If you’ve spent years honing your interpersonal, face-to-face sales skills, we know how frustrating social distancing can be. It’s hard when you can’t shake hands and get to know a potential client before churning out a bunch of numbers. It makes your job hard, we get it.
We want you to continue letting your talents shine, and we’re here to show you that business doesn’t have to be slow because of coronavirus. We’ve got some pointers on how you can get ahead and add a more personal touch to the quoting process, especially during the weekends, which are perfect for insurance sales. Let us show you why.
Weekends Are a Busy Time!
Do you save personal tasks and errands for the weekend? Most people do. People anticipate long hold-times on the phone getting the customer care they need, so they often push the task to a Saturday or even a Sunday, if they can. Or, they simply procrastinate all week and find themselves doing what should’ve been done days ago on a lazy Saturday morning. That includes buying insurance.
In fact, weekends are a big day for car shopping. And with the purchase of a new car there’s the need for new auto insurance. Weekends are a great time to compare rates for many shoppers because people simply have the time to do it all at a leisurely pace.
Families also tend to have the big and important conversations on weekends, when they have time to openly discuss subjects like considering life insurance or health insurance and assigning caretakers and beneficiaries. Often, the work required to buy insurance means taking the time to sift through important papers before setting out to compare options. Working people do not have that kind of time during the week or they prefer to relax during the few hours they have after a long day.
Here are some more tips for you on how to make the weekend work to your benefit.
Finding Insurance Leads
It used to be advised that you participate in community activities to connect with as many people as possible during weekends, in hopes that a small percentage of these people would be interested in a quote. Even after stay-at-home orders have been lifted people are hesitant to go out. You probably should reconsider many community activities, too, unless you find a digital version of the experience.
The new motto for everyone (not just insurance agents) is to stay as far away from each other as
possible. Puts a dent in your marketing strategy, surely, but people are still buying insurance.
Live Transfer Calls: The Highest Conversion Rate
Do you take business calls on the weekends? If you do, you can request that your live-transfer calls come to you on a Saturday, even a Sunday if you wish. When you buy leads from SmartFinancial, you’ll have an agent portal in which you can either ok or pause calls from coming in any day of the week.
You can even set certain blocks of time for calls so you know when to expect them. Your live leads are guaranteed to want a quote, or else they wouldn’t be transferred to you by live agents that SmartFinancial has working over the weekends too.
Look at it this way: Two or three hours blocked off for calls doesn’t really mean you’re working all weekend. And those couple of extra hours may end up yielding some really nice sales and great revenue!
The reason you should consider buying weekend calls is that some of the biggest insurance buying decisions are made then, not during work hours. If you want to stay ahead, there really is no more direct way than to get someone on the line, right after they’ve divulged all their personal information in a SmartFinancial form.
Live insurance calls are not cheap but what do you plan to do with your travel budget now that it’s nearly pointless -- not to mention risky! -- to travel far from home? These have a very strong conversion rate, which is why they are more expensive than other types of leads.
Data Leads: Very Little Competition So You Can Close
If you have budget constraints, buy a few calls and buy more data leads. With data leads you can also set your controls in your agent portal so that they will be emailed and texted to you over the weekend. These are much more affordable, and even though you’ll have some competition, SmartFinancial limits agent sharing and prohibits sharing within the same agency if you’re a captive agent.
Use Video Quotes for the Insurance Products You Sell
After you make a connection with your prospect, you can use video chats to have something similar to an in-person conversation. Once you get used to it, it’s not really that awkward at all. Also, you can use a simple Android or iPhone to make a quick video quote. Why not? Why not say good morning and say the prospect’s name and mention something you talked about? Why do you have to call and give a dry number and hope for the best?
You can send the quote via text or email, whichever way your prospect prefers you to make contact. And then call afterwards to see what they think. As always, it may take some convincing that you’ve got the client’s best interests in mind. But you’re a pro at this. So do it!
