23 Advanced Sales Techniques for Insurance Agents

Selling & Staffing

Dec 13

Being an insurance agent can be a hard task. There is a very fine line between making your customer annoyed by your persistence and using it to get things done. Obviously, you do not want to be an agent who annoys their customers to profit off them. To be a good insurance agent, you should mix several professions inside of you. You are a financial advisor, you are a caring friend, you are a great salesperson and sometimes even a good actor.

If that sounds scary - toss that feeling away. Agents have a lot of aces up their sleeves to use their persistence and hard work to find a perfect balance between them and their clients. Here are 22 advanced techniques that will help you boost your business to a new level.

How Do I Do Well in Insurance Sales?

Insurance sales are all about rapport with your client and a trust that a client should have in you. To do well in insurance sales, you need to know what is on your client’s mind, what they want and what they need. Even if they do not know what they need, or even if they do not know what they want, you need to lure that information out.

It is not enough to know what they need - your next step is to explain to them why they need a certain product, and that can be a challenge. Luckily, we have some techniques that you can learn to achieve your goal.

Stand Out From the Crowd

The insurance market is quite crowded and the number of specialists only rises. You are up for some serious competition if you decide to enter this profession, especially since you do not have much experience. Just as any businessperson, you need to find something that sets you apart from the rest, something that makes you unique.

How do you stand out? You can offer lower prices to clients at your own expense - that will make you stand out. But a more promising tactic that insurance agents have is to put monetary value on something invaluable. It might sound absurd, but there is quite a lot that you can get from this.

Put value on an emotional and professional connection with your customer. Make sure that they cherish your work, not feel instantly annoyed the moment they hear your voice. Your interests are important for you, but as in any other area of service, the interests of your customer prevail.

Create a Brand for Yourself

Insurance sales agents have a reputation for being a person on the other side of an annoying call, whose only purpose is to get money from a client. You can make yourself look differently and stand out from the crowd of countless insurance agents out there. Instead of being annoying, make yourself look useful by developing a brand. You are not just a sales agent - you are a top-notch specialist in the field, you know trends and know a perfect product for your customer.

This is easier said than done, of course, but in the modern world, it is doable. Create an online presence for yourself, make a portfolio online, where you describe how you can be useful to your client, not trying to suck some money from them.

Write a blog on the latest trends for the insurance market.
Interview more experienced professionals in your field for your blog.
Create a monthly newsletter for your prospects, where you outline latest news and products, with links to your blog and portfolio.

In the best case scenario, building enough rapport with your clients and creating yourself a brand of an insurance advisor, rather than a salesperson, will make you their speed dial, when they need one insurance policy or another, and will help you get more customers with referrals.

Do not forget to award your referrals, but more on that later.

Level Up Your Customer Service Game

Insurance sales business is just that - a sales business. Personal communication with your client is paramount, you need to know how to approach them and satisfy their needs - not your needs, but their needs.

Sales is very much a psychological game. Find a way to relate to your prospect, casually find out where they grew up or maybe what school they attended. Find out something in common and stress it. You need to be emotionally intelligent and respond to your prospect’s present and potential needs and grievances. Make them feel that you are acting in their best interests and not just trying to profit off them.

Listen More, Talk Less

People like to talk and they like when they are being listened to. For you, as a customer-oriented businessperson, listening to your client is pure gold turned into words. Clients will gladly give away all their worries, and just listening to them talk will give a clear perception of what they need. Let them talk about their life situation and make notes to offer the best product for them.

Further on, you can improve your listening skills by asking the right questions. That way you will create an impression for your client that you care about their needs, and lure out some more useful information. Make sure they know that your questions help you find the most suitable product for their needs.

Do Not Overwhelm Them

Yes, you need to know every product that is out there, but your job is not just to sell, but also to find what is most suitable for your client. If you are trying to put this job on their shoulders by listing an overwhelming number of options, most likely you will hear “I need time to think about it,” because with an overwhelming number of options - that is what they need to do.

In this scenario, you are a tailor that knows every possible fabric and shape, but also learns what your client wants from the get-go. Present them with a limited number of options and change them based on their preferences.

Develop Charisma and Speech

Your job is to talk and impress, make sure you know how to do both. You do not need your speech to match a news anchor but it should be pretty close. Remember “talk less, listen more?” To talk less, you need to be able to put maximum information into your speech and make sure that this information stays in your customer’s head.

Try recording yourself and be your harshest critic. Yes, listening to our own voice is uncomfortable but you will get used to it soon. Boost your charisma in front of a mirror or even try classes. You might lack experience in the insurance business, but let your prospects remember you as a charismatic person and your chances will increase.

Do Not Use Jargon or Slang

A little slang can be useful to build rapport with some clients but only if you are 100 percent sure that they will perfectly understand what you are talking about, so they can feel you are on the same page with them. However, most of your clients can find slang unfamiliar and unsuitable for the situation, so the best tactic is to avoid using slang.

If slang can have very limited use in your work, keep jargon to yourself and your colleagues. Clients do not want to be confused, they come to you for explanations, not a lesson on the insurance industry. Do not overwhelm your client with jargon but instead, find a way to put your jargon into normal English words.

Proofread Your Written Communication

This step is so crucial and so overly discussed that many people just discard it, when they see the word “proofread.” But nothing will indicate that you are unprofessional as much as mistakes in your email correspondence.

Luckily, you do not need an editor for your emails now, there are many tools online that will let you know that you have made a mistake or that your writing is confusing. Take some time to get familiar with proofreading and editing software and invest some money into a subscription. It does not cost much but it will get you a long way.

Use a CRM

Speaking of notes, there must be one place where you keep them. Along with the proofreading and editing software, invest into a good and convenient CRM to keep track of your clients, their needs, present and potential, to keep track of when to reach out back to them, and so on.

There is a reason why CRMs are a short version of Customer Relationship Management - because that is what you want with your clients: a long-standing relationship. Forgetting your latest conversation with your client might ruin your next sale, and a CRM can help avoid it.

Be Open About Your Downsides - And Work With Them

Maybe you lack experience, and that might be why you are reading this article now. You know that, and your customers will notice it too, that is almost inevitable. Do not hide it - work it. There is nothing you can do with the lack of experience right now but you can use it to turn your client to your side.

How? You are going to need to figure it out by yourself, unfortunately. One tactic is to make them understand that your inexperience is actually good for them, because you do not have that many clients so far, and they will always have your uncontested attention.

It is easy: more clients - less time per client. Make them feel the contrary: you have less clients, so you can devote more time for each individual client and their needs. Obviously, you do not need to shout about it in the first minute of your sales call but keep this scenario in mind.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

We all learn from an early age that you should work harder and harder. There is a limit on how hard you can (or should) work, but there is little limit to how smart you can work. Instead of increasing your work hours, find a way to make existing work hours work better and make you more profitable.

Optimize your work time, find tools that help you optimize your work process. CRMs are one of the ways to optimize your work and put easy tasks on a computer software. Yes, you can spend 16 hours a day working, but find the best way to decrease this time, not increase.

Reach Out To Colleagues

Again, if you are reading this, perhaps you are inexperienced in the insurance business, and it is alright. Not a single person was born with extensive knowledge and experience in insurance sales, everybody was where you are right now. Every experienced and successful colleague of yours was in your shoes at some point.

So talk to them. Find out what they did, when they were on the same stage, where you are right now. People like to talk about themselves and people like to feel useful, use it to your advantage. When talking to your colleagues, lure out stories of their early successes or ask their advice about a particular client, and learn some tricks and professional know-hows.

How Do Insurance Agents Motivate?

Insurance agents are jacks of all trades. Knowing your products and following sales techniques will help you develop your business; but then you will face a meeting with a client, and a whole new game starts from there.

Motivating a client to get a product is a tricky process. Your prospect will do anything in their power to keep their hard-earned money to themselves and spend as little as possible. Your job is to remind them that this world is full of dangers, evoke emotions in them and all of that should be done very subtly. Some psychological tricks can help you achieve that, here are some of them.

Do Not Sell Policies - Sell Emotions

...and emotional stability. There are emotions that you want to highlight and counter: fear, lack of confidence, shame. Learn to manipulate these emotions in your clients, learn how to evoke fear and instability, and lessen your prospects' feelings that your services will counter these emotions. You sell a policy, yes, but you sell more than that: you sell confidence, stability and serenity.

You need to be very subtle though. Do not talk about fear directly but try to link it to real stories that everybody can relate to. 2020 was a hard year for everybody. Use it. Remind your clients of this fear of losing something they love.

Say, you pitch a life insurance policy. Take time to talk about how their 2020 was, how hard it was to feel insecure about their health and life. Do not say “Your funeral is going to be expensive for your children,” instead talk about your friend, who was unfortunate to lose their loved one and was left with a huge bill after that.

Use FOMO

Speaking of fears, FOMO or Fear of Missing Out is one of the strongest motivators possible. People do not like to miss out on their once-in-a-lifetime chances, especially when something bad happens later that makes them think: “Oh I wish I used that opportunity.” Any sales business is based on the fear of missing out. Maybe you have a great opportunity for your client that will expire tomorrow.

Or let’s say you have a client who takes their time to think about your proposal, but cannot decide for weeks and months. Let them know that circumstances change and that this opportunity to buy a cheap life insurance policy now might not be available in a few months, because their health might get worse or because, as we now know, global pandemics happen. In the long run, markets are unstable - use it to your advantage.

Give Referral Rewards

A perfect world of any salesperson is based on a very large network of clients, where some clients are so impressed by your services that they recommend you to their friends or colleagues. Here is where your role as an advisor comes in - you do not just sell, you give advice. Make sure your clients know that their friends can use your advice for free.

Do you have a blog like we recommended? When your customers have a question, give them a short answer and refer them to your blog, where you explain a complicated question in detail. Make sure they can share a link to your blog post with their friend(s). On a contact form of your blog, potential clients can let you know who referred them, and you are able to offer referral rewards.

This way, your new prospect knows that they are guaranteed a reduced price, and when your existing client needs a new policy, they can cash in on their referral bonus.

Use Open-Ended Questions

Conversation is your most valuable asset. Keeping your conversation going for a longer time increases chances of securing a sale. Again, people like to talk about themselves and they like when they feel like they are interesting. Be interested - and show it by asking open questions.

Open-ended questions allow for a longer and more informative answer, as opposed to closed questions, that allow a simple “yes” or “no.” Ideally, your question should be followed by a short story. It helps to keep conversation going and allows you to take notes on something that might be of interest to you later.

Mirror Your Client

Mirroring is a usual technique to build trust and rapport with people. Notice your client’s behavior and subtle actions. Crossing their legs, touching their face, raising or lowering their voice, and so on - these are all movements that people make subconsciously, and you should learn to notice them and understand them.

After you notice them, do the same but not immediately but within a few seconds. If you mirror too fast, that will attract unwanted attention. But for most people, that will stay unnoticed if you wait for a few seconds and then follow. Mirroring will subconsciously indicate that you are on the same page with them.

How Do You Offer Insurance to Customers?

Many insurance agents make the same mistake: they rush. They are trying to close the sale as fast as possible to proceed to the next client. It is a well-known fact that doctors listen to their patients for less than a minute before coming up with the course of treatment. Insurance agents do not have that luxury.

Instead, your approach should be “slow and steady wins the race.” In the short run, the percentage of your successful sales will not suffer if you are taking the path of a diligent and attentive professional. In the long-run, clients will cherish an agent who is sympathetic and professional, rather than rushing and careless, and that will bring you even more sales later on.

Try the Eight-Step Closing Process

You guessed it right - the Eight-Step Closing Process is a technique to close a sale in 8 steps:

Research
Meet and warm-up
Client needs
Presentation
Price
Pause
Effective date
Close

These steps can vary from one technique to another, and you can even work out your own later, but it is important that your conversation with a client should not be chaotic. It should be as structured as possible in your head, and the Eight-Step Closing Process will help you with that.

Mention Life Insurance Every Other Time

Life insurance policies are a bread and butter of your business, they generate substantial profit and are pretty universal, especially since Mother Nature was cruel enough to help you with that in 2020.

Most of your clients do not think about life insurance though, so you need to remind them that you think it can be wise to invest in a life insurance policy. Use emotional techniques of evoking fear and shame, and give them a potential reward of stability and security.

But do not overdo it. Remember, you are not just a salesperson, you are their advisor. Do not mention insurance every time you talk with your client, do it every other time by pitching them a new product that they might be interested in, or remind them subtly that stability and security are very valuable in our chaotic world.

Annual Policy Reviews

A great opportunity to talk about insurance policies are annual reviews. Let your customers know that insurances need reviews from time to time, and you are ready to do it for them for free. As you secure a sale, suggest scheduling a call in a year or so to review their purchase. Let them know that markets change and in one year you might have a more beneficial offer.

No matter if they agree or not, create a notification in your CRM a year from now to send them an email with a quick overview of what has changed and how they can benefit from new options. If they agreed to the annual review, you can give them some options that might get them interested before a call. If they said no, still send this email to let them know that they can benefit from your services and suggest scheduling a call.

Do Not Rush Sales

Your ultimate goal is to secure a sale, your customer’s goal is to benefit from your services, and your customer’s interest should be paramount. You are interested in getting a fast sale but there might not be that many people who are ready to commit to your product right here and right now.

Give them some space, let them know that there is no rush and that you are always there for them any time. On the other hand, gently evoke their fear of missing out.

Provide a Short Description For Your Attachments

People are lazy, and an insurance agent client might be the laziest person in the world. Nobody likes to read documents that are longer than a page. Do it for your client, read the document that you are sending them and highlight parts that are most important for them in the body of your email.

If you are using a CRM and are diligent in taking notes during your conversations, (see “Listen More, Talk Less”) they will help you identify what your prospect is most interested in, and stress that part in your email.

Be Unreasonable

Say you have learned what product your client needs. Have three options available: cheap, adequate and very expensive. Start with the latter. Give them a very high price first, evoke fear and shock in them. Let them know that this is the best they can get but there are other options available.

There is a few percent chance they will agree to the most expensive offer - then you are lucky. But this is not why you have this option. It is another psychological trick - give them an unreasonably high price for a product that is somewhat similar to what they need, and then work hard to find another product - the one with a reasonable price on it. It will help ease that shock from the first offer and soothe them with a lower price.

Resonate with their client’s feelings. You know that the price you are suggesting is much higher than this policy costs. Say it. Suggest them a product, tell them a shockingly high price and act shocked yourself. “Oof, that looks much higher than I would sell it to you, I do not recommend it. Let us find something more adequate.” It can have a tremendous effect on your client’s trust in you.

What Is The Most An Insurance Agent Can Make?

Sky's the limit, of course. According to the BLS, the highest 10% of insurance agents in the United States earned above $127,840 in 2020. Although that figure could have been affected by the pandemic, previous years showed similar numbers and a similar rising trend.

The BLS can be a good source of statistics but obviously, your income will depend on multiple factors; primarily, location and everything that has to do with it: competition, income level of your clients. The $127,840 figure that was provided by the BLS looks like quite a lot, but as you will learn later from this page, there are some numbers that look even better.

Average Income Is On The Rise

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported about 8% increase in average income for insurance agents in 8 years:

$48,150 in 2012
$52,180 in 2020

Adjusted for inflation, that is not much of an increase but it is an increase nevertheless.

Moreover, the BLS indicates that in the next decade the insurance agency employment will be on the rise, even though clients can easily buy a policy online. Your services are still in need to help customers sort through the weeds of a complex insurance market.

Stick To Urban Areas

That sounds obvious but still needs mentioning: working in states with high urbanization will increase your average income. Among urbanized states, New York looks the most lucrative due to these factors:

lower competition than states with other big cities like California, Texas or Illinois
a higher income rate for insurance agents, averaging at $93,220 in 2020

Statistics Can Lie

There are “lies, da*ned lies and statistics.” BLS can have their own statistics and the market can disagree. In this case, you are lucky, because the report from BLS is much lower than potential reality. A web job search platform Indeed, for instance, reported a $79,965 average salary for insurance agents - significantly more than 52 thousand from the BLS.

Even better - Indeed’s estimate for the highest earning insurance agents in the U.S. is $212,000 a year.

What Type of Agency Is The Best?

There are two paths you can choose from:

Captive agents work with an insurance company
Independent agents work for themselves

Captive agents are getting leads from the company for which they work, and income may be protected by their salary and they may receive commission and bonuses for their sales. Downside: they can only sell products from one company.

Independent agents do not work for any specific company, but can choose from all possible options that the insurance market offers. It sounds lucrative, but it can also be intimidating. They do not get any leads and their income is not protected by their regular salary: they only work for themselves and by themselves.

It is up to you to choose your path. If you prefer more independence in your work and are ready to take risks, go for an independent agency. However, a general advice for inexperienced agents is to work for a company first. This way, you get clients as soon as you start working and can be sure that you can support yourself at first, even if you fail.