Many insurance agencies have not yet formalized their lead scoring system. This is a worthwhile endeavor for all agencies and should be reviewed every year, while tracking the return on investment of your marketing programs.

What is the lead score? It is a methodology that is used to rank prospects based on a scale and then assign a value to determine the level of interest and distribution. For example, let’s say an appointment for the truck insurance leader comes to your agency. This potential customer is with an owner of 15 power units, they use company controllers and are not happy with their operator. Perhaps your lead scoring system is on a scale of 1 to 10, and this lead is scored 8. What could get a higher score? And what types of leads are out of the profile and what score would they receive? Prospects may need to get a score of 8 to appear on their producer scorecards.

Is lead distributed to producers by territory? Does your lead handling process vary based on the type of lead, product, or lead? For example, are business leads separated by large and small companies, by industry or product? Are potential benefit customers analyzed by age groups over and under 50? Does your agency have a tracking system to determine how many leads showed up for the appointment, moved through the process, received quotes, and ultimately became new business?

Salespeople, sales managers, growers, and other entrepreneurs often refer to prospects in vague terms like: new, warm, hot, cold, likely, qualified, etc. These terms do little to better understand a sales pipeline or convey the probability of purchase to other team members. Agencies may consider creating a simple lead scorecard to solve this problem and quantify their lead score. Formalizing lead scoring offers benefits such as:

  • It helps producers to create ideal attributes to form a buyer image.

  • Create a simple number system to take advantage of your buyer persona

  • Assign numerical values ​​to rank your best prospects

  • Create a simple qualification acronym to determine the probability of closing

What should be included in a prospect scorecard?

Use a prospect scorecard to quantify your approach to pipeline construction. Some attributes of your ideal customer may include revenue, growth rate, customer type (business or consumer), and market niche. For example, are you targeting companies with revenues between $ 5 million and $ 10 million? Are your best prospects fast-growing companies, trucking companies, manufacturers, or consumers?

If you’re selling to consumers, do they have a high net worth, middle income, millennials, or seniors? Are your prospects in a specific market niche like banking, insurance, biotech, consulting, education, etc.? Create a dashboard with your ideal attributes and a custom rating abbreviation to help you determine if you are selling to a potential customer in the profile.

Insurance agencies and brokers looking to get to the next level with their insurance marketing and lead generation, but lack the internal resources to achieve their marketing goals, can contact a competent insurance agency marketing firm.