A lot of agents have trouble visualizing what a successful life insurance by phone business really looks like. Are you always going to be a 1 man show? Do you evolve into a call center? Do you need an assistant or even a virtual assistant? What’s the best way to scale?
All really good questions and the answer will vary based on the person. The one thing that every GROWING life insurance business has in common is a “Systems Driven” life insurance business.
What I mean about “systems driven life insurance” is to replace and/or duplicate yourself by creating systems or processes.
In order to scale, you need systems.
3 Steps to Creating Your Systems
1. Do it first and figure out what works best for YOU
2. Document it. Every step and every detail.
3. Train someone else to do it or replace it with software
….SCALE!
Every agent is different and will do things differently. I don’t want to preach that the way I do things are the way everyone should. I know agents who write more business than me and do things completely different. However, what we do have in common is a systems driven life insurance business.
Once you get it to a “plug and play” business, that’s when you’re ready to scale.
The hardest part is figuring out #1 – what works best for YOU and your business. Everyone will have their own niches and own styles of business – it doesn’t matter what #1 is. As soon as you see a consistency in your business when it comes to ROI and you’re happy with the ROI, you’re ready to start the process of scaling by adding more systems to your business.
My Systems Driven Life Insurance Business
For me, I have my marketing figured out (#1), but my systems are a work in progress and will be for years to come. There are always ways to increase ROI through efficiencies in your business. I have a massive list of to-do’s.
I start with delegating simple tasks which creates more time to do my money making tasks.
This is the reason I use EZlife and sing their praises any time I get the chance. Having a streamlined process for submitting applications and not dealing with paperwork and processing is the biggest reason I’ve been able to scale. I don’t worry about the admin stuff that can take hours out of my day.
I’ve delegated as much of my marketing as possible as well. I have a new virtual assistant who I’m training to fully integrate into my business (this will be whole separate future blog post when I figure things out) – currently she keeps my schedule, gathers data for potential referral opportunities and media mentions, and does all the “one off” admin tasks I send her every day.
My sales funnel systems are managed by my email marketing system/CRM. Everyone no matter where they are in the sales funnel is getting dripped on – it’s still not where I want it to be, but it’s getting close. I just update the status of the lead and my marketing software does everything else: e-mails, snail mails letters etc. My next moves: incorporating SMS text drip campaigns and a term conversion campaign that mails letters and emails a few times a year to my clients. In case you’re interested, I’m building this out with Infusionsoft.
I also have a couple independent agents working my overflow leads that my marketing produces to make sure all my prospects get called.
All my systems are working, but it’s not the well oiled machine that I envision…YET. My goal is to get this so streamlined, that I can get other agents plugged into it easily and hand the keys over to agencies that are producing with our group. I’ll be blogging about my successes and failures in setting up these systems.
Bottom Line
I wrote about some of the systems I’m creating just to give you an idea of what it involves. Instead of telling you what you should do, I like to tell you what I’m currently doing to help you brainstorm for your own business.
It’s a great feeling of freedom when you have systems that YOU built working for you while you’re out with your family, on vacation or sleeping. Every morning, I sit at my desk with fresh leads to call from various marketing sources (referrals, SEO, media mentions, e-mail marketing etc.) – all from systems I’ve set up and work I’ve done in the past. I just show up and do my thing. When I speak with prospects on the phone, it’s just entering notes and a few clicks of the mouse to put them on a drip or reminder campaign. My systems do the rest.
Just know that every successful life insurance by phone business is systems driven and profits can be increased with additions and tweaks to your systems. When you have your leads and marketing figured out, you should invest your time into building out this infrastructure.
Like I mentioned earlier, everyone’s businesses will be different so their systems will be different. Just make sure you’re building out YOUR systems infrastructure so you can continue to scale your business.
2 Comments
Jeff,
Great article and definitely something we want to work towards. Great info, well said, and good luck with perfecting your system.
Thanks Andrew. Good luck with yours.