Agency Leads Destroy Insurance Agent Careers

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Do not think your career is doomed by thinking you cannot sell insurance. If you have over 18 months under your belt, you can make it. It's time to rely on yourself to take a giant step forward. Fail and you hand over to the insurance company all the sales you made. You can beat the odds by realizing that using agency leads annually destroys thousands of other insurance agent careers.

Your career agency is very slick by getting you to think that lead prospecting and insurance sales career endurance are the same. Sly, clever, deceiving, crafty, cunning, sneaky, misleading, and devious. These are terms you may blurt out after looking behind the scenes. (omitted here are all the 4 letter words)

The career life insurance agency located in a modern suburban office looks like the ideal place to call home. But is it? Have you been warned before studying for your insurance license that there's more than a 90% chance that you will be long gone before 4 years are up. Tomorrow ask your sales manager this question and wait for the response. I am sure the answer will highly revised.

Ask yourself why are they willing to pay a sales manager to guide you and pay office rent for a cubicle to do busy work? Why do they initially money subsidize your commissions before releasing you on my own? Why are you required to learn the sales presentation book visual and canned sales speech word for word? Variations are strictly prohibited.

What has their 100 years of experience taught them? Pick the one that sounds most logical to you. My Insurance company is out to make the most money they can from agents and dividends. My sales manager and insurance company is going to do everything possible to keep me from failing.

Do they actually want you to fail? NO COMMENT Right now just look at the agency lead system, which I call "the train to nowhere", to one of those with insurance agent careers.

First is the infamous "100 man list". Before you start selling you are required to fully complete this form of names, addresses, phones, and how you know them. The sales manger says you will sell half and receive 3 referrals on each sale - an endless supply. Off this list, you might make a few sales, often from a relative trying to give you a break. The lesson to learn is just because a person is a friend or relative, it does not obligate them to buy.

Your sales manager should take you to see how easy selling life insurance is. He received his lead from the General Manager for a couple wanting to buy insurance. Don't be shocked if he does not take his sales presentation book in with him. Bite your tongue when the sales manager's presentation is nothing like you had to learn word for word, and not a single word different. The lesson you really learned is only the sales managers get true leads.

Wow, look at bonus policy owner leads! At the meeting the sales manager said he has a ton of leads to boost your production back up. Each of the dozen salespeople received a whopping stack of 50 leads. Your sales manager says that because they are current policyholders, they would be easy buyers. Fantastic, you day has come and your commissions should flow.

Did you know this fact? The sales manager has already spent a day cherry picking the card information, taking best few for himself. Why not? All the other sales managers do it.

After close scrutiny of the orphan policy owner leads, you will find many policy owners living far from your preferred driving territory. These insurance orphans, are called so because the writing agent has long left the agency. Many of them will have a tendency to be mostly over age 50, have health problems, and own minimal amounts of life insurance. After managing to go through 25 orphan leads and tanks of ask, it is time to pause.

Ask yourself, "what's wrong with this picture?" Never ask sales managers, but do ask other agents to find this truth. Four times each year the insurance company prints up orphan low premium policy owner cards and make sure they are fed mainly to newer agents.That means your "leads" were already unsuccessfully worked over by 20 to 60 agents.

This last group comes from the "bible" of leads, a brand new edition of the phone directory. You should also receive an official company sales script manual for making telephone calls(dated 1985). It has officially researched insurance company answers for every possible objection you could receive. (it also contains a lot of scribbling of 4 letter words left by former agents). You should be able to grab a white page directory, and through a sheer number of calls end up with sufficient appointments. If you are not getting enough appointments, the company management is quick to point out that you need to make more calls, and study handling objections better.

Now the final lead car rolls in. Because you try so hard, the sales manager gives YOU a special bonus. The bonus is a photocopied sheet containing 50 slots to fill in names, addresses, and phone numbers each week. The agency, will every week, would send out your 50 name list for FREE, asking people to request information on one of 25 insurance choices. You are to follow up on each of these as a great pre-approach letter. These are still not prospect leads but suspects, and you are still on the train to nowhere.

Ask your sales manager to describe to you the definition of a lead. Check the reply given against this. The ideal lead is a mail or Internet response obtained using a refined prospect list consisting solely of clients often needing one main product, with decent health and money for the policy premium. How many of these features do ANY of the company leads provide?

Get off the death train. Go on the Internet and search direct mail insurance leads or quality Internet sources. Warning, at this stage use extreme caution on Internet leads. Start up your own lead program. For every dollar spent, the return will often be better than 5 to 1.

Start thinking like a person with a promising insurance sales career. Surprise your sales manager. Get your name on top of the leaders sales board, leapfrogging his position with no problem.

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Source by Donald Yerke

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