Common time management questions for final expense agents are answered here!

Never waste another minute with this one secret answer to all your time-sensitive problems!

I hate to break it to you, folks, but this blog post will not serve as an instant cure-all for your time management struggles. I have, however, gathered some advice from experts around the office and would like to relay that advice here.

“What is the top priority for me as a final expense insurance salesman—what should most of my time be spent doing?”

Wise Advice: Don’t shoot the messenger for this one, guys, but most of the people I asked gave me the same type of answer—if you’re not seeing the results you want at work, you’re not putting in the time necessary to get those results. Final expense insurance is a lucrative business, and you already have the skills and the knowledge to sell the number of policies you need to make ends meet. Think (honestly) about how much time during the work day you spend on Facebook or chatting with a coworker or on the phone with someone other than prospective clients. All of these things are detractors from spending time on your priority, which is WORK. People who ask what they should spend their time doing are the people who are not putting in enough time.

“How much of my time should be spent prospecting vs. reconnecting with old contacts?”

Wise Advice: Making new connections should take more of your time than checking in with old contacts. However, touching base with past clients is a valuable practice that is often forgotten, especially by agents who feel overwhelmed with their workload or who are not very organized. I usually schedule 20 minutes a week where contacting past connections is all I do. I can do this in 20 minutes because I have an organized contact list with a color coding system, so I just move down the list that I have already prepared. If you don’t have something like this already at hand, it may require more time to figure out who you’re touching base with, finding their email address or phone number, then actually reaching out to have that conversation. I can do about 5 people in 20 minutes with my system, and that’s what I would recommend as long as you can do it in under an hour.

“On a day to day basis, what’s the best strategy to manage my time?”

Wise Advice: I have heard so many different strategies from agents and executives at all levels of success, so I’ll just list a few common answers:

• Buy an hourly planner
• Create a visual board with weekly and daily goals
• Every morning, create a to-do list and carryover what you didn’t finish
• Set timers on your phone with reminders to switch tasks or reassess your progress
• Create a spreadsheet with sales tasks you’d like to accomplish, then log the minutes/hours you spend on each task over the week
• Divide time up evenly between networking, sales calls, follow up, and paperwork
• Use a task manager app on your phone to keep you accountable
• At the end of each day, log your activities and summarize how much time they took–this will help you find patterns