Listen Now

In this episode, David Duford of DavidDuford.com talks about his new book called “Interviews With Top Producing Insurance Agents” (buy on Amazon here)where he interviews 13 top producing life insurance agents.  We also discuss the process of getting his direct to consumer burial insurance site to daily inbound leads and phone calls. In this episode learn: 1) What it took to get daily leads from the search engines (free leads!) from a brand new website within 6 months. 2) What carriers he sells over the phone. 3) Shared characteristics of top producing life insurance agents. People in the episode: Jeff Root: jeff@selltermlife.com David Duford: DavidDuford.com Mentioned on this episode: Digital Life Insurance Agent Book (Amazon link) SellTermLife Website Service (used to build David’s site) Interviews with Top Producing Insurance Agents Book (Amazon link) Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page

Randy VanderVaate In this episode, Randy Vandervaate guest hosts and interviews Jimmy McMillan from heartlifeinsurance.com.  Both Randy and Jimmy have built niche websites producing consistent life insurance business and discuss the process and what it takes. In this episode learn: 1) How to niche down your life insurance website to get better results in the most efficient way possible 2) Going from concept state to daily leads within 1 year 3) Creating a website to differentiate yourself from the larger more established life insurance websites 4) Educational opportunities to get you up to speed as quickly as possible People in the episode: Randy VanderVaate Jimmy McMillan Jimmy McMillan Mentioned on this episode: SellTermLife Website Service (lifetime community access included) SellTermLife Community The Digital Life Insurance Agent Book (on Amazon.com) DigitalBGA (IMO/BGA for telesales agents) Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page

In this episode, Anthony Martin of ChoiceMutual.com walks us through his journey of starting a website from scratch and getting to daily leads from the search engines within 6 months.  We also talk about why many agents fail at final expense telesales and some ways he makes it work. In this episode learn: 1) What it took to get daily leads from the search engines (free leads!) from a brand new website within 6 months. 2) The link building methods used to fuel his website’s success 3) Why final expense telesales works for some agents and doesn’t for others 4) The 3 core final expense telesales companies Anthony currently writes. 0:00 – 21:45:  New website to daily leads discussion 21:45:  Selling Final Expense Over The Phone People in the episode: Jeff Root: jeff@selltermlife.com Anthony Martin Mentioned on this episode: SellTermLife Website Service (used to build Anthony’s site) Broken Backlinking by Brian Dean Help a Reporter Out Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page

Glen Shelton owns Lead Heroes, a telemarketed lead vendor and in this episode we discuss working internet leads and what it takes to become successful doing it through some of our own insights into the business. We talk about timeframe to profitability, following up on leads, advice on transitioning to telesales and a bunch of other topics. In this episode learn: 1) What following up on your leads should look like. 2) How long it takes to become profitable working internet leads. 3) Advice on transitioning to buying internet leads and selling over the phone. People in the episode: Jeff Root: jeff@selltermlife.com Glen Shelton: glen@leadheroes.com Mentioned on this episode: Lead Heroes How To Qualify, Present & Sell Final Expense and Medicare Supplements To Seniors Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page

Jonathan Musgrave has been building turn-key digital marketing processes for agents for years.  Using a combination of targeted traffic and an optimized digital marketing process, he delivers only the hottest of prospects to his agent clients. In this episode learn: 1) What it looks like to build a turn-key digital marketing strategy. 2) Facebook ads best practices. 3) How to get started to building turn-key digital marketing campaigns. People in the episode: Jeff Root: jeff@selltermlife.com Jonathan Musgrave: jonathan@wiredadviser.com Mentioned on this episode: The Digital Life Insurance Agent Book SellTermLife Custom Life Insurance Website Unbounce.com Perfect Facebook Ad Reference .pdf Anadomy Course **Secret Purchase Page for 50% off Anadomy Course** Link to Jonathan’s Calendar Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page

Brett Kitchen has the most experience of marketing and selling Indexed Universal Life Insurance (IUL) over the phone the phone of anyone I know.  He’s also authored the book “Wealth Beyond Wall Street” and has a program to train and help agents sell IUL over the phone. In this episode learn: 1) How to identify the right IUL prospects. 2) An overview of presenting IUL over the phone. 3) Why agents should be offering IUL products.   People in the episode: Jeff Root: jeff@selltermlife.com Brett Kitchen: mail@brettkitchen.com Mentioned on this episode: EliteLeadsEliteAdvisors.com (if questions, call 801-693-1677) Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page  

Todd Ewing has the most direct to consumer telesales experience that I know of in the industry and he shares his 7 habits of successful life insurance telesales in this episode. At-A-Glance Success: * Produced over $1 billion in premium * Supervised over 500,00 paid policies * Created and built 3 start-up agencies As an Executive Insurance Consultant, he’s helped the top Direct Marketers, BGA’s and IMO’s grow and improve both top and bottom-line results. As Corporate Officer, he helped Transamerica, SelectQuote and InsWeb, Inc. produce record revenue. In this episode learn: 1) How to effectively develop rapport over the phone. 2) How to differentiate yourself with your value proposition 3) Master qualification and underwriting 4) How to present the rates and what to do in what Todd refers to as the “critical moment” 5) And much, much more. (The training starts at 21:00) Click Here to View the Full Transcript Jeff Root: Welcome to the podcast, Todd. Todd Ewing: Hey. Thanks, Jeff. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you and all the good folks out there. Jeff Root: Yup, so why don’t you share with us what you’re seeing out there in the industry and then maybe go into a little background about yourself. Todd Ewing: That sounds great. Thanks, Jeff. Hi, everybody. My name, again, is Todd Ewing and it’s a pleasure to speak with you and present and convey some proven techniques to help you grow your business. First, I want to thank Jeff for the opportunity to speak with you. I really appreciate this chance, Jeff, and hopefully we’ll be able to generate some great results; short term and long term. Jeff Root: Pleasures all mine. Todd Ewing: Yeah. For everybody out there you probably heard there’s tremendous momentum in our industry around technology and new catalysts of change. InsurTech and in tech companies are popping up everywhere and deep capital is being deployed to reinvent the life insurance arena. Buzz words like innovation, disruption, and transformation are really permeating the landscape for insurance carries, EGAs, IMOs, financial institutions and direct marketers. The direct to consumer experience, D to C as you’ll hear it often referred to is really the paradigm shift for increasing sales. The consumer and consumer experience, that is known as CS, is truly paramount. It is the kind of new success; knowing who your consumer is, how they operate, what modality in which they want to transact business and how they’re looking to protect their family in terms of the greatest value. When I say value I don’t simply mean the lowest price. I never want to get into price wars because ultimately you’ll lose that battle. There will always be another carrier, the faster gun in the west, that comes up with a lower two cent price per month. We need to look at the overall picture of creating the greatest value for the consumer. Before I jump into this maybe I can give a little background on myself. I’ve been in the industry for twenty-five plus years. My first real job out of UCLA when I graduated was working for a little company at the time called SelectQuote Insurance Services; probably all hear of that. Jeff Root: We’re all familiar with them. Yup. Todd Ewing: Yup. The ubiquitous ads, believe it or not, just … Some of the commercials that are run are ones that I wrote and helped produce fifteen, sixteen years ago when I was there. I guess they legs. In my opinion they’re getting a little stale, but hey, it still makes the phone ring so … My first job was at SelectQuote. I had the good fortune of being promoted fairly quickly to an agent. I’d never sold life insurance door to door, face to face, knee to knee at the kitchen table. It was all new to me and my training literally was one night. The office manager and president’s wife gave me a huge journal like the Bible. It was an enormous binder. It had all the under writing guidelines in there. She said to me, “Memorize these and you’ll start selling tomorrow.” That was my training. Jeff Root: Wow. Todd Ewing: I got on the phone and and my very first day, for whatever reason … To this day I’m still not certain why I was able to be so successful. It just was intrinsic. It was a native talent for some reason. My first day I sold ten applications over the phone. Jeff Root: Awesome. Todd Ewing: The most in the history of SelectQuote to that point, they’d been a business for six years, was four in one day. I was the eighth agent to be on the floor and for the next, and this is me patting myself on the back kind of breaking my arm doing so, that I lead the company every day, every week, every month, every year for three and a half years in sales. In fact, they actually had to create a new comp line and take me out of it because I was skewing the numbers so badly. Then after three and a half years I totaled over eight thousand pay policies sold over the phone. One day I sold thirty-two applications. Jeff Root: Oh my gosh. Todd Ewing: I think it still may be a record. Back then the carriers were not what we know today. They weren’t the usual suspects. It was travelers, and Midland Mutual Life, and Jackson National, and Federal Kemper which had so many different names, right? The [inaudible 00:04:15]. We didn’t have the luxury of being known to the consumer. It was a brand new experience so we had to create trust and value, unlike today where you go online and type in term life insurance in Google and there’s literally pages and pages, thousands- Jeff Root: Right. Todd Ewing: Of people that claim that they can sell [inaudible 00:04:35]. This was before Al Gore invented the internet, right? People were transacting business all over the phone and it was kind of a cumbersome process but in reality it felt so new and unique to the customer they liked, even back then, not having to go face to face with a stranger or disclose personal financial and health data to a friend or relative. That anonymity was to our advantage. After selling I had the opportunity to move into management and quickly rose to the vice president of sales and marketing for SelectQuote. I ended up staying there for thirteen years. It was a great ride, loved it. This is back [inaudible 00:05:17] when the internet was starting to come online. We developed an internet team within a whole internet platform. We called it [inaudible 00:05:26], the web team and quickly fifty percent of our volume came in through the web. We grew from eight agents when I first started to over eighty agents and our premiums and revenues literally quadrupled. We had a great ride. We became the known direct marketer in the state and they always say, “Imitation is the greatest form of flattery.” A ton of companies started popping up there after trying to do what we had accomplished at SelectQuote. From there I had an opportunity to literally move out of the San Francisco Bay Area and join a company called InsWeb. The CEO called me there, and founder, and said, “Hey, we’d like to move into the life space. You’re just the guy to help us build and start a new one. We want you to teach us everything; direct to consumer marketing, direct marketing, as well as how to close more effectively over the phone.” They already had a P & C, property and casualty, company selling home and auto. I was brought up there to build up a whole new life division for them. We did that and introduced all new carriers and … Really the transformation that occurred there for me was I wanted to do something a little bit different. I just didn’t want to build a better mouse trap than what we’d accomplished at SelectQuote. We started selling … This is cutting edge back then, we started selling universal life policies over the phone. That became transformative. SelectQuote, in the thirteen years that I was there, the highest premium, the largest case, was fourteen thousand dollars. At InsWeb, in our third month I had a gentleman, one of my agents, sell an eighty thousand and a forty thousand that went paid in the fourth month. Jeff Root: That’s pretty typical nowadays now that everybody is use to purchasing online and over the phone. Todd Ewing: Right. Back then it was a challenge to try to get the trust and have people submit payment of that large- Jeff Root: Yeah. Todd Ewing: To an unknown company. Today people are buying houses and cars online. Jeff Root: Yup. Todd Ewing: That’s fairly commonplace. Huge opportunity to do that. We’re also selling non med products which were kind of cutting edge back then as well. I was looking for quicker cash flow and a better consumer experience so we did both. One of the other unique things that we did, and it’s still available out there, I’m shocked my how many direct marketers don’t do this now; that is when you look at a website and you have to go enter your data: you put in your date of birth, you put in what state you’re in, how much coverage you’re looking for, the term length, yadda ya. There’s almost always an empty field there. It’s a blank field where you, the consumer, have to enter in how much coverage you want. Occasionally there will be a health button or they’ll be a needs analysis tool, but not always. The bottom line is it’s left blank and you’re allowing the customer to choose how much they want. It sounds good in theory. The truth is out of the millions of calls that I’ve processed, and hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds, thousands of calls that I’ve listened to; the majority, at least fifty percent plus, do not have any idea how much life insurance they need. Jeff Root: Yup. Todd Ewing: If they do know that number they’re still well under-insured. W

Jovan Will from advisorinternetmarketing.com works with top financial advisors across the country to prosper in the digital age.  We talk in detail about his marketing strategies to get appointments to market annuities and other financial products.   Some agents are even selling annuities 100% over the phone and doing very, very well.   In this episode learn: 1) How he uses his sales funnel to schedule appointments automatically and only speak with hot prospects.  He believes in quality of leads and not volume of leads and his funnels do this.  We go in depth on this topic. 2) Ways to drive traffic into his funnel, from the most expensive way to the most simplified way and some under the radar techniques.  Lots of different strategies discussed. 3) Jovan has a small website that has 15 blog posts and generates 5 annuity appointments (not leads, actual appointments on the calendar) – every week from the search engines. We talk about the characteristics of this website and how you can do this on a local and national level. People in the episode: Jeff Root: jeff@selltermlife.com Jovan Will: jovan@advisorinternetmarketing.com Mentioned on this episode: Advisor Internet Marketing Bright Scope Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page  

The market for final expense is just getting bigger as more and more baby boomers are aging into retirement.  This week we’re bringing in David Duford from FEAgentMentor.com to discuss how he teaches final expense agents to grow their business.  We’ll cover lead programs, sales techniques and general advice on how you can sell more final expense life insurance. In this episode learn: 1. Top final expense lead programs 2. Sales techniques in presenting final expense 3. Insights to the final expense market People in the episode: Jeff Root: jeff@selltermlife.com David Duford: DavidDuford.com Mentioned on this episode: DavidDuford.com customizedquote.com needalead.com jenmarco.com leadconnections.com   Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page

Shaun Caldwell makes a great case to implement direct mail in your business.   As the internet continues to provide increasing access to more products, the need for direct mail will grow as means to differentiate brands and sustain existing customer relationships.  In this episode we discuss” In this episode learn: 1. The risks in relying solely on internet marketing 2. The elements of an effective direct mail campaign 3.  What an integrated direct mail approach looks like. People in the episode: Jeff Root: jeff@selltermlife.com Shaun Caldwell: info@charlotteprint.com Mentioned on this episode: CharlottePrint.com White Pages Pro Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page Want to help improve the show? Want to hear about a specific topic? Just want to leave some feedback?  

Gregory was recently named one of the 20 most creative people in insurance and has over 20 years of life insurance industry experience going from agent, to home office executive and now as a thought leader for insurance industry innovation. In this episode learn: 1.  Ways to act on your ideas to innovate the insurance industry and get funding to build your ideas. 2.  What’s on the horizon for insurance industry startups. 3.  There’s a systemic problem of insurance companies to innovate and stay current with what consumers and agents want and why they can’t do this on their own.  Innovators outside the insurance companies need to make it happen. People in the episode: Jeff Root: jeff@selltermlife.com Gregory Bailey: gregory@insurevc.com Mentioned on this episode: Insure VC Pacific Life Prime Melius PolicyGenius Global Insurance Accelerator Insurance Disrupted Conference Angel List The Denim Rivet Podcast Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page Want to help improve the show? Want to hear about a specific topic? Just want to leave some feedback?

Thom Singer has over 25 years of sales and marketing experience and is the Master of Ceremonies and Keynote for this year’s MDRT Top of the Table event.  We’ll be talking about connecting with people in a technology driven world. In this episode learn: 1.  Why social media isn’t a replacement for human to human networking. 2. How to get people to want to be in your sphere of influence. 3. Misconceptions about what networking is and how to do it more effectively. People in the episode: Jeff Root: jeff@selltermlife.com Thom Singer: @thomsinger Mentioned on this episode: MDRT Top of the Table Cool Things Entrepreneurs Do Podcast ThomSinger.com Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes – Leave us a Review! Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page Want to help improve the show? Want to hear about a specific topic? Just want to leave some feedback? … Send me a voice message  

Jonas has been marketing in financial services for over a decade, focusing on lead generation and personal branding.  He’ll be sharing with us some tips on building your local brand. In this episode learn: 1.   How to use your email signature to generate business 2.  How to use LinkedIn for local referrals 3.  How you can use Google Alerts in your business. People in the episode: Jeff Root: jeff@selltermlife.com Jonas Roeser: jonas@agentreview.net Mentioned on this episode: 3in4needmore.com Calendly LinkedIn Google Alerts AgentReview.net Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes – Leave us a Review! Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page Want to help improve the show? Want to hear about a specific topic? Just want to leave some feedback? … Send me a voice message  

Forget what you’ve heard about targeting Gen Y.  Sophia Bera has built a very profitable business around Gen Y and in this episode talks about how she did that. Sophia is very open and generous with the inside look at her business and how she works with Gen Y.  Lots of great “how-to” information for any financial services business. In this episode learn: 1.   Why Gen Y when industry vets tell us there’s no money there? 2.  Sophia’s path to build her brand and actionable advice to get started on yours. 3.  Why connecting remotely with people is a lot more intimate than face to face sales. 4.  Technology used to build her business remotely and connect with Gen Y. 5.  What fee-only financial planners look for when referring business to life insurance agents. Click Here to View the Full Transcript Sophia: Thank you so much for having me, Jeff. I’m excited to be here. Jeff: Great. Let’s start here by telling us a background in your business. Sophia: I’m an actor turned financial planner which is not the typical career path I guess for financial planners. Everybody is like, “How did you get to that?” My undergrad in theater and women’s studies. I did 15 blank shows while I was in college and I decided that I was determined not to be a starving artist. I would sit in a personal finance section of Barnes and Noble and read every finance and business book I can get my hands on and realized I really wanted to buy a house when I graduated from college. I graduated when I was 21, this was back in 2005. You can do the math and figure out how old I am now. Three months later I bought a house and my friends started coming to me with their money questions. They were saying things like, “Hey, I just got a job but I have no idea how to read my company benefits package,” or, “How did you buy a house,” or, “Can you help me with my student loans. I’m in credit card debt, what should I do?” These were all really great questions and there was really nobody for them to go to to answer those questions and so I learned about this thing called the CFP until I started taking my classes to become a certified financial planner and I wasn’t really sure about it because it was a lot of selling and I really wanted to help people with their money. I really wanted to work with your clients but in my second course I ended up needing my future boss. This guy was working at his father’s financial planning firm and they ended up bringing me in for an interview because they were hiring somebody for their back office and I got my foot on the door, I ended up planning the job which was great. I ended up getting into the profession in 2007 and then taking my CFP exam in 2009 and becoming a CFP in 2010 and then I worked to a couple traditional financial planning firm before I working for a startup for a year, that was based in New York. Then, two years ago I launched Gen Y Planning and now I’m a virtual financial planner for millennials. Jeff: A virtual financial planner for millennials, that is awesome. What age group are millennials? Just for context here for everybody listening. Sophia: Millennials come at this point go until about age 35 but I work with a lot of young gen-Xers as well. People will say things like, “I’m 40, can I work with you or not?” Absolutely we can work together, however I would say that most of my clients are within ten years of my age. I’m 31, most of my clients are mid-20s to early 40s, all of them are actually. I don’t have any clients over I think like 42 and the reason why I really like to focus there is because so many financial planners have been focused on baby boomers and beyond and I really think there’s a bunch of people that are serving that market really well and I wanted to offer something different. When I do have baby boomer clients reach out to me I usually refer them to one of the former firms that I was working at, that might mentor still works at, because I know that he’ll take good care of them and he does great work and that’s something that I’m happy to do. Jeff: You really stick to the millennial Gen Y age group here. You really don’t go outside. If somebody wants to work with you and they don’t fit that mold, you say no and you refer them out. Sophia: I do because I’m really good at working with people when they’re going through a bunch of life changes. People in their 20s and 30s, early 40s, people are getting married, having kids, moving, switching jobs. All of those things are major planning opportunities and for me that’s really fun. When people get into their 50s and 60s they really want somebody to do a social security analysis and figure out what’s the difference if I retire at 62 versus 66, and I have chosen not to use financial planning software and those people need somebody to run these detailed projections and figure out what is the difference if you retire at those different ages or if you work part-time and whatnot. I really want to make sure that those clients are getting the best service that they can and having somebody that really meets those needs and that allows me to really focus on what I’m good at. Jeff: I love that because in the early days in the business, and I’m sure you heard this. I know I’ve heard it. I’m sure a lot of people listening have heard this too. Freshly licensed and getting trained were told by industry veterans that the younger generation, generation Y, millennials can’t be profitable and we shouldn’t target them and here you are. Sophia: Right. Jeff: Yeah, and here you are crushing it in that market. How did you make gen Y profitable for your business? Sophia: Great question. Yeah, and just to touch on what you just mentioned when I would go to financial planning conferences I would say, “I really want to work with young clients.” All the advisors would say, “Why? They don’t have any money.” Right? It was this idea that if you were to target clients in their 20s and 30s they have the time to build up their assets yet so you couldn’t charge them an AUM fee because you weren’t going to make enough money off of them, or because they didn’t have any assets, or maybe they have a negative network or whatnot. For me I didn’t see that as our client’s problem. I saw that as an us problem, like as financial planners, as financial advisors. What I do is I charge, I’m really big on the planning. Some people are really big in the investment. I always say like 80% of what I do has nothing to do with investing. I have become a CFP and I’m really passionate about the planning and I think there’s a lot of planning that goes into things and that really has nothing to do with the asset level that you have or very little. A lot of times if we’re talking about assets, what are we talking about? The 401(k) plan, right, or the Roth IRA that they just started. I decided to charge an upfront planning fee so I charge an initial planning fee of $1,500 to $2,000 upfront. and then I charge a monthly subscription of 100 to 200 bucks a month but right now most of my new clients are paying 149 a month to 199 a month. Jeff: For that monthly fee, did they just kind of get access to you as their life and changes continue? Sophia: Yeah, that’s a great question. I do an upfront financial plan so we have two meetings upfront because I really want to dig into the financial planning. Then going forward, we do a meeting every six months and these are I should say virtual meetings, so Skype meetings or Google Hangouts. They may have unlimited e-mail support with me so we continue to address throughout the year. Because what I saw with so many of my traditional firms, clients would only come in once a year and they would really reach out to their planner because they didn’t want to bother them and that all of a sudden there was a ton of things, you know, there’s a ton of fires to put out. Right? Jeff: Yeah. Sophia: I really encourage my clients to reach out to me throughout the year and a lot of the planning we’re doing is putting them into contact with the right life insurance agent, the right estate planning attorney, the right CPA. One of the things they love is they get access to my network. They don’t have to stay up late yelping like a estate planning attorney is California. I can just connect them with your sister apparently. Now you’ve learned that there’s a estate planning attorney in California which kicks ass. Jeff: Yes. For those listening right now, my sister is a estate planning attorney. Does it over the internet just like Sophia. All right. That’s my sister. Sophia: Yeah. Those things I think are really valuable to my clients because a lot of my clients are busy young professionals. There’s a lot going on. They have really intense jobs or they’re busy with their families or they’re travelling. There’s a lot going on and so I want to be on their team. The reason that I feel like I’ve been able to build a profitable business off of this and not have a huge focus on AUM or Assets Under Management is because I charge a monthly subscription. For example, I have quite a few clients that have six figures in income and might have six figures on student loan debt from law school or med school or MBA. I wanted to be able to help those clients too because there’s a bunch of planning that goes into which student loan repayment program should you choose, which student loan should you pay off first, what should we do in terms of putting money into your retirement account while you’re also putting money into paying off your student loans, how do we stay for other goals like a

Glenn Cooke is a life insurance industry veteran that uses marketing and technology to make life insurance easier for consumers to understand and purchase using his own twist on online marketing and building his own systems. In this episode learn: 1. How Glenn generates leads online for his agency 2. Importance and tips Glenn uses to increase conversions from website visitor to lead on your website. 3. How and why he builds most of his life insurance agency technology himself. Click Here to View the Full Transcript Jeff Root: All right. So it’s my pleasure to have Glenn Cooke on the podcast. I’ve actually interacted with Glenn back in 2007 on the life insurance forum he actually built, and we just recently reconnected, and I just had to get him on this podcast. Welcome to the podcast, Glenn. Glenn Cooke: Hi Jeff. Thanks for having me on. Jeff Root: Of course. Let’s start here. You have a very unique background in the business before starting your online life insurance agency. Tell us about your background and how you got started. Glenn Cooke: Sure, well my original intention was to become a programmer. This is back in the eighties, and I was just an absolutely horrible programmer, so I ended up doing tech support at an insurance software company, and that’s led me into doing a lot of insurance software kinds of things. I spent a bit of time working to be trained as an actuary at a head office of an insurance company. Back in the nineties, I actually presented to the vice president of marketing a proposal on websites for insurance brokers at the insurance company I was working for, and that got turned down. So I actually left my job at the insurance company, struck out on my own and started doing websites for insurance brokers around about 15-18 years ago. Did a lot of work in the U.S. market. Sold websites and online turn quoting systems and [inaudible 00:02:57] optimization services to insurance brokers. And about seven or eight years ago I determined that the American market is relatively competitive. The Canadian marketplace is both five years behind what you folks are doing down in the U.S., and I just transitioned my business away from providing websites and services to brokers, and took that knowledge and created my online life insurance agency up in Canada, and it’s just a much easier marketplace because it’s much less competitive. Jeff Root: So you’ve had your Canadian agency for how long now? Glenn Cooke: In the range of about seven years, I think. Jeff Root: Okay, great. And in that length of time, I mean, being online in Canada five years ahead of the curve, from what you’re saying, you’ve probably done a lot of business the past seven years. Glenn Cooke: I have. I personally have a few thousand clients. All of my clients I have sold non-face-to-face; I never see clients. It’s all from my home office. We live in a rural location; I’m not even centrally located anywhere. And all of the leads I work off of our website. That’s exclusively the source for our leads, so I’ve generated that volume of clients just off of my website and over the phone. Jeff Root: I love it. Glenn Cooke: Currently we have about, well, not about, we have exactly three brokers and one admin person, who share the leads with us. And we are in the midst of transitioning to a wholesaler type of business arrangement, where we’re acting as a general agency for other insurance brokers. And, again, one of the draws we’ll be providing is leads off of our website. Jeff Root: So let’s talk about how do you generate leads for an agency? What’s your main strategy? Glenn Cooke: Well, and this is kind of pertinent, because folks … You get reading on the internet, and it’s just an overwhelming amount of information as to how to generate a lead. There’s kind of two ways to look at marketing and lead generation, and anyway, one is, you actually push yourself out to people who aren’t specifically looking for insurance, so that’d be a direct mail blast or something like that, which you can also do that kind of promotional marketing on the internet. Alternatively, and this is what we do, we try and get a front of people who are, on their own decided that they were looking to research life insurance. And those are the people we target. As a result of that, we’re targeting people who are doing research on life insurance. Consumers who are looking to buy life insurance. And the end result of that is, there’s really only one place where that happens. So if you’re a consumer, you’re sittin’ down, lookin’ for life insurance, where are you going to go? And the answer is you don’t go to Twitter, you don’t go to Pinterest, you don’t go to Facebook. Nobody is looking for life insurance on Facebook. Some people have success with those venues, but it’s extremely limited. The best place to get life insurance leads, if you’re developing them yourself, is Google. That’s really the focus, because it’s where all the consumers are. Jeff Root: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Absolutely. So- Glenn Cooke: So that’s what we do. Jeff Root: What’s your main strategy on Google, then? I mean, what have you found that works for you? That brings in all your leads? Glenn Cooke: Okay. Well, in terms of … The short answer is you want to be on the front page of Google. But what a lot of people miss is, if you go Google a variety of topics, there is probably a half a dozen different ways to get on the front page of Google. People think you need to rank organically, in the regular listings. And that is certainly our focus currently. We’re moving away from that, which, we’ll go further into that in just a sec, but there is, if you want to search on Keurig coffee machines, as an example, you’re going to see a whole bunch of ways to get on the front page of Google. There’s Google Images, there’s Google News, there’s the organic results, there’s pay-per-click advertising, and there’s also something that’s called the three-pack or the seven-pack. Which are the local listings. If you do a search on something like life insurance brokers in Austin Texas, Google will try and find people who are physically located near you in Austin, Texas, and they actually parachute that lock of brokers’ websites right into the front page. You beat all the organic rankings, all the big guys, by getting into those local search results. And they call ’em the three-pack and the seven-pack because Google usually lists three people or seven, and it’s that listing where you get the little map on the side, is where you can click on and get the broker’s address. Right now, we have been focusing on what is called the short tail. So big search terms, like “term life insurance,” “life insurance brokers,” and stuff like that. Very very hard for an independent broker to rank on those search terms on any country. So we are rapidly expanding into doing local search engine optimization. We are going to start recruiting brokers and putting their office, their physical location, as one of our locations in Google’s eyes, with the expectation that when somebody types in “life insurance brokers” in Toronto, or Edmonton, or Calgary, or Vancouver, that our website will show up as having a location in that area. Not in the organic results, in that little seven-pack that gets us bumped right onto the front page. So 2015, 2016, that is one of our strategies going forward, is the local [SEO 00:07:47]. And that is probably the easiest strategy if an independent broker wants to get started, forget getting ranked organically initially. Go after local search engine optimization. Much easier, much less competitive, and you’ve got a big advantage because of your physical location. Jeff Root: Right, and you’ll probably get less leads just doing it local if somebody contacts you under local to you, they’re going to have a high conversion rate because they’re local. That in itself has value. Glenn Cooke: Absolutely. Now, in terms of numbers, numbers are all over the place, some folks say they don’t have much success. The yardstick, or the measurement that I use is one of my brokers on his own does very well in a city of about 200,000 people, and he tells me he gets three to five leads a week, plus a couple of phone calls. And they are excellent leads, because they’re not just looking for life insurance brokers, they’re looking for somebody in his city, and that’s him. So they’re absolutely wonderful, wonderful leads. Jeff Root: Right. And, to rank for local, it’s completely different than any sort of organic, you know, the typical search engine optimization that we do. Can you dive a little bit into that? What that entails? Glenn Cooke: Absolutely. Now, I’m still working on being very successful in the local SEO field. However, there are some fundamentals that aren’t that difficult. You need to set up a Google+ page and tell Google your physical location. They’re going to mail you a postcard, so that verifies your actual address. Second thing is, on your webpage, you want to indicate the hours you’re open and your location. Again, there’s a website called Schema.org. S-C-H-E-M-A.org. Schema.org will generate some code for you that you can put on your website. It’s HTML code that sits in behind things, maybe your developer will need to do this for you, that will specifically tell Google on your website your physical location, and the hours that you’re open. You can dictate that to Google right on your webpage using the code from Schema.org. So that’s the first thing, is set up your website, tell Googl

Taylor Pearson is a digital marketing consultant and has spent the last 3 years meeting with 100’s of entrepreneurs from around the world helping them with their businesses.  He’s been a huge influence on my business through a mastermind we take part in and we’ll be discussing accountability and a excerpt from his new book, End of Jobs. In this episode learn: – Accountability through forming a mastermind…and how to form one. – Learn about “Expected Value” and how it relates to entrepreneurs (and our business). Click Here to View the Full Transcript Jeff Root: Taylor Pearson: Thanks for having me on, Jeff. Jeff Root: Of course. Let’s start here with a little bit about you and what you do. Taylor Pearson: My name is Taylor Pearson. My background is in digital marketing consulting for about the past half decade. I’ve worked in digital marketing either as a freelancer consultant in the agency or with a company. Over the past year, I have transitioned to working just on my own as a consultant and then moving into scaling that up and doing some more writing and publishing as a way to promote and generate leads for that. Jeff Root: Awesome. When you say writing and publishing, you’re actually coming out with a book, right? Taylor Pearson: I’ve got a book coming out the end of June. Jeff Root: Cool. We’ll get to that later in the podcast. I initially asked you to be on here because I had a request from an industry magazine to answer a question asked by a new agent in the business. Instead of writing a long article about that, I figured I’d talk to the person about masterminds. I’m going to read the question verbatim real quick so we can get some context here in the problem we’re solving here. The question reads, “What is your accountability method? As we all know, advisors often fail because they do not hold themselves for the things that must be done to succeed. What do you do to ensure that you hold yourself accountable, and that you are held accountable to your goals and activity?” When I got this question I knew right away for me it was our mastermind. You and I have been masterminding for over a year now. On the phone every single week consistently. You’re the expert in this. You put it together, you run it. I’ve heard you talk about it a lot. Let’s get into that. Tell us what a mastermind is. Taylor Pearson: A mastermind is based around this idea that came from a book called Think and Grow Rich which was published probably a hundred years ago now. This guy named Napoleon Hill went out and he basically interviewed the most successful people of his era, so Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller and all these industrial titans to try and figure out what their secrets to success were, so to speak. One of the things he noticed was all these guys hung out together, and they all competed with each other and used each other for accountability. They had this mastermind trust of other individuals they relied on. They could go to and say, “Here’s what I’m going to accomplish.” They had these people both to help them accomplish that, like sort through and talk through those challenges, but also those people to keep them personally accountable to actually getting the work done. The mastermind concept today, our mastermind and other masterminds I’ve run, are based around the same premise which is get a small group, usually four to six people, who are motivated and commitment and smart. Set up a weekly call, or some people do it bimonthly. Set up a regular recurring call to get in one place and have goals which you set for yourself that everyone else in that call holds you accountable for. That’s the basic breakdown of a mastermind. Jeff Root: Yeah. I can tell you that every week you and I and everybody else on our mastermind call, we talk about what we’re going to accomplish this next week and what we accomplished over the previous week to hold ourselves accountable to what we say. I know I hate getting on that call if I didn’t do what I said I was going to do. You know? Taylor Pearson: Yeah. I think it’s a natural tendency, or what most people seem to naturally believe, is you should just be able to hold yourself accountable. I’ve tried that so many times and never been able to do it successfully. Peer pressure and social pressure just works extremely well. There’s a lot of times where I will do things I don’t necessarily want to do whether it’s making a bunch of cold calls or something that otherwise seems unsavory. I just don’t want to get on the call with five other smart dudes that I respect and be like, “Uh, I didn’t do what I said I was going to do.” It’s like that’s far more embarrassing than actually doing the work. Jeff Root: Totally. Yeah. What would you say are the major benefits to joining a mastermind? Taylor Pearson: I think one is what we’ve been talking about which is that accountability. If you set a goal, you said, by next week I’m going to accomplish either X … I like to have it be something that’s either falsifiable so it’s an event. I’m going to do this and then I’m going to send this proposal or I’m going to make X number of calls, fifty calls, a thousand calls, whatever it is. You have something which you can either definitively have or have not accomplished, so the accountability portion is big. Then also problem solving. A lot of times it’s very easy to get caught up in your own head thinking about one way to attack a problem. If you air that problem out to other smart people in your industry who are thinking about the same stuff, they can help you sort through your own thoughts to figure out the solution a lot faster than you doing it on your own. Jeff Root: Absolutely. For me, also it helps me to keep aiming higher on top of that. To make sure that the stuff that I claim I’m going to do or that I want to do, that it’s not just easy stuff that I know I can knock out in a couple of hours. It pushes me to aim higher and pushes everybody else in the group to aim higher as well. Also, one of the things too is, in our mastermind … I can only speak for us. We all run different types of businesses. We’re all sales/marketing guys. That’s the foundation of what we do, so we share a lot of the same things. I tried to get a life insurance mastermind together and it didn’t go too well. It just felt like the dynamics were off. I had a couple of life insurance agents flat out tell me they didn’t want to share some information out of fear of another life insurance agent stepping in on their market or one of those things. I almost think it’s good to find people outside of your actual industry, for us life insurance agents at least. Find other entrepreneurs that are also sales and marketers. Do you find that to be the case? Taylor Pearson: It’s often the big, big, wins come from outside the industry. If you stay inside your own industry, everything flows together. If you look at technology start-up web pages, they all look the same and they have the same format. Everyone is copying everyone else. It’s only when someone comes in from the outside and brings out those big ideas. I look at what you’ve done in life insurance. You were in these internet marketing industries, and you’ve brought a lot of that innovation into the life insurance industry. That wouldn’t have been possible if you had just stayed in your own industry. Jeff Root: Absolutely. It all happened really a few years ago meeting up with our group. I think I met you in Thailand almost two years ago now. Since then my business has completely morphed. I used to be a decent internet marketer. Now it feels like I’m a bad-ass internet life insurance marketer. I feel like I’ve figured some things out. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I didn’t get out of the life insurance industry and joined some masterminds and learned from other businesses besides life insurance businesses. Taylor Pearson: Yeah. I’ve been feeling that a lot lately. I’m always seeking to broaden those horizons. What is it that I don’t know I don’t know? Jeff Root: Um-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Let’s say you’re a life insurance agent and you want to get started in a mastermind, get this accountability thing going, learn from other businesses, teach other businesses the things you know, that type of thing. How would somebody go about reaching out to people to join a mastermind, other business owners? Taylor Pearson: Sure. I always start with personal friends, people I’ve met in person, personal relationships. I would sit down. I would make a list of five people who I know personally who are … I think the important things seems to be some sort of shared values. If you’re trying to start this new venture, new business, new endeavor, having someone else who’s out there trying to do something ambitious and make something happen, who are the four to five people that come to mind you can think of that are on a similar path. Then sit them down and just explain this concept. You can either send them this podcast, or there’s plenty of resources online about masterminds and what they are. Say, “Look. You know, I think I want to make this happen. If you’re committed to making something else happen, let’s get down and let’s make it happen.” I generally find three people is plenty. Four to six seems to be optimal. Jeff Root: Um-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Okay. As far as structure, for somebody that’s never done a mastermind before, would you recommend the same as ours? Taylor Pearson: Yeah. The structure I like is a wee

Patrick Pegram, also known as “Skipper”, is a 30 year life insurance industry veteran and has to be one of the most experience mortgage protection experts out there. There’s a lot of hype around the mortgage protection life insurance market and Patrick gives us the truth on what you can actually expect and how to best work this market. 2:35  MetLife and Century 21 partnership in the mid-80’s 14:50  Sell to their immediate need, don’t do a full needs analysis. 27:00  Current mortgage protection data and lead discussion 35:40  Data examples – Statistically why NAA (and other MP outfits) can’t realistically work.  NAA is in the lead business, not the life insurance business. 43:05  Cost per lead and what seasoned mortgage protection agents are doing. 50:15  Why it’s difficult to sell mortgage protection over the phone. 53:00  Many mortgage protection sales are final expense products.  Top agent that does $500k+ does a lot of final expense. 55:30  Live search of mortgages in 1 state and how many leads can actually be generated.  (great perspective) Click Here to View the Full Transcript Jeff Root: All right, let’s get to it. Today we have Patrick Pegram, from Legacy Insurance Group. Welcome to the podcast, Patrick. Patrick Pegram: Thank you for having me, Jeff. Glad to be here. Jeff Root: Yup, great. Why don’t we start with some background about yourself. You’ve been in the industry for, what, 20-plus years, right? Patrick Pegram: Yeah, actually, this is my 30th year in the business. When you start measuring in decades versus every other year, it starts to get real real quick, but actually I started young in the insurance business, only a couple years out of college, so I then joined Metropolitan Life, a career agency, as you all know, every familiar with that name. A couple of things happened there right when I had joined. They actually had bought a real estate company we all know, Century 21, and they had envisioned a insurance agent in every Century 21 office. At the time, they had a big property and [inaudible 00:03:03] division at Metropolitan, and they wanted to sell homeowners insurance, because in the mid-’80’s also with [inaudible 00:03:11] came a deregulation where brokers, banks, could start having an insurance license. Their vision was to basically have a split commission with an agent to the broker, so we could sell homeowners policies and eventually, again, the mortgage protection, as it was termed. They called it mortgage insurance back then. It worked out really well. They had a very good system of training life guys as P&C guys, so we were extremely well trained on the P&C side, and did pretty well. Myself, I was in the Detroit/Toledo, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan area, in between the two cities, and I had three real estate offices, oh, within probably a five-mile radius, maybe six, of each other. It was a nice area south of Detroit, and as a young man, I was still in my early, mid-20’s, and it gave me an opportunity to get a high volume of insurance. Yes, I had to split a whopping 50% life commission with a broker at 70/30, and the same thing with P&C, but it in turn gave us a lot of volume at the time of business. We walk around today of, “How are we going to get leads, how are we going to get leads?” Well, each office generated about 50 to 70 closings a month, and I had three of them, so I had 200 new prospects a month to sell homeowners and life insurance to. That kept me extremely busy, obviously. I was very typical, six days a week, typically worked on Saturdays because that’s when real estate sold a lot, and on Sundays. I usually took a Monday off, and lived, breathed, and did everything with Century 21 Insurance Services, as they called themselves, which was a division of MetLife. Had a wonderful career there, I was the number one producing agent in the company, and also at the top five Metropolitan nationally for life insurance. The whole system was, I was a very organized individual, and I had a way of basically endearing myself to the broker, because it still had to build on relationship building. An agent couldn’t just get thrown in the office and they had to do business with you. You still had to woo your way in, because what you were selling is not how they really make money. Jeff Root: Right. Patrick Pegram: They make money on that nice one percent, two percent they’re making on the closing of a $100,000 house. Their 30% on a $350 premium at 20% commission, being the whopping- Jeff Root: 60 bucks, yeah. Patrick Pegram: -nothing, so you can’t jeopardize … You had to find your way to endear them, and one of the ways back then was Metropolitan came up with a good way of doing a homeowners policy with instant issue, where I could provide a death page for the mortgage company to accept and close. That wasn’t really available a lot back then, instant issue. It was a lot of handwritten binders and stuff. This was an instant issue setup, which was unique. Now it’s commonplace, today, but my laptop was an old 200 … What’s it called, a 286 from IBM. The battery was the size of a car battery. It had a six-inch screen. This was big technology back then, and we were able to do a lot of policy issues right inside the real estate office. I had a routine where I was just bouncing from one office to the other, making sure they got their closings, and we basically did about one out of every three homes closed, or sales done, in that office. I was able to bring on board with Metropolitan, which is a huge percentage, roughly about 60, 70 new homeowners policies per month. Jeff Root: Wow. Patrick Pegram: Mind you, an agent is usually going to do simple, small office that’s your mom-and-pop agency, like a State Farm, they’re lucky to do that many in a month, of themselves, and for a big office, most of the time it’s between 20 and 30 of them. Here I am, just one little guy, bouncing between three real estate offices, doing about 70 a month. I was really cranking it out, and basically that’s all I did, is to get in the door, meet them, get them a policy, put a little bug in their ear about mortgage protection, covering themselves, and basically let the mortgage close. Let everybody make their money, they gave me the relationship, and then I just basically worked the book of business afterwards, and would see these folks at night a lot of times. Obviously, most of them were just home buyers in their 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s, so you had to see them at night. It was really all about covering their mortgage at that time. Now, that was an easy sale because I’ve already established a relationship with them, and they let me in, and I was basically the first one to talk to them about it. Over time, I’ve learned that that is the key to mortgage protection. The first person to talk to them about it usually wins. Out of all those homeowners policies I sold, at least 75% of them bought mortgage protection from me. Jeff Root: Wow. Patrick Pegram: That means I was first in the door, and they all bought. Now, back then, mortgage protection is like what [inaudible 00:09:13] fully underwritten, decreasing term, and I think the biggest term level was five-year term, on a level based. Most of the time, it was a decreasing term program, or whole life with a five-year term rider. You’re looking at that type of program that you were selling, and it was very easy to sell. Now, mind you, mortgages where I was at were a lot of first and second time home buyers back in the day, where you had a starter home of $50,000, so I was writing a lot of small policies; but then I’d talk to the people, and I ended up converting a lot of those policies a few years later, when I was still at MetLife, into UL’s because they needed additional coverage; or I’d talk people into buying a UL right off the bat. Again, $100 a month was always the simple asked. It depends how young they were. I had a simple rule, I had a 90/10 rule. If they were in their 20’s or 30’s, 10% had to be maybe permanent, and 90% had to be term insurance, just because of affordability and to make sure they had the coverage. I learned that early in my career, that it’s more important to have the coverage they need at a young age than what they want. Everybody wants to save for retirement at 20 bucks … I mean, at age 25, rather. That person could put 40 years into a UL at 12% interest rate, or 10% at the time that they were getting, and those illustrations look fantastic. Obviously, they didn’t stick around that long; obviously, the rates went down to four percent 20 years later, but that’s what you did back in the ’80’s. I never did, I always did it at a smaller percentage rate to illustrate, but the main point is it was easy to convince somebody to put 100 bucks away to save for retirement back then. They would do that at the … probably at detriment of covering themselves for what they really needed. I learned that early in my career, to make sure somebody was covered properly, rather than selling a high-priced, high-commission product like UL, making sure they at least had a five-year term policy that covered their basic needs of replacing income. Four months into my career, I had somebody buy a policy from me. They loved the idea of I used to do an old story called the “hundred man story,” and I’d sell somebody on the idea of putting $100 a month away. They loved it, went over their budget. They really could only afford 60 bucks at the time, but that only bought the guy about $70,000 worth of insurance, and he was a young man with three kids and the wife was at home. Realistically, $60 could buy him $400,000 of coverage. Now, as a new trainee, you have your mana

In this episode we interview a life insurance underwriter.  We’ll keep the life insurance company and underwriter name anonymous so the interview can be as candid as possible. We ask a broad range of questions from what it takes to become an underwriter, what their average case load is, if cover letters really help.  and common questions many of us have.  Get to know the thought process of underwriters and the underwriting process to place more cases! Click Here to View the Full Transcript Jeff Root: Hey life insurance agents, you’re listening to the Modern Life Insurance Selling podcast where we provide the tools to help you grow a more profitable life insurance business by selling online and over the phone from anywhere with an internet connection, even if you’re alone in your quest to build your life insurance business, just know that there’s a community of life insurance agents at SellTermLife.com connecting and helping each other grow their businesses from home offices, coffee shops, and beaches all across the nation. Welcome to episode number 39 of the Modern Life Insurance Selling podcast. I’m your host Jeff Root, and today we’ll be speaking with an underwriter from a life insurance company who will remain nameless. I thought it’d be a cool episode to do a Q and A with an underwriter without giving away the company name or the underwriter’s identity so he can be as candid as possible with us in his answers. Hopefully, this episode will give you a better understanding of underwriting and of underwriters in general. We’ll talk about stuff like how to become an underwriter, typical caseloads, how many cases they’re working on at a single time. What they’re evaluated on, and we’ll also ask questions our community came up with as well, but first, like always, if you like what you hear and are listening in iTunes or Stitcher, please leave us a review. Also, if you have any questions or would like a topic covered on the podcast, please use the send voice mail tab over at SellTermLife.com. All right. This is going to be a straight Q and A, so let’s get to it. All right, welcome to the podcast. Underwriter: Thank you. Jeff Root: I usually start with an introduction of sorts, but we’ll keep this interview anonymous, so let’s just start with what it takes to become an underwriter. Is there any schooling for what you do? What’s the typical path an underwriter takes? Underwriter: It’s all over the place. We’ve had people who do the more conventional, finance, e-con majors, we get BATs, business majors of all stripes. You also get people who might have been former nurses who just got sick of the hours. I think someone I work with is also a pharmacist. They just got tired of that whole gig. It’s all over the place. We have people who used to work with field reps as assistance reps, stuff like that. It’s a wide and varied range. You don’t know from person-to-person what you’re getting. Jeff Root: Okay. Is it typical a more analytical person who pursues underwriting or is there a typical type of person you see that becomes an underwriter? Underwriter: Yeah, they’re big on the whole analytical, time management side. That’s what they’re like. I’ve always felt that they should pursue the kind of agent [versus 00:02:37] work in the field more because one of the big things you get at the end of every case is that you have to sell the rating to the field. That’s kind of a problem if you don’t have any experience with selling yourself. Jeff Root: Is your position tied to how many cases get placed? Underwriter: Not placement necessarily. We usually use it by how many cases are either approved, declined, so how many you’ve taken your last action on. Jeff Root: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Underwriter: That’s one of the bigger things, so it’s not necessarily placement. They can’t always track those because sometimes commissions are paid all year long it’s done suit your [tail 00:03:12]. Jeff Root: Yeah. Underwriter: It might be placed for a year, and then all of the sudden they drop off, or it might be 6 months and they’re gone. Jeff Root: Okay. How are underwriters evaluated in their jobs? Underwriter: It depends on the company. You could be based on a number of cases you approve or decline every month. Certainly, there’s an element of accuracy. That’s a tough one, though, because if you do audits, you get a ten-case, twenty-case audit, however many you care to. That means you have to pull somebody else out of production, so that’s someone else not doing work and having to go over your cases. They like to keep track of agent satisfaction on this. It’s a big key for them. If they’re consistently getting calls about your ratings, your decisions and the time you’re taking on cases that’s a giant problem. If you’re taking two weeks to go over a set of records that’s not really that complicated, then, yeah. Jeff Root: You’re caught. Okay. Underwriter: It’s going to be an issue for you. Jeff Root: Yeah. Okay. What is an underwriter’s usual case load? Underwriter: That’s going to be carrier-dependent. I know for us they usually wanted to keep us around about 80 to 95, but with end-of-the-year and they’re trying some new things with my specific work place I’ve seen people around 150 and some approaching 200. Yeah, it’s all over the place. Some carriers don’t mind if you go a little bit higher if you have lower amounts because you’re not waiting for as many requirements. Some carriers if you have to wait for those higher dollar amounts and higher requirements they don’t want you going above 100. Jeff Root: Okay. Are you supposed to blaze through as many cases as you can? Are you supposed to just push the process along as fast as you can? Underwriter: Within reason. Some companies have it down to, “We think you should be able to review so many cases per hour for your initial look-at or initial walk through.” Some cases have even, I believe, actually [tied through 00:04:56] what they believe their average underwriter can get through an APS and other documentation task for. It just really depends on the carrier and what their expectations are. Jeff Root: Got you. Okay, so I guess the question we have here that we took from the community. We asked our community a bunch of questions that they would ask an underwriter if they had the chance to. A few of the questions here, we’ll start with one, is, when underwriting times are slow all around for a company … We get some companies that sometimes take two to three months just on average. It’s not just because of one case that the APS took forever or whatever. Is it because of caseload that you guys are getting just bombarded with cases? Is it you got short staff? Is there anything else that it can be? Because it seems like every once in a while carriers take months for decisions on average. Underwriter: Right. Those are two of the big ones. Caseloads can get in your way. Sometimes you have ten or fifteen cases just to follow up on and look at and prod the field and say, “Hey, I’m waiting for this information. Do you have it?,” or, “Do you have any further information about when you might have it?” You can also be waiting for the things on files. You can order discretionary requirements that might need time to take in. MIB code details might need time, public record checks, things like that. Financial requirements, those can take extra time off your day, too. It can also take a whole bunch more time if you’re having to talk to reps about your decisions, so a twenty minute phone call sometimes, or just bouncing emails back and forth and just saying, “Well, this is the reason we rated you,” and, “Well, why is that? When did you find this?” It’s back and forth. You come out and you do one thing, and then you see a reply from this person. You don’t want to leave them hanging, so you reply again to them. It goes back and forth for what feels like for ever, and it’s only ten minutes, but it’s ten minutes that you’re not looking at this other case. Jeff Root: Got you. Overall, I know there’s times where that happens. For example, I’m not going to call any companies this year, but there is one company this year that was taking on average ninety days from application submitted to an actual decision. That wasn’t just one-offs, this was everybody that was submitting cases to this company, and it’s a big company. It happened to another big company earlier in the year. We’re wondering why those happen. We understand the delays because of all the reasons you just mentioned, but as far as that goes, do you have any insights to that at all? Underwriter: It could be carrier-specific. When you get APSs, you usually order through a couple of different copy services, so there could have been a breakdown in relationships there. Jeff Root: Okay. Underwriter: I know that a couple of different places that we get records from we expect them to take at least four to six weeks minimum without breaking a sweat. Kaiser Permanente is one that’s notorious for that. Jeff Root: Yeah. I’m sure the VA as well. Underwriter: [crosstalk 00:07:46] KP records and, yeah, VA records are all of the [peach 00:07:49]. If they’re not slow, then they’re totally disorganized, and you have to deal with it that way. It could be a host of things going on. I would expect something like it’s a caseload/requirements-gathering type of thing. Jeff Root: Okay. All right. Next question here to shift gears a little bit. Why don’t life insurance companies give agen

This episode covers the current state of life insurance marketing and the magnitude of the opportunity in front of us for 2015 and beyond. As we close out 2015, there’s a few opportunities agents haven’t fully grasped that I’ll also cover those in this episode. Click Here to View the Full Transcript Jeff: Hey, life insurance agents, you’re listening to the Modern Life Insurance Selling podcast where we provide the tools to help you grow a more profitable life insurance business by selling online and over the phone from anywhere with an internet connection. Even if you’re alone in your quest to build your life insurance business, just know that there’s a community of life insurance agents at SellTermLife.com connecting and helping each other grow their business from home offices, coffee shops, [inaudible 00:00:30] all across the nation. Jeff: Welcome to episode number thirty-eight of the Modern Life Insurance Selling podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Root. Today will be a solo podcast talking about the current state of life insurance marketing and the magnitude of the opportunity in front of us for 2015 and beyond. As we close out 2015, there’s a few opportunities agents haven’t fully grasped that I’ll cover in this episode, but first, like always, if you like what you hear and are listening in iTunes or Stitcher, please leave us a review. Also, if you have any questions or want any topics covered please use the send voice mail tab over at SellTermLife.com. All right, there’s a lot of life insurance agents out there taking baby steps or on the fence to making the move to bringing their businesses online. If the latest LIMRA stats saying that eighty-five percent of consumers do some sort of research online and fifty percent of consumers purchase online and over the phone don’t convince you, let me reframe it for you. Agents are grossly underestimating what’s actually happening in technology today. We are experiencing the single biggest culture shift in US history. It’s going to change the way we sell life insurance and it’s already happening and agents are taking advantage of this today. In every industry, not just insurance, there is wealth being created like we’ve never seen before because of the massive shifts in the way business is done and technology advancements. Any time there’s big societal shifts like this there’s a lot of money to be made. Decades from now, in my opinion, agents are going to look back at our time period and comment on how lucky we were to be able to take advantage of these shifts. In the life insurance industry agents are either thrilled with what’s happening with technology or scared out of their minds. I could hear it in their voices when I talked to you agents on the phone. I can sense it in the emails I’m getting. No matter what side of the coin you fall on it all comes back to value. Do you provide value for your client beyond anything else out there? Do you value your client’s time? I can preach about the opportunity and spit out LIMRA stats about the opportunity ahead of us for hours, but it all comes down to you and what you can provide your clients. Let’s get down to how to take advantage of these big shifts. There’s a lot of agents make the move online with nothing that differentiates them from the rest of the industry. It’s scary for me because a lot of these agents are going to fail. It’s just like the saying, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Simply building a website with no marketing direction is a waste of your time and money, and I see agents doing it all the time, spending a thousand, two thousand, three thousand dollars on a website, adding some content and waiting three, six months and saying, “Hey, why am I not getting any leads?” Before you make the jump to get in front of this tidal wave of consumers headed online to research life insurance, think about what value you’re providing. Why would a prospect choose you over any other agent out there without ever meeting you face to face? What makes you memorable so they’ll come back to you to purchase life insurance when the time is right? I like to compare it to a social outing. When I’m introduced to five new people and ten seconds later I couldn’t tell you’re their names. Even after I shook their hand, looked in their eyes and said, “Nice to meet you” I forget their names. However, if there is someone that stands out from the crowd because of a common interest I always remember their name because I have a clear motive why I wanted to remember their name. Make sure you have that differentiating factor that will make a consumer remember you when they’re ready to purchase life insurance. What do you do well? What segment can you serve best, and can you articulate clearly how you can help that segment? What are you doing that no one else is doing? Highlight and focus whatever value you provide. That’s how you set yourself apart. Simply putting up a generic website saying you can get the lowest term life insurance rates, that’s been done. It’s been done. It’s out there. That’s not going to set you apart. Beyond the value you provide it’s important to value your time and your prospect’s time. Beyond the health of my family and friends my biggest asset is my time, and I bet it’s the same for you and your prospects. Let me ask you an off topic question, and this will all circle back, it will make sense. Do you get annoyed when somebody calls you on your cell phone? Think about it, you’re going throughout your day. Somebody calls you on your cell phone. You look at it. Are you a little bit annoyed that this person is actually calling you? If you’re one of those people who get annoyed, and I would hate to admit it but I’m one of those people too, I would guess that you’re up to speed with technology, because technology is in a place where somebody shouldn’t be bothering you on your time. Think about that. This is what’s happening right now in our industry. People aren’t as receptive to phone calls as they used to be. I remember in the ‘90s loving to get phone calls, but now the telemarketing has jaded our view of answering our phones, and it’s so easy to communicate on your own time online via email or text, or whatever your preferred communication method is, it’s harder to get people to open up on the phone. We need to communicate with customer two-point-oh differently and on their time. We now live in a world where information is available twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. People aren’t communicating only during business hours now. I can’t tell you how many after hours email conversations with clients I’ve had this year. Guess what? I email them back immediately, even if it’s after hours, because I’m working on their time. They’re ready to communicate so I’m ready. I know I will get their business because I communicate on their time. It’s almost like consumers are beginning to expect us to be available on their time, and if we’re not they will find someone else who is. I think that’s one of the reasons why [Leeron 00:06:51] from previous podcast episodes, he pulls in several applications per week, and even more leads from his website chat from the weekends and late in the evenings, because he understands and respects other people’s time. We’re also having luck contacting people who never pick up their phone or return emails or phone calls by texting them. That consumer obviously prefers to communicate by text and so that’s what we have to do. Is it convenient? No, we don’t like it but we’re on their time now and technology is pushing it so that we have to communicate on their time. Am I saying you need to be on point twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year? No, but you should figure out a reasonable way to be accessible to your prospects and clients on their time. The internet has made it so consumers almost expect a live person to be available by phone, chat, or email at 8:30 at night after their kids go to bed. That’s when they are able to go their research. That’s when they can get online. If you don’t do it someone else is. Think about how you’re communicating with prospects and be receptive to their preferred mode of communication. Let’s shift gears a little bit and let me respond to the question, how are these independent life insurance agents crushing it online while I’m struggling to generate a few leads? It’s something I talk about with agents daily. Right now there’s a widening gap of successful agents becoming even more successful. Then on the flipside there’s even more agents struggling to make it. You want to know that one theme that makes one agent better than the other, why these successful agents are becoming more successful and more and more agents are struggling to make it? Besides work ethic and investing in their business, they actually market in the year we live in. Most agents aren’t marketing in the world we live in today. I look at agent’s websites and rarely do I see a mobile optimized site. We’re seeing over thirty-five percent of our traffic to our life insurance websites from mobile devices, tablets, smart phones, whatever. I see general rehashed content everywhere. Nothing is new anymore. Everybody is just rehashing, rewriting the same thing and ripping each other off, rewording it. I have agents emailing me from their Gmail, AOL, and Yahoo email accounts. I see websites that look like they’re from the mid ‘90s. I found the reason agents aren’t marketing in the year we live in today is either time, money, laziness, or lack of education, and all those reasons are simply excuses. Every agent needs to be marketing to today’s consumer and this will always be evolving. I’m constantly changing the way I do business. It may seem wishy-washy to some agents, but

This week we have Bart Catmull, President and COO of Sagicor Life Insurance. Bart and I have a conversation about Sagicor Life Insurance and the no medical exam life insurance marketplace.  Specifically his thoughts on where it’s going and challenges it faces. Click Here to View the Full Transcript Jeff Root: Hey life insurance agents, you’re listening to the modern life insurance selling podcast where we provide the tools to help you grow a more profitable life insurance business by selling online and over the phone from anywhere with an internet connection. Even if you’re alone in your quest to build your life insurance business, just know that there’s a community of life insurance agents at SellTermLife.com connecting and helping each other grow their businesses from home offices, coffee shops, beaches, all across the nation. Jeff Root: Welcome to episode number 37 of the modern life insurance selling podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Root. Today we’ll speaking with the president and COO of Sagicor Life Insurance about his company and then we’ll tap into this insights on where he thinks the non med life insurance marketplace is going, and just talk non medical life insurance in general. If you’re not familiar with Sagicor Life Insurance, they’re one of the best non med life insurance companies to arrive at the moment, or our agency’s favorite non med carrier. That’s for so many reasons that we’ll discuss in this podcast episode. First, if you like what you hear and our listening in iTunes or Stitcher, please leave us a review and if you have any questions or would like a topic cover on a future podcast, please use the send voice mail tab over at SellTermLife.com. All right, so today we have Bart Catmull, president of Sagicor Life Insurance. Bart’s been with Sagicor since 1999 and in my opinion, is leading one of the more progressive life insurance companies and we’ll dig into that today. All right, welcome to the podcast Bart. Bart Catmull: Glad to be here Jeff. Jeff Root: All right, so let’s kick this thing off by telling us a little bit about your background at Sagicor. From what I’ve read I see you’ve had a few positions there before becoming president and COO right? Bart Catmull: That’s correct. Actually I’ve been with the company since 1999. At that point in time it was under a different brand and in 2005 it was acquired by Sagicor financial corp which is a Barbadian life insurance company that’s been around since the 1840s. It has a wealth of history and being with, supporting friends and family. I started out as the chief financial officer and held that position until 2006, which time I became the chief operating officer and then have held that position and title until today. I became the president, I guess last year. Is that right? I had to think about that one. Maybe it’s been two years now. Time flies when you’re having fun and we’re actually … It’s been a great experience with me. I love the company. I’ve seen ups and downs with the economy and the world in general but we’ve weathered the storm and are growing dramatically. Jeff Root: Awesome. We love the company too and I’m glad to have you on here. I’ve made it known that I’m a huge Sagicor fan and in our private community, and one of our most popular threads is our Sagicor thread with agents sharing their experiences and the reason we’re riding so much Sagicor business is you guys have a such a well priced non med product and easy application, fast decision times, which in most times is instant, and you have a non med [inaudible 00:03:33] to top it all off. You guys make it really easy to send you business and the non med market has been so stagnant for so long and you guys in my opinion are the tops of the non med market. What do you see as Sagicor’s biggest strengths in the market right now? Bart Catmull: I think it flows from our beliefs and it’s important to understand if somebody doesn’t understand why they do something than they’re not going to do it very well. It all stems from our belief that we’re here to serve our friends and family and neighbors. We’re here to make things simple and straight forward and we’re all about long term solutions. As we looked at the marketplace, we felt that one of the areas that we could really have a major impact in the lives of our friends and family neighbors was on those lower face amounts. When I say lower, it’s I mean, on the term we go to $400,000 and on the guaranteed UL it’s 250, so it’s not that low but we really wanted to make a difference there. We know that we all want to have in this day and age instantaneous, almost instantaneous results. It didn’t make sense for us at that level why someone should have to wait around six weeks for a decision. We live in a day and age when there are significant amounts of technology and information available to make decisions that you shouldn’t have to wait that long. We took a platform that we had internally and looked around for partners that on the technology side that had similar philosophies as us. We said, “Listen, let’s make a change here.” Our goals was to have everyone have the advantage of having our best underwriter on their best day 24/7. That’s what we set out to do. When we talk about non med, we wanted to do something different that I believe, the questions that we ask, the information that we get whether it be from a potential policy holder or from outside sources provides us with the information that we need to make a very knowledgeable decision in a few minutes. It can be as quick as a few seconds but definitely within a few minutes. We can make that decision and give that policy holder the peace of mind that if they have done everything that they’ve been asked to do and have been truthful in their responses, and pay their premium, that they’re going to have a policy in place within 24 hours. It’ll be in place. They’ll be covered and their family will be protected and it just takes one thing off their table that they have to worry about. Jeff Root: Yeah, and the way you guys do that too is so seamless. One of the biggest strengths that I see with your product is you have different health classifications, preferred, standard, rated pricing options on your non med term. That is huge because you can take a wide range of people and be competitive in different situations. Bart Catmull: Exactly. If you look out there and the industry statistics tell us that most of the life insurance that general public has comes from their employer. They’ve got a group policy that their employer has just given them. That’s great except that all of those group policies are taking into account that there’s healthy and unhealthy people and they’re mixing that rate. While it’s easy, the employee doesn’t have to do anything. They didn’t have to have any picture or prods or anything that they needed to do. It can be expensive. It’s kind of a stealth expense, but it’s expensive. What we wanted to do was provide them with quality coverage, great benefits and come as close as we could to the ability to basically, a pricing of a fully underwritten product without the expense of incurring … To go out and do the medical exams and all that. That’s what we set out to do. That was the direction that I gave the underwriters and the actuaries was okay, figure this out. It allows us, what they’ve done I think is great in that it allows us … Somebody’s got great health, they’re going to get a great rate. If somebody is a little, they’ve got a few issues health wise, they’re still going to get a good rate and they’re going to get an answer real quick. That’s an added benefit to them. Jeff Root: Yeah, absolutely. I feel like the no exam life insurance market took a step back from what was available to agents four to five years ago until you guys came in. We had HSBC go all the way up to 500,000 with an instant decision and consumers could apply online without an agent. Same thing with RBC Liberty Life, except they had a 250K cap. I guess my question for you is, I know you guys are doing this right now but why aren’t we seeing these types of products on the market right now? Bart Catmull: I think that … One reason why is from a re-insurance standpoint, the re-insurers are just getting up to speed. Pricing of the products is always an issue. The technology is just coming into play. I think that you have to have companies who are willing to be innovative to look out there and look at information in a different way, work with partners who … Some of the partners we worked with in developing this were just starting out. We saw the benefit and the expertise that they had in their platforms that made us excited and said, “Hey, you know what, we’ll take a chance with you. We’ll work on this together and come to a common solution.” I also think it takes individuals who are knowledgeable on technology as well. I fully expected that yes, the marketplace is going to grow in this area because everyday new technologies come into play that allow us as an insurance company to analyze risk better which then provides the opportunity for us to provide that benefit to policy holders and providing improved products at better rates. Jeff Root: Awesome. Where do you see no exam life insurance going next? You guys have already implemented this technology, lots of new technology coming out. What’s next? Bart Catmull: I think there’ll be uses in expanding the product line for products that maybe in the past didn’t lend themselves as easily