First off, thanks for such an awesome resource for agents. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to improve as an agent and when I found this forum, I rejoiced.
I am curious as to how other agents’ workweeks compare to mine. I have been a captive with Liberty National for 5 years now (I know the reputation of the company, and one of the reasons for my lurking and occasional posting is to explore what else is out there). I’ve had a modest amount of success and have a nice book of companies (30-35) that I closed. I’m in the Worksite market, by the way, but I dabble in Individual from time to time.
With that said, I am confident the training I received was junk. Zero product training. I mean zero zip nada. And the “scripts” were designed to push your way to a decision maker and hope they don’t ask about product. Now, I studied every product we offered and learned about them all on my own time as well as how they compared to other competitors, etc. competence breeds confidence. Anyway, it goes without saying I had to basically wing it and developed my own style and have done pretty good.
Even though I developed my own style which has worked well, I realized I’m still planning my week around what I was originally trained to do (I came in as a career changer with no experience). And that made me wonder: if the training was so bad, was the “structure” and process with which we approach a week bad too?
Basically we were trained to walk into 60 or more businesses per week based on pretty much worthless “leads” from salesgenie.
Walk in. Try to talk to decision maker to do a presentation. If that isn’t feasible, try to set up an appointment to come back another day. If that doesn’t work, check back a week or two later. I had zero personal connections for warm business leads, so everything I’ve done was a true cold call walk-in. (I’ve since started to earn referrals which is great).
I always set a goal to hit 80 walk ins per week which was 20 per day since we were required to be in the office to “plan” on Monday. I use the term “plan” loosely.
That method worked ok—at least after I dumped the scripts and just started talking to people. But now that I’m doing an annual or semi-annual reenrollment pretty much weekly and all the associated footwork with helping folks file claims, I’m struggling to get that same number of walk ins.
I wondering if there’s a better way?
Is this the way most agents do business? Just mass cold call walkins?
I know I should know more about how the insurance business works by now, but I was so focused on trying to earn a good living that I didn’t bother to look around and see how other companies and their agents go about their work. I want to know if I can be better at what I do because I absolutely love being in this industry.
Thanks for the time you took on this long read. And thanks for any insights.
I am curious as to how other agents’ workweeks compare to mine. I have been a captive with Liberty National for 5 years now (I know the reputation of the company, and one of the reasons for my lurking and occasional posting is to explore what else is out there). I’ve had a modest amount of success and have a nice book of companies (30-35) that I closed. I’m in the Worksite market, by the way, but I dabble in Individual from time to time.
With that said, I am confident the training I received was junk. Zero product training. I mean zero zip nada. And the “scripts” were designed to push your way to a decision maker and hope they don’t ask about product. Now, I studied every product we offered and learned about them all on my own time as well as how they compared to other competitors, etc. competence breeds confidence. Anyway, it goes without saying I had to basically wing it and developed my own style and have done pretty good.
Even though I developed my own style which has worked well, I realized I’m still planning my week around what I was originally trained to do (I came in as a career changer with no experience). And that made me wonder: if the training was so bad, was the “structure” and process with which we approach a week bad too?
Basically we were trained to walk into 60 or more businesses per week based on pretty much worthless “leads” from salesgenie.
Walk in. Try to talk to decision maker to do a presentation. If that isn’t feasible, try to set up an appointment to come back another day. If that doesn’t work, check back a week or two later. I had zero personal connections for warm business leads, so everything I’ve done was a true cold call walk-in. (I’ve since started to earn referrals which is great).
I always set a goal to hit 80 walk ins per week which was 20 per day since we were required to be in the office to “plan” on Monday. I use the term “plan” loosely.
That method worked ok—at least after I dumped the scripts and just started talking to people. But now that I’m doing an annual or semi-annual reenrollment pretty much weekly and all the associated footwork with helping folks file claims, I’m struggling to get that same number of walk ins.
I wondering if there’s a better way?
Is this the way most agents do business? Just mass cold call walkins?
I know I should know more about how the insurance business works by now, but I was so focused on trying to earn a good living that I didn’t bother to look around and see how other companies and their agents go about their work. I want to know if I can be better at what I do because I absolutely love being in this industry.
Thanks for the time you took on this long read. And thanks for any insights.
