It’s a question we’ve heard all too often: “We got a lead from TrustedChoice.com—now what?”

Leads from the Internet seem to have picked up a bad reputation over the years. That’s thanks to services that sell the same lead to multiple agents and agencies, bombarding the customer with calls within 20 minutes of making a query—in some cases without the customer even realizing they had signed up to be contacted by insurance agents.

So what should you do when you get a lead from TrustedChoice.com?

“Treat that lead from TrustedChoice.com like it is someone who just walked in your door,” says Charles Bacciocco, CEO of the Consumer Agent Portal/TrustedChoice.com. “A lead that comes through our site is as qualified as anyone who walks into your agency off the street, if not more so, given that they have actively started the insurance research phase.”

The majority of traffic coming in to TrustedChoice.com starts with the customer searching online for information about a specific type of insurance. TrustedChoice.com is built to answer as many of these questions as possible, with the idea that giving people general, useful information is better than what they receive from other insurance sites: no information (and a hard sell).

Once the user has found what they’re looking for, the portal encourages him or her to contact a Trusted Choice® agent for the best information specific to their situation—which leads them to an agent’s Advantage Profile.

In other words, the lead you receive from TrustedCoice.com isn’t a cold prospect or someone who’s heard from 12 different agents in the last two hours. Try to get back to the person who reached out to you in a reasonable amount of time—give them a call as soon as you can, or send them an email to let them know you received the lead and will follow up with a call.

Whatever you do, don’t dismiss the lead outright. You don’t want to pass high-quality leads to your competitor down the road.