Successful writers follow wisdom: write what you know. Likewise, successful salespeople sell what they know. But top insurance agents? They also need to sell who they know.
The more you know your clients, the easier it is to show them how the right policy can meet their needs, right? So the more you know about your customers, the better.
Agents with long-time customers often gain bits of insight about their clients a little at a time over the years. But whether you’ve been in business for decades or you’re just starting out, you can probably learn more about your customer’s needs, concerns, and situations. Here’s how you can do precisely that, lightning-fast.
Do Your Homework
Getting to know individual customers is critical for building relationships, but it never hurts to zoom out and look at the big picture. You can do that by looking at existing research and staying up to date on industry news.
The insurance industry is vast, so the chances are good that someone has already researched customers like yours. Start with the insurers you’re contracted with. Then, check out industry organizations, such as the following:
- Insurance Information Institute
- The National Association of Insurance Commissioners
- Regional insurance associations, like the Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association
- LifeHappens
From these kinds of sources, you can learn more about your customers:
- Most millennials overestimate the cost of life insurance by over 300% (LifeHappens).
- Car and minivan drivers are more likely to make a collision claim than drivers of other vehicles, but claims for trucks and SUVs typically cost more (Insurance Information Institute).
- Homeowners living in the Midwest are far more likely to experience a loss due to catastrophe than those on the west coast (Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association).
Getting a big-picture view of your customers is great for any agent, but it’s especially helpful when you’re first starting out and haven’t gotten to know your clients individually.
Put Your Ear to the Internet
As an agent, you’re the boots-on-the-ground soldier for insurance companies. You get to know your clients better than the insurer does because you have more chances to meet your clients in person. Still, you can only know what they share with you.
These days, you can learn more thanks to social media. Most consumers are on at least one of the major social media networks. If you can connect with your clients there, you can see what they’re talking to their friends, family, and other connections about.
Most networks also have tools that business owners use to gather intel about specific groups of people. On Twitter, for instance, you can search for keywords like “life insurance advice” or “auto insurance recommendations” to see what people are asking about coverage. And if you have a Facebook Ads account, you can group people by demographics, interests, and favorite brands to look for trends.
Researching your clients on social media may seem like spy-work, but it’s a great way to understand what people find important or confusing.
Conduct Surveys
The best way to answer any questions you have about your clients is simply to ask them. Getting answers may be as simple as a casual conversation starter during an in-person client meeting. But if you have a lot of questions or want to reach people you don’t see regularly, you may want to put together a survey.
Creating a useful survey is a bit more complicated than a casual conversation. Do it well, and your clients won’t mind helping you out, and you’ll wind up with some seriously useful insights. Do it poorly, and you could end up with frustrated, confused clients who avoid opening your emails.
Here’s how to design surveys that are easy to take and give you the answers you seek.
- Short and sweet
If it takes more than a couple of minutes to fill out your survey, you’re asking a lot from your customers and their busy lives. Prioritize the info you’re looking for and ask only enough questions to discover it. If you need more than a handful of questions, it might be better to add them to a separate survey to send out later.
It’s important to avoid survey fatigue. The more focused questions you have, the more likely folks will make it all the way to the end—and still be happy to help next time you ask.
- Choose the right question type
There’s some science when it comes to creating a survey, but to sum it up: certain kinds of information are best gathered with certain kinds of questions. Just ask SurveyMonkey. If you want demographic info, for example, multiple-choice questions usually do the trick. If you’re looking to gauge sentiment, you’ll probably use Likert scale questions (agree, disagree, strongly agree, etcetera.)
Most survey questions are closed-ended, meaning the survey taker must choose from a list of answers you provide. But I recommend including an open-ended question in each survey that allows people to give you more info than you thought to ask for. Something like, “Is there anything else you think we should know about X?” Or, follow up a close-ended question with an open-ended one: “Please share your reasons for choosing X answer.
However you use open-ended questions, make them optional to answer. That way, people who don’t want to write anything won’t get hung up or click away before finishing the survey.
- Well-written
Writing a good survey is harder than it looks. Each question must be perfectly clear and leave no room for misinterpretation. Otherwise, you’ll cause people to be unsure of how to answer, leading to frustrated survey takers and possibly inaccurate results.
To avoid unclear questions, look at the survey from the reader’s perspective. Ask a few friends or teammates to test out your questionnaire and share any points of confusion. More eyes mean a better chance of catching any points of confusion. Then, clean up your questions accordingly. You may need to use more precise language or break a multi-faceted question into several queries.
Don’t feel comfortable writing your own survey? Get help from a service representative from the survey tool you’re using. Alternatively, hire a writer who has experience in this area.
Build—and Use—a Database
So far, I’ve discussed ways to learn about your customers, but all that info is useless unless you use it to connect better with your clients and simplify purchasing coverage. To squeeze the most insights out of all that client feedback, consider investing in data management and analysis tools.
Here are a few popular ones:
These Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools are known for helping businesses large and small improve their sales numbers. One way they do that is analyzing lots of customer information and creating charts, graphs, and tables that help you see broader trends at work. There’s a reason Big Data is so big: being able to crunch the numbers on your clients is critical to understanding them better.
Conclusion
It’s not enough to know the products you sell. You also have to know who you’re selling them to. As an agent, you’re in the perfect position to thoroughly understand your clients. Use these tips, and you’ll take your knowledge to the next level. And likely, your success rate too.
Bio
Kathryn Casna is a licensed life and health insurance agent based in Phoenix, Arizona. She helps readers at TermLife2Go.com navigate the world of life insurance and contemplates the meaning of life, because that’s what writing about life insurance does to a person. Her conclusion? Life is about great coffee, morning yoga, and snuggling with her furbabies.
About Kathryn Casna
Insurance, personal finance, B2B tech are competitive industries that leave marketing professionals like you piles of content projects and little time to complete them. Help has arrived. I serve up in-depth, well-researched articles, ebooks, case studies, and other content that leaves the regurgitated, status-quo copy of your competition in the rear-view mirror so you can get back to steering the bus.
Insurance, personal finance, B2B tech are competitive industries that leave marketing professionals like you piles of content projects and little time to complete them.
Help has arrived.
I serve up in-depth, well-researched articles, ebooks, case studies, and other content that leaves the regurgitated, status-quo copy of your competition in the rear-view mirror so you can get back to steering the bus.