It’s 2017. It’s time to ditch the quote sheet for small commercial and personal lines insurance. It’s a safety blanket that you don’t have time for. Quote sheets are a great way to delay your quote and there is one sales strategy that beats price. It’s speed. So why do we take down information on paper, to enter into a rater or website and then get a quote?
We do it because that is the way it’s always been done. We do it because it’s comfortable. We also do it because we don’t always trust technology. But we have to get over all of it. If you can get information and directly enter it in to your systems you are saving yourself time and errors.
Now we get the common push back like “I can’t quote everyone on the phone.” No you can’t but you can 80% of the time. So Plan A is to enter everything into the system, Plan B is still enter everything in the system and use it to reference if you need to and copy and paste into another system. What we can’t do is continue with paper quote sheets.
When you take a paper quote sheet that sheet tends to sit on the side of your desk. Any paper that sits becomes delayed. You are now getting quotes out 2-3 days later. You should instead burn money. In personal lines especially most prospects will have moved on. Also, what kind of customer experience are you sharing? That we are slow? Remember people can get quotes immediately in their jammies, eating ice cream. They took their time, during the work day to share a ton of detailed information with you. Respect them by quoting on the phone or at a minimum by the end of the day. You will have to sell on price when you can’t move quotes quickly and people keep shopping.
Also, no one has a ton of time to shop for insurance. When you are spending time with a customer on the phone you are taking their time so they aren’t calling other agents. Use this to your advantage. Your main goal should be whenever possible to quote over the phone and ask for the business.
This also leads to another common challenge we see in insurance, the need for the prospect to send in a declaration page. Let me tell you the main reasons I am not in favor of this strategy:
- Most declaration pages are inaccurate because they are old and outdated
- You should use your best judgement on what they need
- They may have to call their current agent to get it which flags their agent and makes your sale harder
- It delays your sale
Unless someone has it in front of them and can take a picture and email it or text it on the phone, don’t bother. It hurts your sale more than helps it.
Breaking up with dec pages and quote sheets is lesson 2 in our 6 Month APPX Sales Training program.
