Referred life insurance leads are undoubtedly the best leads

Everybody in sales knows that the best lead is a ‘referred lead’.  But, when you are in your first few years of the life insurance business it may be difficult to get referrals from ‘happy’ clients.  And, your client base is simply too small to generate enough leads to make a living. So what is a salesperson to do?

Life sales people have tried everything from telephone cold calling to canvassing local business to paying  for appointment setting. While any technique may work for a period of time, many are not durable and do not have a ‘multiplier effect’.

Let’s use paid appointment setting as an example.  Suppose you are a good closer and close 20% of these paid appointments with an average commission $1000.00.  You would have to go on 10 appointments every week of the year to make $100,000.00.  And this doesn’t even include ‘no show appointments’ and fallout due to ‘not takens’ or declinations.  In this case, if you wanted to increase your income to $150,000.00 you would have to increase your appointments by 50% – the equivalent of an additional 5 appointments each and every week. Could you realistically go on 15 appointments each and every week?

Is there a way to incrementally build the number of leads that come to you?

Specialization is a possible answer, but don’t take my word for it. See what Entrepreneur has to say about it.

One area of specialization that is rarely worked today is Impaired Risk Life Insurance.  Consider  that the majority of retail financial planners and insurance agents need to be knowledgeable in many areas  of risk management, asset protection, and retirement planning.  Because of this, they may not have the in-depth knowledge to properly handle some ‘hard to place life cases’.  And, because these cases come along only occasionally (perhaps 5% of cases) they never really have enough incentive to take the time to learn how to handle these cases.  Most clients with health impairments see the long term value in obtaining life insurance and are willing to accept the fact that they will have to pay an increased premium vs. the average, healthy consumer.

Victory Brokerage, Inc. has started a program to help a few agents work as Impaired Risk Life Insurance Specialists.  A qualifying agent will learn:

• what tools are available to assist in this area
• how to efficiently utilize these tools
• how to prospect for referring agents