As we enter the second quarter, this is officially the slow time of the year. The phone has stopped ringing off the wall, and you’ve settled back into your normal insurance routine. So we have a question:

What are you doing with all your free time?

If you’re not being productive, the truth is that you’re just wasting time, and we know you don’t want to do that. To make sure you’re making the most of your time, here are a few ideas about what you can do with the extra hours in the day.

Learn something

Insurance isn’t just a job, it’s a career, and agents should continually strive to learn more and become better at their profession. There are several ways to do that. Here are a few:

• Complete your CE requirements. While the specific requirements vary by state, most licensed agents, unless they’re grandfathered, are required to complete a couple dozen hours of CE every license renewal period. This is a good time of the year to do that. When you do, seek out courses that will actually help you become a better broker, not just ones that will help you keep your license.
• Go to a conference. There are a number of great insurance conferences at the local, state, and national levels that you can attend. Find one or two that offer engaging content and sign up to attend. You’ll gain some valuable insight, will have the opportunity to network with other insurance professionals, and will discover new vendors and new solutions that can help your clients.
• Become an expert on the products you sell. Schedule meetings with your carrier reps and ask lots of questions. Make sure you know the products you’re recommending to your clients inside and out.
• Watch the videos on the AHCP website. We have a ton of content in our online training library designed to help brokers educate themselves and sell more business. We also offer live training events every month. Just click on the Training tab on the AHCP website to learn more.

Expand into a new product line

If a retail store wants to offer additional products to its customers, they have to find the space to display those products and spend money on the additional inventory with the hope that there will be a demand for those products. Insurance is different. Agents are licensed to sell a wide range of insurance products, and all you have to do if you want to offer additional solutions to your clients is get appointed with the carrier and take the time to learn about the solution. This would be a great use of your time and will pay dividends all year long.

Prospect

If you find yourself with nothing to do for a few hours, why not use that time to round up some new clients? It’s much easier to have a conversation with people and build a relationship when it’s slow than when you’re burning the candle at both ends. Perhaps you have some prospecting methods that have worked for you in the past. If so, you should try them again. You might also take this time to try out some new strategies. Maybe you could send out a mailer, introduce yourself to influential people who might be able to recommend your services, sign up to exhibit at a small business fair, or host a seminar. There are countless ways to find new prospects, but one thing is certain: you won’t find them sitting in your office.

Modernize

While you might be struggling to fill your day right now, we all know that time is your most limited—and most valuable—resource. And even during the “slow time” of the year, you probably find yourself saying that there aren’t enough hours in the day to generate more prospects or talk to more clients. But you could talk to more clients if your business was more efficient, and a great way to become more efficient is through the use of technology. The right technology, like Quotit, can allow you to have more conversations and sell more policies in a shorter amount of time. Quotit is a remarkable platform that not only permits you to quote over 300 carriers side-by-side, but many carriers even offer online enrollment directly through Quotit in a single, consolidated application. That means that you can cross-sell various plans from different insurers without jumping from carrier site to carrier site and re-entering data multiple times.

Reach out to existing clients

As you know, regular contact with your existing clients will help your retention numbers. Insurance is still a relationship business, and you can’t build a strong relationship with one conversation a year. A nice by-product of regular contact with your individual and group clients is that it will remind you that you’ve built a great business and genuinely like most of the people you serve (hopefully that’s the case). When we like the people we work with, we tend to like what we do to earn a living.

Be sure to talk with your clients about the products you didn’t have time to discuss during open enrollment. Regardless of your target market segment—group, individual, or Medicare—the fourth quarter is the busy time of the year. Most agents don’t have much time to focus on ancillary benefits; they’re too busy trying to sell health insurance. If there are other insurance solutions that would benefit your clients, you should discuss those now that the health insurance decision is out of the way.

Take a break

Sometimes the best use of your time is to take a well-deserved break. Vacations are always fun, and hopefully you’ll be able to work in one or two family trips when the weather is nice. However, you can have just as much fun if you go home early and play with the kids a couple days a week or schedule a date night with your husband or wife. Doing that will remind you what you’re working so hard for…