One of our mottos in our insurance agency was always “do what others don’t want to do.” When we worked internet leads at 7 or 8 pm, we made sales. When we did in-house telemarketing, we made sales.
Other agents would call and want to know what we were doing to be at the top of the sales charts each week and we would TELL them! Yet, no one else would ever try it. (I never understood that!)
When you choose marketing that requires a little more effort and time, you weed out a lot of competition. I’ve found this to be especially true when it comes to telemarketing.
Let’s face it. No one actually LIKES to telemarket. It’s not a fun way to spend your day. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work.
We consistently drove new quotes by telemarketing for auto insurance each week.
I tried buying leads from a telemarketing company but they didn’t convert nearly as well as when we did calls in house.
Here’s why – the telemarketing leads we purchased had too much time delay. The company would do calls and send us the information but we usually didn’t get it until the NEXT day. By the time we ran the quote and tried to call back, 12 to 24 hours could have passed!
Many people were no longer interested or just didn’t answer the phone. Plus, the information was limited and we had trouble getting a full quote from the limited info provided.
So John and I decided to recreate the same effect using the staff we were already paying.
We wrote a simple script and promised to call back with the quote within 15 minutes. I bought a call list so we had a list to automatically work with that was already scrubbed for Do Not Call’s.
Here are some tips if you decide to try in-house telemarketing:
- Call rural areas. In our own research, we found much higher “phone answering” numbers in the rural country areas around the city we were in.
- Call in the evening. We tested calling in the afternoons and the results just weren’t as strong. We decided to switch to evening so I created a schedule a week or two in advance and had a Call Night. This would be a Tuesday or Thursday evening where two of our staff members would stay late and telemarket until 7 pm. We just traded those late night hours for time off on a different day. (I wouldn’t do calls on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. Mondays are too busy, Wednesday are a popular church night, and a lot of people are out on Friday evenings.)
- We always stayed at the office late with the staff on call nights. That way, they could keep calling while one of us ran the quote and called the prospect back. It also kept everyone on task!
- Track everything. Write down how many dials, how many answers, how many quotes, etc. You’ll discover a pattern and see how many calls you need to make and how often to get the results you want.
- Always promise to save money in your script! When you’re cold calling, you have to stick to what gets people’s attention.
Telemarketing is an easy and cheap way to drive new quotes on a consistent basis. If you’re needing more sales, start a “Dialing For Dollars” campaign in your agency!
