How to convert more leads to insurance policies
When it comes to drumming up quality life insurance leads for your business (or any business for that matter), it’s absolutely imperative to have a consistent flow of leads that will drive your revenue. However it’s important to note, that not all leads are created equal, and understanding the nuances of different lead generation strategies is crucial for maximizing your ROI.
You could categorize leads into three primary types, each with its own strengths and weaknesses:
| Lead Type | Description | Advantages | Challenges |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed Leads | Originate from organic referrals, existing customer relationships, and your professional network. They’re the result of exceptional customer experiences and strong relationship-building. | Seed leads often convert at a higher rate and become your most loyal customers. They represent the ultimate validation of your product/service. | While invaluable, seed leads are difficult to proactively scale. Your best strategy is cultivating them by consistently delivering outstanding value and fostering strong customer relationships. A robust customer success program is key. |
| Net Leads | Generated through marketing efforts, including content marketing (white papers, blog posts, case studies), SEO, paid advertising, social media marketing, and industry events. Focuses on attracting a larger volume of leads. | When executed effectively, net lead generation can be highly scalable and cost-efficient. It allows you to reach a broad audience and build brand awareness. | Building, optimizing, and maintaining effective net lead generation channels requires significant investment in time, resources, and expertise. Careful tracking and analysis are essential. |
| Spear Leads | Result of targeted outbound outreach by your sales team. Involves identifying ideal prospects and engaging them directly through personalized emails, phone calls, or social media. Emphasizes quality over quantity. | Spear lead generation provides predictability, allows for hyper-targeting of your ideal customer profile, and can deliver relatively immediate results. | Building a successful program requires dedicated outbound sales representatives and may not be profitable if your average deal size is relatively small. |
Strategic lead generation: A Balanced Approach Unless your deal sizes are exceptionally small, a balanced approach that incorporates all three lead generation strategies is generally recommended. Each strategy plays a different role in the overall lead generation ecosystem. For example, net lead generation can nurture leads who aren’t yet ready to buy, keeping them engaged until they’re further along in the buying cycle.
Prioritizing your lead generation efforts: Many companies (especially startups) Startups often find their initial traction through word of moth leads . As you begin to scale, prioritizing spear lead generation can be a smart move. It provides the targeted focus and immediate results needed to accelerate growth. Net lead generation, while crucial for long-term scalability, often requires more time and investment to yield significant results. However, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. The optimal mix of lead generation strategies will vary depending on your specific industry, target customer profile, product or service offering, and available resources. Thoroughly analyze your target market and experiment with different channels to determine which ones deliver the best return on investment.
Scaling your spear lead generation: If you’re looking to scale your spear lead generation efforts, consider leveraging specialized tools and services. Outsourcing the lead identification process to a third-party provider can free up your sales team to focus on outreach and engagement. Sales automation platforms like Reply.io can streamline your outbound email campaigns and improve efficiency. Remember to personalize your outreach and avoid generic messaging to maximize engagement and conversion rates.
Qualifying leads and the handoff
The core function of your Qualification Specialists (both Outbound and Inbound) is to assess incoming leads and determine their potential for conversion. They act as gatekeepers, ensuring that only genuinely promising prospects advance to the Account Executives (AEs) for the final stages of the sales cycle. A structured qualification framework is essential for this process. This often involves a discovery call with the prospect, guided by a carefully crafted set of criteria. Each organization develops its own unique qualification criteria, tailored to its specific product or service and target market. However, at a fundamental level, a qualified lead typically demonstrates these key characteristics:
- Problem Recognition: The prospect acknowledges and articulates the specific challenge that your offering addresses. They understand the pain point and its impact on their business or personal life.
- Motivation to Change: The prospect isn’t just aware of the problem; they’re actively seeking a solution. They’re motivated to invest time, resources, and effort to overcome the challenge.
- Decision-Making Authority: The prospect possesses the authority, or influence within the decision-making process, to purchase your product or service. They’re not just an influencer; they’re a key stakeholder.
Once a Qualification Specialist has assessed a lead and believes they meet the criteria, the handoff to the AE takes place. A warm introduction is ideal, either by including the AE in the email communication with the prospect or by scheduling a joint call where both the Qualification Specialist and the AE participate. Compensation for Qualification Specialists can be structured in various ways. Some companies opt for a flat fee for each lead that meets the established criteria, while others prefer a percentage of the revenue generated from closed deals attributed to the Qualification Specialist’s efforts. Regardless of the compensation model, it’s crucial that the AE retains the final say on whether a lead is truly qualified. The AE, being closest to the closing process, is best positioned to make this determination. Therefore, it’s common practice for the AE, not the Qualification Specialist, to formally designate a lead as “Qualified” within the CRM system. This ensures alignment between qualification and sales efforts.
Key performance indicators
While there is an art to building relationships, scaling a sales engine is a science that can be optimized and predicted. In order to do so, you and your team must be rigorous about your KPIs and process. Let’s start with KPIs. The metrics you choose to track are the metrics you will optimize around, so choose them wisely. Here are some of the main KPIs we recommend that you track:
- Contact rate:
- Booking appoint rate
- Average premium size: average dollar amount per customer.
- New revenue per month: total new revenue closed in a given month. Can be split between what channel it came from, and whether it came from an existing customer or a new customer.
- Average sales cycle length: average time it takes from when a lead is qualified to closed.
- Number of SQLs per month: number of qualified leads passed off to AEs per month.
- Cost per lead: average cost per qualified lead passed off to AEs.
- CAC (customer acquisition cost): the total cost of acquiring a new customer, includes marketing costs and salaries.
- Customer churn rate: % of customers that don’t renew in any given month.
- Revenue churn rate: % of revenue that doesn’t renew in any given month.
- Lead to policy:
Remember to create counter-metrics as well.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms can help you streamline your sales process and KPI tracking. Salesforce is the leader in the space and we recommend using that platform once you have over 10 full time salespeople. Until then, we recommend that you pick a lighter-weight CRM to save time on the set up.