Lead management for insurance brokerages
Six steps with a rule at each, plus the weekly check that stops the whole thing decaying. Written as a procedure you can hand someone, not as advice.
Most brokerages do not lose leads to competitors. They lose them to nobody, by leaving them unowned and undated until the enquiry has gone cold.
The procedure
Intake: capture the source, always
A lead with no source is a lead you cannot learn from.
Where it came from is the single most predictive thing you will know at intake, and the only chance to record it is the moment it arrives. Six months later nobody remembers whether that was a referral or a web form, and your spend decisions are guesses.
Deduplicate before it becomes a record
Check by email, then phone. Never by name alone.
The same person enquiring twice in a month is common, and two records means two producers calling them, which is worse than not calling at all. If it is an existing client, it is not a lead — route it to whoever owns them.
Assign one owner, immediately
Within the hour, and to a person rather than a queue.
A shared inbox is not ownership. The failure is silent: everybody assumes somebody, and the lead ages out while the pipeline reports it as active.
Qualify on what you can observe
What they asked for, when they need it, and whether you can write it.
Three questions. Everything else is discovery and belongs in the conversation. Qualification that requires a twenty-minute call has not qualified anything, it has just spent twenty minutes.
Set the next action with a date
Every open lead has exactly one next action and a day it happens.
Not a status, an action. "Following up" is a state of mind; "call Thursday morning" is a task somebody can be held to. A lead with no dated next action is not in your pipeline, it is in your memory.
Close it, including the ones you lose
Record a reason on every loss.
Price, timing, coverage, went direct, never responded — these lead to completely different fixes, and without the reason you will keep guessing which one to make. A loss with no reason is the only kind with no future value.
The weekly audit, which is the part that keeps it alive
Four counts, once a week, in a meeting that takes ten minutes. A process nobody checks becomes whatever the busiest person did last week.
- Leads with no owner. Should be zero. Anything else is the process failing at step three.
- Open leads with no dated next action. Also zero. These are the ones that quietly age out.
- Leads older than your stage limits. Not a scolding, a decision: work it or close it. Most should be closed.
- Losses with no reason. The count that tells you whether anybody believes in the process.
Track the counts, not the people. The moment this becomes a performance review it becomes a data-entry exercise, and the numbers stop meaning anything.
Where scoring helps, and where it does not
A lead score is useful for one thing: ordering a list when you have forty leads and two hours. It is not a qualification step and it does not decide anything. If a score is being used to justify not calling somebody, it has been given a job it cannot do.
It is also only as honest as it is explainable. We publish the complete arithmetic of ours with worked examples, precisely so a producer who disagrees with a score can see the line that caused it.
Put it somewhere it will be followed
The procedure above works in a spreadsheet. What software adds is that the audit counts are free rather than manual, which is usually the difference between doing it weekly and doing it twice.
Related: lead scoring, all guides.