Optimize Your Closing in Sales Process for Insurance Industry

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(upbeat classical music) - Hi, I'm Kelly Donahue-Piro, and I wanna talk today about how to close more insurance sales in small commercial and personal lines. I'm gonna give you our top four biggest strategies, and you can match it up to see how close your agency's coming. The first one is we have to get out of our head that clients don't want to be on the phone with us. And so we miss building rapport, and skip right on into the insurance interrogation. And it's okay if you've done this, because I feel like for many agencies, you've never been given a clear plan. Doing two to three minutes of just rapport building, why are you shopping? What's causing you to look? What are you happy about with your current insurance? What don't you like? When are you going to be making your decision? These are all sales skills that help build up your close, but most importantly you're learning key information and bringing down some barriers for clients. When a client gets on and you just start asking them the VIN number, of course, they don't wanna be on the phone with you. They could do that online at home with a glass of wine in their pajamas. But instead they're stuck talking to somebody who is basically a robot. Now, another thing that you need to be thinking about with insurance is the idea of speed. Personal and small commercial, we do not have the luxury of time any longer. We need to make sure that we're quoting quickly. And we, in fact, really recommend an on-the-phone quote. It can be done in personal lines and some small commercial, some of the time, I can't say it can happen all the time, and I understand that. I'm not saying that 100% of the time, but if you got it down 80% of the time, you will see your closing rates skyrocket. We have an agency that's at 92% closing ratio with 78% that being the same day situation. Imagine what that could do, but you need to understand that people are not gonna wait. And especially, if we just gave them, peppered them with an interrogation of insurance questions, they're just gonna keep shopping until they find a connection. People call into an independent agent because they want that relationship. We are the least convenient way to buy insurance. Our third tip is going to be do not email that quote, which we've talked about before. Do not email that quote without a conversation. When you email the quote without a conversation, my mother does not know what water sewer backup is or any of the other coverages you put in there. And she's gonna look at one thing, which is the price and what's gonna happen is she's gonna make a decision if she ever talks to you again. But when you can get on the phone and explain things and modify things and work with the person on the quote, you can sell the quote while explaining it. We need to get out of our head that people wanna see it. People wanna see something they understand and you can email it to them after, but oftentimes after discussing it with somebody, you're gonna make modifications. And our fourth tip is you have to ask for the business. When we do secret shopper calls or listen to recorded phone calls, we all too often hear this unfortunate phrase, which is why don't you think about it and let me know? That to me is the absolute worst sales closing line I've ever heard because if I've done my job as an agent, there really shouldn't be anything for you left to think about. I'm basically saying go shop me, go find out if I'm the real deal. And I don't wanna do that. A better statement would be where can I send the application? Or how would you like to set up the down payment and lean into the close. But when you're not doing these things and you're inviting doubt into the situation, you're making your job harder. We often find that in personal lines and small commercial, it's small tweaks that can make a lifetime of difference. And I wanna make a special announcement today. In 2021, we're changing up our program offering. We have a six-month AppX Sales program and you can work with us right now with that in three ways. We have our online school, which is all do it yourself so you can learn on your own. And then we have our virtual and on-site programs. The virtual and on-site programs in 2021 will be part of a two-year ridiculously amazing agent program where we're only selecting 20 agents to be a part of. So they're gonna go through all of our programs in a very concise effort to make sure that we keep pushing on forward of the agencies that are the right market to go ahead and make them ridiculously amazing. But that doesn't mean it's a lost cause for you. If your agency is interested in our AppX Sales six-month program, we recommend you reach out immediately because we are still selling them right now and you can start any time next year. So it's not saying we've got to get going right now if there's an issue. We can start any time next year. So basically you're buying it so that you can lock it in and know that your team will get that sales training if you aren't interested in our bigger commitments. Anyway, we hope that you've enjoyed this. And we hope that you use these sales strategies because they will change your closing ratio. And every time you get a better outcome, your agency becomes more efficient, more profitable and more ridiculously amazing. (upbeat music)