Insurance Sales Lead
Understand how the prospecting ladder works

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Why life at the top of the ladder provides more
income and less work.

The best insurance sales lead is the referral. Why? Because warmer (prospects) called referrals, require fewer phone calls and create more sales. But how do you get there?

You need to understand how a poor life insurance prospecting system can impact your income. It is unfortunate that many insurance sales training programs gloss over or even ignore this most important aspect of your life insurance career.

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Understanding the insurance prospecting ladder.

An insurance sales lead Is generated in a variety of ways. Unfortunately many Insurance sales training programs ignore or don’t spend enough time on this most important aspect of selling life insurance.

In my opinion, this is the do or die arena. You can have the worst presentation in the world but as long as you have people to tell your story to, you will make sales.

Generating an ongoing supply of Insurance sales lead(s) creates your inventory of prospects.

So let’s examine how much inventory we need to have each week if we want to generate 10 selling interviews per week. These numbers are based on my personal selling experiences and insurance recruiter days. I have my planning books that go back to day one when I started selling life insurance, as well as data from training and recruiting for over 25 years.

Keep in mind that these life insurance prospecting numbers are based on someone having a decent phone calling presentation. During your insurance sales training program, your company should have provided you with a telephone prompter to help you with this process.

An insurance sales agent calling on cold names may have a 12 to 1 appointment ratio, meaning that you will need to call 12 people to end up with one interview, whereas a person using the referred lead concept (warmest names) should have a 2-1 ratio which means that person needs to only call about 2 people to get an interview.

Now let’s examine the different degrees of prospects (insurance sales lead) you can call and how it can impact your telephone calling time, your work day and your insurance agent salary or commission earnings.

I call this the insurance prospecting ladder. When a new agent is starting out, they usually start at the bottom of the prospecting ladder, and as you grow in the business, you learn how to work your way up this ladder. The faster you can get to the top, the easier this business becomes.

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Climbing up the prospecting ladder for better leads.

Lets look at why you want to climb to the top.

Below is an example of the calls to interview ratio based on type of lead.

Warmest Names

      Ratio........ Type of lead (warmest at top to coldest at bottom)

• 2-1........ A referred lead.

• 3-1........ eyeball to eyeball contacts.

• 4-1........ A name developed through a seminar.

• 5-1........ A name provided through an association

• 7-1........ A name with a one need. new baby, new house, new job
  

• 12-1....... Just a name, no information, a cold call, name purchased

Coldest Names

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So as you can see, a new person just starting out may have to call 120 people a week to get 10 selling appointments.

Whereas a person using the referred lead concept will only have to call 20 people a week to get 10 interviews set up. As you can see by this illustration warm insurance sales leads are the best.

Another aspect of calling on referred leads vs. cold names is that your closing ratio will be better with the referred leads than the colder leads. A referred insurance sales lead should generate about a 1 to 2.5 closing ratio vs. a 1 to 4 closing ratio on cold calls.

How does this closing ratio impact you?

What does this mean to you?

It can mean about 4 sales a week vs. 2 sales a week. In other words, it creates the opportunity for you to double your income, by using referred leads.

Your objective is to work your way up this life insurance prospecting ladder as you grow in the business.

Try and get to top as fast as you can. Work smarter not harder. Learn how to get organized.

Learn and Earn

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