Selling Insurance: A Work From Home Guide for Remote Agents

Master Remote Productivity

When you’re working from home, there’s no boss standing over your shoulder and making sure you’re getting all of your tasks done. It’s up to you, and you alone, to take care of your responsibilities. This change can take a bit of time to adjust to, but maintaining productivity while working from home is crucial to keep your sales up and leads growing.

The most successful virtual insurance workers are highly motivated self-starters who have the tools they need to get their job done well. Being self-motivated is important for all roles in the insurance world, from independent insurance sales agents to business owners to managers at insurance agencies to service representatives.

Create a Dedicated Workspace for Remote Success

It’s easier to succeed when working at home if you have a dedicated workspace. Otherwise, you may end up working from your kitchen table, your couch, your bedroom – pretty much anywhere, which can lead to a lack of productivity necessary to thrive as an insurance agent.

Before you know it, your personal and professional lives can blend to the point where you’re seemingly never fully working and never fully relaxing. Dedicate a specific part of your home for work and work alone.

Structure Your Day for Effective Prospecting

As you adjust to working from home, it’s important to develop a routine to maintain a standard workday and make sure that no important tasks slip through the cracks.

If your goal is growing your insurance business, you need to build prospecting calls into your weekly, or even daily, schedule. This allows you to continue nurturing leads consistently, which means more stability for your business. Over time, at least some of those leads will convert and potentially create loyal clients for many years.

Wondering how you’re going to get leads in the first place while working from home? Learn more about how to find health insurance leads.

Establish Goals and Measure Productivity

Someone might work a 10-hour day and leave the (home) office with nothing to show for it. Someone else might work a four-hour day and convert eight new prospects.

If you want to succeed as an insurance agent working from home, you need to set up a system that enables you to track your progress and measure how productive you are. Otherwise, it’ll be impossible to know how much you actually got done that day.

First, it’s crucial to establish what you intend to get done each day, week, month, and year. Establish a roadmap of what you want to achieve and utilize tools to measure your progress, such as Trello or ClickUp.

Need some help figuring out what great goals look like? Here are some examples from our goal worksheets.

Leverage Digital Marketing for Virtual Success

Competitors are always just a quick Google search away, making it vital for every single business to invest in digital marketing. With the right marketing tactics and techniques, digital marketing can become the easiest way to generate leads and drive more traffic to your services.

You might be thinking that you’re busy enough as it is, and you can’t imagine where you’ll find the time to focus on marketing. With the right software solutions in place (we’ll explore this in more detail later), you can leverage automation to launch personalized email marketing campaigns for you, saving time and resources.

Need help with email marketing campaigns? Use our templates for selling ancillary products or our templates specific to OEP.

Use the Right Software

There’s no sense in making your job any more difficult than it needs to be. That’s why you need to leverage the right software solutions when you’re working at home.

Here are some of the tools you pretty much need to invest in:

A customer relationship management (CRM) solution: This serves as a digital filing cabinet while enabling you to easily personalize outreach to each prospect and client.

Automation (e.g., email marketing automation): Look for a software solution that does repetitive tasks for you so you can focus on other important tasks.

Quote and enrollment software: Software that enables prospects to pull quotes, compare plans, and enroll in coverage at their own convenience – including Medicare, general health insurance, and ancillary insurance – even when you’re asleep can significantly boost your operational efficiency from home.

Accounting software: Look for software that can keep track of your finances so you don’t have to.

Necessary communication tools: This may include tools such as Slack or Microsoft Teams, depending on the size of your agency or communication needs.

Prioritize Your Own Comfort

To avoid stress and discomfort in your home office, follow the general rule of thumb for office engagements: the 90-degree rule. With your back straight, ensure your elbows, knees, and chin are all at 90-degree angles. If your head is tilted forward, your wrists are raised above your elbows, or your knees are overly bent, make adjustments to your screen height and chair height to correct. 

If you are using a laptop, you may also want to consider an external monitor or keyboard for more control over your workspace. Furthermore, since you may be sitting a lot, investing in an office chair you love is worthwhile.

Minimize Distractions for Uninterrupted Focus

Clutter can cause both visual and mental fatigue. If you’re staring at junk all day, it’s going to be next to impossible to maintain constant focus, as you’ll want to remove the clutter.

If possible, try to maintain an organized workspace, as well as a dedicated home office that’s far away from the noise of pets, kids, family members, or outside distractions. 

Cultivate a Dedicated Work Environment

Not everyone has the luxury of extra space. But if you do, try to make your workspace as close to an office as possible. Ensure this space is dedicated to work and rarely anything else. When the workday is done, shut the door or leave the space for the night. This will help separate work from your personal life, which is a common challenge remote workers experience.

Have Seamless Access To Essential Tools and Supplies

You likely spend a lot of time switching between your computer and your phone, so it’s important to ensure chargers and headsets are close by at all times. 

If you need to print something out, don't leave your printer on the other side of your house or apartment. Set up your office so that all of the things you need to succeed at work are close by. You may even consider having a coffee maker or mini fridge in your office as well.

Get Some Fresh Air

Remote workers may sometimes struggle with feeling isolated from others, especially if they begin to sell insurance remotely after previously working in an office surrounded by coworkers. As a remote worker, it’s best to take some time to go outside and get some fresh air to not feel cooped up.

If you have some errands to run, take any time you have for breaks to take care of them so you can go outside and connect with others in person. This can help you strike a balance between working from home and still interacting with others in person.

To sell insurance from home, you need the proper certifications and insurance licenses for each state you plan on selling different types of insurance.

For example, if you’re planning on selling Medicare Advantage plans – and that’s something you should definitely consider since 30.8 million people are enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan, which makes up 51% of eligible Medicare enrollees – you will almost certainly need America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) certification. 

You can join forces with a group, such as our partner and sister company America’s Health Care Plan (AHCP), a national, agent-driven marketing organization that works with you to get you appointed to sell multiple insurance products from multiple carriers. Partner with AHCP, and you can have a much easier time getting approved to sell health insurance, ancillary insurance, Medicare products, and more.

CRM System

A CRM solution enables remote insurance agents to organize all of your customer information in one place, making it that much easier to deliver personalized experiences that keep clients engaged with your business.

CRM solutions also make it easier to generate and manage leads, streamline workflows, and increase sales opportunities. As an added bonus, leading CRMs can integrate with the other tools you rely on every day, allowing you to extend your investment and unlock additional efficiencies.

With a CRM solution in place, you’ll:

Stay organized: Create records for each client and organize all relevant information in one place, including contact information, personal information, product information, payment details, communications, and more.

Nurture relationships: Keep tabs on where each client is in the sales process automatically instead of having to stay up to date manually.

Boost customer retention: By providing a robust, personalized experience for each client, you can increase the chances that they keep doing business with you.

Improve marketing ROI: A CRM gives you a deeper understanding of where your leads are coming from and where your marketing dollars have the biggest impact.

Automation

There’s no sense in doing things manually if you don’t have to. Investing in automation can help you work more efficiently by taking care of the simple tasks that are critically important to your business but also repetitive. 

You can use automation to generate and expedite notifications, marketing, communications, and more – giving you more time to focus on nurturing relationships and improving your marketing outreach.

Two of the most popular types of automation are email marketing automation and social media marketing automation. 

Email Marketing Automation

With email marketing automation, you can set up “drip” campaigns that automatically send notes to clients when they perform certain actions (e.g., downloading an e-book from your website). 

Email marketing automation also enables you to send messages at routine intervals. For example, you might want to let all of your clients know that the Open Enrollment Period (OEP) kicks off in two months and then remind them again when it’s one month out. With automation for your email marketing campaigns, you can set it and forget it.

You don’t have to create your emails from scratch, either. Check out our Sales Cadence for Selling Ancillary + Email Templates and OEP email templates to get started.

Social Media Marketing Automation

Social media marketing can play an important role in the success of your business, but manually managing various accounts can be both overwhelming and inefficient. Social media automation platforms, such as Hootsuite, enable you to automate the bulk of the process, saving you time and making your work-from-home environment more streamlined.

Quoting and Enrollment Software

Searching for plans, helping prospects narrow down their options, and manually pulling quotes from different carriers takes a lot of time. It’s a long, drawn-out process that can be frustrating for everyone involved.

Modern quote and enrollment solutions help you overcome these challenges by enabling clients to shop for plans at their own convenience. With real-time quotes, the ability to compare different plans, and the ability to even complete the enrollment process themselves, utilizing advanced quote and enrollment software can improve multiple aspects of your operations, especially operational efficiency. What’s more, the top quote and enrollment solutions also enable you to centralize all of your data in one location. 

With potential hours of reclaimed time given back to you, you can invest that time in growing your business the way you want to

Quote and enrollment solutions also help your business stand out from your competition. By taking advantage of such a solution, you can prove to clients and prospects alike that your business is focused on adding as much value as it can, and you’re always investing in the newest tools to improve the health insurance shopping experience.

Learn more about how our online shopping features work for your clients here.

You read that right: With a quote and enrollment engine powering your website, you can sell insurance 24/7, 365 days a year! Talk about meeting your client’s demands for instant gratification.

BLOG: The Importance of Online Health Insurance Enrollment While You’re Working Remotely 

Accounting Software

Running a business from your home is one thing. Handling all the financial details of your business while balancing your work and personal life is an entirely different story; one that usually ends in unnecessary stress.

Investing in a solution such as QuickBooks or FreshBooks will make it easier to stay on top of your cash inflows and outflows. You’ll have more control over your finances and more time to focus on more important matters, such as expanding your business and maintaining a healthy balance between work and your personal life.

Communication Tools

With all of the other tools in place to help you thrive in selling health insurance from home, you’re going to need the right communication tools in place to maintain proper communication with your clients and leads.

You’ll not only need a mobile device that enables you to access your CRM and other tools from any location, but you’ll also need a laptop or tablet that supports video conferencing functionality. This will allow you to hop on a quick call to talk a client through their options if they’re so inclined.

Additionally, you may also want to consider trying out a real-time messaging platform such as Slack, which would allow you to address any questions and concerns that clients and prospects have in real time. It’s an easy way to provide that extra touch that sets your business apart.

1. Constantly Prospect for New Leads

There’s no denying that high-quality insurance leads are invaluable assets in many ways.

Growing your health insurance business starts with getting great leads quickly and efficiently. One way to do that is through Quotit’s Lead Marketplace, which enables you to get leads within an hour after they show interest in a health insurance product.

2. Get Organized To Enhance Efficiency

When you’re working from home, you need to be organized. Otherwise, you’ll spend too much time searching for documents, files, client data, and contact information. 

With a CRM in place, you can keep track of important client and prospect information from one convenient location. Crucial information, including names, policy renewal dates, pre-existing conditions, and more, is always just a few clicks away. 

3. Sell Ancillary Products

If your goal is to expand your revenue streams and, ultimately, your business as a whole, you need to sell ancillary products – such as dental, vision, life, and short-term policies.

Add ancillary products to your portfolio and pitch to your loyal clients the most relevant ones for their current needs. Building deep relationships with your clients by providing products that specifically fit their needs not only makes you a quick buck, but makes it that much easier to cross-sell products when more opportunities arise.

BLOG: Why Agents Sell Ancillary Health Insurance Products After AEP

4. Launch a Referral Program

Imagine your client selling business on your behalf. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Well – believe it or not – it’s actually something that’s attainable. In fact, 92% of consumers trust referrals if they come from friends and family. 

By creating an effective referral marketing program, you can incentivize your clients to bring business your way and cement yourself as their go-to health insurance agent.

Learn how to build the foundation for successful referral marketing at your insurance company with our guide: Referral Marketing Tips & Techniques for Insurance Professionals. 

5. Nurture Your Prospects With Personalized Follow-Ups

Not everyone is keen on buying insurance upon first contact, but that doesn’t mean you should give up!

Enrolling in a health insurance plan is a major decision, and some people may take more time than others to figure out what’s best for them. As a result, it’s important that you nurture your prospects to gently encourage them to buy insurance from you. 

Pro Tip: Follow up every phone call with an email. It’s an easy way to provide that personal touch your clients want.

There has never been a better time to work from home, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t come with its own set of challenges. However, many challenges that stand in the way of successfully selling insurance from home can be solved with the right software designed for insurance agents.

If you’re thinking about launching your career as an insurance agent working from home – or you’re looking to transition into remote work permanently – Quotit has you covered.

Through a comprehensive demo of our software, our team will answer any questions you have and explore features of our software, such as:

• Client management (CRM)
• Professional quoting engine
• Unlimited proposal creation
• Policy tracking
• Compare and enroll
• Marketing automation

Get your personalized demo today to get started with Quotit!