As an insurance broker, your goals include looking after your clients and their changing needs, so they continue to buy from you. You want them to do more than renew policies, you want them to:

• Turn to you for advice, as their needs change
• Rely on your professionalism
• Trust you
• Share their worries, and discuss their goals with you as their situation and circumstances change
• Automatically see you as a reliable expert

You achieve your goals by helping them to achieve theirs. This takes knowledge and experience. Knowing facts and opinions is essential. Knowing how to assemble those facts and opinions— and how to use them to grow your business—is the difference. Here are a few ways to use client data to increase sales. 

Collect the right client data—build profiles

You collect a lot of data about your clients. Some of it is basic information—age, type of work they do, marital status, size of the organization, etc. Some of the data is soft information—where they see themselves next year, five years, their business's market place, etc.

Some of this is valuable for simple policy reasons. All of it is valuable for your own business plan—your plan for each client, and for each similar client type. Collect data that enables you to build client profiles. You know your preferred client, so you know what data to collect.

How to use the data to increase your sales

Every client, whether they are individuals or business organizations, share common profiles. Those profiles enable you to link the data within the profiles to your individual and group plans. By knowing your own marketplace, your own products—and by putting them together—you can create marketing programs and sales presentations. By being prepared in this way, you will always know:

• How to interpret what your clients, and prospective clients, tell you about their current circumstances and future changes
• How to relate those to details to your product offerings
• Which of your products are most likely to meet their current or changing needs and goals
• What, therefore, to offer and how to offer it so that it has maximum chance of being bought

Use the data to create scenarios

All businesses and all individuals have different types of experiences. Those experiences create needs. When you understand and know the needs that are created, you can link your products to them, so it makes sense for your client to take advantage of the product. For example:

1) Business scenario. A business expands and employs new people. Those new employees must become productive as soon as possible. By helping the employer to link your plan to employee satisfaction, it is easier for the employer to see how they can recruit higher caliber staff, and encourage new recruits to become productive as quickly as they can, so they can join the company group plan. Additionally, by knowing the kind of people they are likely to recruit, you can change the plan they currently have, or introduce a new plan that will better fit the business's needs.

You can use this simple example to look for other businesses that are growing, because they will have exactly the same needs that your plan will fit.

2) Personal scenario. One of your clients has an individual plan with your brokerage. You learn that he or she is getting married or expecting a child, or has been promoted or is looking for new employment. All of these life events generate a need for more or different insurance. You can sell the product now, and you can help your client to think ahead for when the next life event will call for another policy or plan change.

In these two simple scenarios lies a wealth of collected data that enables discussions, presentations and sales. Those sales give you knowledge you can use to find similar prospective clients who share similar needs, goals and problems.

Collecting the right data, using it to build profiles—and to make the features of your plans into advantages and benefits, and then looking for more prospects who fit the same profiles—will help increase sales and win more business more quickly.