How to recruit insurance agents
How I built a life insurance agency to over 2,000 agents
Prior to Insurance Agent Recruiting | A brief look at my work history
Born as an entrepreneur, I started selling candy and pencils in grade school. When I learned I could buy 10 packs of gum for $1.79 and sell each pack individually for .50 each or 3 packs for a dollar, I was hooked. Every Saturday I rode my bike to the candy shop down the street and would buy 50 packs of gum, then sell each of those to kids in my school the following week. I was profiting around $15 per week (in the early eighties and only in 2nd grade), I then took that money and would buy baseball cards, which I then sold later for HUGE profits!
By the time I was 15, I had my first real job washing dishes at a local deli. I quickly realized that I needed more from a job and as soon as I turned 16, I got a job in the mall selling shoes, where I was paid both hourly and a commission. I was always the top sales person, some days selling over $1,500 worth of shoes, at an average price of $40 per pair! By the time I was 18, I ended up getting promoted to Store general manager and was the youngest store manager in Thom McAn’s history!
My next job was at Applebee’s, I stayed here for about 10 years through my 20’s. I worked every position as an employee and eventually worked my way to Training General Manager, I was their youngest GM here too, only 24 years old, I was managing a restaurant doing $60k per week, with a staff of 100 employees and 3 assistant managers. After 10 years here, I was ready for a change, this is when my insurance career started.
My first insurance position
My first Insurance job I worked for Bankers Life & Casualty, they had an excellent training program. After I was here for about 4 months my branch manager said he was leaving to start his own Brokerage Agency and asked me to come with him and help build it. I said, Absolutely, Yes!
We ended up building an agency over the next 6 years with 500+ agents, selling Medicare Supplements primarily with some Final Expense, Long-Term Care, and Annuities. I had an amazing mentor here at this agency, he taught me so much. After 6 years, I ended up thinking I could do this on my own, and left the agency I had helped build over the past 6 years to start my own Brokerage Agency.
About one year into owning my own agency, I ended up meeting a very good friend, Alan Solomon, we decided to go into business together. We started a different agency together which is the agency that ended up growing to 2,000 licensed agents in 7 years and eventually being sold. In the beginning of this agency I would work very long hours setting up systems, running the lead program, running the insurance agent recruiting advertising, and Alan would be in the field selling during the day and in the evenings talking to the new agents on the phone. We made a great team and having a partner certainly makes things easier, although it is not necessary, it does help. After we sold our agency, we are still good friends and talk almost daily and work on various projects together still today.
This is where we will start the main topic of this book, in chapter 2.
Insurance Recruiting Tools
I knew starting a new insurance agency, I needed to provide all agents with the following three things:
- Training and A System to Follow
- Quality Lead Program
- Fair Compensation
We will take a look at each of these now, then I will get into the secrets of how to find agents.
Training and A System to Follow: I have always believed in systems and making things easily duplicatable. If you do not have a training platform yourself to start agents off with, you can find many options online. Put together a training program that outlines everything you want your agents to know. Some of the things you should include in your training are:
- How to Do a Sales Presentation
- How to Work the Leads in Your Lead Program
- How to Follow up with Clients
- Where to find product specific training from carriers
- How to ask for referrals
- How to cross sell
These are just a few of the basics, you can add additional items necessary for your agency.
Quality Insurance Lead Program: I know how important it is to have a solid lead program to be succesful, so in my life insurance agency I built a lead company! In the beginning my lead company was me doing voice broadcast messages for each agent I brought on. I quickly learned I could sell these leads at a great price to agents outside of my agency, this helped cover the cost of the system and making it possible to give leads to my agents for FREE or reduced pricing. Eventually voice broadcasting to consumers became illegal so I had to start hiring a team of telemarketers. This started with a small group here in the United States and ended up going to off shore callers from other countries.
Insurance Telemarketing leads are not considered the highest quality leads so I also offered a direct mail lead program.
Fair Compensation: Agents will always find someone else offering a higher commission, the trick is to be somewhere as close to the top of the competition, this helps you attract higher caliber agents and keep them longer.
Now that I was able to put all of these things together it was time to start recruiting a team, let's look into that in the next chapter.
Recruiting Insurance Agents
Not only did I need the 3 things from the last chapter, I also needed a way to get my message out to the agents. This is where the best part of this guide is! The secret sauce!
“Recruiting insurance agents can be very easy if you have the right tools” So, what are these tools? Well, it starts with the insurance agent list, you have to have a list of licensed insurance agents to send your message to. I started off by buying a list from another IMO I knew in the business. It was an older list, but it got me started. Eventually, I went with one of the big brand name companies who sells agent lists for around $20,000 per year. Now, I own my own list which contains over 700k licensed insurance agents. If you want to get a copy of my list to market your agency it is available here on my website: www.insuranceagentlists.com
Tool #1 Insurance Agent Recruiting Voice Broadcaster
This is by far the best option I have found for getting your message out to the licensed insurance agents on your list. The cost is only about 1-2 cents per call and it can make up to 10,000 calls per hour. This is the same thing I used to use for generating leads for consumers, the thing is when it became illegal to call consumers, the law does not regulate calling businesses. A licensed insurance agent call is considered a b2b call.
My messages are always short and sweet. I would say something like this: “Attention agents working in the senior market, there is a new final expense policy available with a top rated carrier, the commissions are very good and we even have a lead program for you to work, to get more information please press 1 now or to be removed from this special call list press 9.” As you can see in this message I mention something new, all agents love to hear about a new product. Commissions, they all love to hear about good commission levels. Leads, is very important to most agents as well.
Tool #2 Insurance Agent Email Blaster
Another great tool to help get your message out is an email blaster. If you are doing bulk emails to hundreds of thousands of agents, using something like Mailchimp won’t work as your account will get shut down for SPAM. You need to have an email server which is specifically set up for sending bulk emails. When you send bulk emails, you will need a landing page for the agents to input their information to request more info from you. So basically, you send an email (kind of like the voice broadcast message in Tool #1) make it short and sweet. Place a link In this email that says something like to get more info click here. Once they click on that link, they are sent to your landing page, which is typically a beautifully professionally designed webpage with a bit more info on it about your offer. The idea is to not give out too much info, you want them asking for more. They ask for more info by completing the landing page form. Once they complete the form on landing page, you will get a notification that they requested more info. Now, you can reach out to them.To use my bulk email server you can do that by visiting this website: www.insuranceagentlists.com/bulk-email
Tool # 3 Insurance Agent Recruiting Website
Any good or big agency is going to need an online website that tells the story of their agency. I have designed hundreds of websites over the years and will be happy to help you design and build your very own insurance agency website. My insurance website design agency is AgencyBuilderPro
Tool #4 Insurance Agent Recruiting on Social Media
Social Media is a must in todays world. My favorite social media for growing an insurance agency is YouTube and Facebook. You can build a following of Licensed Agents very easily on Youtube, by targeting insurance agents and making videos that are relevant to selling insurance.Facebook is a great place to advertise. It is kind of like voice broadcasting and sending bulk emails, you can create an ad on Facebook and target it to only be shown to agents who are in your list of licensed insurance agents. You can do this for very inexpensive and get a great return. I would run ads and use a budget of $10 or so per day, and run that ad continuously.
Tool #5 A Good Insurance Recruiting CRM
You will need a great CRM to keep up with all of your agent recruits and one that helps automate your systems. Our CRM would connect with our Mailchimp account and send emails at specific times to agents who were listed in certain groups within our CRM. We used a lesser known, lower cost, but very easy to use CRM system called LessAnnoyingCRM I would recommend this to anyone looking for a great CRM at a reasonable price. Enjoy 60 Days FREE on this CRM by using this referral link: https://www.lessannoyingcrm.com/invite/99C34.
There are so many other things that I could have mentioned in this Blog Post, but I wanted to make it simple and easy to follow. One last note, make sure you absolutely Love what you are doing and you will succeed! Thanks for reading!
How to Recruit Insurance Agents
