The lack of face-to-face communication in this pandemic is affecting a lot of businesses – especially insurance companies where onsite business meetings and client interactions are routine. This has led to a change in business model and many companies are focusing more on cold calling these days to continue getting qualified leads.
Cold calling plays an important role for every company to create awareness and sell their insurance policies, services, or goods to customers through telephone calls. Insurance agents do this to pitch their services and explain their policies.
To ensure that agents are able to provide value while making calls, we made a list of 10 tips on cold calling for insurance agents or independent salespeople. Following these tips will enhance your agents cold calling skills or improving their cold calling scripts for insurance to generate more results.
Following these tips will enhance your agents’ cold calling skills or improve their cold calling scripts for insurance to generate more results. In fact, some of the strategies below can also be used to enhance your customer service experience.
More importantly, these should help boost their confidence and motivation while doing such cold calls on a regular basis. Keep reading.
10 Tips for Selling Insurance Over the Phone
Insurance agents should follow the tips below that will enable them to improve their insurance cold calling skills. This way, they can effectively pitch their services to customers over the phone and convert them into potential leads and sales.
1. Research prospective customers ahead of time.
Understanding the persona of potential customers through market research and social engineering is essential prior to cold calling. Insurance agents should do in-depth research to understand the problems that prospects are currently facing. Moreover, this allows them to analyze the exact requirements of their target customers.
2. Write down a motivational and positive affirmation for yourself.
Before you begin with cold calling, try to write down motivational affirmations that will help in creating a positive mindset and reminding yourself that you can nail your call. Moreover, these will keep you motivated that you will succeed with pitching effectively your insurance policies or services.
One example of a positive affirmation that you can use would be, “Today I will win because I have confidence in myself and enthusiasm.”
3. Make sure to have a mirror in front of you while doing cold calling.
Practice having a mirror in front of you while doing cold calling. So while you’re on a call and you can see yourself, it will be easier for you to make sure that you are smiling. While the person on the other side of the phone can’t see you, smiling will help you sound much happier and you’ll be more pleasant to speak with.
Moreover, when you’ll be discussing your main pointers and objection handlers, you’ll be able to pitch more effectively to customers and keep their attention longer.
4. Consider cold calling as a game to learn and experiment.
You need to understand that doing cold calling is a numbers game from a basic standpoint. It is more of pushing yourself through that potential rejection until you succeed with finding the right potential customer or buyer who is ultimately willing to discuss and have a conversation regarding the insurance policies or services that you are offering, which will lead to the next step.
One of the reasons why most people hate making cold calls is that considering their low success rate, they’re probably going to have to make 99 calls and repeat the same insurance sales scripts all over again until they succeed.
Thus, it’s important to evaluate your performance every now and then and try to improvise your cold calling scripts for insurance with each call. Try to make it more of a game – have fun, be playful about it, learn, and experiment with various scripts. This makes the experience of actually going through those 99 calls easier.
Most of the time, these calls mostly go nowhere after endlessly repeating insurance cold calling scripts with customers, no matter how good you are at making cold calls.
Furthermore, whenever you start to see a call going just completely downhill, be willing to take a risk and try something totally new.
If the customer on the call is rude or aggressive, be smart, and do not lose your calm and step up your game. Consider it more of a sport – not something that has any threat to your life or to your safety.
5. Understanding the importance of cold calling scripts for insurance agents.
You should understand the importance of cold calling scripts while pitching any insurance policies or services to consumers. Also, understand that being unprepared during the call is going to get you into a lot of trouble.
Without a proper plan and insurance cold call script, you’ll be jumping from one idea to another which doesn’t make any sense. This confuses your potential customers who’ll have a hard time figuring out what you’re trying to pitch them.
When insurance agents make calls that are not backed by an insurance cold call script for reference, they just go all over the place and the target prospect becomes completely uninterested and gets off the phone.
Every company should understand the role and importance of cold calling scripts for insurance agents for increasing the chances of getting successful leads.
6. Time your calls properly.
Various studies show that weekday afternoons are the best times for cold calling, specifically between 3 PM to 5PM. You need to understand that timing plays a major role in cold calling.
This means that you need to figure out the best time when your targeted customers will be receptive in accepting calls from unknown numbers or simply accept and start a conversation.
One simple thing you can do is research data and fill out fields such as time, date and day while doing cold calling. This data can help you gain useful insights and find the best time to connect with customers who are more receptive to calls.
Contacting prospects using cloud-based phones will also help insurance agents gain insight into their strategy via advanced analytics. Was it effective enough? Or should they change their timing?
7. Prepare a script for free quotes.
Preparing an insurance sales script with good and appropriate quotations can surely increase the chances of overall success of the call. Free quotations can help you bridge the gap between two different topics (services, policies etc.) or to introduce some great offers.
Also, you need to understand the context of the buyer’s persona. This will help you effectively include quotations within the script that is related to the services but most importantly the buyer’s persona as well.
8. Have a strategy for introducing yourself on the cold call.
Most of the time, insurance agents or salespeople don’t often think about how to introduce themselves to prospects for the first time. It’s important to understand that the first seven seconds of your call is buying you the next 25 seconds of your prospect’s attention.
Make sure to use that first seven seconds to get the person off guard using pattern interrupts such as ” you know,” “oh okay”, etc. In this manner, you’ll be getting more time to effectively pitch your product or service.
But you need to understand that none of those additional seconds can happen unless you deliver your strong first seven seconds effectively.
Also, try to include certain lines or sentences within your cold calling script that hook your prospect. One example can be, “Hey Chris, Richard Johnson calling. How have you been?”
This sentence does not focus on how the person is doing. It’s focusing on how they’ve been. Now what you’re doing is, you’re catching them off guard in a way where they’ll be wondering, “Uh, do I know this person? Maybe not?”
You’re using the script in a manner that’s six times more likely to get you that next 25 seconds compared to not using it at all.
9. Talk more about the services and less about yourself.
It is often said in the business world that the more you talk about yourself, the worse you perform. Insurance agents who are going on and on about their own company or about themselves are going to do significantly worse during the cold calling process. The more you talk about yourself or how great you or the company is, the more unengaged your prospect becomes.
Potential customers care less about you and more about themselves, solving their challenges, and accomplishing results. So, focus more on the problem statement or the pain points of the customer and how you can pitch the solutions or services for the same efficiently and to the point.
10. Focus on engaging with prospects.
The more the prospect or customer starts to talk in a meaningful way, the more likely they will stay on the phone and convert. Many insurance agents are focused on pitching whatever they are trying to sell and that they fail to really engage that prospect in a two-way dialogue. It becomes more of a one-way monologue or a presentation.
Get them to start talking because once they do, you’ve hooked them in. After talking about their challenges, try to wrap the paragraph up with something like, “Chris did any of these challenges ring true to you?” In this manner, you’re inviting them into the conversation.
Now let us assume that your prospect Chris says NO. Then you should be ready with a follow-up question like, “Okay, fair enough, sounds like this conversation doesn’t even make much sense. Before I hang up, could I ask you just one last question?”
Your follow-up question should be a more engaging one to identify the actual problem that your customer is facing.
Conclusion
These are the top tips on cold calling for insurance agents. These tips should motivate and help you effectively pitch your insurance sales script to convert your prospects into buyers or leads. By now, you understand that the first few seconds of every call can determine whether or not the prospect will be willing to stay on the call and discuss.
So, carefully plan how you will be introducing yourself, your organization, and conveying your services to reflect the pain point of your customers at the beginning of the call. Hence, these tips will surely help in improving your cold calling skills.
