One of the best things your insurance agency can do is understand the correlation between marketing and sales.

What do we mean? Take a minute to think about your sales funnel: how do you get your leads down the pipeline, bringing them from new opportunities all the way to converted prospects, and ultimately, retained sales?

Does Your Insurance Agency Know How To Convert Sales Leads?

Lead conversion is the process of converting a lead into an opportunity. At the end of the day, your end goal should be for all of your leads to result in sales. However, not all leads are qualified. How can your insurance agency know?

Typically, any business uses a wide array of sales and marketing processes to convert leads – your insurance agency is no different. However, without implementing strategy, you may just be grasping at straws. Converting sales, when done right, is a well-thought out process.

1. You must qualify your leads – Many organizations will use lead scoring to identify the leads that they have generated as they move through their lead nurturing process.
2. You must manage your leads – Whether you use marketing automation software or not, you have to have a system in place to manage the process of handing off your leads (Remember: Statistics show that 30-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first).
3. You must know how to convert leads – There are many best practices for lead conversion. Is your insurance agency implementing a strategy that works?

How To Convert Leads: Converting Leads Into Sales

There will be little point to all of your lead generation and lead nurturing strategies if you do not have a handle on your lead conversion strategy. However, without the buyer’s intent in mind, it can be tough to do a good job at this.

The first thing you will want to do is qualify all of your leads. After that, you must implement a lead conversion strategy that keeps the following in mind:

• Know who your buyer is – Where is your lead in their buyer cycle? Awareness, research, negotiation or purchase? That is going to help you target your communication with this specific person.
• Align yourself with the prospect – What is the intent of the buyer? What type of information is this person looking for? What type of information do you need to provide in order to bring this person from a lead to a prospect and how can you then convert that prospect into a sale? Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes.
• Create a need and help solve it – At the end of the day, your product is a solution. You want to subtly use your promotional strategy to remind people of the need they have and provide a solution. As a marketing and sales strategy, you will convert more leads if you cater your messages to the needs of your prospects.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to communication. As a business owner, you need to be certain that you are answering all of the right questions for your prospects to convince them of their need for your product.

Are you certain that your sales team can consistently follow up with all of your leads and convert them into opportunities for your agency? You certainly do not want a qualified lead to get a call from a producer who is not adequately prepared to convert the lead. Download our Opportunity Conversion Strategy Guide for more information and be sure to register for our webinar on June 25, 2014.