If you ask other insurance agents about their experience with insurance lead programs, you will get responses from “great” to “terrible” even about the same program!  How can that be?  Because 8o% of the value of the lead depends on what the agent does with the lead.  If you think that you can just call the lead and say “I understand you want to buy life insurance,” for get it. You must have a LOT more finesse than that and a great deal more sales skills.   The experienced agent who has honed his sales skills, knows how to ask appropriate, penetrating questions and engage the prospect can turn a name from the phone book into an appointment.  The inexperienced agent who has no sales training can use the best insurance lead programs in the world, but not knowing how to work the leads, will report that the leads are terrible.

Most agent don’t understand the paragraph above.  They think that lead programs should just deliver new clients.  But insurance lead programs can only deliver prospects that have interest.  The exception is appointment setting programs which actually set the appointment for you.  of course, this are infinitely more expensive (insurance lead programs typically offer leads for $20 to $30 while appointment setting systems will charge $60 to $100 per appointment).   But even with set appointments, you will have two issues:

1.prospects not home when you show for the appointment (it’s my philosophy if YOU are not the one to set the appointment, you have no rapport and the prospect has no commitment to you)

2. even with a set appointment, you are a total stranger and if your sales skills are not top notch, you won’t make a sale.

With the above warnings presented, let’s provide a few guidelines to find quality insurance lead programs:

1. The prospect should have expressed interest not more than 10 days ago.  More than that and the lead is stale.  Even with that said, we have agents that ask our company for our old leads, those more than 10 days old and they have success with them.

2. The prospect should have expressed interest in insurance without being coaxed.  For example, if the prospect replies to an ad in a magazine, an ad on the Internet a mailer that they must fill out and return, this is indication that the prospect has genuine interest in the insurance offer as they had to respond.

3. Quality insurance lead programs will make best efforts to deliver prospects that are qualified.  For example, if the prospect sees an ad in a magazine and the ad asks for age, or income or health conditions, the prospect may not tell the truth with personal questions.  Additionally, if the magazine is targeted at people between age 30 and 50, there is no way to control someone 75 years old getting the magazine and replying. The insurance lead generation company has attempted to get you the prospect profile you desire but cannot guarantee it because they cannot control which prospects reply to the offer.

There are things you can do to increase your success with insurance lead programs:

With a business like the insurance sales business, which is so dependent on the amount of sales registered, if you want to build a long-term business, it’s in your best interest to be consistent with your lead flow.  Without consistency, you won’t be able to forecast sales, decide what your staffing will look like or be able to invest in your business.  So when you decide to look for legitimate insurance lead programs, this is one thing that you should keep in mind.

When you get to the point where you’re discussing the lead source’s practices with them, you should always bring up the question of lead exclusivity.  If they’re going to be shared leads, how often do they resell them?  You may be surprised by the answer, because some companies may resell the leads up to ten times, leading to a very stale lead, very quickly.  There are two numbers you should be aware of – the number of agents that will be sold the lead and the average number of agents that end up buying the leads.

Exclusive leads are no different.  Many insurance lead programs usually resell their exclusive leads over time, eventually making them shared leads.  If you’re going to go down this path, you must know what your time line will look like to close the sale.  If it’ll take you two months to reach the lead and the program will start reselling them in one, you’ll be paying for a competitive advantage you can’t lose.

However, even the most experienced insurance  lead generation companies require that you do your own due diligence.  Before signing with anyone, you should go back to your sponsor company and ask around to see if anyone has used the lead generation company before.  Try visiting online forums to see if anyone has been talking about their reputation lately, and if they have, what they thought of them.  You should also check the Better Business Bureau and do a Google search to see what comes up for the insurance lead programs you’re considering.

Finally, you should have a good feeling for the technicalities of the company’s insurance lead programs.  How will you receive your leads?  Will they arrive on a CD in the mail?  If so, will you be required to load them into your CRM system manually?  Do they scrub their leads for accuracy and replace the leads that have bad contact information for free?

With so much riding on the quality of the insurance lead programs you’ll be using, you simply can’t afford to not check into the validity of the details and the customer service reputation of the program you’re considering.