5 Tips to Sell Insurance Over the Phone

Want to boost your insurance agency sales? Then you’ve got to be calling prospects. Cold and warm calling is one of the most effective ways to sell insurance from your home or office. This is true for selling insurance of all kinds, from health to auto, life, and home.  

You’ll never grow your insurance agency if you aren’t calling prospects and inquiring about their insurance needs. But the phone can feel like it weighs a thousand pounds, causing you to freeze instead of dial. This fear will subside after you make enough calls to get comfortable talking to strangers as you offer your insurance services.

Everyone has different lines of insurance they are selling so we are not going to dive into specifics on how to sell life, property, or any other types of insurance, BUT if you need some help getting started in selling insurance over the phone, OR some tips to improve your phone sales game, then consider this blog your personal how-to guide. 

Let’s dive in! 

Tip #1 – Build Rapport With Your Prospect Before You Ask for the Sale

Many insurance agents out there think that selling insurance over the phone is all about coming up with a bunch of great insurance sales tactics, and then calling a list of insurance prospects and hoping they will be ready to buy when you call them.

Well, it’s not that easy! A lot of your prospects are going to be suspicious about why an insurance agent would randomly call them on the phone. So, it’s your mission to build rapport with your prospects before you ask for the sale. 

One way to warm up the call is to send the prospects email or physical mail before reaching out. Keep in mind that physical mail is on the rise again with QR codes becoming more commonplace in society, but more on that in a later marketing blog. Reach out to jonathan@insuredmine.com if you need some suggestions on warming up and nurturing insurance prospects.

The fact is that many of the prospects you call will not be ready to buy. It’s your job to help them see the need to buy your insurance or to schedule a follow up call to continue the conversation until they are ready to buy. 

Building rapport with your prospects before you ask for the sale will help you sell insurance over the phone much faster, while giving you a much higher chance of your prospect saying yes when you ask them for an appointment or the opportunity to quote.

Tip #2 – Cross Selling and Up Selling Insurance

One of the best insurance sales strategies is to sell additional insurance products to your current customers. It’s much easier to increase the billings for an existing customer than to sell to a new one. Selling an additional insurance product to an existing client is called cross selling. Selling an increased line of insurance like an additional vehicle or otherwise increased coverage, to an existing customer is called up selling. Both cross selling and up selling are two surefire ways to see success with selling insurance over the phone. 

You’ve already got previous history together so that rapport we talked about in step 1 is easier to reestablish. Think about it like this, when you sell to an existing customer, you are making a friendly warm call to someone you already do business with rather than a cold call to a complete stranger. Use this to your advantage as it will be far less nerve racking than a regular cold call, giving you more confidence to close the deal. 

Tip #3 – Give Away a Free Gift if They Take Action

This is a little different than the strategy mentioned above for warming up cold call prospects so let’s dive in here!

When a prospect fills out their name and email on your insurance lead generation form, they have indicated that they are ready to buy insurance. This will help you get them booked with an appointment faster when selling insurance over the phone.

You can entice your prospects to fill out a lead gen form by offering them a free gift. This gift can be an instant download of a free insurance guide (like this one), or a free insurance report and premium estimate. The more creative you get here, the better. Request a free list of 42 lead generation ideas from jonathan@insuredmine.com. 

This insurance sales technique is going to help you sell insurance over the phone much easier because it increases the perceived value of your offer in the eyes of insurance prospects who are ready to buy insurance. That means that your prospect will already be interested when you give them a call, making the deal much easier to close. 

Tip #4 – Use the Magic Words, “I Have a Question for You”

Here’s a question for you. How often do you ask your prospects if they are available to talk when you cold call them? Better yet, how often do you address the elephant in the room by admitting that your call is unexpected for your prospect, giving them the option to hang up or listen to your 30 second pitch? Questions like this show appreciation for your prospect’s time. 

If you don’t want to get hung-up on when selling insurance over the phone (as often), consider using the magic phrase, “I have a question for you.” Make your prospect the hero by giving them the power to control whether the call happens now or not. 

Tip #5 – Use the Right Insurance Agency Sales Tools

If you want your insurance sales strategy to be successful then you need to use the right tools. You will need to find the right Agency Management System (AMS) to manage your insurance agency from a general view. You will also need an insurance agency Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software that can help you track your sales efforts, manage your data both internally and for your customers, manage your team’s daily to-do list, and manage all communication within your insurance agency.

Bonus Tips – Thanks for your time & I’ll follow up with a calendar invite for next week.

Bonus tip #1: Don’t forget to say thank you. Customer service has changed a lot in recent years, and the tone of gratitude is all but lost unless it’s built into the ethos and training in an organization. Remember, a genuine thank you for your time goes a long way. 

Bonus tip #2: Unless you feel like it would ruin the relationship, always try to set up the next call while you have them on the phone. A post call email is a must, but if you try to use that as a tool to book the next appointment, you’ll lose multiple percentage points for chances to get that next meeting. Instead, use the momentum you have while you’re on the phone with them and lock in that next step.

InsuredMine – The #1 Insurance CRM.

So now that you know the basics of what you need to do to succeed in selling insurance over the phone, all that’s left for you to do is find the right insurance software. Luckily, you don’t have to look far to find the perfect Insurance CRM. We are great by ourselves or as a compliment to your AMS (Agency Management System). InsuredMine has everything you need to ensure that your insurance agency is set up for success. Click one of the buttons below to try InsuredMine for free or schedule a personalized demo today.