When your focus is community-minded, personalized insurance, it can be challenging to translate your skills to sales, marketing, and lead management. It can seem like a herculean task to figure out an insurance CRM and how it can help you identify and gain your ideal customers, growing your book of business.

When everyone in your agency is doing two, three, or more jobs, how can you manage to keep up with sales and marketing, too?

Our Partner Platform agencies can attest that it’s easier than you think. With our integrated management system and insurance CRM, we take the guesswork out of creating and managing customer and lead profiles in a CRM system. When everything is linked in one place, you can leverage the sales and marketing power of an insurance CRM with relative ease[SD1] .

Identify Your Best Customers

One of your insurance CRM’s jobs is to help you identify your ideal customer. The data in your CRM can answer questions like, who has stayed with us for years? Who continues to grow as a customer? And what do each of these people have in common? Once you have a handle on your ideal customer profile, you can use your CRM data to determine critical factors like their common coverage needs, ideal price points, and barriers to purchase.

This customer knowledge also helps determine your niche market. A niche could be anything from serving a specific geographic area to specializing in insuring a particular type of business. Once you know your niche, you can explore ways to expand on it for other opportunities. For example, if you specialize in serving residential real estate, can you pivot to providing coverage for individuals who are Airbnb and VRBO hosts? Test out these new opportunities, gathering data along the way to determine what to pursue and what to rethink.

Understand How to Reach Your Ideal Customer

Part of discovering your ideal customer is understanding how to reach them. What are their preferred contact methods? How did they find you? And how can you translate that information into a strategy to find more long-lasting customers just like them?

Your insurance CRM has all this data. Start by discovering where most of your ideal customers found you. Whether it be an online search, postcard, review, or referral from a friend, start capitalizing on that method. Investigate which outreach methods secured the sale – phone call, email, text, or other – and how many times you needed to follow up on average. Armed with this information, you can construct a winning strategy that fits your agency.

Keep Track of Your Customers’ Journeys

You may notice that a big part of leveraging your insurance CRM is that it needs to have data on your agency and customers. That means your team needs to track each customer’s journey. When you have customer data, you can get the big picture on your agency’s clientele, showing how they found you, when they engaged with your outreach, and the exact sequence of events that led to them signing their policy with you.

Get your team in the habit of recording their contact with prospects and customers. And, do targeted outreach to your ideal customers to find out what “secret sauce” brought them on as a customer and keeps them around. This outreach can be phone calls, email surveys, texts – whatever is best for your customers. Perhaps you include a few questions in your annual check-ins around renewal time. Just keep in mind it’s better to keep your questions short to get a response – people are more likely to respond to something that takes ten minutes rather than twenty.

Be Ready for Change

Your ideal customer and their preferences are not the same today as ten years ago, nor will they be the same ten years from now. The most important part of your CRM management is keeping up with data and continually checking how your strategies are working. Stay on top of the market’s evolution with regular re-evaluation of who your ideal customer is and how they’re responding to your outreach.

That constant re-evaluation is a central tenant of our practices at SIS. Our Partner Platform team is always on the lookout for how the industry is changing and stays engaged with our Partner Platform agencies to understand how their needs evolve. Most recently, we expanded our business insights reporting to allow for greater report customization. That’s just one of the many ways we’ve continued to put our agencies’ needs first.

Want to know more about how we work with and serve our Partner Platform agencies? Find out what they have to say here, or get in touch at [email protected] or 800.747.7005, Option 6, to find out more.