***Guest post by: Sa El, owner of simplyinsurance.com***
Being an independent insurance agent is hard work, it’s even harder when you have no idea where your leads are coming from, and you don’t have the right products.
But here’s the thing:
What if I told you it doesn’t have to be that hard at all, that you can control both your lead flow and your sales process to create a business full of helping people and making a great living while doing it.
In this post today, I am going to show you the steps I took to build a 6 figure insurance business in under 2 years by using Ninja Quoter.
Understand Your Business Model
After you get licensed, your usual next step is going to be to get appointed with a few insurance companies, or an FMO or IMO.
These are all great ideas, an FMO or IMO will usually help you with training.
They will also have a ton of insurance companies you can get contracted with all at one time.
However, before you do this, you must understand how you want your business model to work and to get the products that will work well with that model.
What type of products will you offer? Will you focus on life insurance companies that require no exam, “Fully Underwritten life insurance,” “Final Expense,” “Whole Life,” “GUL”?
You also need to know if you will generate your own leads and if you plan to bring on agents eventually.
For me, I decided I only wanted to offer online products that customers could go direct with.
I wanted to have nothing to do with the backend of the approval process.
But here’s the thing:
I did take a substantial pay cut when I decided to go this route, you can forget about renewals and you can also forget about getting paid a percentage of the annual premium, with this route, it is only a 1-time payment.
Build The Right Partnerships
The next step is building the right partnerships with the right insurance companies.
If you decide to go directly with an insurance company, make sure you are speaking to the person that can make a final decision.
Try to avoid speaking to the random marketing rep that you are usually assigned.
If you decide to go with an IMO or FMO, you need to ask at what level of production can your commissions increase and what their caps for increases are.
It is essential to make sure that you understand how each product will work within your business model.
You also need to determine if you will be paid on an advance, paid as earned, or paid as an affiliate.
Now, this is important:
Paid On An Advance
If you get paid an advance, you need to be able to place a good book of business.
Usually, these contracts will pay you a 9 month advance on an insurance sale.
So:
If you sell a policy for $50.00 per month, and you are on a 100% contract, you can expect a payout of $450.00 the following week for that policy.
However, if that customer cancels the policy or it lapses due to non-payment, you will get charged back that $450.00 and depending on how long the customer had it, you could still be on the hook for the full amount.
This can lead to what is known as a debit balance, and the difference will be taken from your commission checks until you have a positive balance.
Paid As Earned
If you get paid “as earned” this means you are only paid out when the customer pays for their policy based on your contract percentage.
So if you sell a policy for $50.00 per month on Jan 3rd and it goes active and in-force, you can expect to get paid $50.00 per month on the 3rd of each month for the first year as long as the customer pays their policy.
Paid As An Affiliate
Now, the payouts are entirely different as an affiliate because of your very small role in the sales process.
You aren’t usually going to be directly contracted, and mostly you are going to be passing the customers directly to the insurance company.
The affiliate route is going to pay the lowest amount so I wouldn’t recommend starting with that option.
Generating Your Own Leads
As an experienced agent, I think your best option is going to be to start generating your own leads regardless of the route you take.
Before I started my blog, I was using Datalot and paying around $25.00 per exclusive lead and buying about 50 leads a week.
This means I started every week $1,250 in the hole.
Now imagine using Ninja Quoter and getting just 50 leads per month, which would save you thousands of dollars and it would be the best lead.
There is absolutely no better lead than one that came to your site and is expecting to deal with you.
Custom Work
From time to time, you may find that a process might not exist that you need to run your business correctly; at that point, you need to get custom work done.
I was able to use Ninja Quoter’s custom work to have them add specific carriers to my quoter that weren’t already there.
This gave me the ability to offer products that my competitors didn’t have inside of their quoters.
This was an essential part of building my business because in the insurance space, getting a quote is usually the last step before purchasing and offering different carriers makes you stand out.
Easy To Understand Content
No matter what option you decide on, creating easy to understand and fun content in the insurance space is essential.
If you want to build a stable insurance career, you will need to generate new leads monthly.
The most affordable option is spending your time creating content that will get people to reach out for a quote.
You should have content that is as long as it needs to be, it should explain everything in detail and leave your reader asking, “how can I get started?”
Then, you give them an answer by having your quoter placed in a position for them to get started fast.
Almost all of my content pages have quoters in the sidebar which is essential to hitting your goals.
Quoter Placement
You must map out which pages will have a quoter on the sidebar and which pages will have a quoter throughout the content.
You also should be mindful of mobile and how your quoters function and look on mobile.
Ninja Quoter has done a fantastic job on making them mobile responsive, but they will look different for everyone, so be sure to play around with the width and mobile code.
Customer Follow Up
Another great feature about the Ninja Quoter setup is that customer follow up is super easy.
There are so many ways to receive your leads, you can have them go into a CMS, go directly to your email, or pull them up in the Ninjaquoter backend system.
Following up with your customers fast is going to be essential in building a strong business and making the leads work for you.
No matter what you do, always follow up with your customers within 1 minute of getting the lead and first thing in the morning if you get leads in during your off-hours.
The first person to the lead usually wins.
Getting To 6 Figures
I can honestly say without the Ninja Quoter system; I wouldn’t be able to hit six figures on an annual basis.
I have all of my first checks on a wall behind me, and the first sale I generated through Ninja Quoter took me 9 months to make, and it was for $120.00.
With the Ninja Quoter system in place and my business model working on average, we are clearing $15,000 per month.
The system I have set up using Ninja Quoter is going to allow me to grow this into a 7 Figure business in no time.
Taking Action
If you don’t have a quoter and are planning on starting an insurance agency, then you need to act fast.
And here’s the thing, you don’t have to focus only on life insurance.
I am sure Ninja Quoter could do some custom work and add online disability insurance quotes to their quoter system.
They could even add something like quotes for home insurance with their experienced programmers.
Whatever you decide, you need to have a system in place, and the tools that will allow you to execute that system and Ninja Quoter is the best tool in the market.
I say give it a try and get your business started today!