Incubate your X-Dates 

Collecting expiration dates hasn’t gone out of style.  Astute and aggressive insurance sales organizations have annual X-dating goals and strategies. These strategies include not only collecting them but following up on them with smart marketing tactics that include multiple contacts prior to the personal or business insurance renewal dates.  Here are NINE tactics that are helping our clients get X-dates and close sales. 

The incubation process

Mother hens have got it right.  They keep the nest warm in order to hatch the chicks.  Developing X-dated suspects into prospects into customers takes the same tender loving care. 

1. Collect X-dates everywhere you go, from everybody you meet. 

2. Do a target direct mailing with a BRC and e-mail address so that a suspect can respond with their X-date or a request for an immediate appointment or quote. 

3. Make sure X-dated suspects have three of your business cards. 

4. Make sure suspects get a token of your appreciation---a letter thanking  them for the X-date and letting them know you will be in touch.  Enclose an ad specialty item with your letter – a fridge magnet with your name, product line, telephone number, for example. 

5. Follow up by doing something at least 2 or 3 times before renewal time. Like send suspects your customer newsletter, a note, a card, a sales brochure. 

6. Make sure you feature your Web site in every contact you make. 

7. Keep reminding suspects that you want to be their full-service professional  for all their insurance needs. 

8. Ask your suspects for permission to provide an apples-to-apples comparison before they renew, i.e. to get a no-obligation Second Opinion.  

9. Jump the gun.  Make a contact before the current agent-of-record--- or another astute competitor---makes the customary 60-days before expiration date call.  

Persistency is a virtue 

All too often, agents install a program like X-Dating for a year, and then abandon it.  Wrong.  The highest ROI will come from persistent mining of your X-Date Sales List, year after year. 

Use the same process, the same tactics.  Continue to let people you have contacted know you would appreciate their business…that they are the type of responsible insureds you want as clients.  Prospects and customers reward marketers who are nicely persistent, and value them as individuals.