How Outsourcing Lead Generation Makes For Better Business

06 Sep How Outsourcing Lead Generation Makes For Better Business

Keeping an insurance sales company safely in the black means feeding your representatives a consistent source of high-quality leads. There’s a lot that has been written about how to source good leads, but the one thing all of these strategies have in common is that they require a lot of time and energy. Many insurance sales companies, hoping to conserve their valuable resources to use elsewhere in their operations, are opting instead to employ professional and experienced lead generation services that will take on this time-intensive work and effectively allow you to gain years of lead generation experience – instantly. This week, we’re making the argument for why this choice is a solid investment for any insurance sales team hoping to improve the quality of their leads and focus on the real goal: making sales.

Your agents have a special skill. Each and every sales agent gets hired because they possess a special knack for communicating with prospects, helping the prospect feel confident in your company, and securing their business. A sales agent’s skill in speaking with clients is invaluable to your agency, and should be used to your advantage. However, an agent with a talent for communications may not possess the skills required to seek out high-quality leads, and instead are only successful at closing. Employing a lead generation service specializing in finding and assessing leads that are qualified and enthusiastic about hearing an agent’s pitch allows your agents to show their true colors and focus on what they do best.

There’s only so many hours in the day. There’s no way around it – finding good leads takes a lot of time and patience. Even if an agent is multi-talented and knows how to track down and assess their own leads, doing this work will dilute their performance in the long run. Managing an insurance company requires a lot of energy. Agents must be scouted, hired and trained to communicate your company’s message and be able to explain your policies backwards and forwards. Outsourcing lead generation allows companies to focus on bigger priorities like educating your agents to be the best representatives of your company they can be, planning new campaigns, and securing sales. Surveys show that expertise in lead nurturing results in a 50% increase in sales-ready leads, along with a 33% decrease in their cost (HubSpot).

There’s a lot of bad data out there. There are many data firms that will attempt to sell you lists of contacts at bargain prices, and many insurance companies have been tempted by this seemingly easy way of acquiring a large amount of leads instantaneously. But this approach, as many agents will attest, is usually very risky. To get high-quality leads out of such lists actually requires a lot of additional time and work on the part of your sales team: the data must usually be scrubbed thoroughly to ensure that contact information for each prospect is accurate and not duplicated, and the whole endeavor usually results in a far higher cost per lead. An expert lead generation service can assure that their leads are qualified to purchase a policy, that their contact information is up-to-date, and that they have even confirmed interest in speaking with an agent.

You’ll lower your costs and get a better ROI. There are a lot of costs associated with lead generation that can easily be overlooked. Successful companies will take all of these costs into careful consideration and calculate the real cost of generating leads given the time each of their agents is putting into the process. Thirty-seven percent of marketers report that budget constraints hinder them from conducting an efficient marketing automation strategy (Pepper Global). When you weigh the costs of conducting a helpful campaign against the benefits that could be gained by reallocating those funds into making better hires or investing more into training your agents, it quickly becomes clear that outsourcing lead generation can give your company a better return on their investment.