Sorry this is long (and a little rambling...)
Is it normal to talk to one IMO and then when it comes time to contract end up contracting through a different one?
I am brand new (got my license Friday) and really don't know what I don't know.
I contacted an imo a couple of weeks ago and spoke with their ACA onboarding person. It sounded good and he sent me all the info about what I would need to do in order to move forward after I got my license.
Saturday I followed the link he sent to get contacted, that link took me to a page that had the original companies name "in partnership with enrollinsurance.com" everything in that process continued to say the original companies name.
Today I start getting carrier contracts from a THIRD company. From what I gather this third company is the parent/sister company to Enroll.
I guess my question is who am I really doing business with? The original company, Enroll, or the sister company?
I am also concerned about this because I was under the impression (again I'm new and don't know anything, literally) that independent agents got paid by the carriers DIRECTLY, but at least two of the carrier contracts I looked at today were explicitly paid by the imo (which one I have no idea, see above ).
Am I being overly cautious or should I cut and run?
The reason I went with the original company to start with is that it had a good reputation on here and elsewhere and seemed like it had a reliable system in place for the kind of sales I wanted to do. Now I am unsure of who I am dealing with and what their reputation is like and have no idea what system they are offering.
I tried emailing and calling the onboarding person I originally spoke with but haven't heard back yet.
Thanks in advance for any advice.
Sometimes an marketing organization doesn't want to build their own system for a niche market such as ACA sales, so another marketing organization makes them an offer to be the middleman and get a portion of the override in exchange for sending business their way. Sometimes it is transparent, sometimes it's not. When it's not transparent, it bothers me; maybe it shouldn't, yet I feel like if someone else is getting a portion of the override, I'm not going to get much from the hierarchy. But then, in my experience (over 30 years), I have received very little in the way of something to help me make sales from any marketing organization; for that matter, even at the very beginning when I was a captive, the company didn't do a whole heck of a lot to help me make sales, seems like it was 95% my own doing even as a captive (the 5% was a book of business I had to collect premiums from on sales by prior agent, commonly called a "debit route," that provided a source for some new sales). Some of the platforms out there for ACA can be helpful; so if you are new to ACA, that would be a major positive if you can get a GOOD platform to sell on. If you are only doing local sales (i.e., not taking incoming calls from all over the nation), the platform is less of an issue, but it would still be nice.
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