One of the joys of being an independent insurance agent is being completely in charge of your own destiny. You set your own hours, make the big decisions and generate your own business.

As an independent agent, one of your primary roles is lead generation, which is critical to your success. However, equally important is lead cultivation—something many agents tend to overlook.

Lead cultivation is the function of keeping a prospect on the proverbial hook once you’ve piqued their interest, and slowly reeling them in to purchase a policy by keeping them engaged.

Every independent agent ought to be nurturing leads—a process which consists primarily of the following two activities:

1) Communicate electronically. Send frequent emails to prospects containing information about new insurance products and links to webpages. Provide brochures and other ancillary materials, or send monthly newsletters—whatever you do, the content must be produced, collected and then disseminated.

2) Communicate regularly. Call prospects periodically to check in and see if they’re ready to purchase a new policy or migrate their auto from one company to another. It’s also important to make a note of when a prospect’s existing third-party policy is due to expire so you can contact them a month or two prior to that date and pitch a better policy.

Of course, while these two tasks are critical, they can be time-consuming. Agents often can’t spare the necessary hours each week because they need to be devote their time to helping existing clients, upselling or cross-selling new policies, and working with prospects that are ready to buy.

Some agents rely heavily on a hired admin to do much of this marketing and lead nurturing work for them. However, these professionals can cost small firms over $30,000 a year, according to indeed.com, which is likely cost prohibitive to many independent agencies. Others can opt to do this work themselves, but that could lead to 14-hour work days. Some agents may elect to procure a marketing automation tool to facilitate the nurturing process, but these systems don’t come cheap, especially if you have a lot of contacts.

New cloud communications software provides an easy and affordable way to automate much of this work. Some platforms can integrate right into your agency management system and offer built-in customer relationship management functionality to keep all your contact details in one central location. Because everything resides online, your data and lead nurturing tools are available from any connected device.

Here are a few ways cloud communications software can help you with the lead nurturing process:

• Automated email drip system. Prospects can be entered into an automated email lead nurturing campaign, which will automatically send out pre-scheduled emails at intervals you determine up front. Once it’s configured, which literally takes minutes, you never have to touch it again.
• Automated voice-based reminders. Agents can pre-record short phone messages and have them automatically sent to prospects at predetermined intervals, without any further action from the agent. These messages may include information about new products, reminders to renew or offers for a policy review consultation.
• Workflow automation. All customer engagement is tracked automatically, which saves time on manual data entry. Triggers can be set to initiate an automated phone call, connect the lead with the live agent or to send a follow-up email.

Whether you like it or not, all independent agents are salespeople. In order to compete with the agent down the street, you need to dive in and start nurturing.

Joe Wu is CEO of Voicent, a communications software company that offers cloud tools to help businesses connect and engage with customers.