Producer Blog

What is a Successful Sales Strategy?


 As an insurance agent, you've probably heard the "Always Be Closing" sales strategy. But in an increasingly complex, digital world, there is more to strategic selling than just focusing on a close.

Here are five components that can help you develop a successful and comprehensive insurance sales strategy.

1. Understand Your Market.

To develop a successful sales strategy, you first need to understand who you are selling to. Create buyer personas using the following demographics to identify your ideal customer:

  • job
  • household income
  • industry
  • age
  • gender
  • location
  • how they prefer to communicate

It is also a good idea to note how they gather information, their purchasing behavior, their challenges and concerns, and how you can solve those challenges, so you can create your elevator pitch to that persona.

2. Create Realistic Goals and Stick to Them.

Look at your success in previous years and identify trends. Then create goals for the coming year. These goals may include high-level metrics such as:

  • the number of new customers
  • number of returning customers
  • number of policies sold per month
  • amount in dollars made per month

Your goals may also include metrics such as:

  • leads generated
  • referrals generated
  • website traffic
  • social media fans/followers
  • email opt-ins
  • calls made per day

Once you've completed your strategy, check back to make sure these key performance metrics are still on track with your sales tactics. If everything is in sync, then reaching your end goal will be easy.

3. Create Your Plan of Attack.

Consider how you are going to reach and sell to your market and create a plan. Look at how your customers gather information and how they prefer to communicate and then tailor your strategy and tactics to their preferences.

As someone selling more complex products like insurance, becoming a thought leader is a great idea. Start producing informative content in a blog on your website or write a column in a local paper.

Other ideas include offering to speak at local events, sharing educational content on social media, and engaging in online conversations.

4. Don't Forget Business Retention.

Keeping previous clients (generally) takes much less effort than acquiring new customers. Use your network to gain referrals and sell to customers who already know and trust you.

How can you reach and retain customers? Refer back to who you are targeting and their preferred modes of communication and purchasing.

5. Work with Your Marketing Team.

Nothing can harm your sales more than being a one-man or woman show when you have a team at your disposal. Work with your marketing team to understand how your prospects are interacting with your brand online, what they are searching for online, what emails are most successful, and what PR opportunities exist for you.

In addition, if you are going to become a thought leader, your marketing team can help you immensely. They will assist with setting up your social media pages, optimizing your website and blog for relevant search terms, and creating a timely, useful content strategy that will help you reach the right prospects and engage them.

Once you've developed your sales strategy, create a report dashboard where you can view your progress. This could be a report in your CRM or in a simple Excel file. Then set a monthly or quarterly time to review your progress and make adjustments.

Topics: sales support sales strategies successful sales strategy