Insurance Appointment Setting Services - Boost New Customers | Renewals | Commissions
Insurance appointment setting services is a means for an agent to efficiently increase business development, through more prospect presentations, closings and sales. Specifically, outsourcing appointment setting allows an insurance agent to quickly pre-qualify prospective customers, shortens the sales cycle, increases productivity, revenue, and profitability. Whether the appointment starts with a telephone call or an informal face-to-face over coffee, outsourcing insurance appointment setting services helps speed up the process of finding and converting prospects into customers.
So, let’s discuss more about what it is, where it fits in, the benefits and related factors you should consider before moving forward outsourcing appointment setting services for your insurance business.
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Insurance Appointment Setting Services Overview
Appointment setting is part of the sales development process of an insurance business. That is to say it is in charge of the front-end of the sales cycle: identifying, connecting with, and qualifying leads. Basically this involves cold calling prospects and following up with top-of-funnel leads to schedule sales appointments for an agent who will deliver a detailed sales presentation.
The purpose of the appointment setting is to delegate the prospecting of sales leads, allowing the agent to spend time only on pre-qualified sales opportunities.
Appointment setting is crucial for any insurance business since sales leads are a key element of its success. Because the sales cycle begins by finding suspects that becoming prospects, which then become qualified sales leads. Consequently, the sales appointment serves as a basic step of converting pre-qualified prospects into customers.
Difficult Part Of Business Development
Appointment setting is considered to be one of the most difficult parts of business development and is a major challenge to an insurance agency’s growth. That is to say, this is the most typical barrier in growing a company since new sales won’t be possible without first directly speaking to a prospect. Consequently, many agencies choose to use insurance appointment setting services to solve this issue.
Why Should Your Insurance Agency Do This?
Whether you are an insurance broker or agent, you should be more focused on closing sales and not making cold calls. Specifically, this is the job of an appointment setter. Consequently, if you spend more time on appointment setting rather than selling, YOU ARE NOT SELLING. Basically, outsourcing insurance appointment setting services gives you more time to close sales and grow your commissions.
Altogether, once you considered the above, here are some of the primary advantages and benefits of insurance appointment setting services.
Insurance Appointment Setting Services Benefits
As mentioned insurance appointment setting services offers a variety of potential benefits to your company. Accordingly, based WHY you choose to outsource will determine which benefits are most relevant and important to you.
1 – Insurance Appointment Setting Services Speeds Up The Sales Cycle
As a broker or agent, if you are setting your own appointments you could be spending more than 50% of your time generating leads and scheduling meetings with potential clients. Instead, by outsourcing appointment setting services, you can double your time spent in face-to-face meetings and increase the number of customer closings. Additionally, when an outsourcing provider is generating appointments with pre-qualified consumers who are genuinely interested in your portfolio of insurance services, your job will be easier, you will be more motivated and you will close more sales.
Appointment setting requires research, searching homeowners listings (consumer home, auto, and life insurance), and lots of cold calling, which takes time and results in a high level of rejection and stress Consequently, with a limited number of hours in the day, that means you are not focusing on closing the hot deals, personal networking or getting referrals.
Consumer insurance selling is a “people business” and you need to have a sales team that knows how to handle the process from prospecting to signing the insurance policy. Because there are different skill sets and experience required, very few will master the seven processes of selling.
It is better to save time by outsourcing insurance appointment setting services to a provider with personnel trained and experienced to follow the above process. As a result this makes better use of your limited time and will to speed up the sales cycle.
2 – Appointment Setting Keeps Your Sales Pipeline Full
Your sales pipeline refers to the stages that you go through to convert a prospect into a customer. Basically it identifies where things really are, in terms of sales, and what’s being done at each stage.
This is in contrast with your sales funnel which reflects your prospect’s behavior. Simply put, your sales funnel represents the actions they take from awareness to signing up with you as their insurance agent.
On the other hand, your sales pipeline identifies the actions taken by you and your sales team. Basically, for you and your team, it is about getting the leads, qualifying them, and eventually closing the deal.
Your sales pipeline starts with prospects that need to be found, then qualified, and then converted to leads (appointments). So how do you consistently do that? When you focus on lead generation, you are not closing deals. When you are closing deals, you are not focusing on lead generation. All in all, it is either feast or famine.
Both sales activities need to be done on a balanced, consistent basis. Also, as briefly discussed, there are different skill sets required for each type of sales activity. Consequently, as a broker or agent, you probably use your limited hours in a day focusing on closing immediate deals, working closest to the dollar. Likewise, using insurance appointment setting services keeps the sales pipeline growing with leads. While you keep focused on sales prospects most likely to generate sales commissions.
3 – Appointment Setting Requires A Different Skill Set
It should be obvious that not all salespeople are built the same. Whereas some excel on the telephone, others thrive when meeting prospects, and some ACTUALLY enjoy the challenge of cold calling. Basically, if you don’t like or are not good at cold calling then you simply SHOULD NOT do it. Because cold calling is a very poor use of your specialized, high-value personal skills.
Appointment setting requires gathering data, repetitive dialing, persistence, and other skills that most insurance agents dislike doing. Rather, they want to shine in negotiations, close deals, and be the hero, not do drudge work.
Outsourcing insurance appointment setting services can help achieve the best results versus an in-house solution (you). Because they employ professional appointment setters who cold call, pre-qualify the prospect, and know the techniques to set appointments daily.
They have the training, experience and mindset to consistently produce results. Accordingly they will tell the prospect (homeowner) just enough to grab attention and then suggest an appointment to expand further. Then, you take over to close the deal. Basically each offers specialized skill sets that should work together.
4 – Insurance Appointment Setting Services Is Scalable And Cost Effective
Insruance appointment setting services is often cost-effective for an agent with limited experience and sales/marketing resources. Because appointment setting activities may be initially small (think pilot-project) requiring only a small budget and investment of resources.
Start-up time for appointment setting services is less than investing in an in-house staff. Particularly considering recruitment, training, facilities, and technology acquisition. Consequently, fast completion and review help you determine whether outsourcing appointment setting services are cost-effective, producing the results expected.
The insurance appointment setting services provider may offer a performance-based fee structure after completing the initial pilot project. For example, your costs may be a fee per qualified sales appointment or live transfer to your mobile telephone.
An insurance appointment setting services company can scale their services according to the demands of your business and budget. For example, let’s say you want to start with a small pool of prospects and gauge the results first. Then, you can broaden your outreach as they can scale up their services.
In summary, outsourcing insurance appointment setting services allows you to manage costs, reduce risks and provides clear metrics of the results and return-on-investment.
DISCLOSURE: Nexus Teleservices is a Nearshore Outsourcing Appointment Setting Services business provider.
5 – Insurance Appointment Setting Services Provides Measurable Results
Insurance appointment setting services provide measurable business goals. Particularly both qualitative and quantitative goals are used since appointment setting services lend itself to highly measurable results.
Using your appointment setting provider data, plus your own, you can make adjustments to get the highest ROI.
Here are some basic appointment setting quantitative goal metrics:
- Calls/Representative Hour
- Contacts/Representative Hour
- Qualified Appointments/Representative Hour
- Cost/Qualified Appointment
- New Customer Conversions/Qualified Appointment
- Cost/New Customer
Do not be surprised if you do NOT have similar in-house data for comparison.
Insurance Appointment Setting Services Conclusion
Insurance appointment setting services work. Basically an insurance broker or agent chooses to outsource appointment setting services to increase prospect presentations, closings and sales.
Insurance appointment setting services speed up sales, keep the sales pipeline full, are scalable, cost-effective, and offer measurable results. In brief, bcontributes to your personal success.
Please call us at (888) 339-6699 to discuss how our insurance appointment setting services will serve your business needs or Contact Us.