How Many Insurance Leads a Day Should an Agent Be Taking? Understanding “True Cap”

How many insurance leads should producers be working?

If you asked 100 insurance agents the question - how many new internet leads should a producer receive each day? - you would undoubtedly receive a wide range of answers. While having sales producers each work 10+ leads a day might seem like par for the course for many agents, for others it would be overkill, only serving to overwhelm their team members and make for a poor return on investment. And still for other agencies, 10 leads a day per producer would be woefully inadequate, leaving the producers with not enough opportunities to hit their revenue goals. 

But how do you know if you and your team members are working the right amount of insurance leads each day? What if you have hybrid (sales and service) producers? What about new team members? With so many possible scenarios for insurance agents working internet leads, I wanted to outline some strategies that you can use to find your “true cap” – the amount of new leads that your agency should be receiving each day – based on common agency use cases. Understanding “true cap” can help you understand how to best maximize your team’s productivity potential by ensuring that producers are working the right number of leads. This not only sets them up for success, but also helps maximize lead ROI – helping ensure that producers are working the optimum amount of leads and are not overwhelmed. This way you are making the most out of every dollar invested in purchasing leads.

What is “True Cap?”

Simply put, “true cap” is what an agency’s optimal daily volume of leads should be. So for example if an agency’s “true cap” is 40, they should set their EverQuote Pro account to receive no more than 40 new internet leads each day. True cap is determined based on the experience and sales acumen of each producer, what type of producer they are (meaning are they sales focused or are they a sales and service focused “hybrid” producer), how many producers are on the team, and the technology being used. True cap helps agents understand exactly how many leads their producers should be working each day to give their agency the best chance to succeed and drive the most return on investment.

How to Determine Your True Cap

There are a number of factors that go into determining your true cap:

• • Budget - what is your budget for internet leads?
  • How many sales producers are on your team?
  • What is the tenure/experience level of each producer? 
  • Sales acumen of the producers – are there any sales “rockstars?”
  • Responsibilities of producers – are your producers just doing sales, or sales and service?
  • Does your agency employ a Lead Management System (LMS)?
  • Is the agency using the LMS to its fullest potential?
  • Do you have daily activity goals for your producers? If so what are they?

But how do these factors impact an agency’s “true cap” and how do you determine what that number should be? I’m going to lay out a system that you can use for calculating your agency’s true cap as a good rule of thumb.

For each type of producer you can start with a minimum base number of leads that each should be receiving per day. Using this base number for each producer, you can then adjust that number to fit each producer’s specific situation.

Hybrid Sales/Service Producer: 5 leads per day is a good place to start for a hybrid sales/service focused producer. If the producer is highly experienced or particularly good at selling, you can increase that number up to 10 per producer.

Sales Focused Producers: with 100% sales focused producers, 10 leads per day is a good base number to start from. If the producer is highly experienced or if they have high sales acumen, you should increase that number (as your budget allows) up to 20 leads per day. This is also dictated by the technology your agency is using. If you are employing a Lead Management System (LMS) to deliver leads immediately to producers, this will increase the number of leads each can work successfully. A highly experienced sales producer with an effective LMS and sales process in place can generally handle working up to 20 leads per day.

New Hires: with newly hired sales focused producers, it’s best to start off with a lower daily volume of leads compared to your more tenured sales-focused producers. So instead of starting with 10 leads a day as a base, for the first 30-60 days the producer should be getting anywhere from 5 to 10 leads a day depending on your technology (LMS), budget and the sales person’s experience and sales ability. If the new producer is doing well with 5 leads a day after their first week, move them up to 7 leads per day. If they’re having great results with 7 leads a day, move them up to 10 leads a day. Once they’ve established they can handle 10 leads a day effectively, you can transition them to receiving the same amount of leads as your tenured sales producers.

Budget: obviously internet leads have a cost associated with them. And agents can only purchase as many leads as their budget allows. So your overall lead budget must be taken into account as well. For example if you have 4 experienced sales-focused producers, with an efficient LMS system, your maximum true cap would be 80 leads a day (20 per producer). However, if your budget only allows for 60 leads per day, you can reduce to 15 per producer until your budget allows you to increase that number.

Technology: as previously mentioned, agencies effectively using a Lead Management System (LMS) to deliver leads immediately to producers (and trigger automated actions) can increase the number of leads each producer can handle. With an effective LMS and sales process in place, producers can handle more leads than they would otherwise. An LMS with a proven sales process can help producers work up to 25% more leads than they would without an LMS.

Lead Connection Service (LCS) and/or Live Transfer Calls: for agents using EverQuote’s Lead Connection Service (LCS), where EverQuote’s top-notch telemarketing team works your leads for you (transferring the customers to you once they are ready for a quote), you can adjust your volume cap to work up to 50% more leads than with traditional data leads alone. So, for example, if you typically assign 20 internet leads per sales producer per day, with LCS handling the initial lead outreach, you can increase that number by 50% – so 30 leads per producer per day. The same goes for live transfer calls. Since producers are delivered the lead only once they are live on the phone and ready for a quote, they do not have to spend the time and effort required to dial out and attempt to get in contact with these leads, thus allowing them to work more leads than they would otherwise. So, for example if a producer’s typical daily volume is 15 leads, you can expect them to be able to work at least 50% more with live transfer calls. So if they receive 10 data leads each day, they should be able to handle at least 7-8 additional live transfer calls per day.

Establishing your agency’s true cap is not an exact science – it’s more a process, testing what works based on established norms and then adjusting to fit your agency’s specific needs. Not all producers will cleanly fit into the guidelines we’ve laid out – some will be able to work significantly more leads, others will work less. It’s all a matter of what works well and drives the most return on investment for your agency. Use our guidelines as a starting point and then adjust as necessary. In no time you’ll have cracked your agency’s “true cap” and will be on your way to seeing maximum results with internet leads.