Is my workweek similar to yours?

[somarco]

8am: Coffee/News/Work
9am: Work
10am: Work
11am: Golf
12am: Golf
1pm: Golf
2pm: Golf
3pm: Beer
4pm: pu kid from school and hang out
5pm: Work
6pm: Work/Beer
7pm: Beer

You really don't have much free time. At that pace you will burn out before you are 30.

 

[rousemark]

Some of the FE boys would have a heart attack with that idea... They say over and over, do not book more than one day out...

 

[Willie2358]

DHK I have been told if you don't have an appointment in 72 hours you have none. But I've set one of this weekend and one for the weekend following. I thought that was far out but I'm gonna show up and knock the door with the quote and plan I have drawn up. My question is would I consider those actionable appointments or not. Do I do a follow up call before or just show up.

 

[DHK]

If it were me, I'd be sending an introductory email and/or other appointment confirmation notice just to "confirm" that this is an appointment with an agenda.

If you have a short YouTube video, send it. If you have more, space them out.

If you wrote a book or booklet, send it.

If you have a blog and/or newsletters, send them as you send them out to everyone else.

You'll have the appointment if:
1) They know what they'll get out of it
2) What problems they want to solve with your help
3) That you continuously remind them of your appointment while providing additional value of what they can expect.

However, keep in mind that I'm coming from a 'planning' perspective and a 'problem-solving' perspective... not just a product selling interaction.

 

[DHK]

There's no way Van Mueller can do 30-50 appointments a week by only scheduling out for the current week.

 

[scagnt83]

You really don't have much free time. At that pace you will burn out before you are 30.

Hell, if I was still in my 20s, there would be an extra hour of golf and an extra hour of beer in that schedule!!

 

[Stephen]

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.

A few questions:

1. Where is your income related to your goals? Are you halfway there, almost there, or
not even close?

2. How many presentations are able to do per week with your current service load?

These are some things that you can consider when making projections on what your income will be when you hit 100% capacity. You will hit a point where it becomes necessary to bring on a junior agent to take on some of your smaller accounts on a commision split agreement.

 

[somarco]

Hell, if I was still in my 20s, there would be an extra hour of golf and an extra hour of beer in that schedule!!

Why not combine both?

 

[Willie2358]

So I decided to walk it out today after I was shit down by a gate keeper. Ended up with a hot lead 4 business later. A younger part owner of a limo and sedan rental company. So I'll take it working for appointment beginning of the week.

 

[somarco]

I decided to walk it out today after I was shit down by a gate keeper.

Roughage day . . . .