Since its introduction in 2008, Medicare Advantage has been one of the fastest-growing segments of the health insurance market. Despite that growth, it’s a hotly contested space as insurance agents vie for policyholders. 

Help your team rise above the competition with a variety of top Medicare Sales and marketing strategies. Use these tips to shore up your sales process and scale your business.

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Check out our Health Insurance and Open Enrollment Sales Success Kit where you’ll find a bounty of resources 

Build a Foundation of Consent

In and out of enrollment season, your Lead gen pipeline is your business’s lifeline. Building this pipeline on a foundation of consumer consent is essential to driving results in any health insurance business. On the one hand, capturing and documenting success is important to supporting compliance with regulations like the TCPA. On the other, practicing consent- and permission-based marketing helps lead gen and marketing efforts to achieve sales efficiency.

Consider this: When you optimize lead forms and make it easier for consumers to give you permission to be contacted, you also make it easier to obtain actionable customer data that streamlines the sales process. And by contacting only those consumers who have raised their hand to be contacted, your team only spends its time on worthwhile efforts. It’s a win-win for you and your potential customers.

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Get your TCPA and compliance questions answered at our Contact Center Compliance Resource Center​

Optimize Outreach Across (and Between) Channels

While sales may ultimately wind up happening over the phone and in person, these days Medicare marketing and sales teams need to be operating in a variety of channels to achieve desired results and growth. But your Medicare team doesn’t need a multichannel strategy. You need an omnichannel strategy. 

That is, all of your outreach channels—phone, SMS, email, smart voicemail drop—need to be working in tandem. You need to be able to create automated outreach workflows that automatically coordinate the right message, in the right channel, at the right time. 

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Leverage Data at the Lead-Source Level

As your business grows, the number of leads in your CRM does, too. Things can get complicated. But that complexity can’t stand in the way of transparency, efficiency, and improvement. To understand (and then refine) the results of your sales efforts, you need contact center reporting tools that can give you real-time insight into your leads’ performance on a source-by-source level. That way, at the drop of a hat, you can shift your team’s approach, paying due attention to sources that are delivering—while turning off those sources that are eating into your bottom line.

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Empower Your People with Automation

Being an insurance sales agent isn’t always smooth sailing. Luckily, there’s no shortage of contact center automation technology available to make tedious, manual tasks a thing of the past, while boosting contacts, conversions, and compliance support. For example, today’s agents can find support fro:

• Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) solutions: Prequalify leads—or even dial low-intent and aged leads—to save agents’ time and still move leads through your pipeline with the power of advanced artificial intelligence.
• Dynamic scripting software: Automatically pop Medicare sales scripts that update in real time, helping agents support compliance and conversions.

• Smart skills-based routing: Put your most important leads in the hands of your top-performing agents, and ensure that customers get in touch with someone best equipped to meet their needs.

• Answering machine detection (AMD) software: Save your agents from having to code for so many leaked voicemails with accurate answering machine detection. Filter out missed opportunities and increase agent talk time with this essential automated solution.

Protect Your Reputation and See the Results

No Medicare sales team can go without a strategy to combat call blocking and flagging. Call flagging has been on the rise in recent years, and if your numbers are coming up “Spam Likely,” your leads are not likely to pick up the phone. (One study estimated that around three-quarters of calls labeled spam are rejected.) 

In this environment, having a caller ID reputation management solution is a key component of any Medicare sales strategy. Without it, your contact rates will likely suffer. So, equip your business with technology that not only identifies numbers that have been flagged so they can be rested or swapped out but also enables you to break up the call patterns that get you flagged in the first place. 

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Get There First with Speed to Lead

Coming out on top in the world of Medicare Advantage doesn’t always (or even frequently) mean you had the best policies on offer. Converting health insurance leads into policyholders often comes down to the simple fact of who gets there first. Plus, research shows that reaching a lead in the first 5 minutes after they’ve submitted a lead form boosts conversion rates by 391 percent.

Medicare sales teams need to center their lead response strategies around this crucial capability known as “speed to lead.” Of course, as with the other tips we’ve covered here, achieving speed to lead isn’t simply about thinking strategically—it’s about having the right technology partners.

Without the best predictive dialer software to bring all these tactics and tools together under one platform—everything from speed to lead and real-time reporting to caller ID reputation management and compliance support—your business is leaving efficiency and growth on the table. 

See how Convoso’s dialer can be a difference-maker for your book of business by scheduling a free demo today.

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