A Successful Sales Strategy

My name is Kris Montierth, I own Your Personal Secretary.  Direct mail marketing, lead calling and appointment setting for insurance related products are what I have worked with professionally for 16 years. Each year has been a challenge with events that influence potential customers. Over my time in the insurance appointment-setting field, the American economy has sustained terrorist attacks, politics, and wars, housing bubbles, economic recession and good and bad job growth. While these are influential to the way people spend money, a few basic things are consistent from year to year.

But first.

In 2006, YPS scoured the data of approximately 20,000,000 outbound calls made by insurance companies where I had worked as Director of Operation. Using this data, efficiency increased 33% by eliminating calls placed over the sixth call to any lead. The data revealed that there was only a 0.013 percent chance of setting a qualified appointment on calls seven, eight, and nine. Therefore, an agent paying appointment setters to call beyond the sixth call was essentially idle in production, but still paying wages –or throwing good money after bad. Six-call campaigns are now a standard across the appointment setting industry.

In early 2008, YPS reviewed our own calling data with attention to the lead sources that were most successful in their mail card return yield. Using these free reports, agents could see what lead companies were pulling higher return numbers. When they cross-reference their sales data with appointments, they could see more appointments were returning more sales. Incidentally, America’s Recommended Mailer outperformed their competition and still has the same success today.  

Outside of calling data and return yields from direct mail, another consideration that can help insightful agents is associated with the “season of customers” or seasons, as there is more than one optimal advertising window each year.

Summer is the least productive time of the year for mail return cards. Potential buyers are on vacation, or sometimes spouses vacation separately and “one-leg’ appointments are not wanted. Many insurance agents are vacationing as well. The insurance industry slows each summer; with hard work, a person can be successful in the summer months, but with proper planning vacation is a better goal for the summer. Summer is a challenge, therefore setting goals and attaining those goals by getting the most out of January 1 to June 1 is an essential key to a successful annual sales strategy. If you would like more information on this Successful Sales Strategy, send me an email today! Kriss@callingleads.com                     www.callingleads.com

Two calls, Four Calls, Six Calls, A Dozen

Years ago, while I worked in the “boiler room,” I was connected by the auto dialer to a telephone number in Bullhead City, Arizona. The man who answered the phone had the same last name of a local casino that was very near Bullhead City. I used this tidbit of information to dig into a conversation that would get me past the normal twenty seconds of phone time, where rejection seemed to lurk. To my dismay, the pleasant conversation was not enough to provoke the potential customer into setting an appointment for a living trust. I discharged the call on the computer screen by pressing F4, to indicate that the contact was not interested and was now a “dead-lead.” Two months later and regardless that the lead was marked exhausted, I was connected to the same customer. My memory of the peculiar name had reminded me of the first contact with the lead and I excused myself to the customer and discharged the call.

            Why were we calling people who had so clearly asked to not be bothered with free information about living trusts? The answer; our advertising director was a cheapskate and our owner was too lazy to oversee his own interests. This was the beginning of my education on calling leads and the lesson I learned was not to call people who didn’t want to be called. But what about those who did want to be called? How many times should we call them? I can now tell you that the answer is six. Six calls, Monday through Saturday, varied by morning, noon, and evening call times. But why not call two, three, four, or five times?

            I have worked many call campaigns and from my experience the only way to canvas a six day campaign and make sure I am appointment setting and not harassing; is to place two morning, two afternoon and two evening calls. You may be thinking, this is all too methodical or black and white. And you are right, because it has to be methodical and it is black and white. Spending time and money calling people who are not in your specific market is a waste of time. This detracts from contacting new genuine leads. Calling a lead only twice doesn’t take in account of the available schedule of the potential client. Calling the lead only four times can skip vital contact windows like Saturdays and during multiple week night prime-time television commercial breaks. So I shoot for six. However, from my experience and from time to time, if a lead is not reached in a timely manner within six days of receiving the lead; the lead is more susceptible to being contacted by a more attentive agent.

 I am sure there are people who contact leads with a different approach than I do and will call potential clients up to twelve or thirteen times. I see this as either an indecisive lead or a person who is not really interested in the market information I am sharing with them and it too nice to say no. This is a total waste of marketing resources, unless the goal is to chase down clients who won’t returns a weeks’ worth of phone messages about information they actively requested.

In the end its simple, get the lead contacted with a quick and efficient calling campaign and don’t let someone else get them before you do.

Lets call 22 million people on the phone

Years ago, over a ten month period, I was a production and quality manager in an out-bound call center. We had forty-eight call stations that were programmed from an automatic dialer.  The calling campaign was programed to make calls from 6:00am to 4:00 pm, Monday through Friday, with an hour and a half of break time. The average time we were billed for each call was only about twenty seconds. We set approximately six qualified appointments each hour, or about fifty a day off this regimented cold-calling machine.

Equation

Forty-eight marketers, processing approximately three calls a minute, for eight and a half hours a day over a ten month period is 22,325,760 cold calls.

48 callers X 3 calls a minute for 60 minutes =  8640 calls per hour

8640 calls per hour X 8.5 hours a day = 73440 calls per day

73440 calls per day X 10 months (304 days) = 22,325,760 phone calls

This data tells us in order to set quality appointments from a cold calling list, approximately 1468 calls must be made for each quality appointment that is set. 

Cold calling list expected ratio is 1468 calls to 1 qualified appointment

Some might ask why on earth anyone would make nearly fifteen hundred calls in order to get one quality appointment. I did too. However, it was not the only calling campaign that was being launched for the call center. In a small office adjacent to the main call room, a few select, experienced marketers were making calls off signature cards. I noticed immediately that our success ratio was much higher when using a signature card that was signed, dated and returned from an interested customer. In fact, the ratio was between four or five to one, or a twenty to twenty five percent success ratio. Before I move forward, I want to make perfectly clear that I understand that this was just my experience and that other marketing firms may have a different result when using cold call lists and signature cards. However, I do believe that these number are a valid basis to form my opinion, I do not want to insinuate that the statistics I found will always be the only stats. The world of insurance marketing is a constantly changing world and I would never assume to have all the answers. Fortunately for me, I do however have an addition ten years of appointment setting under my belt to reflect upon.

Since my early days in appointment setting I have been part of countless calling campaigns. In fact, from my records, the only state I have not called to set appointments is Alaska. Maybe there is something in the cool, clean Alaskan air that repels the incessant ringing of the telephone, I don’t know. I do know that even as the business world changes and evolves to meet the new demands of customers, some things never change. For instance, one of the best ways to reach a customer is though a quality referral from a friend or a family member. Sadly we all do not all have a massive and endless supply of friends and family that spend their time selflessly promoting their insurance selling relative. No, we must strike out on our own and look for new and better ways to get the customers we desire. 

From my experience, a quality lead card marketing campaign, carried out by a reputable lead provider, is one of the most efficient and hassle-free ways to connect and write business with customers who are in the market and looking for insurance options. It certainly beats making 1000+ calls to folks who are not in the market, in order to get one qualified appointment.

Next time... 2 calls? 4 calls? 6 calls? A dozen?

Why Would Anyone Be An Appointment Setter?

On June 15^th 2001 I took a job setting living trust appointments for an insurance and investment company. I needed a job and I only intended on being an “appointment setter” for two to three weeks, or at least until I found a better job offer. The work was simple, but required a personality that did not absorb the rejection. I had worked in retail since I was fifteen years old and I was used to upset or confrontational personalities. This job kept any aggravation at the other end of the phone, or in Ohio. Ohio is where I was calling to set appointments for living trusts.  The leads were horrible, but I didn’t know that at the time. In fact, the whole operation was slightly suspect; I did not know that at the time either.

Since that first day, in what I would find out later was called a “boiler room,” I have worked setting appointments for people working in the field of investments and insurance. I have seen the crooks, the saints, the doers, the lazies, the successful and the unsuccessful. There have been hundreds of agents cross my path and each was working, in different ways, for the same goal. With this blog intend to share some success I have had working with a variety leads and marketing philosophies.  I do not pretend to be the expert in the field of insurance marketing. I do however, have over ten years of personal experience working in the appointment setting profession and that will be my guide for this blog.

So why should you read this blog? Well it will be about people you work with, your customers. This blog is dedicated to different ideas on reaching genuine customers and how to not waste time while connecting with them in a business relationship. I will talk about different ways to edify the agent, while not losing your shirt to expensive and risky strategies that waste time and money. So if you know everything there is to know about the fabulous world of insurance and investment marketing, move along. But if you are looking for an honest discussion about business and a few helpful hints from a seasoned professional, all I can say is welcome reader.

My next blog will be about signature lead cards and reinventing the wheel.