FMO Advice

[Todd King]

You mentioned MA at the end, I got the impression that Todd was talking about Med Supps.

And I was.

 

[DonP]

Are you saying that FE leads and Medicare leads are exactly the same? Well, I guess you can set your demographics for the same, but it doesn't make them the same. But why would you set the demographics the same anyway. That doesn't make sense.

Same demographics . I’m talking low income dual/ lis dm leads . Same exact clients as fe .Mailing to upper income for med sups is a disaster . 2 leads per 1000 if your lucky . If you want med sups Dm you have to target t-65

 

[Newby]

You mentioned MA at the end, I got the impression that Todd was talking about Med Supps.

MA is what most agents are focused on now. I sold more sups than MA. But MA was very easy to cross sell from FE leads. Back in those days we could actually use the Medicare.gov website to enroll them. It had a place to put your agent number in. I was just getting warmed up with MA's and then they rolled out all the sales prevention stuff. And a lot of them in the early years had PFFS networks that didn't go well so a LOT of seniors had bad early experiences with them. They were willing to pay for supplements.

 

[Todd King]

Well Todd I’d just have to say you are wrong. For many reasons.
One, I sold a LOT of Medicare from FE clients on FE leads. Never found that hard to do at all. If they were not on Medicare, who cares? You don’t sell Medicare that one. I don’t get the problem.
I think one thing that is different in your mindset is you used the words “they will find a lot more Medicare when they target that”. Of course you will find more Medicare when you target Medicare. No one would argue that. I never cared how much Medicare I was selling. I ended up selling a lot of it. Enough that I convinced my wife to quit her very high income job to come work with me and handle the Medicare. I wouldn’t have done that if it wasn’t going very well.
But my focus was on the life sales. I never ran an annuity lead in my life, yet I sold 2-million dollars in annuities one year and around 1-million several years and many of those were from lowly FE leads. In fact most of those were FE leads.
Here’s the huge advantage of newer agents targeting FE and cross selling the Medicare over the other way around.
1. Agents who start out selling zero premium plans with no underwriting are WEAK agents. They don’t develop sales skills. There are exceptions of course, but as a general rule, they never get out of that rut and develop as an agent.
2. Cash flow is much better with FE. They make their living expenses and more much quicker.
3. Compliance. It’s way easier to gain client compliantly with FE. Once you have clients you are set for cross sales.
4. Follow up work- If an agent has 1,000 FE clients he is free to go out and sell more. He has little maintenance work to do for his base each week. With 1,000 Medicare clients you have hours and hours of touches needed with your clients weekly. It’s high maintenance. And it gets 20x worse during annual enrollment when you would most like to be selling.
5. Retention- FE clients get older and less healthy. They are less and less likely to drop off as they age because they can’t qualify for as good of rates. Not so with Med Advantage. Their clients always qualify for the same rate that everyone gets no matter how old or unhealthy they get. This means your competitors are always trying to steal your clients forever. If you ignore them they go away.

There is more than one way to sell insurance. All I can say is that I prefer selling life and cross selling the rest. It makes the most sense to me.

I will guarantee that your FE leads were not targeting "zero" income like FEX is running nowadays. You weren't going in and seeing the poorest of the poor on a regular basis. That's what I'm talking about. If you want to target the FE audience, you certainly can't use a bottom income of $30K or so like you can with Medicare.

 

[Newby]

That’s total BS scott . I’d bet you a dollar to a dime 50% min of all the policys fex has sold the past 5 yrs have been replacing coverage . Jd’s said 1000 times he prays they have ins as he can replace it . So when you replace your not getting anymore premium . There ALREADY paying for it . Your just playing slight of hand and “ giving them a better deal “ I’ve been a $300 k plus fe producer several times . I find mapd 100 times more challenging than fe . Selling is 5% of the total sale . 95% is keeping it on the books .It takes yrs to develop loyalty and touch after touch . Your right anyone can right a dual/lis but few few few can keep them on the books

I don't understand your post at all. 50% of all FE I've sold over the last 20 years have been replacing other policies. It's the whole reason I got into FE in the first place. I used to review what insurance people had at the funeral homes and wondered why people bought such horrible life insurance policies. AARP, Colonial Penn, Londen Life, and on and on. That was my original motavation to contract with the better deals and just go out comparing rates. I sell on price. Always have. Always will. It's what the people want.

But what in the world does that have to do with cross selling Medicare?

 

[Newby]

I will guarantee that your FE leads were not targeting "zero" income like FEX is running nowadays. You weren't going in and seeing the poorest of the poor on a regular basis. That's what I'm talking about. If you want to target the FE audience, you certainly can't use a bottom income of $30K or so like you can with Medicare.

I did not use income filters at all in my early years. I didn't even know what that was. But yes I was in ALL kinds of houses. But I never saw any house that sent a lead card in as anything but a prospect. I just had to figure out what tool to use.

You guys are just looking at this with glass half empty eyes. Nearly every home an FE agent goes in is buying Medicare from someone. If you are their life agent why wouldn't they buy from you? If you sell one out of 20 of them you are throwing logs on your renewal base.

I was very different back in my day. Everything has become pretty standardized today. In some ways that's a lot more efficient. I was not efficient where I could go in the field 2 or 3 days a week like the agents today and write the numbers we see all the good producers writing today. I was out 6-days a week. I always had the mindset that I wanted to write $1000 per day in commission 365 days per year. I didn't care if it was FE, Medicare, term, an annuity or whatever. And I only counted commissions not face amounts or numbers of policies. These were the early days before "best practices" were figured out. Today we see guys having $10,000+ weeks fairly regularly with just FE alone. It's a different world.

 

[DonP]

I don't understand your post at all. 50% of all FE I've sold over the last 20 years have been replacing other policies. It's the whole reason I got into FE in the first place. I used to review what insurance people had at the funeral homes and wondered why people bought such horrible life insurance policies. AARP, Colonial Penn, Londen Life, and on and on. That was my original motavation to contract with the better deals and just go out comparing rates. I sell on price. Always have. Always will. It's what the people want.

But what in the world does that have to do with cross selling Medicare?

I’m attacking your statement that selling a free product is weak. And that’s why so many spaghetti throwing dsnp against the wall fe and former fe agents don’t do well long term in mapd . Fe is a transaction sale for most fe agents . 30 mins gone , 30 mins gone . Most fe agents rarely if ever talk to their client again unless they are contacted . Mapd takes much much more to keep it on the books 1-5 yrs .

 

[Newby]

I’m attacking your statement that selling a free product is weak. And that’s why so many spaghetti throwing dsnp against the wall fe and former fe agents don’t do well long term in mapd . Fe is a transaction sale for most fe agents . 30 mins gone , 30 mins gone . Most fe agents rarely if ever talk to their client again unless they are contacted . Mapd takes much much more to keep it on the books 1-5 yrs .

I don’t know how many agents you’ve dealt with through the years. But I can promise you the ones that come into the industry just selling MAPD’s, probably semi-successfully or less and then want to branch into something else are most often just weak and cannot ask for the money.
There are always exceptions to anything. Anybody that gets into the top five or 10% with whatever they’re selling has got something going on for them.
I agree with you with much more maintenance of keeping the business on the books though. And it’s gotten worse and worse the last few years with the more aggressive annual enrollment season TV commercials. Those constant ads definitely chum the waters.

 

[Todd King]

I did not use income filters at all in my early years. I didn't even know what that was. But yes I was in ALL kinds of houses. But I never saw any house that sent a lead card in as anything but a prospect. I just had to figure out what tool to use.

You guys are just looking at this with glass half empty eyes. Nearly every home an FE agent goes in is buying Medicare from someone. If you are their life agent why wouldn't they buy from you? If you sell one out of 20 of them you are throwing logs on your renewal base.

I was very different back in my day. Everything has become pretty standardized today. In some ways that's a lot more efficient. I was not efficient where I could go in the field 2 or 3 days a week like the agents today and write the numbers we see all the good producers writing today. I was out 6-days a week. I always had the mindset that I wanted to write $1000 per day in commission 365 days per year. I didn't care if it was FE, Medicare, term, an annuity or whatever. And I only counted commissions not face amounts or numbers of policies. These were the early days before "best practices" were figured out. Today we see guys having $10,000+ weeks fairly regularly with just FE alone. It's a different world.

Back in your day was my day too. You know you're getting old when you start using that line!

I do understand that the homes that the FE agent goes into is "getting" Medicare Advantage from some agent, and selling Medicare Supplements in some homes, but the typical FE agent isn't going into home that have much money for other things. That's all I'm saying.

I was greatly successful at cross-selling to my Medicare clients. FE, LTC, Annuities, etc. Of course, we didn't go after the Medicaid people as there were no MA plans to help cover them. When I did get those leads, I did run them and sell FE. Many agents wouldn't even run them at all. I remember one agent that wouldn't even stop if there house didn't reflect that they had some money. He missed a lot of business!

My point is that when you run leads with a higher income, you're going to find more business for the most part. In the typical FE house you might get to cross-sell an MA plan and MAYBE a HIP plan if you're lucky.

 

[walthamny]

Todd, Newby is right on sales skills development. Skills gained from selling MA plans and saying you dont have to pay anything is very different than selling $60 a month monthly payment to someone on SSI. People who sell MA plans or health insurance at the beginning dont develop strong sales skills. People who sell FE first develop more skills quickly. And people who sell fully underwritten term develop even better skills if they can survive the beginning. Lets also look at this from beginning cash flow. Most people enter the insurance world are relatively broke. FE is the fastest way in the first 3 months to turn into positive cash flow.