your database you need to invest in a CRM Tool. Our recommendation is Hubspot (and we are certified partners and installers of their product). There are a few things you need to do no matter where you are in the process:
- Your agency needs to be blogging, posting on social media and automating email campaigns on a weekly basis. We need to build highways to your website so a CRM tool can track who is checking you out. In LinkedIn there is a feature to see who has been checking out your profile. It’s the same for your website and social channels. Hubspot will help you analyze this traffic and alert you to warm leads. What comes first, the content or the CRM? Doesn’t matter because you need both!
- You should think through with painful detail what your ideal client is. Think about the following:
- Location
- Income/Revenue
- Products
- Beliefs
- Lifestyle
- When you have this you can hyper target who you are looking to impress
- Start to clean up lost customers and identify who you want to retarget so we can track them. We certainly don’t want to waste time targeting lost clients who we don’t want to invite back.
- Making sure that we have a method to track quotes. Hubspot has this feature built in. This is something you should start doing ASAP! We need to build lists of unsold quotes to easily market to them. Many management systems make this simply with the right workflow however too many agencies just wait for the policy to download. For 30 seconds extra effort you can starting building a valuable database.
What To Do Once You Identify Warm Leads
We have to call them! Now maybe your agency is super productive and you don’t have time to call these high quality warm leads. What do you do? You have two options:
Just Do It
Sounds simple right? Calling people who are nice and warm as a business owner you have $$$$$ in your eyes! No doubt. But then everyone is too stinking busy to call. Your dreams of grandeur quickly get derailed. Here is what you need to do. Think about scheduling a golden hour twice per week. Everyone has to make 2 hours of outbound calls no matter what. It’s scheduled and must be adhered to. If you are in sales this should be a minimum of 1 hour per day. These are warm leads that are just waiting for you to reach out!
Appointment Setter
Here are APP we have been bringing on new clients in a healthy pace. With that being said the best use of my team’s time is attending to serving our clients. Also with us being on the road we can get derailed with travel and being onsite at clients all day. Looking at our schedules, sales and clients we decided it was time to invest in an appointment setter for warm leads. We now have a part time person who we know and love, who calls these opportunities and sets sales appointments for our team. It’s been a great process to make sure we are focused on sales and service equally. It takes training and time but it’s been a great investment.
Growth
In order to grow we can’t just rely on referrals. We can’t control the number of referrals that come in day to day. There has to be a stage in between prospecting and call in business. Warm leads are the answer. Now warm leads take time to develop, you need to focus on building content and a great clean database. But once you do, you will have a crop to pick off of!
