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?