Consumers today can gain immense advantages by purchasing indexed universal life (IUL) insurance. This permanent life insurance product offers people a death benefit as well as a cash value, which allows the money they have in the plan to grow based on how certain stock market indices, such as the S&P 500, perform.
The attractiveness of IULs creates a great opportunity for financial advisors, insurance agents and brokers, and other professionals in the financial sector to sell these products to clients. To do so, though, you need to generate qualified leads on a consistent basis.
Here are some strategies that financial professionals can follow to generate leads.
If you want to consistently increase sales of IUL plans, you’ll need to consistently generate quality leads. Below are some tried-and-true lead generation strategies.
The internet provides a wealth of opportunities for salespeople to find qualified leads for IUL products. This should all start at your personal company website, which can be set up relatively easy and for not that big of an investment even for an independent agent.
Your company website will serve as the hub for all information you’ll post online about your business, and it will serve as a resource and instant access for potential customers to learn more about you and what you do.
You should also set up profiles on major social media platforms that make the most sense for your business, namely LinkedIn. Become active on the platform, and use it to prospect for potential clients who are most likely to be interested in IUL plans as part of their retirement process.
These resources also provide you with a place to share success stories in financial planning, tax free retirement ideas, and how people can achieve success by purchasing IULs through financial advisors or an independent agent.
You can also consider paid ads to find leads for life insurance products. This is slightly different from hiring a lead generation company to generate leads for you, but could still lead to more success in gaining exclusive IUL leads than just traditional cold calling.
Once you have an attractive and robust company website and social media accounts, you can set up various lead magnets to collect information on potential clients for life insurance products. Lead magnets are essentially free resources that you provide to leads in exchange for their information — most notably, their email address and phone numbers.
You can create a free eBook, for example, that provides helpful tips and information about the benefits of IULs. You can offer a free demo of the product, as well as links to YouTube videos you’ve created.
The lead magnets don’t have to be specifically about IULs, either, but need to be something valuable that someone would want to exchange their email address or phone numbers for. These can result in quality leads coming your way for the personal finance products you sell.
You may also consider hiring lead generation services, where you’ll be purchasing leads from a lead generation company. These can be exclusive leads that are high quality for financial advisors and independent agents who want to sell more IUL products and save time doing so.
Partnering with other professionals in the IUL space can be invaluable for growing your business. Networking with others who are involved in client finances and establishing relationships with them, for example, can lead to you being a trusted referral source should they have a client who is interested.
For instance, if you establish a good relationship with a local community banker, they may refer some of their high net worth clients to you if they mentioned being interested in life insurance products. This is just one example of how partnerships could generate valuable IUL leads.
A big aspect of successfully selling IULs is establishing trust among prospective clients. People who are wealthy and have money to invest in IULs typically are very protective over their money, assets and loved ones.
Because of this, they often only work with professionals they believe they can trust, rather than just selecting products they like.
One great way to establish trust and build rapport with leads in this regard is by providing valuable information to them. Educational webinars can be very effective at introducing yourself to prospective clients and showing them that you are an expert in your field.
Again, you don’t have to charge to attend these webinars, but rather can just collect email addresses in exchange for entry.
This is one of the most effective ways to connect with life insurance leads and to generate free leads in the insurance business.
Once you’ve collected all email addresses, you can use them to set up email marketing campaigns. This marketing tool has proven very effective in modern times, especially when it comes to financial and insurance products, and is a great way to convert leads into customers.
By putting your name, face and information constantly in prospective clients’ inboxes, you’ll be front-and-center in their mind when they’re considering IUL products. Not only that, but you can target specific groups of prospective clients by sending emails that cater to their needs, wants, interests and pain points.
IUL products can be a little confusing, so you want to make sure that your clients know exactly what they’re purchasing. By building educational content about IUL policies, you’ll be helping your current clients be more knowledgeable.
In addition, you’ll also be establishing yourself as an expert in IULs and building that trust that’s so necessary to attract new clients.
Social media is invaluable in today’s business world. It’s completely free to set up and provides you with the opportunity to literally reach millions of people across the world.
It’s essential that you have a social media presence to succeed today, but make sure that you choose the platforms that are best for you and the clients you wish to attract. As mentioned before, LinkedIn is one of the most valuable and powerful platforms for attracting IUL prospects.
IULs are intricate:
We’ve touched on this a little already, but IULs aren’t simple life insurance products. They involve cash value growth that are linked to stock market indices, which can cause confusion among agents and clients alike.
Understanding the Illustration:
To sell IULs successfully and consistently, you must heavily rely on illustrations. However, many agents struggle to fully grasp the mechanics and all potential outcomes of the products themselves, making it even more difficult for them to communicate those to prospective clients.
Regulatory Scrutiny:
Regulators have amped up their scrutiny on IULs because of concerns about potential misrepresentation and unrealistic illustrations. This has created some uncertainty around the product in general, which can make it harder to generate qualified IUL leads.
Market Fluctuations:
Since IULs are directly tied to the performance of the stock market, agents need to be able to understand what market trends are, and how they can impact the value of policies.
Fee Structures:
Not only are IULs themselves complicated, but so, too, are their fee structures. In many cases, this can include things such as potential surrender charges, administration fees and insurance costs. Agents must completely understand these aspects of IULs themselves so that they can properly and clearly explain them to clients.
Client Education:
Education is a huge aspect to successfully selling IULs. Agents need to be able to clearly inform clients about the potential benefits and risks of IULs, which includes the possibility that the plan can actually lose cash value depending on how the stock market performs.
Finding the Right Target Audience:
Not everyone is a perfect fit for an IUL. This requires agents to be able to accurately identify prospects who could benefit from the unique features of the product, and then effectively find, target and communicate a message to those prospects.
Building Trust and Relationships:
If you want to sell IULs consistently, you need to take a more consultative sales approach compared to how you would sell traditional life insurance. This involves establishing long-term relationships and building genuine trust.
Staying Up-to-Date:
The landscape for IULs is constantly evolving, as new regulations and products emerge rather quickly. This requires agents to remain informed about all the changes, and adapt their strategies to fit the current status.
Need more leads? For the best ideas on how to get more life insurance leads check out the Life Agent Growth Instagram and their website.
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