We’ve all heard the mantra – a dozen qualified insurance leads a day keeps the bankruptcy away.  When trying to start a new insurance business, its often pounded into our heads how important leads are to our business.  Of course, we quickly find out that this is true – to some extent.  We also find out that the most important part of that statement is missing.

Once we get started and established in our businesses, we find that it’s not good enough just to have leads coming in to the office – it’s much more important to have qualified insurance leads coming in.  The difference between the two is demonstrated in the prospect’s intent, i.e. interest and motivation,  and ability to purchase insurance.
The most qualified, ideal prospect has been searching for a solution and is ready to purchase insurance today.  They know exactly what they want, have already done their shopping and are ready to close with you as soon as you can get the paperwork drawn up.  A completely unqualified lead needs a lot of educating in the workings of insurance, has no intention of purchasing insurance and may never actually become a sale.  Of course, most leads fall somewhere in between the two opposite ends of this spectrum.  Note:  there are far too many agents that spend too mush of their day with the latter–unqualified leads in attempt to interest or convince them to buy.
But the question still remains as to how to find these highly qualified insurance leads.  Qualified insurance leads are out there, but unfortunately, most of the time they’re mixed in with the completely unqualified leads and may never show their face among this crowd.  If you purchase leads from a company, you have very little control over the source and quality of the leads.  Even though you cannot control the acquisition of a purchased lead, you can still ask how the lead was obtained:

• how do we know the prospect has interest?
• do we know if the prospect has the ability to buy?
• are they at the point in their shopping cycle when they are ready to buy now?

If you don;t get satisfactory answers, then don;t do business with that lead generation firm.

If you do proceed, the control you have to separate the buyers form the non-buyers  is to ensure that your company is using a qualifying form when getting the lead’s information.  A qualifying form is one in which the lead has to answer a few questions like, “When do you plan to buy insurance,” or “What type of insurance are you interested in,” among many others.  By forcing the prospect to answer these questions, you’re ensuring that they are self-qualifying themselves.  The once unqualified lead then becomes qualified and you won’t be wasting your time on leads that have no intention of buying insurance.

If you’re generating your own leads, you can do this as well.  Just be sure that they can submit the qualifying form on your website without answering all of the questions.  While they may be qualified and interested, they may not be comfortable putting all of that information on a form to send over the Internet or through the mail.  However, you can’t discount them because of this.  Instead, give them a call and ask them further questions to qualify them before you spend your valuable time ensuring they’re serious.

These tactics are known by most, but practiced by the very successful insurance agents only.  If you take these tips to heart, you’ll find that you’ll work less and make more money.  Pre-qualification is a very powerful process and should always be used, no matter how you buy your qualified insurance leads.

There are a several ways to find long term care insurance leads.  You can buy them or generate your own leads.  Both processes have their pros and cons, but there’s one distinct advantage to generating your own leads.  If you do decide to purchase leads instead of generating your own, you should be aware of some common pitfalls that most new insurance agents stumble into.

If you decide to purchase your leads, it’s strongly recommended that you use exclusive long term care insurance leads to start off.  The difference between exclusive leads and shared leads is exactly that – exclusive leads are sold only to you, whereas shared leads are sold over and over again to many insurance agents, sometimes up to ten or more at a time.  As you can imagine, it’s much harder to convince the prospect to go with your products if you can’t prove to them you have a good, solid business under your wings.

Additionally, if you decide to go with shared leads, you should have a good marketing system in place that ensures maximum success with the leads you are getting.  A good marketing system must include a script for setting appointments, a way of automatically following up with the prospect and a good, solid, unique selling proposition that differentiates you from the rest of the crowd.

Once you have these things in place and they’ve been tried out and honed on exclusive leads, you can try your hand at shared leads.  There are a few words of caution, however, as there are many lead sales companies out there that will sell you stale leads or those don’t convert for of a variety of reasons.  There are many tricks a company can use to get the prospect to give up their information, and they use them a lot.  For example, you’ll find that there are some companies that offer incentives for a person to fill out their information, like a chance to win a free cruise or even monetary rewards.  While this may seem harmless, it will waste your time because more often than not the lead has no interest in insurance – they just wanted their free gift card.

After you’ve finished putting the finishing touches on your superstar marketing system, you can try them out on shared leads.  By first trying to use them on exclusive leads, you get a chance to talk to many more prospects and find out what you need know to tweak your marketing system to garner maximum responses and lead satisfaction.  Then, you can start thinking about generating your own leads using your own advertising and marketing system.

The danger with this method is that your results aren’t hinging on something or someone that you just turn on and off when you need to work on your business.  You constantly have to be ready to receive long term care insurance leads or you risk losing the prospect.  In addition, you have to be ready to take the emotional and economical roller coaster that’s associated with marketing your own business.  However, if you’re willing to put in the time and effort, you could soon find yourself in charge of a successful and profitable business.