In essentially any industry, getting to know your clients can help boost sales. For insurance, where purchasing decisions can become complex, understanding your buyer becomes even more important.
By getting to know your clients, you can offer policies better suited to their specific needs. Not every business needs the same type of policy or level of coverage. Clients can differ significantly in terms of their budgets, risk tolerance, communication preferences, etc. All of these factors affect what you sell and how.
Plus, building rapport with clients can be the difference between a business owner choosing you over another insurance agent. You don’t need to be every client’s best friend, but even a small effort, like asking about their family, can make a difference.
Ultimately, if you know your client both personally and professionally, you can:
- Form strong relationships that help increase renewals
- Build loyalty and trust that help you earn client referrals
- Improve marketing and sales effectiveness by targeting similar buyers
Unsure where to start? This guide will help you learn what to focus on so you can get to know your clients and find new ones.
Know Your Clients’ Business Needs
Insurance is not a one-size-fits-all offering. If you want to boost sales, you have to know your clients’ business needs to match them with the right policies. To figure out these needs, insurance agents can:
Conduct client reviews:
Set up a meeting with clients, such as an annual or semi-annual review. During these meetings, ask clients questions about their businesses. Get to know their sales successes and challenges, what their growth plans look like, their talent management strategies, their compliance and risk issues, etc. The more you can understand what a client’s business is like, the more you can offer relevant insurance policies.
Plus, conducting these reviews can help you earn clients’ trust. You can also learn more about their personal lives during these meetings to build stronger relationships.
“A mere 25 percent of customers today consider solution providers to be their trusted advisers. [Customer success] teams that hold regular business reviews with customers and help them track value are twice as likely to be trusted and make customers their advocates.”
Deloitte.
Keep up with clients on social media:
As much as you try to get your clients to open up, they don’t always share everything they should and need to discuss with you. However, what clients might not say during meetings you might be able to learn by keeping up with them on social media. On LinkedIn, for example, you might see if a business owner is posting jobs for their firm. That could indicate they might need more coverage soon. Or you might see that a client is launching a new product or expanding into a new market, which could cause them to want to minimize risks in other areas.
Check in periodically:
You don’t always have to hold formal reviews to see how clients are doing and understand their business needs. If you haven’t heard from a client in a while, you can send a quick email to ask them how they’re doing. You could also congratulate them on an accomplishment of theirs you might have seen on social media. Even if it’s brief, keeping the communication flowing on an ongoing basis can help you understand how clients are doing and whether you can support them in new ways.
“Everyone needs a helping hand every once in a while, and even if you have worked with a client for years, they might need extra support to make their jobs easier. Some account managers might fall into a false sense of normalcy and assume that everything is going smoothly,” advises Kapta, an account management software company.
Know Your Clients’ Communication Preferences
Getting to know your clients’ business needs can help you match them with the right policies, but to close sales, it also helps to know their communication preferences.
For example, as you learn about your client, you may realize they’d be a good candidate for expanding their insurance coverage. But perhaps they’re very averse to receiving sales calls. And the more that you reach out to try to get to know them, the more you push them away.
As such, it’s very important to both ask your clients for their communication preferences and analyze their behavior. Doing so can include:
Asking for preferences during onboarding:
When you sign up a new client, you likely have to send over a bunch of paperwork. At this time, just add one more form asking for their communication preferences.
For example, see if they’d like to have annual or semi-annual reviews. Ask if they’d prefer to be contacted via phone, email, traditional mail, etc. See if they want to sign up for your e-newsletter. The more you can find out early on, the easier it will be to keep in touch in a way that helps clients open up to you.
Once you know your clients’ initial preferences, see if you can spot any trends. Perhaps business owners among different age groups prefer different communication methods. Or maybe small businesses prefer more regular reviews, while larger ones just want to receive your newsletter. Then, you can extrapolate this knowledge as you try to generate new leads. If you know your clients like to connect with you on social media, for instance, that could mean you’re likely to find similar customers on those channels.
Review marketing data:
When you send e-newsletters, post a social media ad or conduct other marketing activities, take a look at any associated data. Clients may not know or tell you their exact communication preferences. But if you see that sending emails in the morning leads to more opens than it does when sending them in the afternoon, that helps you know your clients better.
Similarly, you might find that certain marketing topics resonate with clients more than others. If your website traffic helps you know your clients like to visit certain blog posts, that can give you an idea of what to write about to attract and retain more clients.
Or, if you see clients tend to bounce from your website quickly, that may mean you need to change how you’re communicating information on your site. As Accenture finds, almost 40% of consumers leave a website due to being overwhelmed by options. If your marketing data shows similar trends, that can help you know your clients would prefer simpler communication.
Know Your Clients’ Personas
As you start to know your clients’ business needs and communication preferences, while learning a bit about them personally, you can start to understand your typical buyer. Instead of trying to target all business owners, you can use your knowledge of your client base to target similar ones. That way, you can better target your marketing to those more likely to buy from you.
To help put what you know about your clients in a succinct package, you can create what’s known as buyer personas.
“Buyer personas help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better. This makes it easier for you to tailor your content, messaging, product development, and services to meet the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of the members of your target audience.”
Hubspot
To get started, consider factors such as a typical client’s:
- Industry
- Company size
- Business goals and challenges
- Budget
- Communication preferences
In many cases, you’ll have a few different buyer personas, as not everyone fits in the same bucket. For example, one persona might be for small e-commerce businesses that need liability insurance. Another might be for mid-size retailers looking for property insurance.
You can find templates online, such as from Buffer, to help you craft personas. From there, you can generate new leads by going after prospects with similar personas.
Close More Sales by Knowing Your Clients
Making this effort to know your clients better can go a long way toward increasing sales. The more you know your clients, the more efficient you can be in connecting with them. Whether you’re trying to renew policies, expand coverage with existing clients or attract new clients, if you know your clients you can provide them with what they need.
Using technology like Wheelhouse, an InsurTech platform powered by Talage, can help you meet clients’ needs for receiving insurance quotes easily online. If you know your clients value efficiency, Wheelhouse can help you take your marketing further.