Sell More Insurance by Learning from Yourself
If you don’t know where you’re going, how are you going to get there?
You’re probably familiar with this rhetorical question, which is a way of pointing out that having a clear goal is a good thing. But it’s not the only thing, especially if you’re in a field like insurance sales, where you want to achieve or exceed a goal over and over in a week or a month or a year. To make that happen, there’s an additional question you might want to ask:
If you can’t remember how you got there, how are you going to get there again?
In other words, when you achieved your goal, what did you do to make that happen? For insurance agents, this is where tracking metrics can be a huge help. Not because you can do the same thing over and over and always expect the same result, but because data can reveal trends that will help you know where to concentrate resources and when to redirect unproductive practices or staff.
Take, for example, your marketing efforts. For each source of your leads (e.g., Hometown Quotes, social media advertising, direct mail, etc.), there are at least three standard metrics that are worth tracking:
- Contact rate (how many leads you connect with)
- Quote rate (how many leads you quote)
- Bind rate (how many leads convert to customers)
Over time, you may find that one marketing source ends up being responsible for lots of contacts but not many sales, whereas another provides fewer contacts, but those few are more likely to convert. When you also track your cost per acquisition for each of your marketing sources, it’s easier to know where to spend more of your marketing budget in the future.
That’s one common category of metrics. If you’re an agency owner, another one is related to the production rates of your staff. This might include things like:
- Number of dials (how many calls each agent makes per week—you could also do this for emails or other forms of contact)
- Amount of prospecting time (how many hours each agent spends prospecting per week)
- Number of policies written
- Amount of premiums written
You may have an agent who spends a lot of time on the phone with each customer. Her dial rate might be low, which could make it look like she’s falling behind her colleagues. But you may then see that though her dial rate is low, the total she writes in premiums leads the pack. The more you track, the clearer your picture will become.
A third set of numbers to pay attention to has to do with the types of insurance you and/or your agency sell—homeowners, life, auto, etc. Here you can track things like:
- Number of policies written per lead type
- Amount of premiums written per lead type
- Cost to acquire per lead type
Look at your numbers and see where they point you. If your agency really excels at auto-policy sales, maybe you make that your niche. Or if you find that one of your agents is especially good at selling life insurance, ask them to lead an hour-long training workshop to share their tips.
The more information you can pull from your data, the better. The idea is to create a map that will consistently get you from where you are now to where you want. That way, if a roadblock occurs—like COVID-19, which has affected how so many people do business—it’s easier to find an alternate route to get to your desired goal.
Hometown Quotes is pleased to provide insurance agencies with high-quality leads filtered by policy type, geographic location and more. Call us at 800.820.8921 to find out how we can help you achieve your sales goals.
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