New to Insurance -IMO or Broker Recommendations

[AgentMAL]

I am new to insurance in the Portland area with life/health license after over 25 years of sales success within the healthcare industry. I have been so disappointed and somewhat disillusioned after talking to numerous life insurance brokers because it seems like most of them operate more like network marketing companies. They seem to want you to spend more time (even when you're new) building a down line than selling insurance so the managers can make more and more commission off of people they've never met. And most of them told me I had to spend hundreds of dollars a week on leads to be successful, although I heard that many of the leads you pay for are re-used and not very good. Any recommendations for a starting point where I can learn and work and sell ethically without getting ripped off?:

 

[FRJ]

I am new to insurance in the Portland area with life/health license after over 25 years of sales success within the healthcare industry. I have been so disappointed and somewhat disillusioned after talking to numerous life insurance brokers because it seems like most of them operate more like network marketing companies. They seem to want you to spend more time (even when you're new) building a down line than selling insurance so the managers can make more and more commission off of people they've never met. And most of them told me I had to spend hundreds of dollars a week on leads to be successful, although I heard that many of the leads you pay for are re-used and not very good. Any recommendations for a starting point where I can learn and work and sell ethically without getting ripped off?:

You've been talking to all the wrong ones, apparently. Unfortunately, there are a lot of them. The good ones don't tend to be prolific recruiters so finding them is not easy.

To be successful, you are going to either spend a lot of time or a lot of money to acquire prospects. That's pretty much going to be true for whatever product(s) you choose to focus on. If that's life insurance then you have to determine which carriers have the products that you want to sell. Once you identify that, then you can go about finding where to get the contract or who to enlist as your middleman.

This is truly a stupid industry with its MLM structure - it's totally not necessary but somehow it has become the de facto way of doing business. The next time that you find yourself evaluating a broker to work for/with - look around and see if you can identify the successful agents...are there any? How long have they been in the business? How much are they pushing recruiting as opposed to soliciting new sales? If recruiting is more than 5% of the equation, move on!