Have you been ignoring phone analytics? They can help lead you to success with life insurance sales.
It’s five degrees below zero. You’re dressed in typical office attire, and you just realized your jacket, hat, and gloves (the ones with the built-in hand warmers!) are all locked in a coworker’s office where you left them after your early-morning meeting. Everyone else is gone for the day. It’s a ten-minute walk to the train. You think about toughing it out and walking quickly to the station, then you remember that news break you heard earlier today.
In those temperatures, and with a steady wind, you could get frostbite in as little as 10 minutes. You decide to take a cab and make a mental note to always know where your jacket is.
What helped you make that decision, and other countless smart decisions throughout your day, is a little something called analytics. And in the case of phone analytics, that information can help make your sales calls more efficient, more effective, and more lucrative.
What are phone analytics, though? How can they help you? Analytics, generally, is data, but not just any data. It’s data or information that’s organized in a way that helps us answer specific questions, such as whether or not it’s worth the risk to take a ten-minute walk in below-zero temperatures. Analytics can help us move in the right direction and refine our processes.
For example, your data might indicate that you make 50 sales calls per day to potential life insurance clients. The analytics, however, might reveal that you rarely connect with anyone on Mondays, but your Wednesday afternoon calls result in more meetings and conversions than any other day or time. That’s valuable information. Now you can shift your focus to making more calls on Wednesdays and use Mondays for other essential tasks.
As powerful as that information is, it’s only one small way phone analytics can boost your success. Let’s take a look.
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Find out what phone analytics can do for your life insurance sales
How many calls does it take for you to connect to a prospect? Depending on where you look, you’ll find research that says you need to make anywhere from six to 18 calls before you talk to someone. Statistics like these are helpful, but individual experience varies widely. With the right dialing software in place, you don’t have to guess. You can look at your reports and find out how many calls you should expect to make for each sales opportunity. So if you’re starting to feel dejected on the eighth call to the same person, your analytics may suggest that you average 10 calls before you connect with a potential customer. So don’t give up! Just two calls to go! You’re almost there!
What about cold calls? Some salespeople swear by them. Others would prefer to skip them altogether. But if you examine your phone analytics for a particular campaign, you might find that cold calls do, in fact, result in a high conversion rate. Without the data, though, you have little way to know for sure if your cold calling campaign is working.
What about warm leads? How long does it take you to respond to incoming calls or website queries? Are you waiting too long to reply and losing sales? Your phone analytics hold the answers (and the possible solutions) to these questions.
Taking that even further, you could A/B test your life insurance sales scripts. Set up two separate campaigns, with two different scripts, and find out which one performs better. When you do it all within your automatic dialing software, it’s easy to track. And if you really want to perfect your script, you can continue to A/B test until you have a few scripts that are real winners. It may only take a few tweaks here and there to produce substantial changes in conversion rates, and as long as you’re looking at your phone analytics, you’ll be able to see that difference.
Your analytics can give you other valuable information, too, such as your average time on a call, the number of calls you make, and your total call time. Remember, information is one of the strongest tools you have in your sales box. Take advantage of that and use it to make better strategy decisions.
Don’t make these phone analytics mistakes
“Statistics are no substitute for judgment.” – Henry Clay
The same can be said for analytics. As an example, some managers feel that high call times and low call volumes are a sign of an unproductive salesperson. That could, of course, be true. It could also be that in spending more time with fewer people, you’re converting more calls into sales. In that case, fewer calls would be positive.
Another mistake that pops up a lot is relying too heavily on limited analytics or data. You need both breadth and depth to get an accurate picture of what is happening. In the above example, if you only look at the number of calls you’re making, you won’t have a correct idea of whether or not those calls are successful. Similarly, the results of a day or two, or even a week of calls won’t give you an objective view of your efforts and results. Gather at least one month of data before you make any major changes to your system, so that you can feel sure you’re moving in the right direction.
It’s also a good idea to ensure that the month of data you use isn’t an anomaly. For any number of reasons, you may have a month that is busier or slower than usual. While you don’t want to ignore these numbers, use caution in basing major marketing decisions on them.
Phone analytics can help you direct your sales efforts toward more efficient and productive ends. And don’t forget that the right dialing software can make it easier than ever to get that information.
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