We get it. Running, owning and operating a business can be a challenge. You never seem to have enough time in the day. In this blog I’m going to share with you how automation and a little marketing strategy can help make your life and job easier. We all forget that one of the dirty little secrets of insurance is creating and curating a clean database. In your agency you have many data points we can curate and then point our marketing resources to, these include:
- Prospects (both niche and general)
- Sales Opportunities (people you are currently quoting and have quoted)
- Customers
- Referral Sources
We all know the service team needs to relentlessly pursue data accuracy but your sales team should as well. When we have great and clean information we can retarget our best unsold opportunities. Would you like to take 15 extra seconds now to automate a lifetime of touch free contact? If the answer is no and you want to do it manually let me know how that works out.
So let’s spend a little time on niche marketing. Niche marketing a great example of how you can use data to help pull your prospects down the sales funnel. With niches you should be building a database to put your name in front of. You can do this by buying lists, attending trade shows and being present at networking events. Think of each record as a coin in your prospecting piggy bank.
Once you have a database for your niche you can start marketing to them via email, video, social media and direct mail. With modern marketing tools (we always recommend Hubspot) you can quickly identify your most engaged and qualified opportunities. We are all pressed for time so you need a system that can analyze who is most likely to purchase from you.
Let me share with you a personal example. At APP we recently hit over 10,000 contacts in our Hubspot portal. Of these we know that about 3500 are unengaged (meaning they haven’t interacted with our last 6 emails). We only put our sales team on contacting an agency if:
- They have 5+ team members (we find we are a better fit with a few staff members to work with)
- They have visited our website 10+ times in 6 months (this also makes sure that we host everything on our website)
- They are an owner or manager level team member
You may be saying “Wow that’s great but how do I get the information I need to qualify a lead? (For us it’s agency team, title and website hits). Well let me share. Each month we produce the following content:
- 8 blogs with calls to action at the end (minimum)
- 1 Podcast
- 1 3 Minute Training Video
- 1 E book
In order to get our E book and other resources you have to give us some information about the agency. Once we obtain that we can then get to marketing. For those agencies that do not or have not provided it we have an overseas virtual assistant that scourers the internet to find information and then updates our system. This way if you love our blogs which are open but you have 5+ employees and are the right job title we can find you. Hubspot helps us see who is visiting our site with routine frequency so we can identify the cream rising to the top.
If you have seen us speak across the country, in order to get our presentations you must provide the information we need to qualify you. This helps us makes sure new opportunities have the best information on them.
Once you become a sales qualified lead our sales team takes over calling and trying to set appointments. We rarely run into someone who doesn’t know who we are when we hit his stage!
Using data will help you spend time where it’s valid. Imagine you can apply this to even your unsold quote or lost customer database. Now your sales people aren’t making pointless calls. Instead they are making highly qualified validated calls and the system is taking over the hard work of warming them up.
Sounds too good to be true. It’s not but it does take some elbow grease, the belief in marketing and some detailed set up.
