As a career agent, you will have weekly production requirement of 1750 in sales some offices per week of annualized production this means you will need to sell at least $146 of "Monthly premiums" per week... so if you wrote 3 applications at $50 per customer you will be "At goal that week". Although you are provided a book of business which is usually around a 200K book size, this book is usually well overworked by former agents who have cleaned the plate up pretty good. You will rely on going to your friends, family, and most importantly your referrals that you personally generate from your prospecting activities. It will be crucial that if you become a career agent that you will need to constantly generate your own referrals from your book of business or lead vendors or friends and family. You will always be on the lookout for these referral sources. The way I look at it is you could grow their block of business that you can't keep if you were to leave or you could take the independent route and grow your own book. For starting out the company does give a nice introduction pay for 7 bi-monthly paychecks then you are on your own with a sales pool and a bi-monthly renewal depending on your book size that could be a bi-monthly salary of $400-$500 a pay which will be used in gas servicing the existing clients for beneficiary changes and cash outs which don't normally result in a sale. The challenge of this position will be the constant requests of service items and encouraging clients to give you referrals in exchange for helping them with all of their service issues. Service issues include: Bounced checking accounts that customer is unhappy about, company requiring all new customers to be on draft, Cashing out policies, Customer information is incorrect on the policy often which isn't your fault but requiring you to drive to the home multiple times to fix it with multiple forms that bounce back and not get processed quickly. You usually have to monitor all papers to ensure they are processed for your customers which takes away from selling time. Other things that take away from selling time in this position include: Weekly APCS, Action Planning conference forms which you must fill out weekly on your own with no manager, these take a good 40 minutes to fill out correctly, purpose of the form is to help you qualify for the Vacation of the year. (Now they offer a trip every 6 months) However the requirements for going on the yearly trip is currently 107,250 conference credits.... this includes something called an Increase report so if you have a lot of lapses making many agents disqualified for the trip...for example if your regular renewal persistency falls below 88% you will be Disqualified no matter how much production you sold. Also the company has something called 1'st Year Persistancy!! 1'st Year Persistancy can RUIN your career.... for example let's say your getting the base compensation of 66% on a whole life and your 1'st Year persistency tanks to 68% they will give you a "Factor" called a "1'st Year Persistancy Factor" which affects your compensation ...so now instead of making the base compensation rate of 68% you will now make 39% compensation... as you can see that is a huge difference and you will have a tougher time because all compensation goes into a "Sales Pool" so let's say I sell a $50 policy... the policy is $50 x 12 annualized which is $600 now apply my commission of .39% which would equal $234...you "get this money over a long long long LONG Time!" ...you only get .22% of your "POOLED AMOUNT"... the $234 would go into a pool with all of your other sales you made! So let's say you have 4 of these sales and built your "Pool" up to $936... instead of getting paid $936 now you would get .22% of that per each bi-monthly pay until the pool runs dry...so in this case of a $936 sales pool you would be paid $205.92 into your paycheck...in addition they do have the renewal of $300-400. So your paycheck would "STINK" it would be $505.92 ... at that rate you would starve so you really need to sell a lot to build this pool up. If you would have went the Independent route.... you would have 108.5% on a whole life so 4 apps at $600 annualized would have netted $2604 in commissions and 75% of that would have been advanced equaling $1953.00 which is a little bit easier to work with and the independent agent Doesn't Do all the service work a career agent does. An independent agent is not required to go to all the weekly district sales meetings and the weekly training meeting. So if you are new you may wish to take advantage of the training at first then you may discover because of the way you get paid that you may wish to take advantage of the independent route. The career position does offer some very nice benefits such as: Pension, 401K, Health, and Dental. You really need to weigh in on this decision because if you have experience or someone can train you, you may wish to write independently with them. The company has changed so much over the last 3 years that it has made the company more complex in helping you with getting your business issued. In addition many departments have closed down and more work on yourself. The company is more about "doing it yourself now" where as in the past when Transamerica was Monumental Life it was more of "were in business together" and help you with everything possible...That is A Very Big Difference on the way things are now. I have watched this company change every piece to it... even the copier machines were eliminated from 2 copiers to 1 in every office. Cutbacks galore is the name of the game and the only thing that is important at the moment is How many people can we get recruited and how can the agents help us recruit more people just like them ...and the other is what have you done for "me" lately in terms of production... so if sold $6K in sales last week and I'm barely close to goal this week with 1200 I'm a bad employee this week. Either way it does offer challenges which does help make the day go by extremely fast....in fact I can never find time to do anything "else". Personal life doesn't exist if you work your job the way they want. This pretty much sums up a lot of it...another thing is the Yearly Sales Requirement of $36,000 in order to keep your job... your job will always be on the line if you are not keeping pace...they just will not keep you if you are below that number and I have seem them raise that number year after year...use to be no number requirement I've seen it start with 30K and now it is 36K maybe next year 40K but right now it is 36K. Good luck! If you are new you will get a workout here! I've have seen and heard of many agents including important veteran agents leave the company. In addition whole life doesn't seem very favored around here anymore so if you like to sell whole life you will be pretty much pushed to sell all Term Life insurance and make less compensation on your term which is .35% and by the way if your persistency is low like in the above example that .35% becomes .21% compensation which means you would have to sell 10K a month in insurance to make $2,100... I don't know about you but that sure is a lot of work which I why I said you will get a workout! I firmly believe the company needs to fix itself immediately as I recently learned that their was "80 Open Books" out of 200! That means the company has a 40% open book with no agents serving those customers... that is huge especially in a world where everyone needs a job and all those vacancys should be filled but those former agents just couldn't hang on. It is a revolving door where agents come in and are usually out within 6-9 months from what I've personally seen here in the sales area where I work. It is a tough go so that's why they say it is not for everybody. That is the best rundown I could give you, sorry so long winded but I truly hope this helps everybody considering a career with Transamerica Agency Network.
Thank you for such a detailed post! It's been very helpful and I appreciate the time you took to write so much!
