You are one of hundreds of thousands of insurance agents in the United States. With such fierce competition, how are you going to stay afloat, let alone forge ahead and increase your profits?
You can start revving up your profitability by following the ten steps below. Most insurance agents will have considerable fluctuations in their income - sometimes as much as several thousand dollars each year. If you want greater stability in order to grow your business, keep reading.
- Dump your plate.
No, don't just clear your plate - that implies you'll have to finish everything currently sitting on your To Do list. Dump it all. Call those who expect something from you and tell them that they won't be receiving that for a long while. Get rid of any paper shuffling or menial tasks. You need to have your top priority slots clear! - Make more time.
Trying to "find" time never works, so you're going to make time. By simply starting your workday an hour earlier, you'll have another 250-300 hours a year - that's the equivalent of 15-20 weeks. Also, starting earlier gives you some quiet time before the phone starts ringing off the hook. - Do only what matters most.
Figure out the most productive activities you can do, and repeat them. Let those priorities take up the bulk of your time, rather than wasting hours on tedious house-keeping. If you aren't talking to people to generate leads, you are losing money! 
Keep your eye on the ball.
As you go through the steps of the process from getting a lead to securing a check, remember the ultimate goal. You're making this phone call to set up an appointment, and you're setting up this appointment to talk to the person face to face. You're talking to this person to present your plan, and you're presenting your plan to get this person's application signed. Everything you do should ultimately be a step towards turning that lead into a client and making money.- Treat your business like a business.
You are entitled to certain legal deductions as a business - take them! There are over three hundred money-savers that could apply, so we've included a resource section to a tax attorney at the end of this email. You could be saving several thousands of dollars per year in taxes, which is a form of income. - Improve something each day.
Renowned success trainer Tony Robbins has a discipline called "CANI" - "Constant and Neverending Improvement." Your goal is to make one part of your business better each day, no matter how small a part. Over time, all these small improvements will snowball into a powerful, successful business! - Keep smiling.
Keep in mind that your prospects may have an assortment of bad experiences, resentment, or mistrust associated with salespeople. Shouting "I said no!" into the phone is not something they would ever say to a friend, but it's easy for them to throw it at you, someone they don't know and haven't learned to trust yet. If this happens, keep your cool - remember that they've probably been burned in the past. Don't lash out or retaliate; keep your voice calm and pleasant, and make sure to answer any questions or address any issues they bring to you. It's up to you to be their first good experience with a salesperson! 
Delegate as much as you can.
If you can earn hundreds of dollars while in front of your prospects, do you really need to be doing your own paperwork? Consider using a virtual assistant - a talented, affordable, English-speaking professional to whom you can delegate everything you dumped in Step One. Imagine getting all of your administrative needs handled, the bills paid, the phones covered and even your appointments set while you focus on what really matters.- Touch it once.
In John Malloy's classic book, How to Work the Competition into the Ground and Have Fun Doing It, he claimed that you must only touch paperwork once. As soon as you touch it the first time and open that letter, you immediately take care of what needs doing in regards to it - that means getting up, going through your files, copy the application, and continue processing it. If you don't have some sort of assistant to handle this paperwork for you, it's vital that you learn to get it all done in one go, yourself, and spend the rest of your day working on your priorities. - Leverage your time.
Your time, even with an extra hour each day from Step Two, is still valuable and not to be wasted. Spend a little bit of that time on thinking how to make yourself more efficient. Are you occupying your days with talking to leads on the phone and in person, selling them insurance, or are you scrabbling to come up with enough phone numbers and names to have leads at all? Consider this: if you buy ten leads for $15 each, and you sell only one for a profit of $500, you're still netting yourself $350. And, instead of squandering two or three days finding those ten leads, you've spent perhaps five minutes purchasing just the leads you want - saving yourself time, which is more valuable by far than the low price of those leads.