How To Sell Home Insurance: 5 Things You Absolutely Must Have To Succeed

Creating a new insurance agency is a complex process, just like building any new business from the ground up. One of the most crucial—and often intimidating—parts is figuring out how to fund your brand new venture.

Securing insurance agency funding can be similar to acquiring funds for any other startup if you choose to look for small business loans through traditional bank processes. However, there is an alternative way to obtain a loan for an insurance agency that doesn’t exist for typical businesses.

Before you commit to a certain path, take a look at your options below. Depending on your situation, you might find an advantage in opting for one particular type of insurance agency loan over the other.

Insurance agency funding options: Which is best for your circumstances?

1. Get a small business loan through a bank or another traditional lender.

Like most startup owners, you have the option of walking into

Home insurance sales isn’t exactly an easy line of business to jump into without a plan.

The policies can sound intimidating to customers.

People get emotional at the thought of losing their homes and possessions.

And on top of all that, most customers need weeks to think over their options and discuss the decision with their spouse.

But if you have access to experienced mentors willing to share their proven methods for how to sell home insurance, you can skip the learning curve and start boosting business for your agency faster.

Your inner circle access starts here.

Below are five tactics used by Eric Kent, former exclusive agent and current Customer Success Manager at EverQuote, and Tyler Clackum of Clackum Family Insurance Agency that helped them both derive steady and reliable income from home insurance sales—and that you can use, too.

Want more insider insights about home insurance sales? For in-depth coverage of these agents’ expertise, check out our full ebook on the topic: Home Insurance Lead Scripts To Grow Your Agency’s Business.

How To Sell Homeowners Insurance: 5 Things You Absolutely Must Have To Succeed

1. High-quality Leads

Selling home insurance is going to be much easier if you’re reaching out to people who are actively searching for a new policy. If you’re contacting people who have no interest in switching policies (or who don’t even own a home at all), you can expect it will be a struggle to convince them to buy a policy with you.

The key is to work with warm leads.

These are people who know they want to buy home insurance and who have filled out a form requesting quotes from agents. They’re already deep into the research process, and they’re likely to commit to a policy when they find one that suits their needs.

You can purchase real time warm leads from EverQuote when you’re ready to get started.

2. A Definitive Lead Outreach Schedule

There’s a fine line between letting a lead slip through your fingers and pestering them a little too much.

There are nuances to when and how you’ll want to reach out to your leads, but a good rule of thumb is to reach out 25 times in the first 15 days. Be sure to use a mixture of phone calls, emails, and text messages (or any other information the prospect provided) to maximize your chances of getting a response. After the first couple of weeks, you can taper your attempts off if you still haven’t heard back from a lead. (You can find a complete outreach schedule in our eBook, Home Insurance Lead Scripts To Grow Your Agency’s Business.)

3. An Effective Closing Technique

If you can confidently steer the conversation exactly where you want it to go, you’re more likely to make a sale when you reach the finish line.

Our experts provided a number of excellent scripts you can follow word-for-word in this ebook, but in general, you’ll want to hit the following checkpoints as you talk with your lead:

• Offer a friendly greeting
• Build rapport with questions and shared tidbits of personal information
• Acquire permission and then access their credit and insurance scores
• Build a case for why the customer needs your product
• Set an expectation that the customer will end up buying a policy from you
• Politely ask for a sale
• If you successfully make the sale, ask your customer for referrals

4. A Plan To Navigate Roadblocks

There are numerous examples of things a potential customer might say to slow down the sales process. Our experts say they’ve heard these and similar roadblocks more times than they can count:

“I need to talk to my husband/wife first.”

“Now isn’t a good time.”

“I prefer to do this online.”

To overcome these, you’ll want to follow this formula:

• Acknowledge the customer’s stated problem.
• Validate it to show them you understand.
• Present a solution that works for both of you.

For instance, you might say, “I understand now isn’t a good time to talk. Would this afternoon at 4 p.m. work better for you?”

5. A Performance Evaluation Process

It’s tough to gauge whether your sales are improving unless you keep track of your own performance over time. You can measure factors such as your quotes given per day, your average talk time during calls, and your adherence to your planned scripts to make sure you consistently trend in the right direction.

These metrics can be early indicators that you’re on the right track even if your total sales haven’t yet begun to snowball.

Need a detailed step-by-step of how to start with a list of warm leads and finish with some successful home insurance policy sales in your pocket?

The points we covered above are bite-sized tips meant to start you off on the right foot if you’re just beginning to branch into home insurance sales or are looking to improve your home insurance sales results. If we expanded on the nuances involved in each of these steps, the information could fill a whole eBook.

And in fact, it already has.

We recently published an eBook (available for free download here) titled Home Insurance Lead Scripts To Grow Your Agency’s Business that goes in-depth on what you need to know to turn a list of leads into a successful base of customers for your business.

It will teach you:

• How and when to contact your leads
• What to say when you get a lead on the phone
• How to close the deal even when the customer shows some hesitation
• More metrics to keep track of your progress

Pick up your copy here, and start selling home insurance just like the pros do.