Dial It In: Making Cold Outbound Work Alongside Your Network

In 2017, when I began my career in insurance, I began getting involved with a handful of associations with the intent of meeting people and broadening my network. In those first few years I met contractors, CPAs, bankers, vendors, and others who helped introduce me to new prospects, adding to the book of business I was brought into the agency to assume. One of the first events I attended was the Big “I” Indiana’s Young Agents Conference in Lafayette. There I met a young insurance magazine editor who, almost 10 years later, asked me to write this article. That’s the power of networking.

Flash forward eight years from jumping headfirst into the insurance industry, and I found myself in a position where leaving that agency and taking a new opportunity was the best choice for me and my family. I was walking away from a comfortable book of business at a small independent agency and walking into a much larger agency with the intention of building an entirely new book of business and spearheading the development of a new office location from zero.

Would the network I had built over the previous eight years be enough to take me from zero to meeting or exceeding goals? Not a chance—but fortunately, it did contribute significantly. I knew that to hit goals and get my book to where I wanted it, I was going to have to pick up the phone and cold call, which is absolutely the least glamorous part of our job as insurance producers, and one in which I seriously lacked skills.

Here are four key takeaways from the first 18 months of leaning into cold outbound prospecting while also maintaining networking activities:

1. Protect the time. The time set aside for prospecting should be treated with the same value as a meeting. If a client meeting gets bumped, you’d never just not reschedule it. Prospecting blocks deserve the same discipline. Put them on the calendar, put away the cell phone, close your email, and treat a cancellation the way you’d treat canceling on a client.

Building a book from zero

isn’t a choice between networking

and cold outbound, it’s knowing

when and how much to lean on each.

Every Friday afternoon before I leave the office, I grab a fresh sheet of paper and write three columns across the top: Calls / Conversations / Meetings set. At the bottom, I add a section for Follow up later / Not interested. Every call I make gets a tally mark in the appropriate column, and before I leave for the week, those stats go into a spreadsheet. After a few months, I had enough data to know roughly how many calls it takes to set a meeting, and everyone who landed in the “follow up later” category could be added to my CRM to check back in with when the time was right.

This, in my opinion, is the best part of cold outbound: After the first few months, a significant portion of the calls you make each week aren’t “cold” anymore. They’re people you’ve already talked with and are likely to engage in a second conversation. The stats begin improving—and so does your confidence.

3. Continue to network. Continually building a network of centers of influence, experts, and prospects is a long-term play, but is highly valuable. Cold outbound fills your pipeline today; networking fills it 6, 12, 24 months, even years from now. I’ve historically found that networking with people outside of my prospect group has been more valuable than directly networking with prospects at industry events. The association directors, bankers, CPAs, etc., all have a network of their own and being able to trade introductions with these contacts can be invaluable.

In the first year of my new role, I was introduced to two prospects by a leader of a trade association—the warm introductions to two businesses seeking a referral for an insurance agent from a trusted source turned into two new clients. Without that relationship, I would have come up short on achieving my first-year goal through cold outbound prospecting alone.