A Changing Insurance Market

A Changing Insurance Marketr
In SELLING INSURANCE IN THE DIGITAL AGE, Christian Bieck identifies core changes in the way people shop for insurance. He closes with this:

Unimaginable just a decade ago, the rise of the Internet, mobile phones, and social networking is changing how consumers shop for and purchase insurance. Customers are becoming harder to satisfy and harder to maintain, so that means insurers have to work that much harder at building and sustaining their customer relationships.
Insurance has shifted from a seller's to a buyer's market.

Bieck has highlighted a very important point: life for the insurance broker is changing rapidly. They no longer control the flow of information going to consumers and they’re dealing with better informed leads with plenty of different options. As such, insurance agents need to find new tools to help them adjust to the changing market. One of these tools should be a Lead Management System like Leads360. Using a LMS will give your sales staff an invaluable resource in organizing and automating the sales process and ensuring that every lead is worked as efficiently and thoroughly as possible, maximizing your ROI by streamlining your sales process.

Bieck lays out three ways that insurance brokers need to improve their sales process to compete in the digital age: increase the number of available interaction points, follow your customers and invest in analytics, and improve interaction quality. In each case, the use of a LMS can provide immediate improvement for any sales staff.

Leads360 can use automated nurturing e-mails to keep in contact with prospective buyers and supply links to information while prompting agents to make follow-up calls at the most appropriate times. What’s more, it provides a single, unified software platform that can allow a sales team to coordinate each of their interaction points with any given lead into a unified front and ensure that the potential customer is finding all the information they need or want.

A LMS is also an essential tool for collecting and analyzing analytics and then implementing the changes called for by the data. A program like Leads360 collects data from every customer interaction and carefully tracks the results to determine what is going into successfully closing leads. Meticulously recorded metrics, over time, can reveal a lot of valuable trends in your customers and help isolate ways that efficiency and closing rates can be improved. What’s more, it can identify the best sources for potential leads and ensure that your sales team is investing their time in ways that will maximize your overall ROI.

Finally, improving the quality of each and every interaction with a lead is one of the biggest strengths for a LMS like Leads360. With the competition for each lead being fierce, things like speed-to-contact, number of contacts, and the timing of those contacts can all make or break a sales team. Leads360 has collected data from millions of interactions to help hone in on best practices and can automate the sales process so that your agents are the first to call a lead, keep calling until they’ve either closed the lead or exhausted the opportunity, and even make contact attempts at the specific days and times that are most likely to have success. Leads360 is designed to make the most out of each and every interaction automatically.

In the end, selling insurance is not what it used to be. The market is rapidly changing and anyone hoping to keep up needs to find the right tools to adapt to the changing market. In this battle to impress ever savvier customers, a LMS like Leads360 can be invaluable in getting to leads in the most efficient and effective way possible.