A forgotten — or, perhaps more accurate, avoided — tactic for making insurance sales is cold calling as a lead generation tactic.
Cold calling has fallen out of favor because of the stigma attached to it. However, it can still be very effective especially for new insurance agents who can’t afford to sink a lot of money into leads.
There are several benefits to cold calling:
- It’s cheaper than buying leads or door knocking
- It builds skill in insurance sales and conversation
- You can write policies in the same day
- It creates a new, warm market of leads for the insurance agent
A few tips for being successful on the phone:
- Be agreeable – The customer is always right and agree with everything they say. If they say, “I’m not interested.” Say, “Perfect. I understand.” Then, continue with your presentation.
- Assume and ask – Assume that they want to talk with you. Assume they are going to stay on the phone the entire time. Assume they are going to answer your questions. Assume they are going to talk more than you. Assume they are going to do business with you. It presents confidence and then they naturally expect for you to ask business. Then, go for the close and ask for it.
- Record your conversations and listen to yourself later – When you listen to your conversations later you can find your bad habits and fix them for future calls or hear what you’ve done well.
One way to make sure you have success with insurance sales by cold calling is to know your numbers.
When Cody made over $117,000 at 19 and in college playing basketball, he found out he was setting one appointment every 33 calls. His goal was to set 15 appointments, so he knew he needed to make 495 cold calls.
That sounds like a lot of calls but he got creative and had call nights and invited over college kids, bought them pizza and paid them for the appointments they set. Now, since they are cold calls, not all of those appointments stuck, but about 10 of them did.
Back when he was in college he didn’t have a whole lot of sales skill, so he closed about three of those sales. About one out of three of those houses were multiple-policy sales, so he averaged about four apps a week. Multiply that by 50 work weeks, that equals 200 apps sold a year.
Multiply that by an average of $500 per sale and that equals $100,000.
By putting in the work, cold calling can turn a newbie insurance agent into one of the 8% of agents that last beyond three years in the insurance business and one of the even fewer who make six figures or more.
Want to make it even easier? Secure Agent Leads has exclusive, real-time leads that match the demographic you’re looking for.
