It’s no secret that generating exclusive insurance leads may be the most important part of any insurance business. However, as any experienced insurance agent will tell you – and with all due respect to Thomas Jefferson – all leads are not created equal.  In fact, there’s such a dichotomy between good, producing leads and stale, overused, uninterested leads that some companies forbid their salespeople from buying leads altogether.  Here’s how to tell the difference.

While buying leads isn’t always bad, there are a few companies out there that prey on the unsuspecting insurance agnet that’s new to the industry and hasn’t bought leads before.  These companies are unscrupulous and will do anything to get a salesperson to buy from them.  On the other hand, buying good leads may turn out to be a great resource that a salesperson can turn to in order to increase their sales.

So how do you know the difference between good leads and bad?  The best giveaway – if you don’t already know – is to always be sure the leads you generate or buy are exclusive insurance leads.  This means that their information will only be given to you, no matter how much time has elapsed.  The other types of leads are called shared leads and should be avoided at all costs.

If you think about what a shared lead is, you’ll understand why they’re so bad.  The lead, who sometimes is completely unaware that they’ll become a shared lead when they volunteer their information, will be barraged with phone calls, emails, and direct mail pieces begging them to buy every insurance company’s best selling product.  This tends to get annoying and even if they were interested in buying when they filled out the form, they sure aren’t anymore.

But even better than buying exclusive insurance leads is learning to generate your own.  By generating your own leads, you’ll never have to worry about competing with other insurance companies or sharing critical information with them.  Instead, you own those leads and you can contact them for the rest of your life if you like.  You can cultivate and grow a great relationship with them that will pay off in spades when they keep coming back to you with their business and recommend that all of their friends and family do the same.

And it doesn’t have to be difficult.  There are many ways to generate your own leads – too many, in fact, to cover here.  But there are a few tips to take to heart while you’re getting started with generating your own leads.

First, become a steady disciple of marketing and advertising.  You have to be very good at both in order to profitably generate the leads you need.

Second, know the lifetime value of your customers.  While you may not make money on your first sale to them, you’ll be growing a relationship that pays off when they come back to buy more insurance for their car, boat, house, and more for the rest of their lives.  You can’t know how much you can afford to spend to build relationships like that until you know how much each customer is worth to you.

By generating your own exclusive insurance leads, you can write your own ticket in this industry.  All of the top producers do, so why not start today?

If you’ve been in the business for an appreciable amount of time, you’ve probably heard that insurance sales leads are the most important aspect of a successful insurance business.  While this is generally true, it’s the whole truth.  Leads are great, but without a good system to follow up and produce closed sales with these leads, they aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.

Unfortunately, this is the hardest step for most new insurance agents to master.  Instead of focusing on closing the leads, they focus on generating them.  They’re then left with hundreds of insurance sales leads that they can’t close because they either have a fear of closing with them or they have a terrible system – or no system at all – for contacting, following up, and closing those leads.

The process begins by selecting the medium through which the leads are generated.  The options of mail, Internet, and fax are all possibilities, and all of them have their own advantages and disadvantages.  The foundation to a successful system, however, is knowing where those leads were generated, how they were generated, and why the lead responded to the marketing.  Without this information, the chances of closing with the lead are already reduced by 60%.

Next, a successful lead follow-up system will be able to respond to the leads quickly and in a repeatable manner.  If the lead is a shared lead – and most of them are – your lead will receive between three and ten phone calls from other insurance agents right off the bat, all competing for the same business.  If you can be the first to reach the lead before they become weary of talking to salespeople, your chances of at least receiving their attention – or of the lead even answering the phone – are greatly increased.

Once you get a hold of the lead, the magic starts to happen.  You should always have a follow-up phone script that’s proven to quickly engage the insurance sales lead in a professional, friendly, and caring manner.  First impressions truly are the most important, and if yours is a bad one, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle throughout the entire pitch.  If you don’t yet have your own script, ask a friend or mentor in the field for help developing it.  Users of the SeniorLeads insurance sales lead system are provided a script that has been scientifically proven to increase results by 300%.

Throughout the conversation, it’s important to be courteous and professional.  High pressure sales tactics are short lived and globally hated – you’ll turn your prospect off for good if you resort to those.

Instead, think about your conversation with your prospect as a conversation with a friend.  Try not to think of yourself as a salesman selling your services, but instead a friend looking out for their best interests.  This attitude will come across in your voice when you talk to them, and if your concern seems sincere, you’ll quickly find that you’ll need a bigger office to handle all the business you’ll receive.

Insurance sales is a very emotional profession, and recognizing this will get you far.  People come to insurance companies when they’re either in turmoil or are thinking about the possibility that bad things could happen to them.  It is your responsibility to stand above that chaos as the strong tree in the middle of a storm.  Do this, and your clients will not only do more business with you, but they’ll thank you every step of the way.