Tips for Selling Insurance Over the Phone

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Selling insurance over the phone is not as challenging as it might look. For example, according to statista.com selling insurance via phone, something around 35%. So let’s dive and define the cornerstones of the insurance process selling over the phone. Check out our tips.

Selling over the phone is almost similar to selling face-to-face. The difference is in distance and that person doesn’t see. But the person can hear you and this is enough to make a sale.

To make a successful selling of insurance, you need to follow the rules of natural conversation. Most of the sales agents try to develop techniques that bring a non-natural style of conversation. As a result, prospects and customers know that this is some kind of advertising, which is bad.

Successful tips for agents

Sales agents that want to sell insurance over the phone must implement these call center selling tips:

  • The research is the basis of selling. If you sell insurance, you can’t be successful, unless you’ve done deep research. You need to know everything about your insurance: discounts, cases, benefits, terms and conditions, age of the customer, examples of payment, financial state, etc.

    This is not all you need to know. You also need to know about the features and benefits of your competitors.

  • Prepare yourself for the call. Really successful agents do their homework by developing scripts, training speech, and studying customers. They do this regularly, the best of them do it every day because it’s always paid off. It’s a bad idea to dive into selling without a prior investigation of the subject.

  • Establish yourself as an expert. Before the call, you need to understand that the customer also knows something about insurance. The most part of your selling will be to the people that: older, experienced, savvy, and more intelligent than you.

    Do a great job and be ready to answer all the questions and objections of prospects. And to do so, you must act as an expert. Don’t talk about something that you don’t know— this is a dead sale. Talk only about relevant information about your insurance, benefits, and USP.

  • Appeal to the needs of the prospect and customer. When you speak with a customer, you need to find some kind of empathy. You need to understand what exactly this customer wants to hear from you.

    If you don’t talk about the needs of customers, you’re likely to talk about the company’s needs. The more you talk about something that doesn’t concern the customer, the worst for you.

  • The first 4 seconds and 2 minutes are crucial in conversation. When you open a conversation with an introduction, you’re likely to entice customers or push them away. If customers suspect you are trying to sell something to them in these 4 seconds or 2 minutes, they reject you.

    If you are striving to make a sales pitch, it doesn’t have to look like an advertisement that is overused by salespeople. It must look like a genuine desire to help customers solve problems with: finance, health, retirement, car, family, children, etc.

    Don’t sell, make a genuine interest in customer problems, warm up and when the time comes, make a friendly pitch.

  • Create a strong USP for your insurance. USP is the unique selling proposition that differentiates your product among others. There are thousands of insurance agencies all over the world, and it’s your job to define what’s the best benefits of your insurance that are better than competitors.

    And don’t say your insurance doesn’t have a USP. You just don’t do enough of the research. There is something in your product that is better than the other products. Or if your insurance is similar, there are some benefits that others don’t mention. Make deep research on the topic and find out these benefits.

Reasons why customers buy insurance

There are clear and concise reasons customers buy products, services, and insurances. This is a practical or emotional reason. You need to appeal to one of them or both.

Practical reason

Customers buy insurance for practical reasons, which means customers think about what this insurance will do. Does this insurance help to save more money, guarantee health coverage, help invest in the future, help increase money for retirement, help save money to put children in college?

If so, you’re likely to succeed, because all these are the best interests for the customers.

Emotional reason

When you touch the emotional side of the purchase, you’re likely to entice customers. If customers feel uncomfortable because of excess weight or physical illness or financial insecurity or whatever they feel bad about.

You need to aim for these emotional appeals because they’re truly genuine appeals of customers. Samples of emotional appeals look like these:

  • You don’t have to feel fat again;
  • You don’t need to be uncomfortable again with someone;
  • You don’t have to feel financially insecure anymore;
  • You don’t have to feel uncomfortable, because you haven’t something that others have;

Maybe this appeal does not carry material benefit, but it is powerful because it gives some sort of control of the world around the customer.

Both practical and emotional reasons are powerful appeals you can touch. And which one you use is only up to you. But remember that effectiveness of these appeals depends on the market and insurance you sell. And sometimes it’s best to use the combination of emotional and practical appeal.  

The sale of insurance is not just a sale

The best sellers of insurance don’t sell just insurance and its benefits. They sell something intangible. That means that you sell the restoration of dignity that customers lost in struggling with problems.

You sell the restoration of time that the customer spent by waiting for a doctor (in the case of health insurance). You sell confidence in the case when insurance gives money savings. Don’t sell only tangible items, but a bit of intangible items. If you reflect on this in your sales pitch, your customer will be delighted.

How to not to fail in sales of insurance

The first reason for failure is that agents slump after a few calls. It’s especially important for agents with small experience. The rejection is an uncomfortable situation, and it brings some lack of confidence.

There are situations when you can meet a rude client trying to insult you personally. In overall result, it affects your activity as an agent. It shouldn’t be the case, because you are a professional and you do your work.

If you’d known how many successful sales agents achieve rejections from prospects and customers in their lives, you wouldn’t believe it. But it’s true. The most successful agents in the world achieve the biggest amount of rejection and insults.

Agents must work on their mistakes to close as many sales as they can. This is the obvious situation when the agent makes the same mistake repeatedly. As a result, a tremendous amount of sales are not closed. The crucial mistakes in selling insurance that you need to avoid:

  1. Feel yourself confident. Don’t limp in the conversation with the customer because it’s a dead end of a sale. When you try to speak too unnaturally, weak and humble, it creates an opinion that you want something from a person. Once a customer understands it, you will never get a second chance for selling. So be confident as a professional in your selling.

  2. Listen and speak. Even experienced agents make this obvious mistake. They talk without interruption and don’t give a chance to respond. The expression of the customer is that this is a selling machine, not a human.

    By giving a chance to answer your questions or thoughts, and listening, create a good mood for conversation. When the time comes to speak, you must make your best efforts, but then you need to listen to customers and understand them.

  3. Use closing techniques in insurance sales. Two things people remember the most. This is the opening and closing of the conversation. Customers rarely remember the part in the middle of the conversation. To make a sale, you need to make an effective opening and closing of conversation.

Challenges of call centers and agents in selling insurance

Some agents struggle with cold calling scripts for insurance sales. Sometimes ideas for creating a script don't come easy. If you have trouble with your script, visit this guide to cold calling script to reshape your ideas and script skills.

Insurance phone sales are easy with the proper software. Call centers that implement the strategy on selling insurance over the phone must be up to date. The call center software solves the problems with CRM, SLA, and KPI metrics, but it also helps to generate revenue in sales. Agents struggle so much in dialing numbers, verifying information, and checking the notes, so they forget about what they want to say to the customer.

They need to think about work and reasonable appeals for customers. To tackle dialing problems you need a solution like a cloud predictive dialer software. It does all the routine of dialing instead of you.

During COVID—19 impact, there is no better time to sell more over the phone. The pandemic seems to continue for a few years or more, and you need to consider how to develop your call center.

But when you tackle one issue after another, that’s time-consuming. Instead of this, use an ultimate software solution for a call center. And one of the profitable solutions is telemarketing software. Telemarketing software gives the capacity to a call center to:

  • Talk with a tremendous amount of customers with minimum effort;
  • Automate dialing of numbers;
  • Ease setting appointments;
  • Schedule calling to existing clients and re-signing contracts.

Tanya Gonchar

Expert in call center process automation, Head of Marketing at Voiptime Cloud. Interested in customer service, B2B sales, marketing, business analysis.

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