Many insurance companies have not yet formalized their lead scoring system. This is a worthwhile effort for all agencies that should be reviewed every year while tracking the return on investment of their marketing programs.
What is lead scoring? It is a method used to rank prospects on a scale and then assign a value to determine the interest level and distribution. For example, let’s say an appointment with a truck insurance lead arrives at your agency. This lead is with an owner of 15 power units, they use drivers from the company and they are not happy with their courier. Maybe your lead scoring system falls on a scale of 1 to 10 and this lead gets an 8. What could get a higher score? And what types of leads fall outside the profile and what score would they get? Perhaps prospects need to score an 8 to appear on your producer scorecards.
Is the lead divided between the producers per area? Does your lead processing process differ per lead type, product or prospect? For example, are commercial leads separated by large and small companies, by industry or product? Are benefit leads parsed by groups above and below 50? And does your agency have a tracking system to determine how many leads were shown to the appointment, put in the pipeline, received quotes and ultimately converted into new clients?
Salespeople, sales managers, producers, and other business people often refer to prospects in vague terms such as: new, warm, hot, cold, likely, qualified, etc. These terms do little to better understand a sales pipeline or to increase the likelihood of purchase. to be given to other members of the team. Agencies may consider creating a simple prospect scorecard to solve this problem and quantify their lead score. Formalizing lead scoring offers benefits such as:
- Helps producers create ideal attributes to form a buyer character
- Creates a simple numerical system to leverage your buyer persona
- Assigns numerical values to rank your best prospects
- Creates a simple qualification acronym to determine the probability of closing
What should be on a prospect scorecard?
Use a prospect scorecard to quantify your approach to pipeline building. Some characteristics of your ideal customer may include revenue, growth rate, customer type (business or consumer), and market niche. For example, are you targeting companies with $5 million to $10 million in revenue? Are your best prospects high-growth companies, transportation companies, manufacturers or consumers?
If you sell to consumers, are they wealthy, middle-income, millennials, or seniors? Are your prospects in a specific niche market such as banking, insurance, biotech, consulting, education, etc.? Create a scorecard with your ideal attributes and a custom qualification abbreviation to help you determine if you’re selling to a potential customer.
Insurance agencies and brokers who want to take their insurance marketing and lead generation to the next level, but lack the internal resources to achieve their marketing goals, should contact a skilled insurance agency marketing agency.
