By Seth Kravitz

It can seem overwhelming when you first get started using Insurance leads to find more clients and make more sales for your agency. And there’s a good reason why: It is overwhelming, if you don’t know how to manage it.

There are horror stories of agents trying to enter all the information about all their leads – dozens and dozens of them – manually into Excel spreadsheets, or worse yet, onto old-fashioned ink-and-paper ledgers. Obviously, those methods were the norm at one time, but the business is now a lot more fast-paced and competitive than it used to be. Customers have so many options and so much information coming at them now that it isn’t just about going to the agent on the corner or in someone’s hometown. It’s about speed, service and persistence.

That’s where a lead management system – a software program or a Web-based tool many companies offer for agents to use – is such a powerful benefit in today’s marketplace. It won’t just help you keep up with your leads and your current clients. It will let you know immediately when it’s time to call up one or more of them to gauge their interest in buying a policy or renewing. And, better yet, a lot of these systems even make first contact on their own with an automated e-mail.

With leads, it’s imperative that you be the first one to make contact. About 80 percent of the time, it’s the agent who makes contact with a lead first who makes the sale. That automated e-mail and your quick follow-up call can literally be the thing that makes you the sale.

And after that, they are a big help in keeping you and your office in line with when you should follow up with clients who asked for a little time to make a decision. It also should give you a good idea of where each of your clients is in terms of progress through the sales process and serve as a database of your notes regarding all your conversations with clients. That’s a big deal, too, since you’ll be spending more time answering your clients’ questions and working through their concerns and less time trying to catch up from the last time you talked.

Of course, not all lead management systems are created equal. Some are not even suited for the insurance industry at all. Others may be very good for the insurance business, but not to your agency specifically. Like any software, different systems are made with different features and different users in mind, just like you likely cater your agency and your policies to a different type of customer than other agencies do.

So how do you know which one is best for you? Sometimes it’s best to just take it for a trial run and see how it works out. But there are some things you can make sure of beforehand:

• Does it generate automated e-mails?
• Does it track the sources for your leads and pinpoint the areas where conversion rates are the highest?
• Is there training available from the provider?
• Do other agents with similar clientele like it?
• Can you view your full history with it?
• Does the workflow adhere to the best practices of the insurance industry?

Don’t fool yourself. No lead management system, no matter how well-suited to your agency or how good, is going to do everything. There’s still plenty of leg work for you to do to really turn that lead into a sale, from showing that you really care about the customer to taking time to answer questions to doing everything you can to craft the perfect policy for your client.

But a lead management system gives you the chance to spend your time doing those important things rather than throwing numbers into a spreadsheet and trying to extract the data you need from it later. You should take it.