Before the dawn of technology and the Internet, insurance brokers and agents used traditional methods to acquire sales leads. Let’s discuss a couple of them.
Direct mail has actually played an important marketing tool long before emails were invented. But even to this day, a direct mail campaign that is well targeted and well-produced can still be a very effective form of generating leads. In fact a strategically focused direct mail was used not only by insurance companies. A lot of other companies made use of this marketing tool from supermarkets to beauty product companies and from travel agencies to real estate.
Direct mail fundamentals are very basic. First off is you have to know your prospect. It’s when you’ve finally identified your prospect that you can proceed to developing a message specifically for them, a message that will catch their interest enough for them to act on your offer.
Telemarketing is another method on the other hand requires a salesperson to solicit potential customers to purchase a company’s services or products by the use of the phone and with the boom of the Internet, telemarketing has come to include the use of Webconferencing as well. Sometimes, telemarketing agents are replaced by a recorded sales pitch that’s programmed to play over the phone through automatic dialing.
But now that Internet has become a huge part of a lot of people’s lives, insurance brokers can now also get their potential clients through internet leads. Online lead companies have mushroomed all over the World Wide Web over the recent years and these online vendors main business is to sell “leads” or information of potential customers to interested insurance brokers and/or agents.
Not all insurance brokers are actually all for Internet leads. Some of them love it because lead companies deliver valuable prospects to their inbox in real time, meaning as soon as a prospective insurance shopper inquires via the lead company’s website, the information gathered is directly forwarded to one of the insurance broker clienteles of the company.
Some insurance brokers hate Internet leads as they think that lead companies take away their customers, the people that they had worked so hard to win over. Some also have developed great distrust and dislike over Internet leads because they were given bad phone numbers and unqualified buyers.
Whether you love them or hate them, the real issue with Internet leads is the quality of the generated leads. The trust worthy online lead companies addresses this issue by exerting more effort to screen out the calls they receive.
Some insurance brokers on the other hand after getting frustrated with lead companies have decided to generate their own Internet leads, competing with the lead companies through developing their own insurance related website.
Will Internet leads ultimately change the way insurance brokers and other types of sales agents do business? The answer to this question however is far from certain. But at the end of the day, successfully closing a sale relies heavily on cultivated relationships whether it was made online or offline.