Daily sales & marketing tips for insurance professionals

If you’re a young agent well versed in using the Web for business, you’re probably familiar with online social networking sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Sites like these hold much promise for the future, as insurance customers wander around online, chat with friends and business associates and talk about their lives.

Why not make insurance part of that discussion? And why not meet customers online, right where they are, and do business where they’re most comfortable? 

According to the Auto Insurance Report, insurance companies like State Farm are joining the world of social networking, attempting to connect with and service customers all over the country.

And sites like these aren’t just for young people and companies anymore–or for corporations. Small agencies and individual agents are also finding their voice in social media, amidst everyone else looking for a piece of the pie. There they can answer questions, dispell myths, offer service and talk about breaking news in the insurance industry that might affect their customers.

Rather than pretending their clients have nothing but good to say about them and tuning any negative remarks out, insurers are wise to listen up, participate in the discussion and know what’s being asked and said about them online. This immediately puts them on the offense, rather than the defense, and offers the opportunity to inform, engage and connect with  customers–instead of playing damage control after the fact.

Not only that, but by tweeting on Twitter or posting comments on their Facebook wall that link back to their own Web sites, agents who participate in social media strategies can increase their business by driving potential customers who need insurance directly to their own contact information.

Are you using online social media sites to increase business opportunity? If you’ve never made use of sites like Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook in growing your business, we recommend you check them out. If you have, drop us a comment and let us know how it’s working out for you.

Though it does take some time and effort to establish a “following” of existing and potentially new customers, it could be well worth the time you put into it when examining your bottom line.

More Information:

Using Social Networking in Business 101

Using Social Networking for Business

Do you sometimes feel managed by your leads? Are you tired, run-down, listless? Do you poop out at parties? Are you unpopular? Oops, sorry….I started thinking of Vitameatavegamin from I Love Lucy…that was a great episode.

Our veteran agents may remember when InsureMe used to fax the leads to them, before the Internet. You probably had to file the paper fax once quoted. Time has certainly changed, and with the advent of the Internet, more consumers are now comparison shopping. More shoppers may lead to more leads, and with this, a difficulty in managing them.

We do understand there are more facets to an insurance agent than just quoting rates, and that your time is valuable. Therefore, for those who may not be aware, lead management systems/comparison raters/quoting systems may be an option in managing your time and leads.

The following overview is courtesy of InsureMe’s Lead Management Specialist:

Lead Management Systems (LMS) contain several features that enable agents to better manage their leads. An LMS will assist agents in managing marketing and sales operations for optimization and increased conversions.

In addition, LMS performs agency management and tracking. Typically, agents using an LMS are able to handle more leads and accept more volume than if they were not using an LMS.

Comparative raters (or raters) assess the given insurance risk across multiple insurance carriers for comparison. Comparative raters are primarily used by independent insurance agents and can be PC- or Web-based.

Quoting engines are used to generate multiple, automated quotes for ease and convenience. InsureMe has integrated with several company quoting engines to decrease the time it takes to quote consumers.

Sounds great, don’t you think?  Check out InsureMe’s LMS and quoting partners.

Don’t turn to Vitameatavegamin to cope with your leads successfully. Please stay tuned for a listing of our lead integration partners, available on the agent site soon!

Blue Cross Blue Shield now uses Twitter as another customer service channel. You might consider doing the same.

What’s Twitter? It’s a web site that lets you share 140-character messages with your friends and followers. For those who use Facebook: it’s essentially Facebook stripped down to the status-update feature.

More and more companies are using the tool to connect with their customers, and the best among them, like BCBS, use the site less for aggressive marketing than for customer service and low-intensity PR.

(The companies that simply use it as a platform to say how great they are typically quit after a short period, realizing that few people are interested.)

Here are a few other examples of how organizations are using Twitter:

• During the height of the Swine Flu scare, the CDC used regular ‘tweets’ with sober, straightforward information in the midst of a media-fueled panic.
• The Kitchen, a high-end restaurant in Boulder, Colorado, uses the service update followers on their latest culinary concoction.
• Novelist and journalist Susan Orlean updates followers on her life as a writer, generating buzz about her upcoming book in the process.

Twitter can serve as a useful signaling strategy—it conveys a sense of technological savvy, accessibility and even a modicum of hipness. In the case of BCBS, it conveys the sense that, with every new technology, they’re going to try to use it to help their customers.

There’s a lot of hype around Twitter, about its promise and the prospect of parlaying a Twitter account into a glorious money-making and popularity-generating venture.

Problem: if you approach the service with that mentality, you’re probably going to do it wrong, get discouraged and give up.

The real promise of Twitter is that it’s another way to connect with your clients and provide something of value, and like any social endeavor, you get what you give.

Insurance companies and lead generators like InsureMe have spent countless hours—years, actually—and truckloads of cash trying to secure a good position in the Google search results for terms like ‘car insurance’ and ‘insurance quotes.’

So, I’m here to burst your bubble: unless you’re willing to spend years and millions of dollars on the esoteric science/art/magic of SEO and paid search marketing, your web site isn’t going to show up on the first page of Google for terms like ‘insurance quotes.’ There’s just too much competition. The small agency doesn’t really have a chance.

But you should at least show up for your own name, and that’s where your Google Profile comes in. Your Google Profile takes minutes to set up, and it will help people find you in the search results. You can set up a public page for yourself or your agency and even add a link to your agency’s web site. I also recommend adding your agency’s physical address and contact information to Google Maps. This is especially important, as Google is increasingly incorporating local results even for  generic search terms. For example, you should be able to see your agency in the map results when you Google ‘insurance agency.’

The point is, don’t give up on Google merely because you’ll never rub elbows with Geico and Progressive atop the search listings. At a minimum, you want to make it easy for people to find you. After all, if someone takes the time and trouble to Google you, that person would certainly fall into the ‘hot prospect’ category, right?

Writing for the New Yorker, economist James Surowiecki notes that the FIRE economy–which stands for finance, insurance, and real estate–shrank for the first time in 16 years. “Since 1980, this sector’s share of the economy has grown by almost half. Now, apparently, the worm has turned,” says Surowiecki.

Looking at credit default swaps and mortgage-backed securities, it’s easy to understand how and why the finance and real estate markets are shrinking. And the insurance industry, of course, is so interconnected with those two that it was only a matter of time before it started to feel the pain as well, even if it wasn’t as reckless as its siblings in the banking and property sectors.

Surowiecki looks back at the last 10-20 year period as the “financialization” of our domestic economy, when Wall Street became an economic driver in its own right, as opposed to a follower. And that’s where things went wrong.

“Wall Street needs to recognize that its proper role is, as it has been in the past, to follow the real economy, rather than trying to drive it,” says Surowiecki. ” During the housing bubble, the financial sector essentially tried to create reality. Now’s the time for it to respond to reality instead.”

A new social network is born. It’s called Agent Zoo. Go sign up.

Earlier this month, we invited our agents to share their experiences using lead management systems.

In all, 1244 people responded to our survey, and their input gave us greater insight into how our agents work after they receive our leads.

A third of respondents were very familiar with lead management and quoting systems. 41 percent were mildly familiar and 26 percent were not familiar at all with lead management systems. “Looks like I have some Googling to do,” said one agent. Just over half, 53 percent, reported that they didn’t use a lead management system.

We asked those who used lead management systems to share their experiences and list some of the strengths and weaknesses of their particular software. Here were some of the strengths mentioned (note that not all agents use the same system):

“All leads are in one area, and you can manage leads very easily and effortlessly.”

“The system is very well organized for storing information and assigning tasks to follow up when working leads.”

“The number one strength is having the information automatically uploaded in to my lead management system.”

“Ability to receive leads directly from InsureMe and stream into our State Farm systems with minimal data entry.”

“LEAD MANAGEMENT SYSTEM: STRENGTHS: TRACK SOURCE, COMMISSIONS, PREMIUM, RETURN ON INVESTMENT, BOOK SIZE PER AGENT, WHERE I AM MOST COMPETITIVE.”

“Leads can be imported easily and it’s quick to get the consumer a price.”

“effeciency for team, retention of info, great for executing systems”

“THE LEAD MANAGEMENT SYSTEM IS ABLE TO PROCESS ALL THE INFORMATION FOR THE CONSUMER AT A FAST PACE, ALLOWING US TO PROVIDE QUOTES IN A TIMELY MANNER.”

“the best feature is lead info being auto populated in from insureme”

Strengths far outweighed weaknesses, but more than a few agents found flaws in their systems. Here are a few:

“The disadvantage with our system is that we have to front load a lot of the info in order so make sure we have everything we need to run a requote later on.”

“The transfer of information is not always clean or accurate.”

“weakness = data entry”

“Weakness is the lack of reporting/spreadsheeting options with the results.”

“takes time to train new staff”

We encourage our agents to use lead management systems. Two caveats: not all systems are created equal, and with all of them there is a slight learning curve. Still, most offer quick increases in efficiency. Used correctly and to their potential, they can make agents a great deal more successful in closing InsureMe leads.

For so long the arguments never changed in the health care debate. Each constituency—insurers, doctors, political parties—had its position, and you could count on its immutability.

So it was strange and somewhat disorienting (in a good way) when, last week, the health insurance industry told Congress that they were open to the idea of abandoning their policy of rejecting people with preexisting conditions—but only if the federal government instituted a universal mandate to buy insurance.

A subsequent article in the Times described the pleasant surprise of many Democratic congressmen, who have been clamoring for just such an scenario for years.

“It was a significant step for them to take,” said Rep. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) in an interview with the Times. “That’s certainly not been their position in previous years. I hope it moves us closer to something that we could label a consensus.”

Rewind to 10 years ago: it was unthinkable then to consider the idea of a universal mandate becoming a consensus. If you predicted such a thing a decade ago, you would’ve gotten derisive snorts.

But times have changed, and despite a long history of health-care-reform failure, it seems the stars are aligning in favor of change. So what has changed?

The way I see it, we Americans are increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of leaving our sick people to face crushing medical costs and bankruptcy. We’re putting more pressure on our elected officials to remedy the situation. Insurers, seeing the writing on the wall, know that a universal mandate may be the only way to soften the blow of impending government regulation.

Email is a great tool that can boost productivity and make life easier, but without regular diligence, it can also rule your days and haunt your dreams.

Which brings us to ‘Inbox Zero,’ an approach to managing email developed by quasi-web-celebrity Merlin Mann, who catalogues various productivity tips on his site, 43folders.com.

The point of Inbox Zero is twofold: reduce clutter and get s**t done. If you’re like most, inbox clutter is something you’re familiar with—go ahead a do a count: how many messages are currently in your inbox? How many of those are dated or unimportant? How many are mission critical?

My guess is that a truly important message is sandwiched between the back-and-fourth you had with the guys about the NCAA tourney.

In many cases, action starts with email. That means that if you don’t have a good system of email organization, less stuff gets done.

As the name implies, Inbox Zero holds an empty inbox as its goal. This does not mean deleting important messages or coming up with elaborate yet useless filing systems. It means doing one of five things each time you get an email.

• Delete
• Delegate
• Respond
• Defer
• Do

(Not to be confused with the 5 Ds of dodgeball: dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge.)

All too often—and I’m as guilty as anyone—email languishes unattended, and the longer it goes without action, the greater the chance that an important message will get ignored or accidentally deleted.

What do you think? Want more information on this Inbox Zero business? Get it from the source.

Lastly, I can’t resist putting in a plug for our Agent Connection lead organization tool. Get all of your leads in one place (far, far away from your dangerously cluttered inbox) and flag them for follow-up, archive and write notes. Learn more about the Agent Connection.

If you ever want a readable and accurate description of any aspect of the financial crisis, check if Joe Nocera has written anything about it.

Nocera writes the Talking Business column for the NY Times, and his latest description of AIG’s outsized role in our current morass is a veritable must-read. It will help you get a better idea of what a ‘credit-default swap’ is and, more importantly, why they were (and still are) so destructive.

Nocera’s article will raise your hackles when you learn just how irresponsible AIG was, and how despite (and because of) that irresponsibility, they are currently the largest benefactor of U.S. government bailout funds—$150 billion since September. In essence, AIG thought it could get away with collecting insurance premiums (in this case, fees from issuing credit default swaps) without paying out any claims. (The lesson: bad things happen when insurance isn’t regulated.) But enough preamble. Read the article.