Is Anyone Selling Life with Life Quotes Inc.

[scott17201]

totally agree. the whole operations is a joke. getting with them was the worst thing ive ever done in this business. stay away.

 

[davidbri23]

below is a what i had to send Bob b/c his team leaders do not respond to e-mails or phone calls

01/25/11 11:56am e-mail to Audrey travis asking who was lic in UT. I have a client that wants to fill out app. no response
01/24/11 5:17pm e-mail to Audrey travis asking who was lic in UT. I have a client that wants to fill out app. no response
01/25/11 6:38pm E-mail To Audrey travis asking why close out letter was sent for client 3613276. no response
01/25/11 6:20pm call to Margaret Thornton to see if she knows why 3613276 was withdrawn. no response
01/22/11 9:45am email to Audrey Travis about client [FONT='Arial','sans-serif']3563144 wants liberty life app since he got an e-quote for a great rate but I can not get libery life to pull up when I quote him. How can I write him? [/FONT]no response
01/12/11 Audrey calls me to ask how things are going and we talked about performance review. She said she would monitor my calls the rest of the day and give me a review as to how things went. Susan Mancione e-mailed me on 01/17/11, 01/13/11 to see if Audrey ever got back to me on my review and I said no she hadn’t. I emailed Susan Mancione on 01/25/11 at 5:35pm for her to call me b/c I need to get answers. no response
01/13/11 at 8:15am E-mail to Audrey travis. Client wants Dr to do her exam, can we honor that. no response
01/13/11 at 3:26pm E-mail to Audrey travis. Follow up to see if she had an answer about client going to dr for exam. no response.
01/14/11 at 2:25pm Call to Audrey travis. I left voice mail stating that on client 3610534 they wanted the child rider. Please tell me where I can add this on the app b/c I seem to be over looking it. Pls call or e-mail me back. no response
01/07/11 9:50am email to Audrey Travis about client [FONT='Arial','sans-serif']3563144 wants liberty life app since he got an e-quote for a great rate but I can not get libery life to pull up when I quote him. How can I write him? [/FONT]no response
12/04/10 I requested that client 3557987 app be mailed out. It didn’t get mailed out until 12/10/10

 

[Stewbie63]

Mr. Bland all I can say is one day you are going to stand before a Holy God and have to give an answer to why you swindled, lied and manipulated good hard working "licensed" insurance agents.
I was once with this outfit. When they canned me I had 12 applications that were approved but needed requirements. We'll they threw me in the garbage and kept all the commissions. Does this sound fair, ethical...is this moral ? By no means ! I was the one who drew blood, sweat and tears...listening to these peoples concerns and problem. I was the one who spent so much time writing business and Bob Bland and all his inside people keep the money.
Bob read the majority of these complaints, they all tell the same story. Bob the good news is, you can repent...God can forgive you of all you sins if you humbly bow before Him and acknowledge Him as your Lord and Savior.
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This is for those who thought about a class action lawsuit.
A class action would be too extensive...get names, petitions, a hungry lawyer etc....Try contacting their state department of banking and insurance to file a complaint so they can investigate their operations. The state department can also do an audit. Surely they would investigate claims that you, the writing agent, was robbed of your commission and given to another agent who did not write it....or Bland might have given some of commissions to non licensed employees which is a no-no. The state in their investigations can find these things out. I think it is much easier for each individual to do this. Just google Illinois Department of Banking and Insurance and call the complaint office. Just a thought.

 

[Josh]

Where did he find the good hard working agents?

 

[ctdavid1]

Anyody question why the CEO is cruising an insurance agent forum? Anyway...

Riddle me this Bob using YOUR numbers: 275,000 polices sold in 27 years. 100 agents. Based on the math your agents are selling 8 policies per month. Assuming an average term policy premium of $40 a month @ 30% commission paid "as earned" the average agent would make $96 his first month. If you compound an additional 8 policies per month for 12 months you are looking at a total paid commission of $6624 first YEAR assuming you are allowed to stay around that long if these numbers don't meet the required quota.

So as an agent you have to use some brain cells and deduce that this has the potential to be a great supplemental income but by no means are you going to make a living from it.

Lets play with some more numbers: Assuming the average broker commssion from the insurance company is actually 60% that means Bob himself makes 30% on each policy sold. So add in 100 agents to the average commission of $6624 per agent annually and it would appear Bob's gross is at least $662,400 for his 100 agents... or almost 18 million dollars earned in 27 years!! Since the agents pay for their own licensing/insurance/computer, etc and I am sure the software is paid for and can be downloaded multiple times..the overhead would appear low. I would like to see where the dollars are actually spent to generate leads since there is no doubt there are some recycled...I NEVER throw a lead away I pay for...sold or not...I will at least use the email address and add it to a database that will blast out a monthly newsletter....but I digress...

I give props to Bob for coming up with a very unique version of the IA model which benefits the consumer and generates easy money for his company while not having to deal with actually having to look an agent in the eye to hire or fire them or deal with thier lousy attitute or pay unemployment/workers comp/health benefits etc ...for the agent though...not much benefit here.

There are a million brokers out there doing this...ask yourself...why can't I do it too?? Answer: you can. If you have a pulse and a license most insurance companies will appoint you directly without much hassle and you can then pocket 60/70/80% comm checks and maybe even get paid annualized as opposed to "as earned." Then hire a few shmucks ..err...college grads to help you with admin, sales and/or appointment setting and "voila" youre a smaller version of Bob and the other million disgruntled agents who have figured out how to do the same thing.

Bottom line: Agents here should stop whining and just do what Bob does: start your own IA, recruit naive newbies to sell insurance for you offering them the freedom of working from home while you hack thier commission check by at LEAST half for each policy sold in order to pay for your $600,000 house ...keep overhead low by making them pay for everything and then generate your own leads via the internet...or hire a SEO mgr to generate traffic to your $9.95 a month website you bought from Yahoo....all of these options are WAY cheaper than 5 figure print ads.

OR...you can just do business the old fashioned way...give back to your community and get involved in something you are passionate about, make an introduction, a handshake, a policy sold and a referral. NAH...that will never work!!

 

[WorthyLife]

One thing Mr. Bland fails to mention is that if you don't have an hour of talk time then you get no money (i.e. it's not pro-rated). So that means there could be days that you could be at home for 8 hours and talk to quite a few "Very Old" leads and only have 1 hour of "Talk Time" and get paid $23 for the whole day. Comes out to $2.87 per hour - hmm. He also fails to mention that the in-house agents (8 as of March 2011 and Mr. Bland being one of them) are the ones making six figures since they are licensed in all 50 states plus DC, they have access to all the carriers, and they all get first dibs to all the leads from all the states and DC. These 8 in-house agents keep the good leads, weed out the poor leads which become the scraps that eventually become "exclusive" to the outside agents. That's why Mr. Bland mentions that you can make six figures. What he should be saying is that his in-house agents make over six figures and write over 75 apps a month. I still can't figure out how these in-house agents do it. They write 75 apps a month at average 25 minutes an app; plus spend hours upon hours working the phones tending the thousands of leads per day. Am I missing something here.

I hung around for 3 months (or should I say was canned after 3 months for lack of activity) and sat around scratching my head for hours waiting for some leads to come in or for the phone to ring. I worked mostly 2-3 month old leads (i.e. the scraps) breakdown as follows (25 CA, 150 FL, 20 TX) all in a 3 month period - WOW. I talked about two minutes to these very old leads who weren't interested since they had already been contacted. I sold no policies, got licensed in FL, TX, and CA, cancelled my E&O insurance and received a refund for the remaining 9 months. Money invested about $300 after the refund, I earned six figures of $000,000 (zero hundred thousand dollars) just like Mr. Bland said. I recently learned that they are now requiring those interested in joining the program to be licensed in 15 states before you can even take the required Outside Agent Training Webinars which by the way are a waste of time. WHAT A RIP OFF for those newbies now joining. Good luck if you decide to join LifeQuotes.

BTW - if you don't believe that the in-house agents get first dibs on the leads do what I did. I created 5 different email accounts and requested an insurance quote through their website. In each case I received an auto reply email from [email protected] (could this be Bob Bland himself) asking me if I wanted an application to call him directly - see part of email response below.
"Buying insurance through us is fast and easy. To request an application, please call me at the phone number listed below.
Sincerely,
Robert Bland,CLU
Chief Executive Officer
1-800-556-9393, ext 310
[email protected]

I called the number and extension and it went directly to their in-house agents. I played along and told the agent that I was looking for life insurance and that I lived in Texas and if he could schedule an appointment with one of his Texas agents. Well, as I expected, he told me I was calling the main office and he could help me. Case in point - all in house agents get the gravy and the outside agents get the scraps.

 

[WorthyLife]

you guys are doing something wrong, I am doing ok with life quotes. it's not amazing, but it's 15% of my business

If you're like most outside agents, 15 % SUCKS if that's all you bring in after investing huge amounts of time and money on 15 to 20 licenses plus the annual CE requirements which will run you about two to three grand. Why don't you use some real numbers; 15% of what. Let me help you. Let's say lifequotes gives you 15% of your business (lets assume your entire insurance business), and let's assumes your total revenue is $100,000/year from everything you do what ever it may be (doubtful but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt). That means you earned $15,000 in commissons (at 30%) from lifequotes meaning that you had to sell at least $50,000 in net alp at best. Let's assume the average monthly premium was $50 (again BIG ASSUMPTION) that means you would have had to sell about 1000 policies for the year or 83 policies a month. Do you know how many good leads you would need to work to sell 83 policies a month and how many COUNTLESS hours a day you would need to be on the phone and completing applications. Do the math. You would need an infinite number of leads a month and over 40 hours per week minimum to generate the kind of business you say you generate --- 15% or $15,000. So I don't know how you have time to work the other 85% of your endeavors what ever they are.

Let's take it a step further. Let's assume that you're Bob Bland's buddy and that you are one of the outside agents who does actuall earn six figures (i.e. $100,000) and that you are no longer on the $23 an hour per hour talk time program. That means you would have to sell about $332,000 net alp for the year to earn your $100,000. If you Lifequotes provides 15% of your business then you are earning over $500,000 from the other 85% of your endeavors. Your combined earnings from everything you do, whatever it is, is over $600,000. I still sit here scratching my head wondering how you have time to earn the other $500,000 after working over 60 hours per week to generate a $100,000 through lifequotes. You either have no business sense or your post is full of what you find at the feet of a herd of cattle.

I question the integrity of your posting. Then again you did say in your post that "it's not amazing".

 

[Pangaea]

What a waste of a great domain name...

 

[WorthyLife]

I haven't myself but, have a pretty good friend here in town that has recently joined with them. He seems to like it, but I'm not so sure about it...For one, it is absolutely $23/hour per TALK time. I spoke with his yesterday, he receives inbound calls on a head - 6 hours logged in, 87 minutes TALK time... I'm just not convinced that spending time waiting on calls is a wise investment of time...And I agree with ya abbyh, too many "have-to's".

Hope your friend is enjoying the $3.84 per hour. He worked the additional 27 minutes for free since the $23 is not prorated.

 

[TPAAgent]

I spent $1,000 on non res licesnes on states they said I had to have in order to succeed and before they would hire me.

Fed me the first day then cut oiff the Geico direct leads and starting feeding my 6 month old leads that have been worked by 6 other agents before me a shown on the log of the cust profile

Someone needs to beat Bob Blands eyes shut UFC style