Are You Wasting Time Quoting Insurance?

If I had a nickel for every time someone at an agency talked about time, let’s just say I’d be writing this article from my very own private island. Time in agencies seems to be at such a premium, there is never enough of it, but we far too often are our own biggest time vampires. In agencies, we see a great deal of inefficiency and waste.

One of my favorite Agency Performance Assessment questions is “How could you be more efficient at your job?” It’s amazing the lack of response I often receive. I hear everything from “Nothing. I’m very efficient.” to “I don’t even have time to think about this!” I rarely hear anyone truly thinking about ways to become more efficient. We can’t create more time in the day, but we can become more efficient and effective.

As we review an agency’s performance, we often see a great deal of time wasted on quoting. You may be thinking “How is that possible? We need to quote to grow.” The answer is yes you do, but many people are wasting their time quoting insurance because they have a poor sales process or they don’t understand main agency objectives. Here are the common themes we see in efficient agency quoting:

We treat all leads the same: Quoting a lead when it doesn’t have a high likelihood to close is inefficient. Yet too often we see agencies treating all leads the same. With a referral, you have more time to quote the opportunity as they are coming to you from a peer recommendation; however an internet lead needs to be quoted ASAP. The longer you wait, the less your chances are of converting it. We often teach agents how to quote over the phone on small commercial and many personal lines accounts. It takes practice but the closing ratio skyrockets. When we quote someone who is shopping two or three days after we speak with them, they are gone. They have called the competition and gotten immediate gratification (which can be more important than the cheapest price).

We email quotes: Email quotes also decrease effectiveness. When we email a quote and tell people to let us know, we should expect a poor response. Emailing quotes means you have no control over your sale. You can’t ask for the business, answer questions and worse, the only reason you will win is because you are the cheapest. That’s horrible. Emailing quotes is efficient for you to get it off your desk, but quoting business that won’t sell won’t help improve your time management.

We reshop out of fear: Too often we reshop accounts too quickly. When someone is upset, we reshop them. I was once at an agency in New York and an account manager was reshopping a $437 annual auto policy because it went up $7. That’s insane. We need to train account managers on how to sell rate. What this means is how to modify accounts and defend the rates where appropriate. Your agency needs a remarketing guideline. They can’t remarket everything while new business quotes take two-to-three days to complete.

We let reshops sit: If I have taken the time to contact your agency to review my rates, I’m most likely upset. This can trigger me to call you AND shop my insurance. We need to handle rewrites quickly—again we recommend wherever possible handling rewrites on the phone with the client. We can’t let rewrites sit for three days. You will kill 45 minutes of your time and lose a customer. Instead, we need to respond quickly and efficiently.

We quote insurance we shouldn’t: Every agency needs to work on defining what business they do not want. Yes you should and can turn business away. If your team is spending hours on a monoline home that no one else wants, do you really want it? We can try to be insurance superheroes to get it done, when in reality we need to just walk away.

Quoting insurance is a necessity but too many agencies don’t have a firm strategy on how to quote it effectively. I’d rather not quote insurance if we can’t do it well. If we close 25% of new leads, there is a lot of time wasted. You have to get good at tracking and knowing where your time is being wasted and then build better processes for efficiency.