If you were to ask any successful LTC insurance agent what the secret to their success is, they’ll likely tell you that it’s in the steady flow of qualified LTC leads that they receive.  Unfortunately, finding a good quality long term care insurance lead may seem like playing a game of “Where’s Waldo” sometimes.  In a mass of potential prospects, there are only a select few LTC prospects that are legitimately interested in buying the product that you have to offer.  The following are some ways to find the quality LTC leads that are vital to your success as an LTC agent.
 
By far the best place to look for a long term care insurance lead is on the Internet.  This is simply the place where most consumers interested in LTC insurance go to do their research. If you start your search there, you’ll find LTC insurance lead sales companies to choose from. Additionally, you will see how you can generate your own LTC insurance lead as you will see the methods used–banner ads, pay per click ads, editorial stories,etc.  The way you generate a long term care insurance lead is by attracting the consumer to something you offer.

Always remember that when you contact along term care insurance lead sales company, you’ll be talking to a salesperson just like you, and that they’ll try to get you to buy as much as they can right from the start.  If you’re just starting out, don’t buy as many LTC leads as you can afford.  You need to spend some time building your business’s marketing and follow up systems before you make your way to the prime time. Start at a reasonable pace (e.g. 20 leads per week).

Screening a long term care insurance lead company is one of the smartest and most essential actions you can take with your business.  If you get stuck using an LTC lead company that provides you with under-performing or fraudulent leads, you’ll quickly come to realize that you’re in a tough situation.  You’ll be stuck paying for LTC leads that won’t convert to sales, you’ll waste lots of time trying to make them convert and, in the meantime, your business will suffer because you won’t be making any new sales.  If you can, try to avoid this situation by doing your due diligence before you buy or contact your long term care insurance leads. 

On the other hand, if you have no interest in buying long term care insurance leads, you can always generate your own LTC leads.  To do this, set up a website that showcases what your specific skills are and your unique selling position.  Your unique selling position, or USP, is what you use to differentiate yourself from the masses of other insurance agents that will be grasping for your prospect. For example, you may want to communicate to your long term care insurance lead that you are an independent agent that can help them shop from among 10 LTC companies.  If you don’t establish what’s unique about you, your service or your offer early, then you’ll just disappear into the crowd like all of the other non-performing agents that call up this long term care insurance lead with the sole intent of selling insurance.

Within this website, you’ll need to develop a thorough form that your prospect can fill out to request that they be contacted, whether via email or phone, so that they become a worthwhile long term care insurance lead.  The form should also ask for their number, name and address, and should also include questions like age.

As the population of the United States gets older, their needs for health and long term care insurance at a decent cost increases as well.  Of course, every one of these people are possible prospects for a good long term care insurance agent that knows how to close sales.

LTC insurance leads are great if you know how to find them and work them.  The residuals form these policies can have you in the top 2% of American earners if you devote 10 years to this field.  These interested prospects are usually focused on finding out more information about long term care insurance, and you should be more than happy to give it to them. So the first rule of seeking LTC insurance leads is to get leads where the prospect seeks INFORMATION and don;t be fixated on those that have filled in a request for a quote. Think about it–those that have filled in a form for a quote are the price shoppers–are these the LTC insurance leads you want?
Those that seek information (e.g. offer a booklet such as “Six Mistakes to Avoid When Buying Long Term Care Insurance) are usually seriously interested. These clients have proven, time and time again, to be able to cut to the chase and tell the agent exactly what they want in terms of insurance.  This is good because it will save you time and effort that could be spent building the foundation of the business you’re running.
When you start to look at different companies that offer LTC insurance leads, you should ask a few questions. 

The first – probably the most important – is that you ask whether or not the company that you’re using sells shared or exclusive LTC insurance leads.  If you have some experience in the industry, you always want to be using exclusive leads.  This way, you’re not fighting against all the other insurance agents that purchased the lead at the same time.

Along the same lines, ask the question of how quickly your exclusive leads expire, if not exclusive.  Most exclusive leads will expire over time and become shared leads, and it’s important that you know the specific time frame that you’ll have to close the sale before every agent across the land comes charging in and soliciting your lead.

Once you have a short list of LTC insurance lead companies, you should check with the Better Business Bureau, as well as the company’s local chamber of commerce.  You should be able to perform a quick Internet search and find out the lead company’s online reputation by visiting insurance agent forums or websites. The BEST test you can do is try the two LTC insurance lead companies that look best to you because your own experience is far better than relying on another.

A word of caution.  Some agents make the mistake that the LTC insurance lead company offer some guarantee that the prospect is insurable.  At first, this may seem like a good idea but you will lose business in the long run.  Accept the fact that some LTC prospects may not qualify for insurance.  But maybe the husband will.  Maybe the prospect refers you to a neighbor or asks you to give a talk at their garden club.  Don’t be nearsighted.  Meeting one nice person can lead to a lot of business

Finally, you should attend some industry trade shows and talk with the people there to see what products and solutions they offer.  While you’re at the trade show, ask around about the best places to find LTC insurance leads.  Remember that some insurance carriers and long term care insurance wholesalers can help you find the better LTC insurance lead sources. You’ll find that while a lot of people consider you to be their direct competition, a lot of people are willing to help you anyway out of the goodness of their hearts.
 
Finding a good LTC insurance leads company takes a little investigation and its worth it.   Once your appointment calendar is full, then you leverage each new prospect into referrals and you are off to growing a big LTC insurance practice.

When an insurance agent first starts out, they’re given the keys to a very successful business.  Unfortunately, most of these same agents don’t know how to drive just yet.  They may be able to get the car out of the driveway, but most times, they either get lost or crash the car into a ditch before they even get close to their destination.

While many agents focus on generating new leads, the best agents focus on closing the ones they currently have.  They also leave lead generation up to the experts by utilizing various forms of insurance lead services.  By doing this, they free up their time, allowing them to focus on the things that will be generating the most money for them.

However, that begs the question – how do the top producers find the right insurance lead services?  How are they able to tell the difference between a company that only makes promises and a company that delivers high quality leads that turn into sales?  There are a few tips that you can use to help you join the elite few that end up becoming solid, six figure a year earners in this highly competitive industry.

The first place you should look when trying to find reputable insurance lead services is online.  A quick Internet search will reveal thousands of these services, all of which are trying to get your business.  Search on “insurance leads” and you will quickly be inundated with results of insurance lead services. Start at the top of the list and take a look at every one of these businesses.  They’ll all have their positive and negative points, so be sure you look for both in every company.  The best way to keep track of them is to create a spreadsheet and track all of your research for each company.  Additionally, it may help to keep a record of any correspondence you may have with these insurance lead companies.  Whether you send an email or make a phone call, log the contact and list your opinion of how it went.

While you’re online, make a stop at your favorite insurance agent’s forum and ask others where they’ve found good insurance lead services that have produced good leads for them.  You’ll be surprised at how helpful some people are online, particularly considering they may be viewed as your competition.  When you’re there, be sure to ask why they are or are not recommending certain companies.  This will give you a good feel for what to look for in other companies when you’re trying to find one for you.

Offline, you can go to insurance sales conferences and events, where you’ll find dozens of insurance lead services vying for your business.  This can also be a good source for networking, as there’s nothing better than meeting the sales people from another company face to face.  Try to analyze what they’re doing well and draw from these lessons to improve your own business.   You should also ask the insurance carriers you do business with as well as FMOs, IMOs and wholesalers.  Given that these entities have contacts with thousands of agents, ask them which insurance lead services have the best reputation.

Finding good, quality insurance agents leads can sometimes feel like a search for the holy grail.  But while they may be hard to find, a source of good life insurance leads will easily spell eternal life for an insurance agent’s business.  The following are some tricks of the trade that have helped hundreds of insurance agents to find the quality lead sources they need.

First, there are many Field Marketing Organizations (FMOs) that act as  distributors for the life, annuity and other insurance products you sell.  In some cases, they will supply insurance agents leads in return for doing business through them (they collect an override form the carrier).  Investigate the source of these leads as if you were paying for them (you are in the form of commissions).  Find out how these leads are generated, how old they are and what criteria they meet. If you wouldn’t pay for these insurance agents leads, then they are worth no more because you get them free.

If you’ll be paying, the best place to find insurance agents leads is by looking online because of the freshness of these leads.  A simple search on a search engine will turn up dozens of lead generation companies offering insurance agents leads for sale.  Start by creating a spreadsheet and keeping tally of the company’s offerings and prices and find out all that you can online before you contact the company.  Never forget that when you call, you’ll be talking to another salesperson.  The person on the other end of the phone will be using all of the same tools that you use to close with your leads to get you to buy from his company.

But before you actually contact the company, do another search for their name online to see what other insurance agentsare saying about them.  Visit the popular insurance sales forums and ask about their reputation.  You’ll be surprised what other salespeople will reveal to you if you ask them for their help.  You should also check with the Better Business Bureau and the company’s local chamber of commerce to see if they have a good reputation to go along with their name.  Do your due diligence before committing a significant sum to buy insurance agents leads.
Another great source of insurance agents leads companies is going to an insurance agent’s convention (e.g. NAIFA, SFSP).  There are several that are held throughout the country at different times during the year.  While you’re there, network with other agentsat the convention and – just like online – ask them for their help and opinions on certain companies.   Additionally, several of the leading insurance agents lead generation companies may have exhibits at the convention.

Once you find an insurance agents lead company that you feel comfortable with, you should contact them and interview them about their practices.  Some of the questions you should ask should include their policies about replacing bad leads, the prices and packages they offer and how they generate the leads they’ll be sending you.  In addition, ask about the exclusivity of their leads and whether they’ll ever be sold again and, if so, in how much time.  Shared leads should be avoided if you can, but if you must buy shared leads, be sure you at least have a certain amount of time – preferably at least two weeks – during which you have exclusivity to them.

You should also ask for customer’s contact information so you can call the other agents and ask them their opinion of the insurance agents lead company.   You’ll be surprised at how much they share with you, even though they’re technically your competition.   Keep in mind that you will get vastly different opinions about the lead quality from different agents using the same insurance lead generation company.  Why?  Because the agents are of different ability.  One agent wont even get an appointment with a particular prospect while another, better prepared, more skilled agent, will turn that same prospect into his next client.

The screening you do on each of the companies you’re interested in is the key to success when it comes time to find insurance agents leads.  Take it seriously and do your due diligence – eventually, you’ll find that holy grail.

If you’re serious about staying in the insurance industry, you’ll take your lead generation and marketing very seriously.  As you may already know, the fate of your business will completely rely on the quantity and quality of leads that you’re able to process in your insurance lead systems.  Sooner or later, you’re going to ask yourself whether there’s anything more you can be doing to ensure your success as an agent participating in insurance lead systems, or if you’ve maxed out the capacity of your system.

Insurance lead systems are exactly that – systems.  They are systems that have one legitimate purpose – to generate as many quality leads as they can, as well as pre-qualify the leads so that the agent and the agent’s assistant won’t have to back track on questions and parts of the contract that have already been answered.

You can create your own insurance lead system or outsource.  In either case, the system must have these aspects:

1. Method to capture interested prospects (and offer and response mechanism)
2. Method to qualify the suitability of the prospect
3. Step that establishes you as a superior source for the product or service
4. Presentation (usually by phone) to have the prospect agree to meet with you
5. Drip mechanism for those prospects that qualify but won’t meet now

It’s not just about getting leads.  Steps 2,3 and 4 are what separate mere leads from an insurance lead system.

Unfortunately, the easiest way to do this is to be sure that you’re using special insurance lead systems that are designed to fit into your current market.  You should also be using a CRM solution that will dovetail into your new insurance lead systems.

Insurance lead systems are all unique in that they’ll only provide the names and personal information to the agent.  They won’t provide the reason for their inquiry or the other personal information required when determining whether or not the lead is even worth pursuing, along with a variety of other issues. So when you finally get that lead, that’s when the show really begins.  You must use your highly developed marketing strategy and knowledge of sales to call or contact the prospect any way you can.  By doing this, you’ll set yourself apart from the hordes of other insurance agents that are no more than a search away for them.  Taking the time to personally connect with them will prove to your clients that you really do care about them.
This can only be done by creating and building a unique selling point, and using that USP in everything that you do.  Unfortunately, the average agent has no idea how this works, which means that they’re already way beyond the power curve and will have a hard time catching up.

To the average prospect out there, you’re just another nameless, faceless insurance salesman.  You have to know exactly who your target market is and what they want out of life.  You need to delve down into the deepest, darkest secrets of the person wants, loves, desires and fears.   If you understand your target market, you already know these secrets and then you develop a video, an audio a booklet–something you can provide the prospect which differentiates you from other agents that merely flap their lips.  This credibility-building steps is missing from most every insurance lead system.
Once you’re able to study your prospect in that great detail, it’s time to integrate what you’ve learned into your sales process.  If you use what you found out about the person in your marketing system, you’ll find that your ratio of leads to sales conversations will skyrocket.  This is because you are going to be doing something called relationship marketing – where you take the market research that you have discovered and use it to write sales letters, emails, fliers and business cards that appeal to your target market’s hidden desires.

With your marketing strategy honed and ready, you’ll be able to fully take advantage of insurance lead systems by ensuring that you won’t waste a bunch of money on leads you’ll never get to convert to sales.

There are dozens of companies that you can buy life insurance leads from – however, the best insurance agents know how to generate their own life insurance leads.  The masters of the industry can generate leads by the hundreds or even thousands each and every day.  If you can master the skill of life insurance lead generation, you’ll be able to write your own checks.  The following are a few strategies that separate the mediocre from the ultra successful in the world of life insurance sales.
Let’s take a look at 3 ways to conduct insurance lead generation on line as opposed to mailers, telemarketing or other methods which we will cover in a later post.
A major way to conduct life insurance lead generation is to use pay-per-click marketing with the major search engines so that when a prospect does a search for your product or service, they will see your ad.  The best aspect of pay-per-click marketing is that your ad is exposed only to people who look for it.  The worst part is that you pay each time someone clicks to see your full ad.  The prospect clicks a small link that might say “The truth about annuities.”  At that point, you pay the search engine for the click.  The prospect is then directed to your web page which needs to be well written and engage the prospect to take the next action.
Obviously, when using pay per click marketing for life insurance lead generation, you pay for all the clicks but only a small percentage of the respondents are viable prospects.
The next method of life insurance lead generation is called co-generation.  Your ad runs on the websites of other business that do not compete with you.  If a prospect sees your ad and complete s a form with their contact information, you then pay for this lead.  This is called “cost per action.”  The best part of this type of life insurance lead generation is that you pay for the prospect’s contact information. If the prospect does not fill out a form, you don’t pay.  The worst part if that your ad may appear on a vitamin site and the prospects did not “go looking” for your product or service.
The third way of conducting life insurance lead generation on line is to use banner ads.  These are ads that have color and graphics and tend to attract the eye.  Prospects click on them, are taken to your form and hopefully complete their contact information. In this type of lead generation, you pay per 1000 impressions, similar to running an ad in a magazine where the cost is based on the circulation.
If you have a limited budget, the first two options for life insurance lead generation usually works best.

The secret technique that most top producing insurance agents will never tell you is that they’ve learned to leverage their existing time efficiently. If you want to earn more while working less, you’ll quickly find that the key to doing this is to automate your business as much as possible and to train assistants and outsourced workers to perform the daily, menial tasks that take up most of your time. This is where Internet insurance leads can come into play – without them, you’re dead in the water.

You can reach more people with your message via the Internet (as can your insurance lead company) than with any other medium.  Additionally, statistics form Pew Internet Life show that the more mature investor who uses the Internet is also wealthier. In other words, the “action” is on the Internet and Internet Insurance leads give you the instant response form a hot prospect.

There are many different types of leads that are generated through the Internet. You can generate them yourself through the use of a web form and website or you can contract with an Internet insurance leads generation company to do this for you. Most insurance marketers will use pay-per-click programs to get prospects to their web form (more about pay per click ads in another post). We’ll discuss the pros and cons of both, but you should immediately recognize the power of automating the prospecting, qualification and appointment setting processes that would otherwise suck a good portion of your valuable time away from you.

This time should be used in more productive and lucrative ways. You should always strive to automate or outsource the tasks that can be delegated to someone for less than what you’re willing to work per hour. For instance, if you want to work for nothing less than $30 per hour, you’ll quickly find that most of your phone work can be given to an assistant to handle for half of that price. But that’s the beauty of the Internet – all of these processes are handled electronically for free. You only have to pay for web hosting, which costs around ten dollars per month, at most. If you run 0ay-per-click program to generate your Internet insurance leads, you can outsource the management of that for a small amount.

As mentioned earlier, there are two basic ways to generate Internet insurance leads. The first is the most common, and that is to hire a company that will do all of the work for you. You don’t have to worry about hiring a web designer, setting up an auto-responder, writing web copy or any of the other technical and marketing aspects of running your own lead generation website. The company will do all of this for you and you only have to pay for the results – the leads it generates.

This is an ideal way to generate Internet insurance leads for the insurance salesperson who’s just starting out in the industry or who is seasoned in the industry, but is just starting on the Internet. There are too many technical sinkholes that the average person can fall into and it takes a good one to two years to learn all of the aspects required to successfully run your own website and do your own Internet marketing.

If you do become seasoned at generating your own Internet insurance leads, you’ll soon find that marketing your site becomes the biggest challenge you face. While marketing your site is beyond the scope of this article, you should investigate options such as pay per click, banner, and contextual advertising. You’ll quickly find that while the medium is different, the principles behind direct marketing – meaning mail order and magazine advertising – are remarkably similar to those that work on the Internet.

Of course, you can also buy Internet insurance leads, but you may find that you have better close rates with the leads generated on your website. Generating your own leads is the ideal situation, but at the very least, you should be focusing on tasks that make you money, instead of tasks like appointment setting, prospecting and other things that can be outsourced or automated at a low cost.

It’s safe to say that the gray hairs in the insurance sales industry have secrets that they’ll never reveal about insurance lead generation.  They know – as you probably do too by now – that insurance lead generation is what makes a business tick.  What they also know, that you probably don’t, is that lead generation is only half the picture.  The other half is what separates them from you and what separates the ultra successful from the agent masses.  But what some of the older agents don’t know is how to profit from Internet insurance leads.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last ten years or have totally resisted information evolution, you know that the Internet is revolutionizing the lead generation business.  An Internet insurance lead has become the standard to which all other leads are held.  They’re the cheapest to generate, the fastest to respond and, depending on the source, the easiest to close.  That is, if you know how to use the Internet insurance lead you just generated.

And quite possibly the greatest aspect of any Internet insurance lead is the instantaneous transmission.  In this age of “got to have it now,” you get the lead within minutes of the prospect completing a request.  Within seconds of the prospect completing their request, your auto-responder acknowledges the request and replies, even if you’re out on an appointment.

Of course, one of the hardest steps for wet-behind-the-ears insurance agents to conquer is to convert the Internet insurance lead into business.  Normally, instead of focusing on closing the leads they have, newer agents focus on generating more.  Nobody ever told them that one in the hand is better than two in the bush and that the true key to success is having a great appointment-to-closing ratio.

So what should an agent do with a new Internet insurance lead?  Should they call, email or otherwise contact them?  What will the prospect expect to receive?  The answer actually lies in the way the lead was generated and whether it’s a shared lead or an exclusive lead.

First, we’ll tackle the method of generation.  The lead may be an email-only lead, where they’ve entered their email as an Internet insurance lead who’s interested in obtaining information about plans that you may have to offer.  These leads are usually sold relatively cheaply and in bulk, and they are also usually shared leads.

Your approach with email-only leads should be to differentiate yourself from the crowd of agents that will be sending them emails.  Place the Internet insurance lead in your auto responder and let your system follow-up with the person automatically.  Studies have shown that most people don’t commit to purchase until five to seven different contacts, so it’s vitally important to keep in touch – even if it’s simply to check in to show that you’re still thinking about them.  There are plenty of examples of someone who waited for over a year before making an insurance decision and you don’t want that decision to go to one of your competitors.

If the internet insurance lead filled out a form that included their phone number, immediately call them before the lead goes stale.  Even though the company you bought it from may have told you the lead is exclusive, many times they have time limits on the exclusivity and, in a short period of time, your lead will be receiving many other phone calls from dozens of agents that sound, at least to the prospect, exactly the same.  So the key is to identify and communicate your unique value.

While the Internet can generate great leads at great prices and efficiency, the true advantage goes to the person who can best capitalize on those leads.  Once you  learn to identify the value of different types of Internet insurance leads, you’ll be able to identify those that best fit with your product offerings, enabling you to focus on only those leads that are likely to result in sales.

Insurance leads are what make the insurance industry go ‘round.  There are plenty of companies that will gladly take your money and give you leads, but there are very few that offer you the right customer service, quality of leads, training and technical support of a world class insurance lead company.   But if you interact and use the resources of the insurance lead company correctly, you can be quite successful.

Insurance lead companies make a business out of selling insurance leads, which consist of personal information from people who are looking for more information – or perhaps even a price quote – on a certain type of insurance.  They range from the completely unqualified leads that will never become sales, to the perfect leads that have their wallets out and ready to pay for insurance from you.  Of course, most leads fall somewhere in between those two extremes and it’s up to the lead purchasing agent to keep the insurance lead companies performing to their expected standards.

Even working with the best insurance lead company, remember it’s a numbers game.  For every 10 leads, maybe 4 of them are not qualified and not that interested.  But from the other 6 leads, you make 2 sales.  You should be very satisfied with these results and consider your experience over large numbers, not just by the last 2 leads you called.

The key to working with an insurance lead company over a long period of time is to make sure that both parties are happy at all times.  The only way to achieve this is by opening a line of communication with your lead generation company.

Before you even start, you should sit down with the insurance lead company and go over certain details, such as how many leads they’re able to send your way, how many times they sell their leads to other agents and what their technology is to ensure you’re getting a functional and accurate email address, phone number and first and last names.  They should have some sort of scrubbing technology in place to ensure that their quality is top notch.  Also, get the guarantee or credit policy in writing.

When first approaching a company about this matter, it helps to at least know the basics behind marketing and lead generation from the insurance lead company’s perspective.  When you’re up to 50 or 60 leads per week, you’ll find that it’s nearly impossible to track the quality very well, so you need to lay the right foundation on which to build a great relationship with your lead generation company.

Once you decide which lead company is right for you, you should spend some time learning a little about marketing in general.  It pays to be familiar with what the insurance lead company has to go through in order to generate the leads you’re going to use.  For example, are they soliciting through paid advertising or freebie giveaways?  If so, the lead may not be as well qualified as one generated through direct mail.  Use this information sparingly, because what happens at one company may not happen at others.

When it comes time to talk about price with the insurance lead company, remember that usually, the more leads you buy, the lower the cost.  While you immediately think of price per lead, think about all other things that are part of the contract you’re about to sign.  Do you like their bad lead replacement policy?  How about their marketing material?  Does it fit with the way you’d like to portray your company?

Just like anything else, what you get out of the relationship with your lead insurance company is what you put into it.  If you’d like to maintain a good relationship with their company, initiate a discussion that addresses all of your concerns and tries to work them out – otherwise, you’re in for a long and unsatisfying contract period.  So if the leads are not working for you, call and ask for their assistance before you just give up.