This blog includes posts on lead generation, eMarketing, Web Marketing, SEO and other leading edge marketing techniques.
-Alan Blume
All posts with the tag 'insurance agency leads'
The 4-Phase Sales Process
Posted on January 14th, 2012 by Alan Blume
Many years ago, in an attempt to improve sales productivity and forecasting while reducing pipeline subjectivity, I created something called the 4-Phase Sales Process. It’s been very effective for my businesses and my clients’ businesses, and is a process which can be used by essentially any sales professional or business. This process provides a simple methodology to improve selling, reducing prospect subjectivity and increasing sales efficiency. The four phases (identify, qualify, present and close) create a fundamental selling foundation, which salespeople and businesses can gradually builds upon. It is an effective process for both virtual businesses and salespeople and traditional operations seeking to web enable their sales teams.
The 4-Phase Sales Process is the foundation of my new book, Sell More & Work Less: Web Selling Techniques Everyone Should Use. Salespeople and businesses can rapidly adopt and tailor this process to improve their current methods, helping quantify the sales process into a series of simple, measurable and easy to monitor steps. Within this process is something I call The Prospect Scorecard, a simple tool to help salespeople track and monitor the top of their pipeline. Some of the web sales and marketing topics in Sell More & Work Less include:
Integrated Marketing - Sell More & Work Less
* Building your prospect database and email list
* Reaching your target market through email marketing
* Leveraging warm calls for quality appointments
* Expanding reach through Social Media Marketing
For more information, go to Sell More & Work Less or The Prospect Scorecard.
White Hat Insurance Agency SEO Versus Black Hat Insurance Agency SEO
Posted on October 28th, 2011 by Alan Blume
White Hat SEO versus Black Hat SEO Definitions
Hopefully your insurance agency is now familiar with terms like insurance agency SEO, insurance agency search engine optimization or insurance agency search engine marketing, the process in which agents attempt to lift their websites to a top position on page one of Google or Bing’s search engine results pages (SERP). There are two basic approaches to accomplish improved search engine rankings, which can ironically (or iconically) be found in old Westerns. I’m referring to the old white hat versus black hat cowboy days featuring white hat actors like John Wayne and Clayton Moore (The Lone Ranger) against black hat actors like Jack Palance. For a more contemporary version, Luke Skywalker versus Darth Vader comes to mind, minus the hat for Luke. Fast forward to today and we’re now referring to white hat versus black hat SEO tactics. Hopefully your agency is not engaging in black hat tactics accidentally or otherwise. As with the movies of yesteryear, the black hat represents the villain, and the villain is usually vilified. Black hat SEO tactics can get your agency in trouble with the search engines, and there is no need to resort to these methods to achieve compelling SEO results for your agency.
Long Tail Keywords and White Hat Keyword Density
Insurance Agency Search Engine Optimization begins by creating a list of preferred insurance keyword phrases, often referred to as trophy words. Examples of this may include: California Liability Insurance, Massachusetts Business Insurance, New York Truck Insurance or Group Health Insurance. These phrases are called long tail keywords and need to appear on insurance agency websites in a variety of ways. Once your agency has determined the best keyword phrases (after reviewing them in Google AdWords or other keyword analytics tool), your agency should populate your website using your preferred keywords. This needs to be accomplished with your metadata (description, meta keywords, page title, etc.) and on the actual content which appears on your web page. Your agency should also measure “on page” keyword density. Each page should be optimized for one to three phrases. Experts and empirical data varies on this, but many consider 5% to 6% to be optimum density for the major search engines. Working within the boundaries of “reasonable” keyword density, meta best practices, quality inbound links to your insurance agency website and a robust social media marketing initiative will yield positive results for your insurance agency SEO web marketing plans.
Black Hat Methodologies, Link Building and Link Farms
This brings us to our first black hat alert. If your insurance agency web page were to continuously repeat your keyword phrase (Massachusetts Business Insurance for example) and were to do this 30 times in a 100 word page, your density would be abnormally high, and you would be keyword stuffing. The same would be true if you repeated Massachusetts Business Insurance five times in your meta description, or ten time in your alt image tags. Search engines can take note of this, resulting in the penalization or marginalization of that website page, which in turn will cause inferior rankings. Other black hat SEO approaches include Link Farms, Hidden Content and Gateway Pages. Let’s review each of these. Link farms are little more than a listing of companies and their website links. If you’re contacted by an organization that boasts they can provide “10,000 inbound links” to your website, you must carefully assess the type and quality of these links (and the company which is contacting you) to ensure there are no black hat tactics being employed. These days, Google and Bing are trending toward quality over quantity, and discount link farms in their complex ranking algorithms.
Hidden Content and Gateway Pages
Hidden content is another taboo, a good example of this is using both text and background that are the same color, allowing agencies to stuff “invisible keywords” on your website without taking up prime real estate. Search engines, however, are looking for this tactic, and if discovered, your website can again be penalized. Gateway pages should not be confused with legitimate landing pages. A landing page is appropriately optimized for your specific solution. For example, you can create a landing page for Professional Liability Insurance, featuring relevant content and appropriate keyword density exclusively for your PLI products and services. One could argue that Gateway Pages (sometimes referred to as Doorway Pages) originally had the same intent, but are now being abused by some companies, as they can be computer generated in the hundreds or even thousands. This refers back to the Link Farming or Link Building black hat tactic because the thousands of generated pages can include a “follow” link back to a designated website. This tactic was purportedly used by a major retailer over the last holiday season, which resulted in their website being removed by Google from Google Page One results.
Conclusion
Most agencies should leverage the old “crawl, walk, run” approach when it comes to search engine optimization, working first on relevant content with optimized meta, meta tags and keyword density, then supplementing these efforts with blogging, ePublishing, YouTube Videos and other Social Media Marketing campaigns. Make sure you or your marketing agency are not leveraging any black hat tactics and you will see your insurance agency SEO results consistently improve. And remember, no matter how pretty that big photo or image happens to be on your insurance agency website, these do nothing to help your SEO efforts. Make sure your website is balanced between graphical appeal and sufficient, relevant content.
Insurance Agency Key Performance Indicators – KPIs Critical for Your Producers and Agency
Posted on October 13th, 2011 by Alan Blume
KPI’s are Key Performance Indicators, and are used by organizations to evaluate performance. They are quantifiable measurements that can help rapidly determine historic, current and future performance, predicated upon the type of KPIs used and the platform selected to use them. For example insurance agency KPIs might include number net new clients, net losses, renewal growth, producer quotations, average book of business by producer, agency revenue, and revenue by employee. For the purposes of this article, however, we’ll focus on KPIs for insurance agency producers though these KPI’s will also be a key subset for agency executives and owners.
Key Performance Indicators should reflect the agency’s goals, and it’s very important to select KPIs which help rapidly indicate the tactical and strategic success of your sales efforts. For example, Producer KPI’s are noted below and might be very similar to the KPIs for many industry sales executives:
- New Commission Revenue
Insurance Agency Key Performance Indicators
- Renewal Commission
- Ratio of Net New Commissions to Renewal Commissions
- Average Book of Business by Producer
- Revenues by Lines of Coverage
- Total New Quotes
- Close Ratio (Ratio of Quotes to Closes)
- Closes by Lead Source
- YTD Revenue Growth (and year over year)
- Revenue by Employee
These Key Performance Indicators help measure your business, and offer indicators of past performance and future success. Year over year revenues compare current performance to past performance, while Web meetings and proposals are forward looking, an indicator of what your future business might look like. If your new prospect meetings have dropped by 20% over the last quarter from the prior quarter, you can be fairly certain that you will experience a drop in new business. However, if you experienced the same type of drop compared to a year earlier, you have a better indication that you are on track for comparable year over year sales.
KPIs can vary by agency, but if they are to be truly valuable to your agency, you must consistently and accurately define and measure them. KPIs should incorporate goals or targets to track and measure performance. For example, our company goal is to close 50% of our proposals and 25% of our web meeting prospects. We measure this goal against our KPIs for this category to track our progress. Your agency might have a goal to maintain a $1 Million book of business for each veteran producer. You might have a different goal for new producers. These goals should tie into your overall KPI tracking, offe
ring rapid insights into the health of your agency, with strong indications of future performance. These KPIs can then be measured year over year – offering accurate historical insights into your performance in mission critical areas. Larger agencies should consider using KPI rollups, where the sales, marketi
ng, accounting and service KPIs are tracked departmentally, with a few mission critical KPIs from each department rolling up to an executive list. This can be done manually or using an automated system.
What type of systems can be used for KPIs? Your agency can use anything from simple Excel spreadsheets, to CRM, to Agency Management Systems to sophisticated KPI dashboards. Selected Web metrics gleaned from Google Analytics or other web monitoring tools may also be used. KPI’s should be kept to a modest number for optimum effect. For example, tracking 10 KPI’s monthly is reasonable, but tracking 50 would result in information ov
erload. This is analogous to the dashboard of your car. Your measurements might include speed, fuel level, RPMs, odometer, engine temperature and oil level. That’s a total of six KPI’s which can be tracked while driving. Some cars offer more sophisticated KPI’s including, average miles per gallon, current MPG, tripometer, and distance to empty. These additional KPI’s may not be displayed constantly, as they may not be deemed critical to your driving. Think of your insurance agency KPI’s in the same way, closely monitoring only those which are critical to your success.
Effective Insurance Agency Closing Techniques – Insurance Agency Webinar
Posted on June 22nd, 2011 by Alan Blume
Join us for this unique webinar as our Insurance Agency Marketing team reviews Effective Insurance Agency Closing Strategies and Techniques. For each concept we review, we’ll share a real world example of these techniques and explain how they have resulted in improved close ratios. We think attendees will find these examples intere
Insurance Agency Closing Tools
sting and elucidating. A few of the stories we’ll share include:
- How can you close a sale by talking about an old wooden desk?
- How can you close a sale by working backwards?
- How can an explosion help you close a sale?
- How can you close a sale using peer pressure?
The techniques and tools discussed have consistently proven successful and will assist you in growing your book of business and improving your closing ratio. Topics include:
- Closing by telling stories
- Closing by leveraging testimonials
- Closing with numbers & statistics
- Effective Lead Handling Methods
- Prospect Scorecard qualification
Date & Time: July 13th, Noon ET
To Register: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/872194921
This webinar is applicable to any B2B insurance agency (or any B2B organization).
Insurance Agency Telemarketing – Appointment Setting Elasticity
Posted on June 6th, 2011 by Alan Blume
Insurance Agency Telemarketing
Recently a client of ours informed us they closed a $750,000 commission from one of the appointments we booked on his behalf. Yes, this was a commission, not a premium. That’s one of the largest individual sales produced from one of our appointment setting campaigns, and the sale occurred within the first year of the appointment setting campaign. This particular insurance agency telemarketing campaign is unique in a few ways. It is a dedicated appointment setting campaign and does not include an eMarketing or webinar component, and it leverages use of both an appointment setter and a senior StartUpSelling Vice President who further qualifies and validates every single appointment to ensure there is a compelling fit between the agency’s skills and the prospects needs.
There is an obvious elasticity when it comes to insurance agency telemarketing. The campaign noted above focuses on high level meetings with senior contacts at very large organizations, which results in perhaps 6 to 8 appointments per month. Some refer to this as whale hunting, and though this term may be politically incorrect, it is nonetheless a reasonably accurate metaphor.
Other insurance agency telemarketing campaigns focus on commissions targets of perhaps $5,000 to $10,000. Depending upon the industry and niche, these can result in 20 or more appointments per month, yielding much higher opportunity volume at lower renewal premiums. And in the middle, of these two targets is the middle market, commissions of perhaps $20,000 to $50,000 which requires appointment activity of approximately 3 or 4 appointments per week for effective results.
Insurance agency telemarketing, or in the case StartUpSelling’s specific version of insurance agency appointment setting, can still yield some impressive results. It has to be done well to be effective, that means no college student bullpen calling centers, and no incentives for appointment setters to aggressively book appointments. A long term approach is best, and campaigns will typically record their best result when accompanied by a professional insurance agency eMarketing and web seminar program. And it’s very important that producers utilize a simple and consistent qualification process. For those who have yet to implement a simple and measurable solution, they should try our Insurance Agency Prospect Scorecard. A free version of this is available on our Sales Tools Web Page http://www.startupselling.com/sales-tools.html, or for more information go to: http://www.startupselling.com/insurance-agency-marketing.html
6 Important Steps For Insurance Agency eMarketing Success
Posted on April 8th, 2011 by Alan Blume
Insurance Agency eMarketing remains a viable and effective method to increase insurance agency leads and improve an agency pipeline. eMarketing has been around for quite some time, well over a decade, though the tools have improved and infrastructure costs have declined since the advent of Cloud Computing.
- Create a Plan: Who is your target market? What size companies? What target titles? What is the value proposition your agency ultimately wishes to convey?
- Determine Topics of Interest: What types of topics will be of interest to your target contacts? What content is appropriate and compelling? If using webinars, video or vlogs, what speaker credentials will help convey your content in a succinct and professional manner?
- Create a Compelling eMail: A compelling eMail begins with a short and compelling subject line, includes short but interesting content and a clear call to action, and ends with a professional salutation. That said, this simple sentence represents the challenge for most agencies. Though the basics of insurance agency eMarketing are very simple, Step #3 includes many nuances which require expertise and eMarketing subject matter knowledge. Avoiding Bayesian poisoning, obeying the CAN-SPAM act, scrubbing emails, honoring opt-outs, and keeping your emails educational in orientation are all critical elements for successful insurance agency eMarketing.
- Sending Frequency: The frequency of eMail sends, sometimes referred to as eMail blasts, varies with the type of eMail and content an agent has selected. For example, for a monthly newsletter, I would suggest a single send each month, ensuring that newsletter registrants are included in a separate segment and excluded from ensuing monthly sends. Insurance Agency Webinar invitations can often command two sends while industry alerts can be done once a week. However, insurance agency eMarketers should refrain from weekly sends unless they are completely confident their subscriber list values the content and frequency. There are tools allowing subscribers to auto adjust their frequency.
- eMail Formatting and Testing: Browser testing, HTML versus text email testing (multipart mime), formatting, shouting and rush words are all important elements of insurance agency eMarketing. Make sure you send emails to various clients for testing including Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, etc. to ensure your emails are rendering correctly. Minimize HTML and graphics to improve delivery. And encourage subscribers to white list your sending address to optimize delivery. Your email solution should include a spam filter test to help determine if your email contains inappropriate words like “Free” or “Buy Now”. There are many other spam filter issues – make sure your email is composed correctly and limits boldfacing, colors and italics.
- Tracking: To track or not to track, that is the question. Tracking allows you to determine open rates, multiple opens and click rates. Tracking can also reduce delivery optimization and increase spam filter issues. Agencies can try some emails with tracking and others without to determine if there is a marked difference in delivery and bounces when tracking is utilized. Tracking when using split test methodologies can be highly effective if an agency employs experienced eMarketers or has outsource this marketing function to an experienced insurance marketing agency.
Cloud Computing Insurance Agency eMarketing solutions are plentiful and inexpensive these days. The challenge is using the tools correctly, not the investment in the tolls themselves. Most tools can do all the basics, some integrate with a platform, agency management system or sales force automation solution. Regardless of the tool selected, insurance agency web marketing best practices will only evolve if agencies and brokers invest in the eMarketing expertise needed to use these tools consistently, professionally and correctly. And if an insurance agency invests in this type of web marketing initiative, particularly if they are running insurance agency webinars in conjunction with the eMarketing program, they will build a strong web marketing foundation which will reap increased insurance agency leads and an improved long term agency pipeline.
Should You Hire an Insurance Agency Producer Without an Insurance Agency Web Marketing Program?
Posted on March 8th, 2011 by Alan Blume
Should You Hire an Insurance Agency Producer Without an Insurance Agency Web Marketing Program? This became my #1 ePublished article, seemingly touching upon a fundamental insurance agency chicken and egg dilemma – which should an agency invest in, more producers or better marketing programs. This blog offers a web marketing update of my original version.
The dilemma often begins at the top of the sales funnel. The insurance agent sales funnel often consists of suspects, prospects, presentations (or meetings), proposals, and ultimately closes (new clients). It’s called a sales funnel because the graphic used to describe this is a funnel, wide at the top (suspects), narrowing at the bottom (closes). The top of the funnel is normally filled with suspects, hopefully in profile suspects. Let’s say that there are 1,000 suspects at the top of your B2B (Business To Business) agency sales funnel. These suspects might have titles like CEO, CFO, Owner, President, SVP or CMO, and perhaps in a certain vertical market, the companies might be within a designated target revenue range of say $20 Million to $100 Million dollars, and may be in a geographic region, let’s say the Northeastern US. There are of course many other variables, but let’s stop here for the moment.
Whose job is it to fill the top of the insurance agency funnel? Some insurance agency marketing plans call for that to be done by the producers. This happens at many other types of firms’ too, particularly smaller organizations reticent to add marketing dollars to their current sales spending allocation. Many insurance agencies want their producers to cold call, network, attend business functions, community events and charity events to build their own pipeline, and fill the top of the funnel. In these cases, insurance agency marketing, or a better description might be insurance agency lead generation, is really being done by an insurance agency producer. This is a probable path to failure, as these new producers are often completely unprepared to tackle the changing world of lead generation as it migrates away from face to face networking and cold calling toward Insurance Agency Web Marketing, Insurance Agency Social Media Marketing, Insurance eMarketing, Blogging, SEO and Insurance Agency Web Seminar Marketing, to mention just a few of the new web marketing tools being utilized today.
According to many producers we speak with (and agency executives too), filling the top of their funnel can be an arduous process. That’s why so many new insurance agency salespeople fail; they are not savvy marketers and fail to fill up the top of their funnel. Insufficient qualified prospects at the top, invariably means inadequate results at the bottom. Why don’t insurance agencies and brokers invest more in web marketing? I think there are a few reasons.
- Sales spend: If an agency is paying a producer a base salary of say $50,000 and contributing to health benefits, overhead and certain expenses, they are already nearing an investment of $100,000 per year. Adding say $15,000 in marketing to this investment seems like it is simply more overhead.
- Some “C Level” executives in smaller firms simply don’t believe in marketing. In the insurance agency space, many still look at cold calling and personal networking as a pipeline panacea.
- Many insurance agency marketing plans and dollars simply focus on local events, traditional seminars and perhaps improving the look and feel of their web site. Web marketing is something they may not understand or simply don’t want to invest in yet.
- Many agencies lack a formal marketing department and are not comfortable outsourcing their marketing. This dearth of expertise creates a marketing void.
There are likely a myriad of other reasons, but the net results are the same, producers who don’t have quality leads flowing into the top of the funnel, won’t have sufficient sales flowing from the bottom. The results are easy to predict in that case, with large sales expenses and a low insurance agency return on their sales investment. The best advice for insurance agencies when it comes to hiring new salespeople is as follows. If you’re going to invest in three new agency producers, but not invest in marketing, consider investing in two new producers and using the savings toward a marketing support, insurance agency lead generation program specifically for those producers. And what if the budget is only sufficient to hire one new producer with nothing left over? Try convincing the producer to take a lower salary while guaranteeing a lead generation program to “insure” their success. Hiring a new producer without a lead generation program is like buying a new car, without sufficient funds to pay for gas. Insurance agencies and producers won’t go very far with that formula.
New article published on Insurance Agency Lead Generation, discussing insurance webinars, insurance agency websites, insurance SEO, etc.
Posted on January 18th, 2011 by Alan Blume
New article published on Insurance Agency Lead Generation, discussing insurance webinars, insurance agency websites, insurance SEO and social media marketing.
Excerpt: New agency leads are derived, or at least should result from a wide variety of sources. Some sources are more traditional, such as word of mouth, canvassing, old fashioned “snail mail” flyers, or telesales. Taking advantage of the new internet offerings opens up many new lead generation sources. Leveraging an insurance agency website to sell is one obvious lead generation tool, but other avenues include insurance agency webinars and insurance SEO to drive traffic, and utilizing insurance agency social media marketing, an important new frontier for any agent. These tools are available to any agency willing to make the commitment to use them effectively. Since insurance agency web marketing and lead generation will continue to grow in importance, it is important to examine these strategies thoroughly.
Insurance Agency Web Marketing & Insurance Agency Telemarketing
Posted on December 21st, 2010 by Alan Blume
Insurance agency appointment setting, sometimes referred to as insurance agency telemarketing can still offer a compelling ROI when used selectively for the support of certain insurance agency web marketing initiatives. Although telemarketing is considered a form of interruption marketing, somewhat antithetical to the web marketing mantra, it can still prove an important ingredient in an effective insurance agency web marketing recipe.
For example, let’s say that your insurance agency has an effective insurance eMarketing campaign, where you invite 5,000 contacts to your insurance agency web seminar. Of these 5,000, let’s say that 200 register for your webinar, and 120 attend. Ultimately that means your producers should followup with all 200 registrants and attendees, plus those who express interest through the insurance agency eMarketing campaign. That’s a lot of phone calls to be made, in fact, if done correctly that could represent over 500 outbound calls, since it often takes multiple attempts to reach a prospective client, something that already busy insurance agency producers might be reticent or unable to accomplish.
To deal with this conundrum, insurance agencies can hire a telemarketer or consider outsourcing this function to an experiences insurance marketing agency appointment setter. Regardless of the venue, the insurance agency is more likely to maximize appointments and optimize their pipeline opportunities by leveraging a well chosen appointment setter. The agency producer can then spend their time qualifying and closing as opposed to casting a broad net with 500 outbound phone calls. For more information on insurance agency telemarketing and insurance agency lead generation, go to: http://www.startupselling.com/lead-generation.html
Insurance Agency eMarketing And Insurance Webinar Checklist – 95 Checkboxes And Counting
Posted on November 24th, 2010 by Alan Blume
As a best practice, it’s a good idea for insurance agencies to create checklists for complex marketing tasks. This is hardly an innovative idea, as we see checklists used for everything from packing for a trip to cooking a favorite recipe to more complex tasks like the preflight checklists for pilots. Seven years ago, we created our first checklist to help ensure the creation of a successful insurance agency webinar, and the eMarketing campaign associated with these webinars. Our initial insurance eMarketing checklist was very helpful and quite thorough, with almost four dozen tasks to be checked off to ensure a successful campaign.
Today, seven years later, that same checklist has doubled in size. Some of these checkboxes are very simple, bordering on the ultra simple and mundane (spell check for example); others are more complex and take some time and consideration to proceed (Bayesian Poisoning). For example, here are just a few of our checkbox items (not in any particular order) which we must ensure are “checked off” to ensure our insurance agency eMarketing campaign and webinar will be properly executed:
- Create or use alternate domain name
- Check all links in the test email
- Spell check, then spell-check again in Word
- Add speaker photo and bio to insurance agency webinar landing page
- Create automated welcome message for the specific insurance webinar
- Avoid rush words (within or outside of contextual syntax)
- Watch out for Bayesian Poisoning, phrases which will inadvertently set off spam filters
- Create two different email subject lines for the a split test eMarketing campaign
- Schedule split test, send test emails for both split test samples
- Select final email based upon split test open and click through statistics
Of course this is only ten out of almost 100 check list items for a successful insurance agency eMarketing and insurance agency webinar campaign. Additional important check boxes including everything from the review of email bounces to the number of characters in a subject line. Granted, eMarketing and web seminar campaigns are an art and a science, but these days, there is plenty of science to be applied. Turning your campaigns into carefully planned events will help optimize the success of your insurance agency eMarketing and insurance agency web seminar program.