Complete Guide on How to Sell Life Insurance: Turn Those Life Insurance Leads Into Clients

A consistent flow of life insurance leads is the lifeblood of your business. When you know how to secure high-quality, affordable leads, you’ll always have a full pipeline.

However, there’s something you need to know: There’s a difference between securing life insurance leads and turning prospects into customers.

We’ve created our complete guide on how to sell life insurance to help you through every step of the sales process — from purchasing aged leads, properly targeting leads, and qualifying prospects, to closing the sale.

There are many comprehensive guides on selling life insurance online, but it’s amazing how many ignore speed and efficiency — two key factors to success in today’s marketplace. 

Even with the best-aged leads, a sales plan that doesn’t take volume into account will leave you frustrated, burned out, and behind your close target rate.

If you’re working with aged leads, or, you just want to streamline your sales funnel, read our complete guide to find out how to sell life insurance faster and more efficiently.

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Why selling life insurance is important

As people grow older, they begin to think more about the impact that their passing will have on their family. 

Some people want to be able to leave behind an inheritance for their children, partner, or other family members. Life insurance can do that. 

Others want to make sure that they don’t leave behind debt. Life insurance can do that too.

Approximately 106 million adults lack life insurance or adequate coverage. 

This number is higher than you might imagine because many Americans don’t think they can afford a life insurance policy. 

The good news is that life insurance policies are quite affordable. 

This means there’s a great opportunity for making serious money selling life insurance to people who need it most. You can be the savior for many people and their families if you can reach them and sell to them.

Get life insurance and final expense leads with Aged Lead Store.

Who is your target audience?

Everyone can benefit from a life insurance policy, but there are a few specific kinds of people who especially need it, including:

• Spouses who provide the main income for the family
• Older adults without savings
• Adults with private student loans
• Business owners

These people are acutely aware of how many responsibilities they have and probably feel bogged down because of it. 

Luckily, you are there to help provide them peace of mind, knowing that if the worst-case scenario happens, their family and employees will be able to move on without going into financial ruin.

Of course, it will take several qualifying questions during your call with your prospect to determine what these trigger events or pain points are for your prospect.

Keep this in mind: the massive baby boomer generation is reaching retirement age every day, and many seniors don’t have adequate coverage or enough savings. These people need life insurance policies the most.

The great thing is when you purchase aged leads from Aged Lead Store, all leads come in a CSV format. This format is easily searchable by age or other qualifications, which can help you narrow down your prospects.

Generating life insurance leads

Starting in life insurance sales can be a grind. 

Salespeople often start working for insurance agencies, only to compete with other salespeople over who gets the leads that have been provided by the agency.

What if there was another way to generate leads, other than waiting for your agency to provide them for you? 

By purchasing aged leads in bulk, you can get a leg up on your competition by boosting your pipeline with thousands of qualified, high-quality leads that you can start calling right away.

Generating your leads through traditional means such as direct mail and online landing pages is expensive and time-consuming. Leave that to the marketers!

You’re a salesperson—you want to start calling people today! 

Buy aged leads

Buying leads is a good solution to both your lead generation needs and your qualifying needs. 

Aged lead queries have already reached out saying, “I need insurance, help me choose what’s right.” 

With aged leads, the cost per lead is very low, letting you buy a large volume of leads at once.

Most queries aren’t ready to buy right away—only 2%–5% of leads buy in the first week. But these leads do buy—about half of all leads close, so 90% of closed insurance sales are found in that 45%–48% of aged lead sales.

If you’re just getting started in sales, purchasing leads that are 86 days to 365 days old gives you a significant discount, at around $.30 per lead! 

At those prices, you can get a very high ROI, compared to shelling out tons of cash for real-time leads.

Find the best deals and discounts when you purchase 1000 or more bulk-aged leads. 

How much do life insurance leads cost?

Life insurance sales leads aren’t nearly as expensive as you think. This is particularly true if you’re focused on buying aged leads. 

In high volume, leads can be purchased for as little as $.20/lead. 

Even if you purchase a low volume of relatively new leads — 15-85 days old — it only costs $1.75/lead. That’s a small investment when you consider the potential return. 

How to manage life insurance leads

The way you manage life insurance leads won’t be identical to other agents, but three basic details always come into play.

Targeting leads

For life insurance leads, the request for a quote is often spurred by a change in life circumstances — a new wife, a new baby, a big career advancement, or even the sudden death of a friend or relative. 

Your lead generation efforts should focus on folks at one or more of these life crossroads. They’re far more likely to convert quickly than a tire-kicker.

Qualifying prospects

Knowing the origin of your prospect’s query is crucial, and it’s also the key to closing the sale in a short time frame. 

In your qualifying process, make sure you learn the specifics of why this lead is considering a new life insurance policy.

Make sure you have your sales process set up so that you can take notes on individual prospects for each call in your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. 

Make notes of names, details, and so forth, that you can reference in future calls. This builds trust between you and the prospect.

Closing sales

Now in the course of your qualifying and follow-up calls, you’ll be asking a lot of questions, but progressively, you’ll find yourself listening more than you talk. That is if you know what’s good for your close rate.

Find out what motivates this particular prospect. Beyond trying to protect his family, he may be interested in a great value, monthly or yearly premium payment schedules, or a highly customized solution. 

The sooner you answer his objections and get down to addressing his needs and offering a motivating solution, the faster you’ll be able to close another sale.

Mastering this back and forth takes some skill and practice, of course, but with focused attention, you’ll get there faster.

Search millions of validated life insurance and final expense quote requests with more added weekly.

Life insurance sales strategies

Sales approaches are as individual as the folks using them. 

However, a slow and tedious process not only frustrates consumers but can also cost you sales. 

A quicker sales funnel isn’t about pressuring your prospects, it’s just about working smarter. Target the right leads, qualify, ask the right questions, and know when to close.

Of course, the whole sales process is predicated on you having leads to call. Instead of spending time and resources generating your leads, go for the more economical option — purchasing aged leads in bulk to build your call list in your CRM.

The only strategy you need is the strategy that generates results. Finding this often comes down to trial and error. Once you know what works and what doesn’t, you can adjust your approach accordingly. 

Explain the risk of living without coverage

Without life insurance coverage for lost income, prospects open themselves and their families up to hardship. But while some may understand this tradeoff, they don’t think through the extent of the risks.

The risk of lost income doesn’t just affect a family’s everyday bills in the immediate aftermath of an unexpected death. 

Many don’t consider bills that may have accrued immediately before the death — costly medical procedures, for instance, last-minute travel by family, or missed work.

Many people today are sensitive to the effect emotional trauma can have on individuals. 

But they don’t anticipate that the anguish of losing a loved one can be heightened by immediately having financial hardship for unexpected expenses, recurring bills piling up, or bill collectors calling.

Lean on referrals

Buying leads will jumpstart your pipeline, but some of the easiest sales you’ll ever make come by way of referral from a satisfied customer. 

It’s good practice to ask current customers to share their contact information with friends, family, and co-workers. 

Experiment with cold calling

Cold calling isn’t nearly as intimidating as it sounds. 

Experience and a defined strategy will allow you to connect with a large number of consumers, some of which may be interested in your product line. 

Read our 22 quick tips for better and more successful cold calling.

Use social media

Social media platforms allow you to connect with a large audience. This includes both existing customers and prospects. 

For example, you can use LinkedIn to connect with professionals who are interested in life insurance to protect their family and/or the future well-being of their business. 

Stay current with health and insurance news

Health and insurance-related news can impact the life insurance market. Maybe premium prices are on the rise. Or perhaps a specific health concern is leading more people to consider a life insurance policy. 

Use health and insurance news to your advantage. Consider crafting a curated newsletter each month for your leads. Let them know what’s going on and how you can help. Email is a great way to get started with this type of lead nurturing. 

Get started with email marketing

Email is one of the best and most cost-effective ways to stay in touch with customers and prospects. 

For customers, share information such as industry and health-related news that could be relevant to their policies. 

For prospects, guidance on buying life insurance and why it’s important is a good place to start. Remember to include calls-to-action (CTAs) throughout so that the lead can easily contact you once they’re convinced that they need a policy. 

Get started by migrating data from your CRM to your email marketing provider. We recommend a user-friendly platform such as Mailchimp to get started. 

Life insurance benefits you can sell

A solid opportunity exists for the millions of American households that have little or no loss income insurance. 

Like many insurance strategies, the answer comes down to education of the facts, selling benefits, and a little bit of anecdotal storytelling — examples where insurance helped someone, or the lack of coverage caused avoidable hardship.

Try to get a prospect to think about the financial problems that coverage could alleviate for family members.

Immediate expenses often include things like:

• Funeral costs
• Outstanding medical bills
• Regular mortgage payments
• Ongoing car payments
• Credit card debt
• Taxes
• Estate settlement costs

Further down the line, your prospect’s family will need to take care of ongoing expenses with their breadwinner. That could include things like:

• Housing expenses
• Utilities
• Groceries
• Healthcare
• Transportation
• Everyday expenses

And even unique situational expenses, like the cost of caring for a sick or elderly dependant.

Without their main source of income, serious financial hardship could lie ahead for your prospect’s family far down the road. 

While loss income insurance is not meant to make a surviving dependent wealthy, having no backup could alter their life aspirations. Proper coverage could provide for:

• College for their dependent children
• Retirement savings for a spouse
• A financial safety net for parents or siblings
• Or allow for a charitable legacy

Lastly, any story that illustrates how coverage helped a client take care of their family after a loss can make a big difference. 

For greater impact, pay attention to what’s important to your prospect and tailor your benefits and examples to directly address their needs.

How to efficiently work a high volume of leads

A quick sales process is no good if you find yourself running out of leads to work. 

It’s a simple numbers game: The more leads you can work through, the more sales you’ll be able to close. 

Of course, with aged leads, this can become a needle-in-the-haystack game. 

The sales are there, but you need a way to efficiently manage a large volume of leads without becoming frustrated.

Automation is a must

When working with a high volume of leads, like with an aged leads system, it’s an absolute must—automate the things you can automate. This means using tools such as:

• An autodialer, calls through leads much faster than you could manually (about three to four times faster).
• CRM to keep track of where your prospects are in the funnel. 
• Email marketing to send drip email campaigns with targeted sales emails, informational packets, reminders, etc. 
• Social media to post info, blog articles, news clippings, etc. with social media scheduling tools 
• Your website’s landing pages to funnel hot prospects into your sales pipeline

Nurture the relationships with your leads

Aged life insurance leads generally aren’t ready to buy the moment they pick up the phone. Most leads today require nurturing. 

They need to get to know you, over several phone calls, emails, and a face-to-face appointment or two. It can take between five to seven contacts before a lead is sales-ready.

Your automated process can help speed this up while you’re occupied with other work. 

An efficient system for reaching out and following up with these leads will save you a lot of legwork, and take nothing away from the bond you’ll be able to build with your life insurance clients. It’s a win-win solution.

We recommend setting up an automated drip campaign for your different segments of leads. 

Close the deal 

When your prospect filled out their request for a life insurance quote, they probably didn’t mention the driving force behind the decision.

Did they recently experience a death in the family? Or just have children? Did they just start a company? 

Asking a prospect “How would your family pay the bills if you were to die unexpectedly?” is a profound question, one that’s probably at the heart of their decision.

It’s important to ask these qualifying questions to get your prospect thinking about things in this world that really matter, about the pain point they’re trying to address with a new policy, and their true motivations for buying.

Once you find out the motivation, you’re that much closer to scheduling a follow-up appointment that will eventually lead to you closing the sale.

How to sell life insurance—final thoughts

Selling to life insurance leads is a rewarding endeavor and a great career for those agents who take it seriously. 

There are countless ways to go about selling to prospects, but without an eye toward speed and efficiency, many sales agents get burned out and discouraged. Don’t let that be you.

Success with aged leads is not about working yourself half to death. It’s simply about working smartly and efficiently. 

Learn how to quickly qualify and move leads through your funnel. Use lead-buying and automation strategies to work a large pool of high-quality leads. With this strategy, you’ll soon see your business moving to the next level.

Start your new year off right with a fresh supply of high-quality aged leads from Aged Lead Store. 

You’ll find thousands of sortable aged leads, ready to boost your sales. Whether your business is 

• Auto
• Life
• Health
• health supplement 
• Homeowners Insurance
• Annuities
• Auto warranty coverage
• Home mortgage refinance
• Or solar installation

We’re the lead provider for you.