If you're an independent agent who generates new leads from online lead providers, referrals, social media, or direct mail, you've probably run into the “law of diminishing returns"—the more you quote, the harder it becomes to keep track of your most valuable prospects. As new leads get added to the top of the pile, your list just keeps getting longer. Soon, it's a real challenge to follow up with all of the right prospects at the right time.

The good news is, there are three things you can do to combat the law of diminishing returns and scale your agency like a pro:

1) Prioritize your leads. It takes an average of 12 calls to close a new customer and roughly 60% of those leads will never close, according to a 2021 Agency MVP Customer Study.

If 6 out of every 10 calls you and your producers make is a waste of time and you need to call each lead a dozen times, then you are inevitably missing tons of opportunities and wasting payroll without a bulletproof system to manage it all.

Let's say you have two producers making 80 calls per day. That's 160 calls per day or 3,520 calls per month. Since 60% of leads are bad leads that never close, you just wasted 2,112 calls this month calling bad leads. If you pay your producers $20 an hour and 60% of their time is wasted working bad leads, then you just lost over $4,000.

A smart lead management system can help an agency in a number of ways:

• It ranks your prospects, so you only spend time and money calling the ones that are most valuable and most likely to close.
• It helps you know exactly when to call, by keeping track of x-dates, competitor rates and claims falling off. That way you only reach out when the time is right.
• It automates your follow-ups by sending immediate SMS or email messages to new leads so you can quote them while they're hot.

Agents who use a smart lead management system like Agency MVP are able to increase their close rates by 57% and improve their contact rates by 300% on average year over year. 

2) Measure your marketing return on investment (ROI). Whether you're buying leads, running Facebook ads, or sending out mailers to generate new business, you need to measure your return on investment. Each marketing lead source is an investment that pays off over time. Many agents buy leads, call through the lead list once and then never deal with them again. To truly maximize your ROI, you need a good system to track contact and close rates from each source over the long term.

A top agent that we interviewed closes over $200,000 per month in premium using multiple lead sources. The key to his success is tracking ROI closely in his system. He typically sees a 2% closing ratio on internet leads in the first four months. If he just measured his return based on those numbers, he'd be losing money on his investment. Fast forward 18 months, though, and his closing ratio on the exact same leads jumps to over 8%—he quadrupled his return by continuing to work the leads for an additional year. That's the power of tracking your ROI over time with a good system.

3) Become a data-driven agency. Top agents collect thousands of points of underwriting data in their systems every day. They then mine that data to turn their most valuable prospects into customers over time.

The more data you add to your system, the smarter it becomes, growing more powerful with every lead and quote you put into it. Not only can you use data like x-dates and competitor rates to rank and prioritize your leads, but you can also trigger text and email workflows to dramatically increase your close rates.

Top lead management systems like Agency MVP integrate with lead providers like EverQuote, AllWebLeads, and QuoteWizard, as well as rating systems like EZLynx, Turborater, and PL Rater, to save you hours of data entry time. To make your data more actionable, it's important to choose a lead management system that works with all of the other tools you use to power your agency.

Here's a special offer for Independent Agent magazine readers: Try Agency MVP free for 14 days and see how a smart lead management system can help you scale like a pro.