How many follow-ups does it take to close an insurance lead?

Six or more dials, over three weeks or longer. At a multi-agent auto-insurance agency in the US, the median lead that bought was still being worked 21.2 days after it arrived. The median lead that said no was last touched 0.2 days in: the same afternoon. Of the lost leads, 1,252 were never reached once, and the median one got exactly one dial.

Before we built Maverick, our sales agent for insurance agencies, the agency let us read its sales history end to end: every call, text, note and recording on every lead it sold, set against a sample of leads it worked and lost. This is what that showed, with the numbers.

What we read	Count
Sold leads, read end to end	1,283
Lost (“not interested”) leads, the control group	1,471
Parked renewals	997
Logged timeline events	23,021
Text messages	157,528
Call audio, both sides transcribed	about 120 hours

What separates a sold insurance lead from a lost one?

A conversation, and the persistence it takes to get one. Here is each signal as a share of each group. Lift is the sold rate divided by the lost rate; where the lost-side share is too small for an exact ratio to mean anything, it reads “over 20x”.

Signal	Sold	Lost	Lift
Had a real conversation (a connected call)	81.1%	14.9%	5.4x
The lead called the agency at least once	74.3%	6.5%	11.4x
15 or more minutes on the phone in total	40.7%	0.2%	over 20x
Two or more agents worked it	48.0%	1.0%	over 20x
Live transfer from dialer to closer	22.1%	0.4%	over 20x
Six or more outbound dials	12.0%	2.2%	5.5x
First touch within an hour	39.9%	42.6%	0.9x

Speed to lead sits at the bottom because it barely moves.

Does speed to lead decide who buys?

No. 39.9% of sold leads and 42.6% of lost leads were first touched within an hour of arriving. The agency was already fast, on the leads it won and the leads it lost alike. Speed to lead is table stakes: you need it to compete, and it does not separate the sale from the shrug.

The gap shows up weeks later, in who was still being called.

How many times should you call an insurance lead?

Six or more, because the later dials connect better than the first. The chance that a dial is answered rises with each attempt: 15.3% on the first dial, 29.9% on the sixth. A lead who is hard to reach is hard to reach, not uninterested.

The drop-off runs the other way. 1,252 lost leads were never reached once, on 1.67 dials each on average and a median of exactly one. The floor stopped after the dial with the lowest odds of connecting, and never placed the ones with the best. Only 2.2% of lost leads got six or more outbound dials, against 12.0% of sold ones.

One qualifier: fewer leads get a sixth dial than a first, so the late-dial figures rest on smaller numbers and are noisier.

How long should you keep working an insurance lead?

Three weeks at least. The median last touch on a sold lead came 21.2 days after it arrived. The agency’s two top producers sell in different styles, one a listener and one a high-volume dialer, and both work a sold lead for six to ten weeks.

A lead going quiet in week one says very little about whether it will buy. A floor that sets it aside on day one never finds out.

What time of day should you call insurance leads?

Late afternoon. The connect rate peaked at 32.5% at 5pm and bottomed out at 15.1% at 11am, while dial volume did the opposite: the floor placed most of its calls at the hour fewest people picked up. Moving dials into the 4 to 8pm window roughly doubles the connect rate for the same effort.

Is an unanswered call wasted?

No. 74.3% of sold leads called the agency at least once, against 6.5% of lost ones, and 39% of those callbacks followed a missed call from the agency about an hour earlier. The missed call did its job: it told the lead who was calling, and the lead rang back when it suited them.

That puts a requirement on the inbound side. When the lead calls back, the call has to reach someone who knows the lead, with its history in view.

Should you judge outreach texts by replies or by conversations?

By conversations. Across nine cold opening texts, how often a text led to a connected call predicted its sale rate almost perfectly (r = 0.97). How often it got a reply predicted almost nothing (r = 0.29). The best reply rate in the agency belonged to an educational blast with a middling sale rate. A text thread is not a conversation.

One change to the first text moved the number that matters. Saying where the quote request came from lifted connected calls from 29% to 41%.

What happens in the first minute of a sales call?

The customer starts talking, or the call is already lost. In the first minute of calls that went on to sell, the customer spoke 54 words across 7.6 turns. In calls that did not, 34 words across 5.6 turns. The median connected call on a lead that bought ran 414 seconds, about seven minutes. On a lead that said no, it ran 60 seconds: long enough to say hello and be told no.

What do the best insurance closers have in common?

They listen, they hand off, and they stay. On a connected call, agents speak about 65% of the words, and the agency’s top producer speaks the least of the high-volume closers. Sold leads were worked by two or more agents 48.0% of the time, against 1.0% of lost ones, and 22.1% of sold leads were handed live from the dialer to a closer.

They narrate the work on the call, so silence never reads as being handled badly. They break the price down before the customer asks: the one-time fee, what recurs, and how it changes at renewal. They ask for the sale once, in one sentence, make the next step small, and stop talking.

In writing, they are brief. The top three sellers text a median of 109 to 157 characters, and the long writers sell less. There was not one emoji in 101,084 one-to-one messages.

Does price decide whether an insurance lead buys?

At the top end, yes. Leads that bought were quoted a median of $143 a month; leads that said no, $172. The closers’ answer to a quote well above the median is to move the call to coverage, not to keep arguing price.

How far can you trust these numbers?

Far enough to act on the right rows. Three caveats belong with every figure above.

Conversation signals run both ways. A lead who is buying talks longer, so “long calls sell” is partly the sale showing up in the data. The behavioural rows, how many dials, at what hour, whether the lead was handed off, how many days it was worked, are the ones an agency controls and the ones to act on.

The lost group is a sample of 1,471 leads, not every lost lead. Ratios between the two groups are meaningful. Absolute close rates are not, and we do not publish one.

Quoted premiums were recovered from notes and recorded calls, so the price comparison is noisier than the rest.

What changed in Maverick?

The order of priorities. Before the study, speed to lead came first. Now:

1. Not abandoning a worked lead comes first. Maverick campaigns keep dialling through week three instead of closing a lead after one or two attempts.
2. Earning the callback comes second. A missed call counts as outreach, and when the lead rings back, the call goes to the agent working with them.
3. Dials are held for the late-afternoon window, when leads pick up.
4. Openers are judged by the calls they cause, not the replies they get.

Speed still matters. It dropped from first priority because the agency already had it.

The limits did not change. Licensed work stays with licensed people: Maverick does not quote rates or bind coverage. When the team is busy, it can call a lead for a short introduction and connect an interested customer live to a licensed agent. It contacts people only within the agency’s contact hours. It pauses the moment a customer replies, so a person can respond. A request to stop is honoured on every channel and stays in place. For each channel, the agency decides whether Maverick drafts messages for an agent to approve or sends them itself.

Every agency holds the same kind of evidence in its own call and text records. More on how we work with agencies is at insurance.