Digital Senior Benefits FE telesales - thoughts?

I've been working net leads since 2015 longer than most on here. I find the client more interested but i find the persistency no different than Dm leads . Also with lead vendors swamping the online area your going to see saturation as people fill out 3-4 requests for info. With so many people not answering the phone nowadays the door knocker will have the advantagegetting to them quicker. I've definitely noticed net leads are much more time sensitive than many yrs ago as people fill out more forms and buy from the first person that contacts them .
 
Wait, Wait but F2F guys will replace it all.

Only if they can find it! (Hands rubbing together)

Honestly I would be hard to convince that telesales has reached the persistency of face to face. But that doesn’t mean it’s not good.

I think they are saying that 84% is the high mark on telesales. That is believable and good. Our agency is all face to face and with our three main carriers the 12 month persistency is all in the 90’s as an agency. Many individual agents are hitting 95%. In fact the group of agents that earned the Trinity/Family Benefit convention all were in the 95% range. The agents in the lower persistency range are all lower volume agents that really don’t sell much.

But agencies that have an 84% persistency with phone sales are doing very well. If it keeps climbing I might have to buy me one of them fancy touch tone phones and have Jeff Root teach me how to use it.
 
I've been working net leads since 2015 longer than most on here. I find the client more interested but i find the persistency no different than Dm leads . Also with lead vendors swamping the online area your going to see saturation as people fill out 3-4 requests for info. With so many people not answering the phone nowadays the door knocker will have the advantagegetting to them quicker. I've definitely noticed net leads are much more time sensitive than many yrs ago as people fill out more forms and buy from the first person that contacts them .

Buying leads from a lead vendor will have a very different outcome than buying leads from an agency like us that is focused on selling policies. We are not a lead company, while we do generate leads for our agents, the goal is 100% centered around placing sticky business, not generating cheap leads with a ton of markup.
 
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You have to have full time telesales experience or else they will not talk to you. They will not tell you about the company, they will shut you down, talk over you while your talking you will literally have to hang up on them that’s only if you schedule a call. But if you call in and speak to one of the lady’s they are very nice and will explain everything to you. Whoever the guy is that reaches out to you is extremely rude. No disrespect but he has to learn how to talk to people. Personally if I was a complete expert I wouldn’t partner with them just because of that horrific experience with that guy I would literally have to deal with him again. No.
 
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You have to have full time telesales experience or else they will not talk to you. They will not tell you about the company, they will shut you down, talk over you while your talking you will literally have to hang up on them that’s only if you schedule a call. But if you call in and speak to one of the lady’s they are very nice and will explain everything to you. Whoever the guy is that reaches out to you is extremely rude. No disrespect but he has to learn how to talk to people. Personally if I was a complete expert I wouldn’t partner with them just because of that horrific experience with that guy I would literally have to deal with him again. No.

I'm sorry you had that experience, and can assure you that it is not typical.

Let me explain a few things about us, and the operation we run. We are admittedly unlike most IMOs.

1. We don't like to waste time or money. Ours, or yours. We vet you quickly and determine if this is the right opportunity for you. It is not the right opportunity for 98% of agents.
2. We have a lot of agent making a lot of money with us. They follow a process as if they are sitting in a call center. The profile of a successful agent with us is spending minimum $2000/month on marketing, working from 7am-6pm daily and calling until their lead queues are zero'd out.
3. We generate all our own leads and sell them to our agents at our cost to generate them. We have expectations on those leads converting at a certain level or we shut the agent down.
4. We are not striving to recruit thousands of agents like most IMOs. We maintain contracts with around 200 producers with an extreme level of dedication. We keep our community tight knit and go to the ends of the earth to help our agents be successful.

From the sounds of it, you probably have other commitments keeping you from being on the phones all day every day. The coach saved you money because we know that if you are not calling leads in real time it is a complete waste of your resources and time.

I would advise you to reach out to an operation with an inbound live transfer program that works more with your schedule.

Again, sorry about your experience with us, but in the end if was to help you not lose money and have frustration.

Nic
 
I'm sorry you had that experience, and can assure you that it is not typical.

Let me explain a few things about us, and the operation we run. We are admittedly unlike most IMOs.

1. We don't like to waste time or money. Ours, or yours. We vet you quickly and determine if this is the right opportunity for you. It is not the right opportunity for 98% of agents.
2. We have a lot of agent making a lot of money with us. They follow a process as if they are sitting in a call center. The profile of a successful agent with us is spending minimum $2000/month on marketing, working from 7am-6pm daily and calling until their lead queues are zero'd out.
3. We generate all our own leads and sell them to our agents at our cost to generate them. We have expectations on those leads converting at a certain level or we shut the agent down.
4. We are not striving to recruit thousands of agents like most IMOs. We maintain contracts with around 200 producers with an extreme level of dedication. We keep our community tight knit and go to the ends of the earth to help our agents be successful.

From the sounds of it, you probably have other commitments keeping you from being on the phones all day every day. The coach saved you money because we know that if you are not calling leads in real time it is a complete waste of your resources and time.

I would advise you to reach out to an operation with an inbound live transfer program that works more with your schedule.

Again, sorry about your experience with us, but in the end if was to help you not lose money and have frustration.

Nic

Agents get real upset when you won’t bend your model that works perfectly for you and the agents that fit it for some idea they have about how they want to work that is different. They think, What is wrong with you that you don’t want me as an agent?

Square pegs need to go in the square holes and round pegs in the round holes and everyone is happy.
 
Lala68 said if you don't have full time telesales sales experience they will not talk to you. I didn't see her say she couldn't do the job full time. Maybe there is more to the story.
 
Lala68 said if you don't have full time telesales sales experience they will not talk to you. I didn't see her say she couldn't do the job full time. Maybe there is more to the story.

There wasn't. She has a full time job and wanted to work our leads around those full time hours. It just wouldn't work out, so instead of her and us investing any time, we saved each other a lot of money and time by not moving forward. At the end of the day, you cannot wait 8 hours to call a lead and expect to see a positive outcome. I wish her well and if she needs a recommendation, she can DM me.
 
I was looking into online Final Expense Sales,I worked before in Call Centers.If the average premium was $40 a policy and you did 5 Sales a week that would be $2400 less $600 lead cost equals $1800 times 50 weeks a year is $90,000 and with 80% persistency is around $72,000 ayear? Before taxes.
If you had some bad weeks in sales you could be almost upside down, or just breaking even?
You will have some bad weeks.. That is guaranteed. Everyone has them.. But, if you are really working, you should have soem exceptional weeks that offset the bad weeks..
 
Quick updates on our final expense telesales platform:

Leads Updates

1) $12 Callback Leads - TCPA compliant meaning we have the opt-in and not cold calling lists. Verified checking/savings and an interest in more information about final expense life insurance. 8 out 10 on the leaderboard last month (image below) worked these.

2) Live Transfers - $1000/week unlimited (works out to under $20 per successful transfer over 2 minutes if working full time. We also have a $500/week unlimited 4 hour AM or PM shift. Each transfer has a verified checking/savings account and answered "no" to knock out questions that would result in a GI case. Average wait time for a transfer is 10-15 minutes which is the BIG differentiator of other platforms. Simply toggle yourself on/off to be put in the queue and you'll see your place in the queue. All the lead data is posted as you accept the call.

3) Call Ins - 80% are TV Call Ins. 20% Direct Mail Call Ins. We produce our own commercials and run our own media campaigns so the quality is VERY high since we're optimizing for quality and not price. Average premium last month was $1297 on these. We also take an infomercial lead that we purchase to stabilize the lead flow - $1197 avg premium on those last month. The remaining are Direct Mail Call Ins with very specific language that it's final expense life insurance and to call in for a quote (no insinuation it's free).

We charge $55 with a 30 second buffer for our call ins. Both are closing above 22% on average with our best agents at 33%+. That's a $250 unique acquisition cost average, but with an average premium of $1,200+...that doesn't include spouse sales and our referrals that we consistently get with our free AD&D program.

Technology Updates

Our most recent tech upgrades include being able to verify bank account information in real-time within our CRM. It's not just a check to see if it's valid, but also if it's a low/moderate/high risk of having funds based on recent data. We saw a decent uptick in successful first drafts after implementing this and our conservation team uses this daily when fixing payment info.

Keep in mind, our sales automation technology is FREE.
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We're selective on who we work with because we put so much time into onboarding, foundational telesales training and continued coaching. Some agents bad mouth us online because they don't like being told we're not a good fit. It's not the norm, we get it. To be clear, as long as an agent can commit to it for a significant amount of their day (doesn't necessarily need to be full time), have the funds to buy leads consistently (you just need to cashflow 2-4 weeks) and can operate a computer fluently (it's seriously an issue) - we'll work with you.

But it shows in our numbers. Here's last month's leaderboard. Over 25% of active agents placed over $10,000 in premium.

March-Leaderboard-scaled.jpg
 
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