Ask the Insurance Salesman

In My Humble Opinion
1

I don’t know if there will be any interest in this or not, but salesmen in general seem to be disliked so maybe there will be some interest if only to yell at me for being scum. :cool:

First things first. I am not your agent, I will not be giving advice in this thread. I will be happy to state my opinions. I am likely not licensed in your state and have no interest in any of you becoming clients. This thread is for entertainment purposes only.

I am a life insurance salesman by trade. I also sell medicare supplements, some supplemental insurance policies and partner with a financial services firm to help people decide if annuities are the right investment for them. (Note, I don’t personally sell annuities much if at all. Mostly I hand those cases over to people who know a hell of a lot more about what they are doing than I do. I don’t want to mess with people’s retirement if I am not 100% sure I know whats up.) I do consider myself to be an expert in my field. I put a lot of time and study into my area and know more than most agents who do the same work I do.

I work almost exclusively with Seniors, and I would say that almost everyone who has done business with me is happy that they met up with me. My first goal is always to put the customer in a better position than they were in before, and I have walked away from sales where that wasn’t possible. And I am good at what I do. I almost never leave a meeting with someone where they don’t tell me that they are glad they sat down to talk with me.

I didn’t plan to be an insurance agent. I thought I was going to run my own theatre company when I got out of college. And I did for a while. We did Shakespeare in the park and it was great. Didn’t pay anything though. So then I went into teaching. Unfortunately just as I finished up getting certified as a teacher my wife lost her job and the 30k a year starting teaching position that I was looking to take wasn’t going to cut it and I had to find something else to do. So I got a job selling for a company who is a competitor with AFLAC, only we went “door to door and store to store” cold canvasing up and down the street. We weren’t allowed to buy leads, and we were discouraged from using the phone. I did that for over a year, and found out that I was good at this. People liked me. People trusted me. Why? No idea.

I made a change to working independently about a year ago and focusing on the senior market which was my favorite group to work with when I was at my other company. I have never been happier with any job I have ever had. I no longer cold call, I buy leads. Otherwise the work is the same, but I don’t have a boss breathing down my neck so it’s much lower stress. I qualified for the million dollar round table (though I will not be joining) and have won a couple free vacations.

So that’s where I am coming from. Do you have questions for me about what being a professional salesman is like? What working in insurance is like? or anything else? Want to know the tricks to getting a salesman to go away?Ask anything, I’ll answer honestly. I won’t give advice. Otherwise, shoot.

I have a question for you. Do you have a gut reaction when someone tells you they sell life insurance? A lot of the people I know won’t call themselves insurance agents rather calling themselves “financial advisers” or something similar. I don’t do that, but I sort of understand why they do.

2

Did you intend this to be about life insurance specifically, or insurance in general?

3

Either. Ask anything. I’ll answer what I can. I know a number of people who work in areas I don’t so I can get you answers on health and property and casualty

4

Have you ever killed a hobo to get an erection?

5

No. But your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

6

Is the “competitor with AFLAC” Combined?

I worked for Combined for two years after college on the accident and SHP side. I still use the tips they taught me even though I’m the farthest thing from a salesman these days.

7

Yes. I didn’t mention them by name because I figured it would be meaningless to most people. It was a really good experience and I learned a ton.

8

My best friend of many years used to sell life insurance in his youth. He’s not really a people person but he can really turn on the charm and pretend like he is. He didn’t do it for very long because he didn’t enjoy the cold calling nature of the business. He said what gave him the most pleasure was to help file claims of a surviving spouse (usually elderly) and bring them the settlement check.

Me, I hate being cold called about anything. But life insurance especially. I think it’s the whole idea of having to deal with my own mortality.

9

WCS would be happy to know that even now, almost 20 years after working for Combined, my boys and I still start every morning in the car with “I feel healthy, I feel happy, I feel TERRIFIC!”

10

How flexible are you when it comes to closing a deal? For example, if a customer is wavering, will you haggle (e.g. offer a 5% premium discount, extra coverage on X, whatever) in order to make the sale, or are all the prices and whatnot already fixed by some underwriter far away?

11

As much as you hate being cold called, I promise the people doing the calling hate it every bit as much. I would not still be in this business if I thought I would have to start cold calling again. I’m glad I learned how, but I am more glad that part of my life is behind me.

The not wanting to think about your mortality is more or less why I have a job. There is a saying in the life insurance industry that most insurance is bought, but life insurance has to be sold. No one wakes up in the morning thinking “today is the day for me to get life insurance”

That’s awesome! I keep a copy of Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude in my office book shelf in case I ever need a reminder to keep my chin up.

The price is the price. Set by actuaries who get paid crazy amounts of money to set these prices. If your kids are good at math becoming an actuary is a decent line of work.

That said, I try very hard to nail down a budget before we talk about benefits. That way any haggling over how much is affordable is done before things get locked in stone. I also try to find out what is important to an person before we talk death benefit.

12

Question about homeowners insurance.

I was talking to my aunt the other day, and she mentioned that her homeowners premium went up $250 (from around $900 to $1,150 or so)

She said that if she switches to a new insurance company, they inspect the house and make you do a whole bunch of updating.

Is this true?

13

I don’t do property and casualty, but one of my best friends has been doing it for 20 years. I asked him and he said “most companies will make you do an outside inspection. A few will do inside as well. Most only outside though” . This is in PA, your state may have different regulations.

So, it’s sort of true.

14

Do you receive your commission on one large piece or do you get a slice of
the month payments the customers make (in other words, each time a
policy holder makes a monthly payment you get a small piece of it)?

15

Short answer, my choice.

Long answer. Technically you only earn commission as it comes in month to month for the first policy year (you do get a little renewal commission, after the first year, but it’s small). Most people can’t sell enough to survive on those small monthly payments when they first start to they choose to get advanced the rest of their commission. Many companies will give you up to a 75% advance on your commissions, though several charge you interest. Also, if a person drops their policy before they have kept it for the full advance period you have to pay the company back the advance. Many companies have weird rules about how to pay advances.

Personally I am on advance with the majority of my companies, but have one company that doesn’t offer advance pay at all and two others where I am not taking the advance for various reasons.

16

Are those life insurance commercials you see on television overpriced? You know the ones, you can’t be turned down, no questions are asked, etc.

Does whole life really make sense for anyone or would we all be better off buying term?

17

When it comes to value it’s not totally black and white. So again, the short answers to your questions are yes and yes.

The stuff you see advertised on TV is almost always going to be more expensive than an equivalent product that isn’t advertised like that. It isn’t always too expensive though. A lot of those policies offer good rates to male smokers at a certain age.

The bigger issue is, do you need a policy that doesn’t ask any health questions, and what are you giving up to not have to deal with having your health checked out? In general, the more an insurance company checks your health out the better your rates will be (group plans are the big exception here), even if you have less than perfect health. Also these guaranteed issue policies (that’s what they are called) are pretty much always going to be modified benefit plans. This means that you will typically have to wait 2 years in order to get the full policy benefit. How the benefits are modified varies from company to company, but it typically involves a two year waiting period for coverage for death due to illness.

Your health needs to be really bad for these plans to be a good option. If you are currently a cancer patients or have hiv or have had an organ transplant or just had a heart attack or stroke in the last 12 months they are your only choice. Otherwise you have more options.

As far as whole life vs term. It depends on why you want the policy. They have different uses and both have their place, anyone who tells you otherwise is either uninformed or trying to sell you something. I’ll post something later on term vs permanent insurance. It’s a longish topic.

18

Is there any disadvantage for a customer to tell you everything? E.g. if a customer voluntarily discloses that they have X medical condition or engage in Y activity, will that help you steer them into the best plan for them or would you use that information against them in order to get them the most expensive plan with the least likely payout for them? In other words, do you primarily serve the interests of the customer or are you primarily focused on maximizing profit for the insurance companies?

19

I don’t work for the insurance company. As an agent (broker) it is my legal and ethical duty to represent the client interest as much as the company. This means I don’t lie to the company, and I do my level best to do what’s be for the client. Why should you trust this? Because it’s also in my own best interest to keep your business on the books and there are a whole lot of other agents out there trying to find reasons to get you to change your policy to them, I don’t need to give them ammo by doing a bad job.

It is more important to me that I have a strong client base who likes me and trusts me and talks about me to their friends than anything. I was taught when I first got into the business that if you focus on your commission you will be driven out of the business within a year. If you focus on the client, commission takes care of itself. That doesn’t mean all agents think this way, but most of the ones who don’t won’t make it. 90% of everyone who starts in insurance will fail out within a year.

It is usually in the client best interest to tell me everything. Insurance companies will find out anyway. Maybe not right away but they will find out. If I know what I’m working with I can get you the best company. For example I recently had a guy who had Hep C. He said it was cured several years ago and so didn’t tell the last agent he spoke with about it. He was quoted one price and then the agent came back after the labs were run and told him it was going to be 100/month more than they thought. So he asked me if I could do better. I knew about the hep c and had his labs, so I went and found him a company that would offer him similar coverage for the price he was willing to pay.

20

You sell life insurance to the elderly? How do you sleep at night?