Where do you get your business?

Insurance agents get leads from a variety of sources.

• Some agents buy leads, often leads that have been sold multiple times to multiple agents, which means the prospects gets multiple calls and emails and might already be annoyed by the time they hear from you.
• Some agents try to create their own leads by writing great content and optimizing their website.
• Some agents are active on social media, working to establish themselves as an expert in their online community.
• And most agents try, with varying degrees of success, to work primarily off referrals.

The truth is, most insurance professionals use several different methods to generate business, and you probably do as well. But do you ever go back and analyze your existing business to determine where most of your sales are coming from? It might be worth your time to do so.

Tracking Your Business

Ideally, you should be keeping track of this information during the year as the leads come in. A simple “source” box in your client database should do the trick. If you’re consistent and always remember to ask a prospect how he or she heard about you, then it should be easy to do an analysis at the end of the year. Of course, this requires you to have a good database and enter all of your prospects, not just those that end up buying.

An alternate way of determining what’s working and what’s not is to go back through your client list for the last year or two, just those who actually bought something, and make a note about how you first met them. For some, you may need to ask, but hopefully your memory will be enough to complete most of the list. A bonus of this activity is that it might remind you of additional products you intended to present to some of your clients or follow-up conversations you need to have.

What’s Working, What’s Not?

Once you’re done reviewing your client list, take some time to compare your prospecting activity with what’s actually working. This may help you conclude that you should double down on some prospecting methods and drop others altogether.

For instance, if you learn that half of your sales come from referrals from property & casualty agents but that you’ve only gotten one sale off of your LinkedIn activity, perhaps you should spend less time online and more time meeting other agents (or, at the very least, focus your LinkedIn activity on connecting with more P&C agents).

You get the idea. If you want to make sales, you have to work to generate leads, but different things work for different people. If something is working for you, you should do more of it. But if something’s not, and if there isn’t an obvious way that you can tweak your efforts to improve the outcome, consider eliminating that activity altogether. In other words, work smarter, not harder.