July 2009
Ask The Expert:
How soon should I hire a sales assistant?
Q: My current pipeline keeps my workday pretty full. But with the big plans I’ve got to ramp up my marketing, I’m worried about how I’m going to handle all the new files. So how soon should I hire a sales assistant?
A: Before you consider hiring a sales assistant, you first have to determine whether you’re working as efficiently as possible. For example, does it take you more than a minute to run multiple quotes for a prospect? How much time are you spending driving to appointments or searching for misplaced lead information?
In this environment, you need to put off any additional expenses as long as possible. And if they’re not necessary, you need to put it off permanently — or at least until the economy improves.
But how do you know whether or not you really do need to hire a sales assistant? Here’s a 10-point checklist that can help you guide your decisions:
1. Lead Generation
How much time, energy and effort does it take you to put enough leads into your pipeline? If you’re still spending time on ads and direct mail, you’re getting left behind by successful producers who just order high-quality health insurance leads with a click of the mouse.
Internet-generated leads let you skip all the waiting time, risks and waste of traditional marketing — and connect you immediately with genuine insurance shoppers. Best of all, the right lead provider can connect you with real-time leads… so you’ll be able to call prospects who still have insurance on their minds.
2. Lead Input
Are you still manually inputting your leads into a database or spreadsheet? How many hours does that eat up every week?
With the right health insurance lead management system, your leads can be easily (or automatically) imported into your database. You just have to log into your system, and all your lead data will be where you need it.
3. Kitchen vs. Phone Sales
In this age of high gas prices, it’s insane to drive to appointments with prospects. It’s nearly also as big a burden for them to come to your office.
You need to stay in your office and learn the art of selling over the phone and enjoying the big benefits this approach has to offer:
- It’s good for the environment.
- It’s good for your bottom line.
- In our Internet age, insurance shoppers increasingly prefer to buy online.
If you’re already doing phone sales, you may also need to develop your ability to close with one phone call. It’s not always possible, but the right (and ethical) “one-call closing” approach will help you shorten your over selling time.
4. Quoting Time
If you’re trying to offer clients the best options and running multi-carrier quotes, doing it manually can take at least half an hour for most agents. That’s a huge waste of time — especially when a powerful multi-carrier Quote Engine can run dozens of quotes in seconds.
Plus! With top platforms like the Norvax Quote engine, it remembers the plans selected for your most recent proposals. So when you re-connect with a prospect, you won’t have to start over. You can just pick up where you left off.
5. Proposal Time
Are you still organizing, printing out and mailing a proposal to prospects? Depending on how fast you are, it can take as little as 20 minutes… or as long as an hour or two.
With a lead management system like BrokerOffice, coupled with the Norvax insurance quote engine, you can generate proposals in seconds and email them to prospects just as fast. Using these web-based tools not only save you time; they also eliminate the cost of printing and mailing.
6. Application Submission
Are you manually submitting each new application for health insurance? It’s time to start using the direct e-application tools offered by many carriers. Some of the leading carriers actually now allow self-service online application by your client.
And many of these programs use smart programming to guide online applicants and check for errors that could delay underwriting. So check with your carriers to see if they have online application technology that can help you cut your submission time.
7. Lead Records & Tracking
You’re away from the office and need to contact a lead. What do you do? Yes, if you had a sales assistant, they can look up the file and give you the information you need. Well, if you had a lead management system like BrokerOffice, you can access all the lead data anywhere you can have Internet access — 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
You’ll also never have to worry about losing important prospect information with a web-based lead management system. BrokerOffice uses secured and backed-up servers. So even if your office operation is interrupted by a minor disaster, your online lead data will help you recover faster.
In addition, BrokerOffice helps you track your leads and lead provider. You can run real-time reports to see which lead sources are performing well…and which ones need to be replace.
8. First Contact With Leads
How many calls does it take you to make that first connection with a lead? If you’re relying on shared leads and they’re not delivered in real time, you’ve probably noticed that it takes several calls.
Here are three ways to improve your contact ratios with leads:
- Make sure you get real-time leads — and call them as soon as they hit your inbox.
- Use an Email Autoresponder to automatically send a welcome email to each new lead that enter your system… and prepare your new leads for your call.
- Try exclusive health leads to improve your contact and close ratios.
9. Continued Contact
A drip marketing email autoresponder, like LeadMiner, does more than just send an autoresponse. It can also help you stay in continuous contact with all your unclosed prospects and leads — even if you have hundreds or thousands of them. This drip marketing approach helps you guide more of these “long-term” prospects to a buying decision. And when they do, having your email in their inbox will increase the chances that they’ll have your contact information nearby when they are ready to buy.
10. Self-Service Prospects
Do you require all your prospects to deal with you and take up your time — even when they’d rather do it themselves? Top producers are now reporting that they’re receiving commission checks on business where they never spoke to the client.
Many consumers, but especially online shoppers, are used to buying products and services online… on their own. They’ll contact you if they have questions. But they’d rather do the research themselves and complete the purchase on their own.
To serve these high-efficiency prospects, however, you need an insurance agent website designed to meet their needs and demand. A Norvax agent website is designed for maximum conversion and comes with an embedded quote engine, so visitors can compare multiple plans and submit apps on their own.
Using the above tips can eventually increase your volume to the point that you may need to hire a sales agent anyway. But this 10-point checklist should give you ideas on how you can quickly improve your efficiency.
