Reach & Convert More Health Insurance Leads Faster—and First—with Speed to Lead

Reach & Convert More Health Insurance Leads Faster—and First—with Speed to Lead

September 29, 2022 | Convoso

In health insurance, new leads can roll in at high speeds, particularly during the crucial Open Enrollment period. To turn more of those leads into policyholders, you need to act fast, and so does your insurance dialer.

Check out this quick guide to speed to lead in insurance lead management, and learn how to step up your health insurance sales with a program that prioritizes this all-important metric during Open Enrollment and all year round.

What is Speed to Lead—and Why Is It So Important to Health Insurance Sales?

Speed to lead,” or the time it takes to contact a lead after they’ve opted in, is essential for all outbound sales teams. And in the highly competitive health insurance space, it’s all the more important. When a lead fills out a webform and expresses interest in your policies, it’s time to pounce—while you’re still top-of-mind and while that potential customer is most likely to take action and convert.

Speed to lead isn’t just about striking while the iron’s hot, though. It’s also about securing a competitive advantage. Think about all of the providers and partners out there vying for health insurance prospects’ attention and, ultimately, enrollment. (It doesn’t take long in the business to understand just how stiff the competition is in this industry.)

Research shows that up to 50% of sales go to the first sales rep that reaches out.

How often are you getting to prospects first? 

When a warm lead enters your sales pipeline, your dialer should be able send new, high-priority leads to the front of the queue and ensure that they’re contacted as soon as possible. Not in days, not in hours, but in minutes. (Or even just seconds.) 

Must-have dialer capabilities don’t end there, however. If the lead doesn’t answer, make sure your software incorporates leads into a dialing workflow that follows up quickly while the lead is still fresh. Better yet, you should be able to build a follow-up cadence that also incorporates multiple outreach channels, such as SMS and email, alongside your outbound dialing.

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The Need for Speed to Lead, in Stats:

While the 50% stat above should be enough to convince you that speed to lead is what you need to improve your health insurance sales, that’s far from the only telling stat on speed to lead. The data on the importance of speed to lead simply doesn’t lie:

Calling a lead in the first minute boosts conversion rates by an incredible 391%, according to a Velocify survey.

Yet another study showed that sales teams should stick to a “five minute rule” when it comes to outbound dialing. When calling leads in five minutes or less, teams were 100 times more likely to connect when compared with waiting an hour. Teams were also 21 times more likely to qualify a lead.

However, according to a survey conducted by Drift, just 7% of 433 companies responded within five minutes and more than half of companies did not respond within five business days.

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Achieving Speed to Lead Requires the Right Dialer Solution

The case for speed to lead in health insurance sales is obvious. But still, as the final stat above illustrates, many teams are still slow to react.

So, what is it that’s holding sales teams back from achieving those speeds themselves? Usually, it’s a simple lack of the right technology.

If you’re racing your competition for leads and you don’t have the right dialer software, you can go ahead and take your business out of the running. To maximize speed to lead and reach customers while your offerings are still top-of-mind, call centers need a dialer that provides maximum power along with leading intelligence. 

With a leading predictive dialer, your software won’t just instantly ramp up its dialing rate to penetrate lists at maximum speed. It will also be able to accurately predict agent availability and adjust the dial rate as necessary. And that’s a recipe for better speed to lead, better contact rates, and more revenue-boosting conversions.

Unfortunately, while some dialers advertise unlimited minutes on a high number of lines, they don’t tell users how quickly their software can make use of all those lines. And without the necessary throughput, all those extra lines won’t mean a thing. Your dialer will take too long to dial through your lists, driving up agent wait times while leads only get colder and colder.

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When Is the Right Time to Switch Insurance Dialers?

“Whenever you have to switch dialing platforms, timing is everything,” says Ron Leonard of USHEALTH Advisors. Because when you upgrade to a dialer software that delivers greater speed to lead, you’re likely also getting a more significantly more sophisticated dialer. 

That’s why Leonard suggests making this move as soon as Q1 and the end of Open Enrollment. “As a leader, you have to give yourself time to learn the system. If you can’t learn the system, how are you going to benefit your agents by putting them in a better position to make sales?”

Evaluate new dialer options as early in the year as possible, set up head-to-head trials with your existing software, and make the switch. With months separating implementation and Open Enrollment season, you can get your new technology—and your team—dialed in for success.

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Convoso Is Built to Deliver Maximum Speed to Lead at Scale

Don’t settle for dialing speeds that don’t deliver sales. Convoso cloud-based outbound contact center software offers the fastest predictive dialer out there, meaning health insurance sales and lead gen teams can dial through their lists much more quickly than with other dialers on the market.

With Convoso, you can drive higher contact rates by calling leads while they’re fresh and more likely to answer the phone. Meanwhile, you can ramp up dialing rates more quickly to handle new influxes of leads, minimize agent idle time, and achieve speed to lead at scale.

Plus, Convoso gives you the ability to prioritize not just your warmest leads but your highest quality lists, too. Prioritize your top-performing lead sources to save on leads while boosting performance—that’s the formula for greater call center ROI.


See for yourself the difference Convoso’s dialer can make. Schedule a free demo today.

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