There are many tech tools that offer a holistic approach to lead generation for insurance carriers and agents but where do you start and how could you benefit?
In this article, we identify and offer helpful tips on some of the approaches you can make to leveraging your agency’s social capital. The potential lies in Commonality, a new AI-powered tool designed to identify qualified prospects.
The History of Lead Generation for Insurance Agencies
As technology continues to evolve, carriers and agents are seeking tools that not only increase efficiency, boost revenue, and grow their businesses, but also allow them opportunities to establish new meaningful relationships with their clients, prospects, and partners. To do this successfully, they need tools that bring the human component back into lead generation.
Lead Generation Tips
Lead generation in the insurance industry, as you might already know, is a dynamic process of uncovering potential prospects.
You apply these lead generation strategies in the following ways:
- Creating Contact Forms
These forms can be the main Call-To-Action on your website and take just minutes to create. Any potential leads that come from any given traffic like organic, paid, direct, etc. can use this as the final step to getting a potential client’s information.i.e.: “Contact us today for a free Insurance quote” A chatbot feature can also be helpful to have on your website as a form of lead generation opportunities.
- Email Marketing
For many insurance companies, according to Campaign Monitor, you’d be surprised to learn that 59% of marketers get the most ROI from email. Perhaps you could offer a discount on your premiums or throw in another incentive. Email marketing is a great way to stay in front of potential leads in your pipeline. You can test personalized emails and experiment for certain days and times of the day to see what is most optimal.
- Reputation Management
For insurance companies and agents, reputation is everything. In order to have credible capital, you need to have assets such as case studies, blogs, and reviews that make you stand out from the rest. Making a practice to create and request for this content regularly is essential.
Typically, the sales and marketing departments are solely responsible for conducting these strategies and forms of outreach. This places restraints on who can assist in the sales process, so allocating time effectively through a marketing calendar and project tracker like Asana, Trello or another project management system is key.
While these lead generation tips are crucial…even more so is the Importance of leveraging your Social Capital.
So you might ask? What is social capital?
Social Capital Defined
Social Capital as is the vast network of prospects your company is connected to through unique traits. These comprise your company’s Social Capital Inventory. While cold calls, direct mail advertising and other marketing tactics used to get a potential client noticed, today, the most fruitful tactics utilize human connection.
The Oneset of COVID-19
According to McKinsey & Company:
“Social capital is the presence of networks, relationships, shared norms, and trust among individuals, teams, and business leaders. Social capital is no longer just nice to have. It’s becoming a core lever business leaders can use to attract, retain, and bring out the best in employees, enabling [leaders] to achieve (and even exceed) [company] performance goals.”
- Less than half of US workers are making an effort to build their networks
- Only 24% are focused on getting in touch with old contacts within their professional networks
- Only 28% are focused on building new relationships
Social Capital is in short supply.
Questions to Ask Yourself
Have you ever wondered of your clients, what are their common interests? How are they connected? What is the best way to get in front of them? Why are my marketing tactics not working? How can I leverage my own network to be heard? What makes me different from other insurance agents or carriers? What is the best “way in” without the heartache of countless hours of outreach and no results? The answer lies in social capital.
“Business relationships are built on the foundation of “Social Capital.” – Jim Sullivan, Founder and President of The Endurance Group
Leveraging Social Capital
In order to help answer these questions, The Endurance Group created Commonality, A tool to help transform the way in the door to building authentic connections in the workplace. “By identifying the unique skills, interests, and backgrounds of an organization’s workforce, our tool, Commonality, changes the paradigm to allow the entire organization to take part in the sales process. The tool reveals previously unseen connections that become the basis for outreach and messaging.” says Jim Sullivan, Founder and President of The Endurance Group. “The commonalities can be as simple as a shared alma mater, or as niche as a common passion for animal welfare.”
The AI-powered tool is designed to replace cold calls with natural, warm networking. It also helps an organization empower its employees internally by creating opportunities for growth and team building.
Commonality is The Endurance Group’s “secret sauce” to making connections and getting one’s foot in the door: “We establish a relationship based on a common connection, background or interest, rather than charging right in with a product or service presentation.” says Sullivan. “Finding that one common link helps connect the dots, and increases your chance for a response or meeting.”
How it Works
The plug-and-play offering starts by assessing a company’s social capital: a Social Capital Inventory (SCI). Every organization has some degree of built-in capital in their workforce’s organic networks. A SCI captures, in one place, the employment history, academic history, volunteerism, and interests for all employees of an insurance agency. Then, The Endurance Group uses the SCI data, an insurance agency’s prospect profile, and their leads to generate a Commonality Report. The report contains highly relevant leads and identifies the employee(s) at the agency who have the greatest chance of successfully connecting with the ideal prospect. That said we can…
Uncover Key Connections
Commonality uses machine learning algorithms to identify shared social ties between your team and potential insurance clients
Provide Targeted Lists
Through Commonality, we generate bespoke lead lists for your insurance company which rank prospects’ connections to your company and their likelihood to convert
Targeted Messaging
By identifying shared ties through Commonality, sales messaging becomes genuine and personalized
Analyze Existing Contacts
Your existing contact lists can be run through Commonality to discover shared traits with key prospects
Rich Insights
Commonality can uncover data trends which inform sales efforts on an even deeper level
Gain An Edge
The Commonality platform was developed exclusively for you to stand out with your sales efforts
By using complex algorithms, Commonality searches for connections between a company’s employees and decision-makers of a target prospect:
- Did one of your agents attend the same alma mater as the lead?
- Did a person on your finance team work at the same prior company as a lead?
- Does an executive assistant volunteer at the same organization as a lead?
Several studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of the tool.
Game Changer for the Insurance Industry
Through The Endurance Group’s research, they have discovered that leads are 25% to 35% more receptive to outreach from someone who they share a common connection with- the stronger the connection, the higher the probability of securing a relationship. With a relationship established, the path to a new sale becomes much easier.
“Let’s look at this in terms of sales for a moment. Dr. Willy Bolander, assistant professor of marketing at Florida State University and his colleague, Dr. Cinthia Satornino, assistant professor of marketing at Northeastern University, have found that as much as 33 percent of the variance in sales performance is attributed to an individual’s social capital.”
This new offering is continuing its rollout with international clients:
“The Endurance Group’s strategy of using shared experiences to establish connections and book meetings with prospects has worked incredibly well for FenestraPro. Their efforts have resulted in an average 30% response rate and has started conversations with key firms that we’d been interested in pursuing for years.” – David Palmer, CEO & Founder, FenestraPro
Commonality allows companies to prosper by forming quality connections and genuine conversations:
“The foundation of SaltGrid’s success has been our domain expertise in the areas of human safety and data analysis. Our growth strategy had previously relied on referrals from industry leaders. The Endurance Group’s efforts to expand our business through networking with like-minded health and safety leaders have helped SaltGrid develop new business relationships across the globe.” – Chris Aitken, CEO, SaltGrid
Through proof of concept, dedication to innovation, and unwavering commitment to revolutionizing the sales process, The Endurance Group’s purpose-driven vision has come to fruition with the release of Commonality. We want to help the insurance industry as well as other industries in not just the expansion of their business but their individual growth as well.
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About Commonality
Commonality is a cutting-edge sales platform created by industry-leading marketing, sales and business development experts designed to breathe new life into the modern sales experience, and increase conversion rates upwards of 40%. Commonality enables authentic communication with prospects by making the most of a team’s unique social ties. This AI-powered tool delivers ready-made lead lists, which feature ideal prospects who share traits with any company’s team such as alma mater, a passion for golf, hometown and much, much more. With Commonality, prospecting is a thing of the past. Instead, focus valuable time building genuine relationships with engaged clients.
Conor Version:
Social Capital: Unlock the Power of Relationship Building in your Agency
September 29, 2022
The History of Lead Generation for Insurance Agencies
As technology continues to evolve, carriers and agents seek tools to increase efficiency, boost revenue, and grow their businesses. Below are some of the most common strategies sales and marketing departments deploy:
- Contact Forms: Gather prospects’ contact information from any given traffic (organic, paid, direct, etc.)
- Email Marketing: Send personalized emails to your prospects
- Reputation Management: Write case studies, blogs, and reviews that make you stand out from the rest.
While these lead generation strategies are crucial, one of the most undervalued strategies is “social capital”.
Social Capital Defined
McKinsey & Company recently wrote about the power of social capital. They explained,
“Social capital is the presence of networks, relationships, shared norms, and trust among individuals, teams, and business leaders. Social capital is no longer just nice to have. It’s becoming a core lever business leaders can use to attract, retain, and bring out the best in employees, enabling [leaders] to achieve (and even exceed) [company] performance goals.”
Essentially, social capital as is the vast network of prospects your agency is connected to through the unique traits of your team members. These connections can be leveraged into opportunities.
How to Use Social Capital as a Lead Generation Strategy
Below is a step by step guide:
- Analyze your agency’s social capital
- Where did your employees go to school?
- Do they volunteer with any organizations?
- What companies did they previously work at?
- Which causes/interests do they have?
- Determine your prospects’ social capital
- Where did your prospects go to school?
- Do they volunteer with any organizations?
- What companies did they previously work at?
- Which causes/interests do they have?
- Compare your agency’s social capital with with your prospects’ social capital
- Did one of your agents attend the same alma mater as the lead?
- Did a person on your finance team work at the same prior company as a lead?
- Does an executive assistant volunteer at the same organization as a lead?
- Do your CEO and prospect share the same passion for a specific cause as a prospect?
- Leverage the connections through outbound messaging
- Hi PROSPECT NAME, Hope all is well. Looking to do a bit of networking and note that you’re a fellow CONNECTION. I’d love to connect and learn more about PROSPECT and swap stories about CONNECTION. Thank you, EMPLOYEE NAME
Results
And why would you do all of this work? Because when done correctly, it is one of the highest-achieving lead generation strategies available to agencies today.
Jim Sullivan, Founder and President of The Endurance Group, a social capital company that specializes in outreach like this, said, “Business relationships are built on the foundation of ‘Social Capital.” According to Sullivan, on average, agencies can expect a 35% acceptance rate on LinkedIn when utilizing a social capital strategy compared to a 5% acceptance rate when conducting cold outreach. Other lead generation strategies listed above have even less than a 5% success rate.
A recent Forbes article confirmed these numbers:
“Dr. Willy Bolander, assistant professor of marketing at Florida State University and his colleague, Dr. Cinthia Satornino, assistant professor of marketing at Northeastern University, have found that as much as 33 percent of the variance in sales performance is attributed to an individual’s social capital.”
Lack of Social Capital in Today’s World
However, despite its high success rate, this type of networking is not as common as it once was. In their piece, McKinsey & Company noted that social capital is in short supply. They found since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic,
“ Less than half of US workers are making an effort to build their networks. Only 24% are focused on getting in touch with old contacts within their professional networks. Only 28% are focused on building new relationships.”
One of the largest consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic is the the lack of social interaction and “networking practice” many people have had in recent years. It is well known in the professional services space that to close a deal, the agency must develop trust with a prospect. And one of the most effective and efficient ways to develop trust is through a common connection. Unfortunately, many people today are not putting in the work to develop those connections.
The Future
Agencies must not be afraid to adopt networking through social capital as a sales technique. At the very worst, they will meet a prospect not interested in their services, but potentially interested in the future. At the very best, they will close a deal quickly because they bonded with a prospect they have a connection with.
Agency leaders must tout the power of social capital to their teams and encourage their teams to get back out there and network.