As we continue on our five part series about the tools you need to be as successful producer, today we’re going to talk about probably the one that everybody hates the most. Still, it’s the one you need the most, telemarketing. We’re going to talk about the things you should and should not be doing to be effective in telemarketing.
As we continue our series on the five tools you have to have to be a successful producer, I’m bringing up the one everybody hates the most, second, telemarketing. I mean, some animals out there love the phones, and actually they’re some of the most successful people I know because they have zero fear. But for the rest of us, we’re not big fans. So I want to talk about some things you can do to up the phone game that’ll make things better for you going forward.
The first thing you have to realize when you get on the phone is all you’re trying to do is book an appointment in most cases. Quit trying to close the deal on an appointment setting phone call. Keep it short and sweet. Now I’m not telling you that you can’t get into some level of detail if questions get asked, but most of the time, you’re dealing with a gatekeeper who doesn’t know why you are calling. All you’re trying to do is stay in your lane.
See, people have learned how to buy insurance from our industry. There is no college course out there called how to procure insurance for your business, so they’ve learned from us, and what they’ve learned is we’re going to call 60 to 90 days before renewal. As much as I love that early entry into a middle-market account, it’s just not going to happen most of the time. If it does, my close rates are through the roof. But the fact is, if I want to get an appointment booked, I have to call when everybody else is calling, and I have to play the numbers games.
The second thing I want you to do is I want you to understand that calling is casting a wide net. Now, I am not calling every single person that’s on a list that I have. It would just not be humanly possible for me to get through that many phone calls. I focus on calling those accounts that I want to get in myself, no matter what. But that doesn’t mean we’re not calling anybody.
So I’m going to give you number 2A, and that: is if you’re not that great on the phones, or you have a massive pipeline, and you want to blanket as much as you can, get an appointment setting service, use a virtual assistant to set appointments for you like we’re doing here at Florida Risk Partners, and you can canvas a much broader area that you would be able to do on your own. Here we have our producers call those accounts that are their ideal prospects, and everything else gets shipped over to a virtual assistant to call and set appointments with them.
With COVID, we’ve been able to expand our horizons and deal with some of the smaller accounts we usually wouldn’t engage. Now, we can sell workers’ compensation over Zoom, whereas before, we may have to drive 30 or 45 minutes to get to an appointment for $2,000 worth of agency revenue, and that’s not my game. So use resources, focus on what you want to write, and everything else needs to go through the other people.
Third and last, determine what you consider a win. You’re not going to call 100 people and get 100 appointments. It’s never going to happen. But what is a success to me is getting off the phone and having more information than you had on that account before you called them. So I don’t view just a booked appointment as the only way to win in these situations. If I can get the decision-maker’s name confirmed and their contact information confirmed so that I can put it into my CRM and let it work its witchcraft in the background, that’s a win to me, that’s a massive win to me, and it should be to you too.
I think so many times we look at the phones as such a daunting task, and we’re all scared of it that really if we stop, take a deep breath. We divide the responsibilities, define who we’re calling, define who we’re outsourcing those calls to, and then define what we consider to be a win; you’re going to kill it in commercial insurance every day.
We all have choices, as do our clients and prospects. Having deep roots in customer service, I am still a student of the game at
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