The Top 9 Health & Life Insurance Lead Vendors to Consider
It can be said that in sales, you’re only as good as your leads. This isn’t necessarily true 100% of the time, but there is a lot to be gained from developing and fostering good leads that eventually work their way through your regular sales funnel. Great selling skills, combined with genuinely interested potential customers, are a pretty good formula for sales success. There’s just one problem, it’s not always easy or feasible to have a constant flow of new leads for your sales business.
Prospecting for new leads is time-consuming, and even the best leads list won’t always yield incredible sales results, so this can create a bit of a dilemma. If you don’t have leads available to you, the traditional options usually involve things like cold calling and investing in advertising. These tactics can provide a certain level of success, but most experts would agree that they aren’t nearly as reliable as having primed, warm leads ready to go.
There is a solution to this problem; using a lead vendor. So what exactly is a lead vendor? What are the best health and life insurance lead vendors? How do you know which ones are the most suitable for you? Read on to find out more.
Shortcuts:
- What Are Health & Life Insurance Lead Vendors?
- How Do Health & Life Insurance Lead Vendors Work?
- What is the Value of Leads to Health & Life Insurance Agents?
- The Top 9 Best Health & Life Insurance Lead Vendors
- What Are Real-Time Leads?
- What is the Difference Between Aged and Real-Time Leads?
- How to Know Which Health & Life Insurance Lead Vendor is Most Suitable to You
What Are Health & Life Insurance Lead Vendors?
In the sales industry, lead vendors are businesses that specialise in collecting sets of pre-generated leads that they then sell to other companies. The main principle is that they have already spent time establishing potential customers who have genuinely shown interest in products or services.
Health and life insurance vendors have taken the time to find warm leads within the industry so that insurance sales agents or teams who buy them can focus their energy purely on landing the sale.
How Do Health & Life Insurance Lead Vendors Work?
Life and health insurance lead generators often use online data to group customer niches together. Once the data they have is organised, they can sell these optimised leads to life and health insurance salespeople or companies. Often they can also categorise their leads by how ‘warm’ they are, which has the potential to make the sales process much easier.
Some lead vendors also offer other services like in-house marketing, database marketing, and the collection of business and personal information and sometimes they can even create specific campaigns to get leads depending on what a sales company is after.
What is the Value of Leads to Health & Life Insurance Agents?
The primary value of buying leads from a lead vendor is that they can specifically target the market that you are looking to tap into. They can personalise their campaigns to very specific degrees of both demographics and psychographics and can ascertain to a pretty accurate degree just how warm a lead is likely to be. This in itself reduces a huge amount of work for a sales company. The time that is saved on sourcing leads for your sales funnel can be shifted over to the actual art of the sale.
Investing in health and life insurance leads can have significant value to agents but remember that they aren’t a sure win. No list of leads is ever without a certain amount of junk leads, and just because they are warm doesn’t mean you won’t have to work to close a sale.
Statistically, only about 2% of sales calls are ever successful on the first contact. 80% of sales are actually made on the fifth call but only 10% of sales agents will continue to make contact after the third attempt. The point of this is that sales is not an exact science, but eliminating the guesswork and making sure the potential leads are warm can assist in yielding higher returns, provided you are persistent.
The Top 9 Best Health & Life Insurance Lead Vendors
If you’re considering using a health and life insurance lead vendor to give you a competitive edge as an agent, below is a list of 10 of the best vendors on the market.
1. Vanillasoft
Vanillasoft offers an entire software package to help simplify and automate the sales process. Their software focuses on eliminating unnecessary tasks and offering detailed insights into current sales activity. They also operate as a lead vendor across a broad range of industries, including insurance.
2. Nectar Marketplace
Nectar Marketplace uses proprietary technology to give agents real-time insurance leads. Their main selling point is that they aim to provide you with leads that match what you are offering as closely as possible. They are powered by Assurance IQ which specializes in digital insurance and finance and has been changing the face of insurance for a while now focusing on tailoring needs to individuals to gain a reliable footing in the market.
3. EverQuote
Everquote offers life insurance leads, but they also do home and auto insurance leads as well. What sets them apart from other lead vendors is that they utilize professional telemarketing teams to initiate lead calls, and once they are warm, they transfer them in real time to the sales agent or agents who have paid for the service. This takes out the most time-consuming part of the sales process and allows the agent to just focus on providing the client with service options to close the sale.
With Everquote, agents can also buy data leads and calls to build prospective leads for the future.
4. Hometown Quotes
Hometown Quotes sells leads for home insurance, renters insurance, auto insurance and most importantly, health and life insurance. They aim to add a personal touch to their communication which was the inspiration for their name. They have very competitive pricing, but they tend to focus on the quality of leads rather than the quantity. Therefore, hometown is a better option for agents who aren’t looking to buy bulk lists of leads.
5. QuoteWizard
QuoteWizard offers leads both in real-time and as aggregated lists. They have a large range of prices and packages and offer several deals in lower price ranges which can be a good option if you are using a lead vendor for the first time. They boast a high conversion rate from their leads, but it’s important to note that this doesn’t mean you are guaranteed to experience this. Leads don’t necessarily work the same way for every insurance agent.
6. Datalot
Datalot only offers live transferred leads, and they don’t offer shared data sets. The reason this is important to take into account is that this kind of service might not be very beneficial for you if you are a new insurance agent. Live transferred leads don’t necessarily lend themselves to creating a decent pipeline of leads as you are building your business. They are a little bit pricier than other lead vendors on this list, but they are well-established.
7. SmartFinancial
SmartFinancial offers great live transfers that are verified, and they also boast a tech-savvy platform to help give agents a competitive edge when buying leads. They are in the higher price category, but this company is run by insurance and tech experts who pride themselves on great customer service.
8. NextGen Leads
The NextGen Leads Company was founded by a marketing expert and former Google employee in 2014. They specifically use an in-house marketing team to generate their leads instead of relying on third-party providers. They boast that this method of working provides higher conversion rates for their clients.
9. ZipQuote
ZipQuote takes the approach of putting the agents first, and they do this through three principles. They provide high intent insurance leads, offer a streamlined lead management platform and warm up the leads by providing them with exceptional customer service. They also offer a system that can integrate easily with most CRMs that is open 24/7.
What Are Real-Time Leads?
To put it simply, a real-time lead is a potential customer who is in the perfect position (or as close to it as possible) to purchase a service or product. For example, someone who is actively looking to buy health or life insurance. They are almost definitely going to make a purchase.
What is the Difference Between Aged and Real-Time Leads?
The major difference between a real-time and an aged lead is the amount of time that has passed since the initial inquiry. Generally, real-time leads are collected online and distributed immediately to lead buyers, or they are sorted through call centers and transferred directly.
Real-time leads are a great example of ‘striking while the iron is hot’ whereas aged leads have made an inquiry, and anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of months has passed since the initial contact. For this reason, real-time leads tend to be more expensive to purchase than aged ones.
Generally, the only real disadvantage of real-time leads is that they are usually so fresh it can be hard to determine how legitimate they are, so the return on investment could be a little riskier.
How to Know Which Health & Life Insurance Lead Vendor is Most Suitable to You
As you have seen, there are many different health and life insurance lead vendors to choose from, so making a choice might seem a bit overwhelming, but there are a few things to consider and some questions to ask that might help you decide.
Possibly the most important piece of information to establish is whether the company is a lead aggregator or a lead generator. Lead aggregators purchase leads from other companies and lead generators usually source all of their lead information in-house. Both can lead to potential sales, but the benefit of going with a lead generator is that you will know exactly how old the lead is and get a better idea of its potential warmth.
It’s a good idea to become familiar with the style of customer service offered by a lead vendor and make sure it fits seamlessly into the style of your business.
Check if the lead vendor has scalable packages available and if it’s possible to adjust your spending or renegotiate terms as your business grows. It’s also equally important that you are aware of the vendor’s buy-back system if you receive leads that are junk.
Always check what the cancellation terms are or if it is possible to pause at times when you need to cut costs.
Ask the lead vendor what they expect your return on investment to be and if any other perks set them apart from their competition.
Lastly, if you are using a lead vendor for the first time, it might be a good idea to just set up a low-risk trial to see if you get the results you are after.
Conclusion
The advent of lead vendors has changed the nature of work for health and life insurance agents. It’s an innovation that helps even more in the profession to work smarter and not harder. With the right research, a lead vendor could definitely help to broaden your sales funnel and give you more time to do what you do best, close the sale.