However, finding qualified leads among the masses of prospects is a more difficult task. With increasing numbers of prospective customers doing more of their research online, the internet is becoming one of the largest providers of insurance leads.

Depending on the need to be solved, there are many types of life insurance leads. Let’s review a few different types.

1.    Mortgage Insurance Lead: Term life insurance may be used to pay-off a mortgage balance in the event of premature death of the home owner.

2.    Buy-Sell Lead: Life insurance can be used to protect the interests of a partner’s share of a business for their heirs.

3.    Key-Man Lead: Life insurance is often used to protect a business in the event of death of one of the business’s vitally key employees.

4.    Final Expense Lead: Retired senior may use a small whole life insurance policy to cover the final expenses of death.

5.    Life Settlement Lead: Individuals who are already own a life insurance policy may desire to sell the policy’s death benefit at a discount to obtain cash for current needs.

Agents are constantly exploring the needs of prospective customers to see how life insurance may best solve them.

Two important decisions in selecting leads are the quality and the cost of the leads. Lead quality many times depends on how the lead is generated. Lead costs can range from a low of $5, to as high as $75 or more depending on how difficult it is to generate the lead.

Life insurance sales leads will always be a key component of an agent’s effectiveness in marketing and selling life insurance.

1. Decide on an insurance product(s) or service that appeals to you, that you know or are willing to     learn, that you believe in, and that consumers have demonstrated that they want.
2. Select a proven method of finding those consumers who want your product.
3. Develop a sales presentation that assists the consumer in making a decision and selecting your product over all others.

Of the 3 steps to successful selling, step #2 is what makes the sales profession so difficult for so many aspiring agents. Selecting a method of finding potential customers for your product is the art of generating qualified sales leads.

So, what is a qualified sales lead? Some believe compiling or purchasing a list of individuals in a specific zip code, earning a certain income level, and having attained a certain minimum age qualifies as a sales lead.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. Even though certain demographics may reveal where a potential customer lives, how much they earn, how old they may be, and even how many children they have, this data does not mean you have qualified leads. Seasoned insurance agents identify this compilation as suspects for leads, but not qualified leads.

Exactly what is a qualified sales lead, and how does an agent find them among the mass numbers of suspects that are readily identified? Qualified sales leads are those potential customers who have actually expressed an interest in purchasing your product, and can afford to make the purchase immediately.

As you can see, generating sales leads that are qualified is a difficult task for the average insurance agent to obtain. Finding truly qualified sales leads is a numbers game which is usually expensive and time consuming to accomplish. Fortunately, this task can be outsourced to lead generation companies specializing in compiling qualified sales leads for insurance agents.

Exclusive leads are more valuable than any other type of lead because once an insurance agent purchases the lead, the lead vendor cannot sell that lead to any other agent, therefore making it an exclusive lead.

In contrast, most lead vendors, to remain profitable, will generate a lead and sell the same lead to 3, or as many as 8 other agents. Therefore, one lead generated by the vendor represents as many as 8 sales for that one single lead. An exclusive lead can only be sold once by the vendor which makes it more expensive for the agent.

Still, top-producing agents prefer exclusive leads to minimize competition for the sale. Increasing competition from other financial institutions like banks, stock brokers, credit unions, mortgage brokers, etc., have made the job of selling life insurance a much more difficult task. As a result, insurance agents are constantly looking for any competitive edge they can get.

Through internet lead generation tools and tactics, insurance agents are able to obtain leads within minutes of a prospect expressing interest in purchasing life insurance. Lead vendors many times create websites to educate internet browsers of the various uses and needs of having adequate life insurance coverage. Prospects expressing an actual desire to purchase will input personal information on these websites and request an insurance agent contact them. With sophisticated communication tools and automatic lead-capture websites, the days of selling life insurance door-to-door appear to be a thing of the past.

Some internet savvy agents are generating their own exclusive leads through direct email campaigns, banner ads, pop-ups, and pay-per-click advertising all designed to direct internet traffic to a lead capture website. For agents with the required knowledge or the willingness to purchase this expertise, this is a way of keeping lead generation in-house.

However, most agents still prefer to outsource lead generation to outside vendors who specialize in generating exclusive life insurance leads.

Insurance agents may also find their own prospects by various methods and sources including referrals from existing customers, cold calling phone lists, mass mailing sales letters and post cards, advertising, etc. These methods do require a tremendous amount of time to implement successfully which in most cases is more expensive to the agent than outsourcing the task of generating the lead to a third party. Many industry sources say that the task of finding prospects for insurance products now requires more than 50% of an agent’s time compared to only 15% in actual selling time with the prospect.

Sales lead generation companies also use various methods of finding life insurance sales leads, many of which the agent would normally use. The most popular methods used by lead generation companies are,

1. Internet advertising
2. Mass mailing letters or post cards
3. Mass fax solicitations
4. Outbound call telemarketers

Most companies will usually specialize in one method of lead generation over the others to develop a degree of expertise in finding qualified prospects. However, the single most popular method is currently internet lead generation. Numerous websites are created and deployed throughout the internet to provide browsers with the ability to select various insurance products and obtain product quotes based on gender, age, insurance amount, and health criteria. This data also gives the agent the required information to assist the prospect in making the proper choice in the type of life insurance coverage to best meet the budget needs of the prospect.

To remain competitive, agents want to spend more time actually selling to new prospects instead of looking for prospects. Therefore, many insurance agents are recognizing the benefits of outsourcing the tasks of generating life insurance sales leads to a company specializing in lead generation.

There are insurance sales leads available for the following types of insurance products,

• -    life insurance
• -    health insurance
• -    final expense insurance
• -    auto insurance
• -    homeowners insurance
• -    Medicare supplement insurance
• -    mortgage life insurance
• -    long term care insurance
• -    disability income insurance
• -    commercial property casualty insurance

Many lead generation companies will usually specialize in a particular type of sales lead they generate. Some companies, however, attempt to develop a “one-stop” shop for multiple types of leads.

Each type of lead represents a different need of the prospect. For instance, someone purchasing a home with a mortgage will consider obtaining a life insurance policy to pay-off the mortgage in the event of a premature death of the homeowner. This prospect would be in the category of mortgage life insurance sales leads.

A family looking to protect their income and financial assets from the risk of a catastrophic illness requiring hospital treatment, would strongly consider purchasing a health insurance policy instead of a life insurance policy. This prospect would be a health insurance sales lead.

Auto insurance sales leads are those prospects who want to comply with state laws requiring licensed drivers owning autos to insure their autos in the event of damage to the auto, property or bodily injury due to an accident.

Ever increasing costs of doing business as an insurance agent has caused many to consider purchasing one or more of the various types of insurance sales leads to maintain a steady flow of revenues.

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