4 Reasons that Your Follow-up Fails

Why is following up so difficult? Insurance agents today often struggle to follow-up and prospects continue to fall through the cracks. Here are four reasons why:

1. Lack of prioritization
If you’ve been in insurance sales for a while it is impossible to touch everyone personally by telephone. You simply don’t have the time. Many agents, however, treat every prospect exactly the same way. They follow up with every prospect in exactly the same manner. They follow up with teeny tiny opportunities the same way that they follow-up with huge opportunities.

The harsh reality is: All prospects are not equal.

All prospects do not require the same follow-up. Spend the bulk of your follow-up time with those prospects that are most likely to buy from you.

2. Lack of organization
Following-up effectively takes organization. You need to know which prospects you are following up with, what has already transpired and what the next step is in your sales process. Appropriate software solves many of these problems. Today it is simply too difficult to rely on Excel spreadsheets or your notebook.

3. No system
In order to follow-up effectively, you’ll need to determine: How will you follow-up? What are your goals for each communication that you have with a prospect? How often should you contact your prospects? When should you let a prospect go? These questions, along with many others, need to be answered before you even begin. Most do not take the time to develop their process and so are left winging it every time. When you have a process in place with scripts and templates it is much easier and far less time consuming to reach out to the prospects you need to contact.

4. Fear
The fear of rejection can keep insurance agents from following up adequately, or at all.  Many worry they are being “too pushy” or think, “If the prospect is interested, they’ll call me.” Some fear the anticipated devastation of having a prospect say, “No.”

Prospecting and follow-up are business transactions. Prospects may say “no” to your offering. They are not saying “no” to you.

Failed follow-up can be fixed. One by one, step-by-step, take each of these reasons and address them. Eliminate these reasons that your follow-up is failing and see the results in your bottom line.