According to recent Liberty Mutual research, agencies that prioritize adopting digital capabilities grow 70% faster than other agencies – and those capabilities include everything from fundamentals like e-signatures and social media to more advanced tools like paid social ads and chatbots.
Looking for digital tactics that can help grow your book? Two simple but powerful tools can significantly boost your close ratio.
Automated information capture services
How much time on average do you spend keying in information prospects provide? How often do you ask a prospect to send you their current insurance information and then never hear from them again?
Visit our technology resources page for more resources for improving your agency’s digital tools.
Getting insurance information from prospects is time-consuming – so much so that prospects often jump ship before you can quote the business. If you’re still gathering and entering policy information manually, you should consider one of the many automated information capture services frequently used by independent agencies, such as Canopy Connect, InsurGrid and Fize.
Insurance information capture services give you a prospect’s information in seconds. You simply send the prospect a link by text or email, and the service then prompts the prospect to log in to their current carrier account. Once they’ve logged in, it pulls in all their information, making it available for you to download into a comparative rater.
Canopy Connect reports that its service saves agencies 30 minutes per client on average, and that the ease and convenience to customers results in a 60% higher close rate for agencies that use it. InsurGrid likewise claims that its clients see a 50% increase in sales conversions from using its service.
Because information capture services gather all of a prospect’s insurance information, they typically uncover valuable cross-sell opportunities an agent may have otherwise overlooked.
Personalized video proposals
Most agencies email PDFs of written proposals for new business. The problem with these written proposals is that they lack personal appeal.
With a short 3-4 minute video, you can add a personal touch to the written proposal, hitting its high points, anticipating questions and sharing relevant anecdotes (“Let me tell you about the time a client declined cyber liability insurance, then nearly lost their business paying damages and legal fees when they were hacked…”) – all while taking advantage of the friendliness and warmth face-to-face communication can convey.
Loom, ScreenPal and Vidyard are great platforms for creating and managing video proposals. Prospects can watch the proposals at a convenient time and share them with other decision-makers. The platforms tell you when – and how many times – a proposal has been viewed so you know when to follow up to close the sale.
Agents using these tools tell me they see higher close rates. According to Forge3, including video proposals leads to a 15-20% higher close rate than PDFs alone. In fact, one agency Forge3 surveyed claimed it had increased its close rate to 91% after adopting video proposals as a sales tool.
Despite these amazing results, video proposals are still underused – likely one of the reasons they are still so effective in helping agencies stand out.
This article was originally posted on in IA magazine and is reposted here with permission. The views, opinions, and positions expressed herein are those of the author alone, and should not be considered to represent official positions of Liberty Mutual nor to imply any endorsement by Liberty Mutual.
