It’s Fun to be an Insurance Detective
In the dark days of insurance sales – before computers, cell phones, and digital cameras – gathering information about a potential commercial prospect required real sleuthing. The Yellow Pages and a quick drive by inspection revealed only so much. Sometimes, you could pose as a customer, but that mainly worked in retail environments. It’s tough to casually shop for fabricated sheet metal or injection-molded plastic.
To gather enough background information to pre-qualify a risk, in yesteryear, you actually had to talk to people. Today, you don’t have to talk to anyone to do it. Isn’t that what the Internet is really all about? So, here’s some online spying tips to learn if a firm is worth selling to.
BBB
Your first instinct is to Google a prospect company’s name to see what appears. Fight it for a moment and shoot to the site of the Better Business Bureau (www.bbb.org). This venerable 98-year old organization neatly organizes a wealth of free information about endless companies, making it a terrific resource for consumers and businesses. A successful search, by company name, reveals the firm’s Web URL (with link), BBB rating (if any), customer complaint history, number of employees, the name of its principal, and tons more. It’s the absolute first stop for serious spies.
Okay. You’ve held off long enough. No self-respecting spy skips Google. Web search for your targeted firm by name and key executives, particularly the ones who make insurance buying decisions. As you know, Googling can unveil some surprisingly unpleasant links, as well as the less exciting good stuff.
For instance, you may spot a significant collection of negative consumer reviews, details of court cases, or even worse. You might also uncover personal charitable and political contributions made by the firm’s executives, clueing you into some easy conversation starters. Plus, you’ll find out whether these execs use LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
Web site
Next stop is the firm’s Web site or blog. If the subject you are spying on is both site-less and blog-free, these facts are telling. They are not only behind the times; they are absurdly behind them. And this absurdity may extend into other areas as well, making the risk a definite no go. However, we are getting ahead of ourselves. Good agents (secret and otherwise) don’t make unsubstantiated assumptions.
When there is a Web site pour over it. Especially helpful are the about us, contact us, and product or service pages. If there are accumulated news releases posted, read the most recent and most interesting. Similarly check out their blog, if any. Every business reasonably expects motivated sellers to know the basics about them. So, when you ask new prospects easy questions that are already answered online, you reduce your chances of the sale.
Social Media
LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, as the top social media sites, are a spying goldmine. Each contains its own flavor of potentially useful information. On LinkedIn, read the profiles of firms (and their employees with accounts) to learn extra facts about the company not posted on their Web site. Also join the LinkedIn groups to which they belong to gain added industry insight.
On Twitter, if the prospects you have targeted don’t protect their tweets, you are free to read them, including retweets. Plus, you can see who follows them and whom they choose to follow. These unique Twitter revelations help you to understand what motivates and interests your prospect. Furthermore, if the firm has a Facebook fan page, you can see how it chooses to promote itself. Often, what they post on their “wall” is more current than what is on their Web site.
More Spy Spots
Free online spying saves you and your carriers the hassles associated with soliciting a poor risk. It supplements the necessary paid sources of information such as credit reports. There are many more cool spy spots than the limited space of this column permits. So, here are just a few extras to explore. Check them out for listings and references to your prospect: county property tax sites, your state’s attorney general and department of state sites, your local daily newspaper, and online Yellow Pages. Hey, admit it. It’s fun to spy; especially when you can justify that it’s for valid business reasons.
Topics Commercial Lines
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