People like to do business with people they know, like, and trust. To build trust, you need to engage your prospects.
Pretend you’re at a networking event. You meet a business owner and the conversation picks up quickly. You ask questions about their business and themselves, finding out some fun facts and informative tidbits. Business cards and text messages are exchanged before you part. Back home, you add them to LinkedIn and comment on some recent posts they made. You send them a message to exchange pleasantries and see if they would be open to a follow-up meeting.
Engaging well is a lot of work and it can be difficult to always be systematic about it. Once you meet a prospect, it is critical to nurture them and gain their trust. The best sales and renewal teams engage more prospects and customers in less time by automating their engagement workflows.
A great example of automating engagement workflows is automating lead assignments among your sales team. It’s easy to evenly distribute leads and track your team’s workload to keep things fair and manageable. You can even connect every lead personally with an agent if you prefer.
Creating templates to engage cold leads is another way to save valuable time with engagement automations. Crafting texts or emails that can easily be sent with a few clicks can prevent your team from formulating a new hook every time. That time can really add up! Automate entire campaigns to bring value to your leads and keep your name at the forefront of their mind.
Text and email templates can also be used to reach current clients. Keep your customers engaged with:
- Alert leads to new products or carriers available in the agency.
- Welcome letters to new clients being onboarded.
- Follow-ups for trailing documents.
- A 45-day reminder before renewal for policy review opportunities.
Individually, sending all these messages would take hours. But by automating your workflow, 15 emails can be sent faster than it takes to walk to the water cooler.
As Roger Sitkins says, sales is a contact sport; you gotta make a lot of contacts! The best teams make more contacts with less effort. Save that effort, time, and money by automating engagement wherever and whenever you can.
Greg McCammon
Marketing Manager
