CRM for Insurance Proffesionals
The insurance industry is fiercely competitive — but of course, as an insurance professional, you already know that. If you’re struggling to grow your business and capture more of the insurance market, it’s important to understand what’s holding you back so you can meet those challenges head-on.
If you’re an independent agent or run a small insurance business, chances are you’re wearing more hats than ever before. From attracting prospective clients to scheduling appointments, onboarding new agents, managing data, and closing sales, it can demand more time than you have in a day.
Even if you’re using various apps and software solutions to stay organized, they may actually create more work if those technologies don’t talk to each other. If you’re not using a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to streamline operations, now might be a good time to take a closer look at how insurance CRM software can help you do more with less.
What are the big challenges facing the insurance industry?
First, let’s dive into some of the top challenges that keep many insurance brokers from achieving their business goals.
1. Competition is off the charts.
It’s a familiar scenario: You receive an inquiry about an insurance policy, but when you follow up with the prospect, they’ve already signed with one of your competitors.
All too often, prospects are simply looking for the cheapest insurance rate, not an “insurance relationship.” If you’re routinely missing out on these inquiries, it might be time to learn how marketing automation can help you better engage prospects before they move on to your competitors. Marketing and sales automation can also help qualify leads more effectively so you or your agents aren’t wasting time following up with prospects who are unlikely to convert.
2. Your insurance sales process is inefficient.
When’s the last time you revisited your sales process? Are you still relying on email to manage contacts or storing account information in Excel spreadsheets? If you don’t have a single source of all your client information, including contact information, purchases, history, interactions, follow-up, etc., then you’re likely missing out on key marketing and upselling opportunities.
3. Your workflow is overloaded with time-consuming tasks.
Let’s face it: Repetitive, manual tasks can sap your productivity and your energy. For instance, are you copying and pasting updated client contact information between apps? Are you manually sending out insurance policy renewal reminders and other client communication?
It might be worthwhile to track how much of your workday is spent on manual tasks, and which ones take up most of your time. Then you can identify which of these tasks could be automated so you can free up more of your time for productive client engagement and revenue generation.
4. The lead generation struggle is real.
As you already know, insurance is one of the most important things anyone can have to protect themselves and their loved ones. And yet, customers hate the perceived sales hassle that has stereotyped the insurance buying process.
For example, some experts believe that insurers need to pivot their marketing efforts toward millennials, who will soon replace baby boomers as their primary customer base. Millennials also represent the least insured generation, which makes them a valuable opportunity. However, they are also a generation that rejects traditional hard sales tactics. Unlike previous generations, they need to be engaged through multiple platforms like social media, emails, online forums, and more.
How can you overcome these marketing challenges and attract new leads using a variety of marketing platforms and engagement approaches?
Chances are, you need a solid marketing strategy that appeals to a wide range of demographics across various age ranges, income levels, professions, geographic areas, and more. Insurance CRM can help you create targeted lead generation campaigns so you can attract highly qualified prospects across multiple platforms. Best of all, you can automatically capture their information and generate notifications for immediate follow-up.
5. Attracting new customers is great, but you’re losing existing customers.
If you’re noticing patterns of customer attrition, it’s critical to find out why. This can be difficult if your sales and marketing data is scattered across multiple apps and management systems, which makes it hard to identify trends.
For instance, are you losing policyholders across the board or is there a larger problem in certain areas? For example, home and life insurance customer retention rates may be fairly stable while a large number of auto insurance customers have migrated to your competition.
No matter where the issue lies, the best insurance CRM software can help you generate valuable business insight to identify current growth and retention challenges among your customer base.
Source: Act!