When you first start out as an insurance agent, you’ll quickly learn the importance of obtaining as many quality leads as possible.  For a person who’s new to the industry, the best way to do that is to leverage someone who has already set up their system and has it efficiently running.  You can do this in two possible ways.

First, you can flat out buy leads from an insurance lead company.  This method has its merits and should be recommended to the brand new insurance agent – the reason being that even with the turnkey package offerings out there today, the insurance agent will still have to do some tailoring to make it unique to themselves and their company.  With lead buying, you’re only buying the contact information of someone who’s demonstrated an interest in purchasing new or supplemental insurance.

The other alternative: you can also utilize a pre-generated insurance lead system to generate your leads for you.  The difference here is that the agent has a lot more control over the appearance of the system and can customize it to look, sound, and feel exactly the way they want it to look, further reinforcing their branding and their unique selling proposition.  However, there are some points to consider when looking for a good insurance lead system.

The first point of contention is to figure out what the best method of delivery should be.  There are some insurance lead systems that will generate Internet-only email leads.  In these cases, you must supply input into the design of the landing page, select key words, set your budget and then monitor performance of your campaign.

Other systems will set up a phone call into your office. These are basically forms that mass dial, state your offer (which you need to compose) and then the service connects you with the live prospect who ex[presses interest.  You pay a cost per live transfer.  Typically, you need to financial commit to a certain number of live transfers with this type of insurance lead system.

You have to analyze what your business can afford to handle and the time and input required of you, while determining how many resources you can dedicate to the lead generation system.

Another aspect that needs addressed when choosing an insurance lead system is the ownership of the system itself.  Who will own the system when you, as an agent, are using it?  Will your company buy the license or will you?  Who will host the system if it’s an Internet-based system and what, if any, royalty or rental fees are required to continue using the system?  It would be terrible to put a lot of effort into generating leads through a proven system, only to find a better one and have to abandon it later down the road.

Last, but definitely not least, is the ability of the insurance lead system to integrate into your current marketing systems.  Do you have an assistant who follows up with your prospects?  If so, how do they access the lead’s information?  Will it require that you give some personal information to your assistant?  How well will the system integrate with your email marketing or your CRM system?  Questions like these are all issues that you need to address before purchasing an insurance lead system.

When you first start out, it may be best not to tackle the complicated issues related to getting started with your own lead generation system.  Instead, you should buy leads until you’re more practiced and established in the marketplace.  But if you’re looking to further advance your established career, you should definitely give some serious thought to  creating you own insurance lead system.

The best thing about pursuing insurance annuity leads is that the prospects are not looking for anything specific other than a conservative place to put their money.  Therefore, the potential universe of annuity buyers is much larger than prospects interested in life insurance.Additionally, there appear to be more lead generation firms focused on insurance annuity leads that life, LTC or other insurance products.

The first and probably most important aspect of working with insurance annuity leads is to learn what the lead generation source was – they may be telephone, Internet or direct mail generated. By knowing the medium by which your prospects gave up their contact information, you can tailor your initial conversation with them to the lead generation source.  It may sound like a moot point, but oftentimes the quality of leads varies, depending on the source.

Telephone leads tend to be of the lower quality, as they were probably generated by a call center using an auto dialer.  The lead most likely never had an interest in an annuity until they received a random phone call from one of the lead generation companies.   The question the prospect may have been asked, “Would you like to be contacted about safe placed to invest other than the bank?”  Those prospects that say “yes” become your insurance annuity lead.  This is not a bad place to start as long as you understand what the prospect replied to.

A better type of annuity lead is Internet-generated insurance annuity leads.  Unfortunately, the quality of these still varies widely, as there are many companies who offer incentives for the lead to give up their information.  These incentivized offers result in leads that have no interest in annuities – they just want their free gift certificate.  Of course, not all Internet leads are generated in this way, but you do have to be careful of how they were generated.

Direct mail leads are, by far, the best quality insurance annuity leads of the three.  The prospect has seen the physical ad, taken the time to call or go online and voluntarily given up their personal information.  These leads tend to know a little more about what they want and aren’t afraid to let you know what it is – making the job of closing the sale much easier.   In many cases, the prospect has replied to a card in a card pack with various offers.  The downside of direct mail insurInsurance Annuity Leadsance annuity leads is the time delay.  By the time you get the reply, 10 days may have elapsed since the prospect expressed interest and has long “cooled off.”

Once you have a good grasp on where your leads are coming from and what action the prospect took to get their information to you, then it’s time to work your magic with them.  The first stage, as you can imagine, is getting to know your prospects.

Getting to know your prospects doesn’t mean you need know all of their kids, grand children and dog’s names.  Instead, you need find out what makes them tick.  Why can’t they sleep at night?  Annuities are relatively mundane things and by finding out what the clients fear, hope, desire and dream about, you can treat them like a good friend instead of a prospect.  This will dramatically increase your close rate and decrease the number of prospects that slam the proverbial door in your face.The way to find the prospect’s hot button or source of motivation is to ask.  The best question to start with “Mr Smith, what motivated you to fill out a card about annuities?”

Lastly, you must have an automatic follow-up system in place for the prospect.  You have to have a way – preferably an outsourced way – to continue to connect with the prospect as they learn more and more about you, and consequently want to buy more and more from you.  Since not all prospects will agree to meet you immediately, you need a drip marketing system.

As you can see, the secret to building wealth through insurance sales truly lies in the ability of the salesperson to find well qualified insurance annuity leads and walk them through a follow-up process that’s designed to relate to the individual prospect and meet his or her long term income needs.