Many of our readers work as insurance agents which means they are responsible for building and promoting their own brand. If you're one of these people, or you work independently in any other industry, you probably consider your business cards to be your best friend. Business cards offer a physical, permanent reminder to people that you exist and they're virtually free to produce.
A Harvard Business blog recently pointed out that in today's increasingly online world,
business cards aren't as valuable as they once were. The post suggests that rather than having a business card, you should just have a website that people can find on Google. Building an online presence is certainly important, but it's not quite as easy to rise up the Google ranks as the article makes it seem.
First, why is a website so much better than a business card? One of the main reasons is because your contact information is bound to change from time to time. If you get a new phone number or email address, every business card you've ever handed out becomes worthless. If you have a website, you can simply update your contact information on the site and you're all set. Websites also provide a lot more information than you could ever fit on a small card.
The problem with the suggestion to simply get your website on Google is that, aside from how hard it can be to make the website in the first place, it can be really challenging getting your site on the first page of Google results if you have a common name.
So what should you do? Well, if you've got the resources, there really is no replacement for your own customized site. If you don't want to spend the time and money it takes for that, make sure that you've got a strong presence on a site like
LinkedIn. Being on LinkedIn isn't enough if none of your contacts know about it. You should put a link to your profile on a business card to make sure that everyone you meet knows where they can find you online.
There are also tools out there that let you put up your own website without having to make it yourself. At
Zane Benefits we have a program specifically for insurance agents that provides a customized website along with some other tools most independent business people need. If you want to see other ways you can establish an online presence, check out my post on the
5 tools that every insurance agent needs.
Have you been wishing that we'd talk about something other than healthcare reform on this blog? Well, you're in luck. I develop software at Zane Benefits and I feel like indulging myself by going all-out nerd for this one post. I want to talk about how Insurance Agents (and most other sales people) can use improved operations and technology to make business run smoother.
First, here's some full disclosure. Zane Benefits builds a bunch of tools to help insurance agents make more money. Some of the things I list in this post can be handled by tools that we offer. Being a programmer, I feel guilty about trying to sell things, so I will mention the tools Zane Benefits offers, but I'll also mention other companies with similar products. The choice is yours.
This is focused mostly on individual insurance sales because that's what I have the most experience building software for. If you sell group insurance (or anything else), it should be pretty easy to translate this advice to fit your business model.
So here are the five tools that I think every insurance agent should be using right now. I'm not suggesting you try one or two out. You need them all. If you're missing any one of these five things, you're missing out on some serious opportunities.
CRM (Customer Relationship Manager)
This is by far the most important sales tool regardless of your industry and it's something that is largely overlooked. A CRM is basically a contact manager that lets you keep track of any and all information you have about a person.
Information is the key to any sale. If you're calling a lead that you talked to a year ago, you should have notes about that call. You should know about preexisting conditions, dependents, long-term goals, and anything else that this person might have told you. Imagine how much easier customer service is if you can instantly look up a client's contact records and see a full report of everything you've ever known about them.
I meet a shocking number of salespeople that just keep all their contacts in Outlook or in an Excel spreadsheet. If you do something like that, you should seriously consider upgrading your technology. It is probably the single easiest and most important change you can make to improve your effectiveness as a sales person.
If you are interested in using a CRM system, I'd suggest looking at these options:
Yes, we offer a CRM which designed specifically for insurance agents. Our basic goal was to keep it as simple as possible because most agents have more important things to worry about than software. That said, we use this software as our company CRM, so obviously it's powerful enough to handle enterprise level needs if you are into that sort of thing.
This is a program from 37Signals (a really great software company). They take the approach of building less than the competition instead of more. It makes the tool really easy to use, but there are some missing features that some of you might want. If you're not using our software, this is a great option.
This is by far the most popular CRM software. That means some people obviously like it (which is why I'm including it in this list) but I think it's pretty bad. It's overly complicated and it's insanely overpriced. They don't publish prices on their website but I contacted them a while ago about pricing and I think it was something like $80/month per user for the most basic version.
This is the worst of the CRM tools on this list, but it's free. If you absolutely refuse to pay for a CRM, use Zoho. If you are willing to pay for better software to help your business, this shouldn't be a consideration.
A Website
Whether you like it or not, a lot of business is moving online. Insurance sales are unique because most people still don't trust such an important purchase to an online quote engine, but that doesn't mean a website can't help insurance agents.
Having your own website helps in a lot of ways. It gives you an online presence so that you can send people to your website for information about your services. The same way many agents choose to have a office so that people can physically find the agent, a website does the same thing to let people digitally find your business.
If you want to build an online presence but don't know where to start, I'd suggest looking at these options:
Both of these websites let you publish your own blog. A blog might not be the most professional way to establish yourself online, but it's dead simple and it's free. Also, you don't have to use your blog in a traditional way. If you want, just put up one post about yourself and your business and never update it again. It will look just like a normal website to most people.
Google offers this tool to let people put together basic sites. It's a little more complicated than setting up a blog, but it's still free and there are a lot more options to customize.
If you or someone you know has some basic HTML chops, you might consider building your own website. There are a lot of companies that host personal websites, but Dreamhost is my favorite in terms of value and service. You'll have to pay at least $5-$10 per month, but that can be well worth it if you can create a website for yourself.
Yup, we're showing up again. We put together a pretty comprehensive site designed to sell insurance policies and HRAs. If you sign up as an agent with us, we give you your own personalized site (
here's an example). This option doesn't give you as much flexibility as building your own website, but with a couple clicks of your mouse you'll have an entire benefits website up with your name on it. We also have a version of the site for group insurance sales.
Remote Access
One of the big technology debates going on right now is whether software should be web-based or installed directly on your computer. Traditionally, programs like word processors, email clients and CRMs have all been installed on your computer. IThis isn't the way things should work.
As computers become more commonplace, they also become more disposable. Most people I know have at least two computers (home and work) plus maybe a laptop. Aside from having multiple computers, the need to upgrade comes every 2-4 years. Since I got my first computer in the late 90s, I haven't gone more than two years without buying a new one. I'm probably extreme in that regard since I make a living off technology, but the reality is that you'll need a new computer sometime in the next few years.
Having said all of that, it simply doesn't make sense to store all your applications and data on your computer. What happens if you're at home and you need to access the CRM on your work computer? Maybe you just bought a new laptop and you need some way to sync information between that and your desktop. If you're like me, there's just no way to manage multiple computers unless most of your work is done online.
So whatever software you use, it's worth putting some serious thought into switching to online alternatives. Using online applications is referred to as "Cloud Computing" because all of your data is in the "cloud". You never need to back anything up or copy data. It's always with you, regardless of where you are or what computer you use.
Email Marketing Tools
Email marketing can benefit virtually any business, but it's especially useful if you sell individual insurance. Because the commissions on most policies decrease after the first year, you can't just sell a policy and live off that revenue for the rest of your life. Most people think of email marketing as a way to get new clients, but it can also be a great way to keep in touch with existing ones.
It's in the client's best interest to consider getting a new policy each year, and it's in your best interest to facilitate that. This process is a lot easier if you allow your clients to opt in to a quarterly newsletter. You should also keep track of when policies are sold so that you can send an email a year or two later to make sure everything is ok.
There are a lot of different email blast tools out there, and they're all pretty similar. Here are a few I'd recommend:
You didn't think we'd leave this out of our software did you? All the contacts in our CRM are automatically linked to any marketing emails you send to them. We also track the activity of anyone that visits your website from any emails so that you know exactly which contacts are interested in your services.
This is a simple, easy to use email application. It doesn't really do anything other than basic email sending and reporting, but it gets the job done. We set up an account with them at Zane Benefits and had some problems with the sign-up process, but everything worked smoothly after that.
I have no experience with this service, but they're one of the industry standards. If you're looking for the traditional option, I think this is it.
Better Office Software
This is going to be the controversial one. I don't think anyone should rely on Microsoft Office products for day to day tasks. One of the main reasons is because they don't satisfy my remote access requirement from above. They also just aren't very good. Email in particular has been crippled for years by Outlooks limitations.
I'm very opinionated about this, so I expect everyone to get a good chuckle at how ridiculous this sounds, but I suggest switching over to
Google for email, calendar, word documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
The organizational tools, online access, and improved user interface take a while to get used to, but they dramatically increase productivity. We made this switch at Zane Benefits recently and after about a week of transition, most people seemed to much prefer the new system.
If you want to stick with normal software that you install on your computer, I suggest checking out
Open Office. It's basically the same thing as Microsoft Office but it's completely free and it works with Windows, Macs and Linux.
Well, this turned into a 2000 word essay. Sorry about that. Hopefully you try a couple of these tools out if you haven't already. I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Are there any great tools that I missed?
