What is more important to you? More referrals? Or higher quality clients from referrals? Or both? Here are a few simple things to keep in mind if you’d like to get better quality clients from referrals in 2009.
Get Clear
What type of client do you want to attract into your business? Are you crystal clear? Can you write it down right now, on the spot? Clear intentions produce clear results. Fuzzy intentions produce fuzzy results. You will be amazed at how much easier it becomes the right kind of clients into your business when you are crystal clear what comprises an ideal client.
One of the questions I always get is “How many names do you try to get in one sitting?”
My answer to this is “it depends.”
It depends on how open your referral source is to the process; how much time and energy they feel like devoting. My personal record is 17 names in one phone call, and I’ve gotten 10-11 on several occasions.
But NOT because I pushed my clients into this. I was ready to move on to another subject several times, but they kept on going, and going, and going (like the Eveready Energizer Bunny.)
One of the biggest secrets to making money as an insurance professional and generating life insurance leads… is the most under used strategy out there.
It’s called Joint Ventures.
But don’t let that fool you.
Joint ventures is not just about talking to some buddies or partners about sending leads to you.
NO.
It’s not that at all. In fact most of us have had bad experiences with passive ‘joint venture’ partners.
What I’m talking about is ACTIVE joint venture lead generation.
The difference between generating life insurance sales leads with active joint venture partners and passive is this: Active works, passive doesn’t.
So what is Active joint venturing? It’s the system of creating joint venture relationships and then ACTIVELY marketing to their lists to generate leads for your own.
So here’s how you do it in a nutshell.
Step 1. Identify your joint venture partners
This means you need to make a list of potential “Non Competing” insurance agents, professionals, and basically anyone else who has a list of clients.
If you’re a captive, there is probably a lot of clients that you can’t write because your companies just don’t allow you to. So you need to be then finding another, maybe it’s a commercial agent… maybe you have a hard time writing the commercial business.
So find an independent commercial agent who you can refer the business to but then in reciprocity he will give you access to all of his commercial accounts for you to write their person. That’s the symbiotic relationship, obviously. Same goes for health. If you don’t sell health, you need to have a relationship with a health agent to get access to all his people and sell them the personal lines.
I am always amazed at how few agents really have solid relationships with other people
in the industry and they work those relationships.
Here are a few examples of Joint Venture Partners we could use.
P&C Commercial agent
High Risk P&C
Health agents
Financial planners
Life agents
Lawyers
CPA’s
Chiropractors
Dentists
Once you established this, you do step 2.
Step 2 is where you become active:
All that needs to be done is write an endorsed mailing letter. You get their permission to send it to their list and you may just start with the newsletter. That may be the easiest and most effective way to do this is start with sending your newsletter to his list and establish that you two work together and if there is any needs that they might have regarding XYZ coverages, you’re their endorsed agent for this and you’d be happy to talk to them about that.
This is the fastest, easiest and MOST effective way to generate life insurance leads.
Michael Phelps’ success has business lessons that we all can benefit from.
First of all, although he is an amazingly gifted athlete that appears to have been born in a swimming pool, he readily admits that he could not have made his goal of getting 8 gold medals by himself. He surrounded himself with other great athletes. In effect, his team, consisting of his coach and fellow athletes all comprise his mastermind group.
This is the first step to Michael Phelps’s Secret Success Formula and if you desire to have gold medal performance in your agency then you must get involved in a qualified mastermind group setting where you can have healthy competition with your peers as well as get ideas on how to improve as a person as well as improve your business results. As a side note, Michael Phelps got better because he was around swimmers as good as he was which pushed him to achieve even more, so keep in mind that a mastermind is not a place to gather and complain about circumstances, but it is a source to go to to help you overcome the circumstances.
The second step is Michael made untold sacrifices. Too many to name here, but one big one was he moved away from his family in order to get the type of training he needed, but equally important in order to be removed from distractions. In other words, Michael was willing to get out of his comfort zone, away from his norm and into something that he was not used to. And in the insurance world today, if you choose to do what you’ve always done because it is comfortable then you will never be able to stand on the Olympic podium. To be a successful agent in today’s environment you must be willing to sacrifice the discomfort that is associated with change because the only constant in our world is change.
The 3rd step in Michael Phelps’ success formula is simple focus. Michael kept saying that all he did was eat, sleep, swim. He obviously did more, but the lesson is he made sure he was covering the bases of putting good stuff into him in order to get the Gold medal performance out of him and the business lesson there is obvious. Your input determines your output, so when you read the great content like what the Insurance Marketing Mavericks provide you can expect gold medal results!
In closing, if you have not taken advantage of the FREE ebook provided by the Insurance Marketing Mavericks then what in the world are you waiting for?! Your gold medal results are waiting for you so go get the ebook and read it right now!
