5 Best Insurance Sales Closing Techniques [DATA]

Taking an inbound lead and turning it into a bound policy is an art. Learning to listen to your prospective customers’ needs and masterfully close deals takes time and practice.

But there’s also a bit of science behind reaching more prospects and closing more sales. Two seemingly simple things—when and how often to call leads—can have a huge impact on the success of your agency by allowing you to bind more policies.

Now we know that there are a million different outreach cadences out there—some with only a few touch points, some with a bunch. Some say call a lot, some say email a lot. And it's certainly true that what might work for a captive agent with one producer in a small midwestern city might not work for the multi-office independent agent running a team of producers. But despite the plethora of potential approaches, there are some general rules of thumb and best practices, especially if you need help getting started on the path to refining your own perfect outreach process.

Based on the results of multiple studies, we’ve put together four simple, proven insurance sales closing techniques you can use to help boost your lead revenue by up to 128%. Here they are in a nutshell:

1. Call fast.

Dial out to the lead as soon as possible from the time you receive their contact information. Why is this important? According to extensive data analysis conducted by Velocify, calling within the first minute of receiving a lead can increase the likelihood of conversion by over 400%. Every minute you wait after that drops.

2. Call within the first hour.

Even if you can’t contact a lead within the first few minutes, when your chances of conversion are greatest, you should still aim to dial out as soon as possible within the first hour—this is still seven times better than contacting them the second hour.

3. Call often.

Pick up the phone several times during the first two days, and continue calling throughout the first two weeks. The magic number for how often you should call? Six times. Both InsideSales and Velocify found that more than half of all converted leads are contacted after the first call and that 93% of converted leads are contacted by the sixth attempt.

4. Don’t just call—send emails, too.

In addition to calling, you should be emailing your leads throughout their life cycle. Sending emails to your leads can increase your odds of making contact by 16%—that’s a huge increase for something as simple as sending an email. Even better, most of these emails can be automated and systematized, so you aren’t sending one-off emails to every new prospect. In our free whitepaper, we walk you through exactly when you should email, and the number of emails to send to give you the most opportunity to convert leads—download it here.

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5. Call at the right time.

Timing is everything. If you’re choosing random times for producers to pick up the phone, you’re missing a big opportunity. There is a proven method of which days and times you should call prospects in order to get them on the phone—you can learn what that call cadence is here. You’ll also find out how much higher the conversion rates are by following this proven call cadence vs. haphazardly calling leads.

There’s a lot more to these points that you need to know to use them effectively. Want to learn more?

This article only briefly introduces five proven methods for insurance sales closing techniques for agents—to get all of the details, and the processes to make these techniques successful, you need to check out our free white paper, Binding Inbound Leads: Using Contact Strategy To Bind More Business. You’ll get all the details on best practices for each tip backed up by data. Just click the link below to download it now!