Finding Ways to Market Yourself As a New Insurance Agent
June 10th, 2010Starting brand new at any career can be an intimidating adventure. This is particularly true if you are beginning a new career in a sales field such as with insurance. How to find new leads and then convert them into clients is the process that an experienced and successful agent has learned how to do but every new agent is still endeavoring to figure out. But before you can begin to convert leads to sales, it is important to first successfully find those leads. Here I will discuss three ways that any new or even an experienced insurance agent can go about marketing themselves and finding new people to quote and sell a new policy to.
1. Cold Calling. Let’s just come right out and admit it, nobody really loves cold calling. It takes a lot of patience, a lot of determination and fortitude, as well as a tough mentality to be able to make enough calls to find people that want to purchase insurance from you. The beauty of cold calling is that it is a numbers game. Everyone in the U.S. legally must have their automobile insured. The key is finding them, even if it takes call after call. History and testimony from those who have been successful with this show that with cold calling, patience does in fact eventually pay off. So if you are fresh out of ideas to market yourself, or just don’t have the money to do anything else, good old-fashioned cold calling can help you to jump start your sales.
2. Create a website. I am actually shocked at how many insurance agents do not yet have a website set-up for themselves. Having a website can do many things for your agency and career. First of all, it offers great branding. You can customize your website in a way that helps clients or potential clients to know what you can offer them as an agent, as well as what insurance specials you may be currently running or about to run. In addition to this, doing some simple SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can help you to rank in search engines which in turn can help you to generate new clients who may come and visit your site.
3. Referrals, referrals, and more referrals. In interviewing an experienced agent once, I posed the question of how he gets most of his clients. He responded that by taking care of his current clients and offering them great personalized service, that he would often get referrals from these clients in the form of family and friends. What is great about receiving referrals is that not only did you not have to cold call and convince them to listen to you to get a quote, but by being referred over to you by someone that they trust, you will automatically have some level of trust with them making and they will be more likely to buy from you.
Hopefully these ideas can get you started on marketing yourself. Don’t forget that in the insurance industry, it is truly your attitude which can determine how successful you become.
Christian B. Smith is a Farmers Insurance agent who runs and maintains a website, myutahinsurance.com, to keep people up to date with what is happening in the insurance world. If you are looking for good Utah auto insurance, or for cheap Utah homeowners insurance, be sure to check out my website and give me a call.