Daily sales & marketing tips for insurance professionals

Did you know that you can now see your leads formatted in an Excel spreadsheet? Many agents previously requested to have their leads downloaded into an Excel spreadsheet, which helped to manage and organize the leads. Therefore, we listened to you and now provide a link that is located under the leads tab. Just click on the Excel link next to the “date range” and the leads are automatically populated for you!

Since you can only view past leads for up to 60 days, the Excel spreadsheet is an option for you to keep track of your leads going forward and to use for follow up purposes.

Remember to follow up with those leads. Even if they didn’t purchase the first time around, they may be looking for insurance in the future. I have spoken to many agents who have had success three to six months after they received the lead.

Happy Holidays!

Lead management systems are quickly becoming the norm in today’s competitive marketplace.  Attractive benefits and features of lead management systems allow you to enhance your selling and provide you with the necessary information to continue to prosper!

Some of the benefits agent are realizing from an LMS system are the following.

• Automatically schedule meetings, follow-up calls, renewals, and other important events.
• Assess profitability with real time reports.
• Track, monitor, and sort leads.
• Add notes and comments for proper follow-up.
• Customize your own automatically sent emails.
• Analyze the effectiveness of your marketing and sales.
• Increase your renewal retention using customizable automated follow-ups. 
• Stay organized by having lead and disposition information in one location.

 Using a lead management system will help you manage your leads so you can work on more leads and write more applications.  Some systems even allow you to round-robin your leads to other agents in your office.  Other systems include comparative raters and dialing systems.

Most lead management systems are fairly easy to use…some even offer free trials and discounts for trying their service.

 And from an InsureMe perspective, our leads are instantly imported into most LMS systems.  Call 1-800-467-8736 or visit agent.insureme.com for more information about getting leads and having them automatically placed into an LMS system.

 Everyone purchases insurance to safeguard themselves against the great Unknown, against what might happen to them one day.  But there is one thing that I can guarantee is likely to happen to each and every individual reading this, and you likely don‘t have a safeguard in place against it.  No matter how safe you think you are, no matter what protection you think you have to keep this from happening, one day – one day­ - your email will fail you.  I’ve seen it happen dozens, nay, hundreds of times.  It doesn’t matter what kind of email you have, public or private; at one time or another they all will stop delivering your valuable emails to you.  On September 1st, Google’s Gmail suffered an almost 2 hour system-wide outage due to simple system upgrades. 

This is why it is so vital for business users to adopt backup practices for their email accounts.  A missed email from a friend is an inconvenience, but if you currently purchase leads from a company like InsureMe, that’s a missed business transaction, and plain old money down the drain.

Fortunately, all is not lost.  Though we can’t prevent these outages from occurring, we can take out our own personal insurance against them.  One way to protect yourself is to always have a secondary email address on file with anyone you do business with (banks, credit cards, etc.)  Companies like InsureMe will happily forward your leads to multiple email addresses at no additional cost.  Yes, you might end up just deleting the duplicate lead unless there is an issue, but wouldn’t you rather pay for the lead once and have the assurance that you’re always receiving it than end up paying for a lead you didn’t receive because your email is unreliable?  Remember that if you decide to create a backup email that it should exist on a different server.  For example, I have one Hotmail and one Gmail email account.  If you haven’t had a chance to get around to that backup email yet and your email does crash, don’t worry!  InsureMe has created some extra protection for you: you can also access all of your leads real-time (i.e. hot off the press) by using Agent Connection, located in your InsureMe account, which will deliver your leads to your desktop similar to email.  To access Agent Connection, you simply need to log into your InsureMe account, no installing, no extra sign ups required.  So while we keep our fingers crossed that it isn’t our email that stops working next time, do yourself a favor and give yourself a little extra insurance. 

 We are excited to introduce to you a new redesign on the agent site! If you haven’t already logged on to your InsureMe agent account, then please do so that you can view the new interface as of last week. We have already received great feedback from the agents that the new interface is pleasing to the eye and user-friendly.

 One point to mention…a few agents have called me with difficulty logging into their account; therefore, if you have saved your password under your favorites, and have difficulty logging in, you may need to bookmark the new log in page. Or, you may just need to reset your password if forgotten. As for any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us via phone or email.

Enjoy the new site, and remember to check out the Free Insurance Tools on the login page that include links to the InsureMe Agent Blog and the InsureMe Agent Resource Center: https://agent.insureme.com.

Given that we all want to sell more policies in a shorter period of time, I thought it would be good to identify lead management businesses that can help.  Did you know that InsureMe has partnered with several insurance raters and lead management systems?  These include lead management systems, sometimes called ‘LMS’ systems,  and comparative raters, also referred to as ‘quoting engines’. These applications can all help you build a powerful book of business.

A  few quick definitions: 

Lead Management Systems, LMS, contain several features that enable agents to better manage their leads.  The LMS assists agents in managing the marketing and sales process operations for optimization and increased conversions.  In addition, an LMS performs agency management and tracking of a variety of potential outcomes.  Typically, using an LMS gives agents the ability to handle more leads and accept more volume from an internet lead provider (like InsureMe)  than if they were not using an LMS. 

 Comparative Raters (or quoting engines) take leads that are sent to them and create an automated quote – speedily, accurately, and conveniently. Comparative raters calculate a given insurance risk and rate across multiple insurance carriers to allow the agent to compare policies available. Comparative raters are primarily used by independent insurance agents and can be PC based or Web based.  Along with the companies that serve the independents, we partner with company specific quoting systems such as Progressive, Farmers, State Farm quoting engines.  

 Our desire and our plan is to decrease the time it takes you to get from lead coming in the door, to selling a policy.  Using a lead management system and a quoting engine will help you get to that customer faster and enhance your ability to convert the lead into a sale.  Check out our partner listing for more information about rating engines and LMS systems.

Just when you thought that InsureMe couldn’t find another way to make our service even better – we have.  We’ve recently revamped our system for our Auto, Home, Health, and Life leads to make the system easier to use, easier to understand, and (best of all) more cost effective.  You’ll be noticing these changes soon.

Another change is the ability to receive new insurance types.    Now you can create profiles specifically for Renters leads, Health leads with pre-existing conditions, Med Supp leads and for Life leads with pre-existing conditions.

Welcome to my first entry for the agent service blog!

 My goal is to provide you, the agent, with information pertaining to service topics, tips, and FAQ’s. Speaking on the phone and corresponding via email with agents on a daily basis provides me with an excellent opportunity to hear your questions, concerns and feedback. I hope that this forum will create discussions that will be helpful for you in building your book of business and in creating a long-term relationship with InsureMe.

 Now…enough with the formal introduction.  Let’s get moving on to a topic we both can benefit from…referrals. I see many emails from agents that include the quote in their personal signature, “the best compliment you can give is a referral.” How true that is! And, I bet you have many great methods on how to obtain referrals; however, I want to tell you how YOU can earn money from InsureMe by referring other agents to our service.

 How you ask? Through the InsureMe Agent Referral Program. For those agents who are already referring other agents- a big thank-you! Maybe you have some tips for us. For those agents who are not familiar with the referral program, take note that the next time you are conversing with other fellow agents, mention InsureMe and if they open an account and mention your name, your account will be credited 5% of what they spend with us at the end of each month…easy money! In these tough times wouldn’t extra money be helpful in purchasing leads?

 So, the next time you are in an agent meeting, conference, or just networking, mention the InsureMe Agent Referral Program and see how our service works for you.

1993.

2009.

As you can see, we’ve made great strides in layout and graphic design since our early days. Still, our first site is nothing to sneeze at. In fact, if you removed the unsightly visitor counter, I’d say that it’s better looking than most sites currently on the internets. As I said to Patrick, our talented graphic designer, the old InsureMe.com has a pleasing minimalism (and I’m sure that was the effect Tim was going for when he designed it).

Want to see what the web looked like back in the day? Check out the Wayback Machine.

P.S. My apologies if this post is not interesting to anyone outside of 9800 S. Meridian Blvd.

We recently invited three local insurance agents to the office for lunch. We wanted to get their thoughts on our service, the lead industry in general and whatever else they felt like discussing.

While we’ve been discouraged by some of our agents’ antics, these three agents, it was clear, were of the highest caliber, and the discussion was worth ten-times the amount we spent on sandwiches from Udi’s deli. (Next time we’ll be sure to splurge on Maggiano’s.)

One of the attendees, a health agent named Jerry, inspired us with his approach to working leads. He said he treats every lead as an asset—even the ones that don’t convert. If you treat the ones you don’t sell with gratitude and understanding, he said, you’ll have earned their respect, and that in itself can generate a referral, turning a “worthless” lead into a lead generator.

In a sense, Jerry acknowledges that every lead is a potential advocate. Treat them as such, and you’ll soon have a legion of advocates doing your marketing for you. Makes sense to me.

Throughout the hour-long meeting we received welcome praise and equally welcome criticism. On the praise side, the agents agreed that we offered great lead volume and quality, excellent service, and useful tools (notably, the Agent Connection lead management application). On the criticism side, they said it’s tough to sell a lead that’s matched to more than four agents, and all three agreed that our filters are awesome but too expensive.

After the lunch was over, it was agreed that we ought to host such ‘lunch and learns’ regularly. Although we talk to our agents on the phone every day and survey them on a regular basis, there’s just no substitute for face-to-face interaction.

Over the years, we’ve fielded regular requests from agents who would like to “turn off” lead delivery on the weekends.

While we can understand their point of view, when these requests arise we gently remind them that our primary goal is to help people find insurance—quickly. That’s the promise we make to consumers who visit our site—which is open for business 24/7—and we strive to do that by matching them with local agents in real time.

Further, we expect our agents to contact their leads quickly, and not just because it results in a better experience for the consumer, but because it increases the agent’s chances of making the sale.

According to research conducted by James Oldroyd, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, contacting a lead within five minutes results in a 500 percent higher response rate than waiting 10 minutes.

For many busy households, the weekend is simply the only time available to purchase insurance. (The same goes for buyers of houses and cars—which is why sellers of houses and cars work weekends.)

Sure, the life-work balance is very important, but insurance agents, like others in sales, often have to strike that balance by working atypical hours—taking days off on Thursday and Friday, for example, or logging four hours on Saturday and Sunday for lead follow-up and working a couple of half days during the week.

Veteran producers with a large book of business can more easily get away with a traditional M-F schedule, but newcomers to the industry will find it pretty difficult, if not impossible.

To sum up, as long as consumers seek to find the right insurance on the weekends, we’ll try to help them, and we hope our agents will do the same.