This is why 9 in 10 insurance agents fail

Thanks for having me. I it's a great pleasure to be out here to be here.

Well, getting in the insurance industry, my dad was a a a a producer, he got in the business in eighty two, during the height of the recession. I never wanted to be an insurance agent. I wanted to be a school teacher. That was my whole goal. And getting into high school, I had found that I wasn't good at going to school. So going to going to university long term was not really a good option for me. So following dad's footsteps, getting the insurance industry was kind of a a stepping stone. you know, something different kind of bridge the gap till I found what I wanted to do. and then in nineteen ninety-nine, as a joke, we started a what we call the insurance pro shop dot com site. It was a we were a large FMO, had two thousand plus agents in South Florida, and we were recruiting heavily and traveling all the country selling life insurance annuities and and br bringing on agents everywhere. One of our agents came in one morning and said, Hey, you should guys just sell some of the stuff online, some of the training you're doing. So we started a simple training system online and we sold out in the first two weeks of doing it. you know, the pro shop, my dad's a professional tennis player. I was a pro bowler at the time. so we spent a lot of time in our pro shop learning our craft for our sports. So we brought that that relevance to the insurance industry, having the insurance pro shop was then born. And after that first two weeks, we never looked back. We shut our agency down two, three years later, and we've been training agents and advisors ever since.

That's a great question. and it it's and it's an easy question to answer. A lot of agents fail simply because they have no sales process. They're they're taught to go out, buy leads, and sell product. A lot of the companies that are out there training advisors, the FMOs, the IMOs, the recruiters, the career shops spend a lot of time teaching the agent product and teaching agents that just to buy leads and if keep if you keep throwing money at the problem, you'll eventually make sales. And the exact opposite of what needs to happen. See, a lot of times it's just simple conversations we need to have with our prospects, tell them the problem they have. The product isn't is irrelevant. It's just a solution. It's the problem people are facing, that's the important part. And having the conversation about those problems brings those problems, emotions to the surface, so they want to fix them. And when you have somebody who wants to fix a problem, then you can apply a pro a product or solution that makes sense for them. But it's all about the conversation and and just lack of education of how basic consultative selling and sales skills work is why agents have a ninety percent failure rate in this country.

Well again. Yeah, well with what with what with our products we offer, with life insurance annuities, you know, disability income insurances, these types of policies, they're all policies of love. Right? You you you love your loved ones enough to leave them money behind. You love yourself and your spouse enough to create an income stream that you c both cannot live. You know, these are policies of products of love and in and emotion. So Tying the emotion in is very simple, it's just asking a few basic questions. So rather than saying somet asking somebody, do want to buy life insurance? Ask them the question, you know, Mick, if if something happened to you tomorrow and you didn't make it home, right? You hit by a bustling from work, what would happen to your family? Right. How would you feel about that? What what would you like to see happen if you were no longer here tomorrow? What would your family do if you weren't here? What would it mean to you to be able to leave them money that could create a better lifestyle for them and the in future generations? It's it's the who, what, where, when, and how and why questions that tie the emotional into it. The how do you feel about that? What would you like to see happen? Who would that affect? How would that benefit you and your spouse? It's the simple small questions, because we can all ask the big questions. You know, do you have a retirement plan? Do you have life? We can all ask those questions, right? Those are pretty basic yes or no questions. But the feeling questions allow us to get the prospect talking. And we get the prospect talking about the problem, they take ownership of the problem. They own the emotion, they own the feeling it brings them. So if they feel that loss, they feel the fear of not being here, of what happens to the spouse and kids. You know, what happens if your kids kids can't kids can't go to university long term because there's no funding for them? You know, what happens when when if you're no longer here and your spouse can't k keep making the mortgage payments on the home? You know, kids that move in the next two or three times before they go to college, before they move out of the house. What's that gonna how's that gonna affect them long term? It's those kind of questions that engage the prospect. And again, this can go for any sales opportunity. I do this in car sales, I do this in replacement windows and doors. Does not matter. It's all how we attract the emotion to the sales process. And getting those emotions to the surface of people, having them really understand how they feel about a specific thing, allows them to take action and fix it.

Yeah, so I the way I teach it and my philosophy is again, it's always about the prospect. See a lot of companies teach you, tell people who you are, why you're calling, where you're calling from, all these different basics. Hey, this is Jeremy. I'm a fashion consultant here and Paul and kind of kinda ask you a quick question about your retirement. And that's how I start my conversations. Not, you know, I'm with Northwestern Mutual, I've been a advisor for twenty-five years. And I think you're valuable in a conversation with me. That doesn't trigger anybody's emotion. But if I can ask you a quick question about about your retirement, about your life insurance, about your mortgage, people tend to be more open than feeling sold. Because again, with a lot of these sales speak scripts that are being taught today, you feel like you're being sold immediately. Where the way we position it, we're just having a conversation with a friend over the phone or face-to-face. Because I do this at gas stations, I do it at the supermarket. Anybody that's here around me, I talk to and just ask a few questions. I know you don't know me, but can I ask you a quick question about your retirement? You know, do you have a retirement plan? It's a yes or no question. And most people say yes or no. So if if they say no, great. So why don't you well, what makes you not have one? Well, if they they're too expensive. Okay. Well, let me ask you, did you spend twenty dollars last week you could have saved? In the week before that. The two weeks before that. So the last four weeks you could have spent eighty dollars to save for your retirement. Is buddy where you s that eighty dollars you spent better off where you spent it or better off in your retirement plan? If I can show you how to do that and not have taking that money out of your pocket, we're having a short conversation about. And I set appointments with people everywhere, all over the United States, no matter where I'm, where I'm talking to people, just by having a simple conversation with them, not trying to force you to a product, not trying to force you to solution to them, but just having a conversation about their retirement, about life interests, about taxes, about inflation, whatever the topic may be for that day.

Again, a a lot of agents skip the fundamentals. And in any anything you're learning, the fundamentals are the most important parts. Right? I as a former baseball coach, I spent a lot of time training kid, you know, little kids, seven, eight-year-olds, how to hit how to swing a baseball bat, right? And or how to feel a ground ball. And mastering the fundamentals can get you to the highest level of any industry. You can be exceptional at the fundamentals and make a lot of money doing it. It's so a what a lot of people try to sp jump to the more flashy or sexy topics, the flashier, sexy applications they can do, then learn the fundamentals. And they struggle. They make a few sales here and there, but they burn out in two or three years out of the business. Where if you grasp the fundamentals early on, your career can skyrocket and scale to the highest levels. I have two agents that I talked to that I brought in the business years ago that were they were doing decent at final expense. Today, fast forward seven years, they have a their own RIA firm with $200 million in assets, and they're scaling still. They're gonna hit $500 million in assets in the next two years. You know, because they've mastered the fundamentals. They didn't skip steps. They started with the hey, this talk this how this is talk people, have a conversation, learn the questions, then learn some set more sales skills, learn some five minute presentations, learn how to present a simple closing procedure. And you just watch and when you master those those basic fundamentals, you don't skip this easy steps. They're they're not fun, they're not sexy, they don't look good, but they are the simple steps that make you successful.

Well, again, a lot of time I tell them to throw away their script. Cause the mod a lot of the scripts we receive from the carriers, from the different IMOs are just they're not good. They're just not they're very sales oriented. and just focus on, you know, what problem you want to solve for somebody. You know, what is it you want to help people do? You know, if you want to sell life insurance, you know, the the end goal is selling a life insurance policy. So what problem does we have to figure out what we have to help them solve for first? Is it income replacement? Is it just death benefit? To pay off the mortgage? Is it paying the mortgage off early? Is it funding the kids' college? What aspect of life insurance do you do you want to sell? And then we work backwards from them to create a to create a simple conversation piece that leads you there. So, like I said earlier, the the first question I teach a lot of my insurance agents to ask is, you know, if you didn't make it home tomorrow or get hit by a bus, you know, and never made it home, what would happen to your family? It creates a conversation, creates a dialogue that anybody can appeal to because it opens up that conversation of emotion that if I'm not here, what's gonna happen? How's my wife gonna replace my income? How are my kids gonna handle going to college if there's no if dad's not around to pay for it? How am I gonna buy my first car if Dad's not around? All these different things go through their heads that are tragic. Not only missing the loved one that they they look up to and revere, but now the the money stream on top of that's gone, the financial aspect of it hits even harder. So you're losing two things, not just one, if if something happens. So when we focus on the script, we focus on those kind of problems first. You know, not just the greed aspect of making more income or rate of return. it's more of how do we protect the family? How do we create that income stream you cannot live using annuities? How do we protect your income in the event of a disability or sickness for disability income insurance? These kind of things that we wanna help them see a problem first. If your income stopped tomorrow because you got you lost a leg, lost an arm, lost both your sights and could no longer work, what's gonna happen? Right. It it it starts off a very unique and different conversation that most people have never been exposed to. And you want to set yourself apart from every other salesperson out there in any industry, if you learn to ask these questions, you can separate from everybody else because no one else is asking this. They're telling people what to do. They're telling them they need to buy life, they're telling them to buy a DI, need buy this annuity, and here's why, or you need to get better rate of return. We've all heard these stories, right? But hitting it a little differently.

You know, what would it mean to you if you never have to worry about running out of money long term in your retirement? What comfort would that give you? What kind of piece of mind would that would that give you long term in your retirement for the rest of your life?

Well again there's there's one point two million life insurance agents in the United States. Right? I've been I have been training agents for almost twenty-seven years. I have a little over a hundred and seven thousand clients. So it's so one in a hundred, maybe two in a hundred, do it the right way. It it's it's maybe a little more than that. There's a few other coaches like me that train this stuff now, but very few. They a lot of agents still don't have a clue how this process works. And When I have my, you know, live classes, my live meetings, and I'll ask the question, how many people actually ask real questions during a conversation or during one a prospecting interview? And only two or three raise their hand. They're usually the guys I've already trained.

A a lot of impact. Go ahead. Sorry.

I I I'm not sure what I what SDR, I'm not sure about those, but what what I can tell you about the industry as a whole, the a lot of the agents that are selling product are being replaced by AI. Because if I can if I don't talk to an agent, I can just go get what I want, go get my term policy, my Medicare, my health insurance. I don't need an agent to get those things. So a lot of those sales are being replaced by AI direct to company. you know, opportunities. So a lot of those final expense agents, more protection, Medicare agents, health insurance are all going to be phased out in the next two or three years. We're seeing a huge shift there. Now the life agents, the annuity producers, financial representatives that I train, you know, we're irreplaceable by AI because AI lacks the most essential thing we we do, which is emotion. It's all logic. You know, and the simple fact of it is people buy based on emotion and then justify decision based on logic. So if the emotion isn't brought up first, if it's just logical, some sales will happen. But for a product of love like life insurance on annuities and disability income insurances, it's a pro it needs to have some emotion attached to it to be successful in this business. So AI can't replace guys that do the actual planning aspect of it. Because even if Client had the emotion they want to fix these problems. If they go to AI and ask AI to help them create a plan to create retirement, they're not gonna know what to ask. They don't have to know what to solve for. There's too many variables there that you have to have some knowledge of to be able to create a plan for people. Not that some people aren't smart to figure it out, and some people probably will, but most people, especially in the United States, are lazy and don't want to do the work to learn something of that nature. They're gonna hire someone to do it for them. So if that's the case, then you know, a our agents like me and the guys I train are never gonna go away because it we're we we have too much value, too much knowledge base that AI would be hard pressed to replicate what we do. Now, if AI develops emotions, we're we're all in trouble as a whole. Doesn't matter what industry we're in. They're gonna figure out every sales opportunity, every opportunity to make money, they're gonna figure everything out for us. And then we'll we'll be out of a job that way. But And then in the very near future, the guys that are doing more of the planning processes, helping people solve problems, have long term jobs. The short term guys that are doing the the basic transactional selling, here's my life insurance policy, take it or leave it, those guys are a dime a dozen and gonna be replaced in the next two or three years.

It's it there's there's two big parts of that. one is the emotional satisfaction you get for help really helping people and seeing the results of your work, right? Being that, you know, you you it may be delayed results, but seeing that when you have to deliver your first death claim and that half million dollar check to a family that needs the money after their hus after the dad dies, it changes you. The emotional impact of that. When you see your first client start taking an income stream from their life insurance, from their annuity, and never to worry about money again. That's a huge impact versus just selling a policy. All right. Two commissions. You know, the average commission is between $500 and $1,000 per policy in the United States. Okay. The guys I'm training are seeing anywhere from four to twelve thousand dollars commissions regularly. Four to 12 times the amount that the commission amount by just learning a little bit different skill. And again, when you're doing it that way, you don't have to grind as hard. So if you can sell one or two pulses a month, you're making, you know, hundred, two hundred thousand dollars a year working part-time versus having to grind seven days a week to make five or six thousand dollars a week. What would you rather do?

Yeah, the easiest way to do is through www insurancepro shop dot com. and you can look at our resource center, some of the tools we have. pretty easy to figure out what to do, how to download some free reports, all kinds of free information on the site. and then if you need to talk to me directly, if you go to www.ipsgeremy dot com, you can book a time with me directly, book a fifteen minute call, we can review your situation, see what's going on in your business, and figure out how to help you fix it.

Thank you for having me.