Raise your hand if you or your team has ever dropped the ball on a sale.

The prospect was ready to buy, you had the correct product or service lined up, the stars aligned—but you failed to make the deal. It happens—but it becomes a problem when the reason for failure is a lack of follow-up.

It generally takes five follow-ups to close a sale. This applies to referrals, purchased leads and random walk-ins alike. So why do so many salespeople give up after just one follow-up?

Due to shifting market demands, referral rates continue to decline across the insurance space. That means your inbound leads, whether purchased or organically driven, are becoming increasingly more important.

Here are three ways to keep precious leads from falling through the cracks:

1) Follow up fast. The agency that responds to an inquiry within the first hour is more likely to get the sale. Your chances increase further if you follow up within the first five minutes. But you have to make it easy for the prospect to contact you fast, which means auditing your inbound sales process to improve speed and experience is vital.

2) Nurture the relationship. Not all prospects are ready to buy straight away. Remember a sale can take place anytime between the first day and six months into the sales cycle. This means you must frequently build customer data and retain prospects’ attention over time to keep a lead warm.

3) Remarket. This is where you can use technology to blow past the competition. By leveraging user data, you can easily reach your ideal customer and find more just like them. For pennies on the dollar, you can continually market to prospects so that no leads fall through the cracks.

Becoming more efficient in how your team follows up with leads is one of the small levers that, when adjusted, can recoup major dollars for your bottom line. Here are four areas of your agency operations where lead nurturing will reap improvements:

• Closing ratio: We know that simply following up with prospects means more sales. But another facet of lead nurturing means spending more time with fewer prospects to win the best prospects. It’s quality over quantity.
• Average premium: Ranking leads based on value and expected premium, then prioritizing your follow-ups accordingly, helps you focus on increasing average premiums rather than volume alone. A second approach is post-sale lead nurturing for cross-sell opportunities.
• Quote volume: Faster follow-ups translate to the ability to process more quotes.
• Closing time: Mathematically speaking, your sales cycle has the biggest impact on your agency’s pipeline. Therefore, even a slight decrease in the average amount of time it takes your team to close a sale will significantly improve your performance.

A new lead is the lifeblood of any agency. By implementing a robust follow-up system, your agency can blast past the agencies that don’t.

Cam Bob III is founder of Infinity Leads, a customer acquisition agency for independent insurance agencies. In 2018, Bob III was named Young Innovator of the Year by British private equity firm CVC Capital in the development of a cutting-edge digital lead generation system for insurance agencies. Bob III is also the author of “The Digital Insurance Agent,” a step-by-step guide to generating exclusive leads online.