Modern Life Insurance Selling Podcast 4h5f6g

In this episode, David Duford of FEAgentMentor.com talks about his new book called “Interviews With Top Producing Insurance Agents” (buy on Amazon here)where he interviews 13 top producing life insurance agents.  We also discuss the process of getting his direct to consumer burial insurance site to daily inbound leads and phone calls. In this episode learn: 1) What it took to get daily leads from the search engines (free leads!) from a brand new website within 6 months. 2) What carriers he sells over the phone. 3) Shared characteristics of top producing life insurance agents. People in the episode: Jeff Root: [email protected] David Duford: FEAgentMentor.com Mentioned on this episode: Digital Life Insurance Agent Book (Amazon link) SellTermLife Website Service (used to build David’s site) Interviews with Top Producing Insurance Agents Book (Amazon link) Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page

Randy VanderVaate In this episode, Randy Vandervaate guest hosts and interviews Jimmy McMillan from heartlifeinsurance.com.  Both Randy and Jimmy have built niche websites producing consistent life insurance business and discuss the process and what it takes. In this episode learn: 1) How to niche down your life insurance website to get better results in the most efficient way possible 2) Going from concept state to daily leads within 1 year 3) Creating a website to differentiate yourself from the larger more established life insurance websites 4) Educational opportunities to get you up to speed as quickly as possible People in the episode: Randy VanderVaate Jimmy McMillan Jimmy McMillan Mentioned on this episode: SellTermLife Website Service (lifetime community access included) SellTermLife Community The Digital Life Insurance Agent Book (on Amazon.com) DigitalBGA (IMO/BGA for telesales agents) Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page

In this episode, Anthony Martin of ChoiceMutual.com walks us through his journey of starting a website from scratch and getting to daily leads from the search engines within 6 months.  We also talk about why many agents fail at final expense telesales and some ways he makes it work. In this episode learn: 1) What it took to get daily leads from the search engines (free leads!) from a brand new website within 6 months. 2) The link building methods used to fuel his website’s success 3) Why final expense telesales works for some agents and doesn’t for others 4) The 3 core final expense telesales companies Anthony currently writes. 0:00 – 21:45:  New website to daily leads discussion 21:45:  Selling Final Expense Over The Phone People in the episode: Jeff Root: [email protected] Anthony Martin Mentioned on this episode: SellTermLife Website Service (used to build Anthony’s site) Broken Backlinking by Brian Dean Help a Reporter Out Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page

Glen Shelton owns Lead Heroes, a telemarketed lead vendor and in this episode we discuss working internet leads and what it takes to become successful doing it through some of our own insights into the business. We talk about timeframe to profitability, following up on leads, advice on transitioning to telesales and a bunch of other topics. In this episode learn: 1) What following up on your leads should look like. 2) How long it takes to become profitable working internet leads. 3) Advice on transitioning to buying internet leads and selling over the phone. People in the episode: Jeff Root: [email protected] Glen Shelton: [email protected] Mentioned on this episode: Lead Heroes How To Qualify, Present & Sell Final Expense and Medicare Supplements To Seniors Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page

Jonathan Musgrave has been building turn-key digital marketing processes for agents for years.  Using a combination of targeted traffic and an optimized digital marketing process, he delivers only the hottest of prospects to his agent clients. In this episode learn: 1) What it looks like to build a turn-key digital marketing strategy. 2) Facebook ads best practices. 3) How to get started to building turn-key digital marketing campaigns. People in the episode: Jeff Root: [email protected] Jonathan Musgrave: [email protected] Mentioned on this episode: The Digital Life Insurance Agent Book SellTermLife Custom Life Insurance Website Unbounce.com Perfect Facebook Ad Reference .pdf Anadomy Course **Secret Purchase Page for 50% off Anadomy Course** Link to Jonathan’s Calendar Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page

Brett Kitchen has the most experience of marketing and selling Indexed Universal Life Insurance (IUL) over the phone the phone of anyone I know.  He’s also authored the book “Wealth Beyond Wall Street” and has a program to train and help agents sell IUL over the phone. In this episode learn: 1) How to identify the right IUL prospects. 2) An overview of presenting IUL over the phone. 3) Why agents should be offering IUL products.   People in the episode: Jeff Root: [email protected] Brett Kitchen: [email protected] Mentioned on this episode: EliteLeadsEliteAdvisors.com (if questions, call 801-693-1677) Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page  

Todd Ewing has the most direct to consumer telesales experience that I know of in the industry and he shares his 7 habits of successful life insurance telesales in this episode. At-A-Glance Success: * Produced over $1 billion in * Supervised over 500,00 paid policies * Created and built 3 start-up agencies As an Executive Insurance Consultant, he’s helped the top Direct Marketers, BGA’s and IMO’s grow and improve both top and bottom-line results. As Corporate Officer, he helped Transamerica, SelectQuote and InsWeb, Inc. produce record revenue. In this episode learn: 1) How to effectively develop rapport over the phone. 2) How to differentiate yourself with your value proposition 3) Master qualification and underwriting 4) How to present the rates and what to do in what Todd refers to as the “critical moment” 5) And much, much more. People in the episode: Jeff Root: [email protected] Todd Ewing: [email protected] Mentioned on this episode: InsuranceMined.com Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page  

Jovan Will from advisorinternetmarketing.com works with top financial advisors across the country to prosper in the digital age.  We talk in detail about his marketing strategies to get appointments to market annuities and other financial products.   Some agents are even selling annuities 100% over the phone and doing very, very well.   In this episode learn: 1) How he uses his sales funnel to schedule appointments automatically and only speak with hot prospects.  He believes in quality of leads and not volume of leads and his funnels do this.  We go in depth on this topic. 2) Ways to drive traffic into his funnel, from the most expensive way to the most simplified way and some under the radar techniques.  Lots of different strategies discussed. 3) Jovan has a small website that has 15 blog posts and generates 5 annuity appointments (not leads, actual appointments on the calendar) – every week from the search engines. We talk about the characteristics of this website and how you can do this on a local and national level. People in the episode: Jeff Root: [email protected] Jovan Will: [email protected] Mentioned on this episode: Advisor Internet Marketing Bright Scope Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page  

The market for final expense is just getting bigger as more and more baby boomers are aging into retirement.  This week we’re bringing in David Duford from FEAgentMentor.com to discuss how he teaches final expense agents to grow their business.  We’ll cover lead programs, sales techniques and general advice on how you can sell more final expense life insurance. In this episode learn: 1. Top final expense lead programs 2. Sales techniques in presenting final expense 3. Insights to the final expense market People in the episode: Jeff Root: [email protected] David Duford: feagentmentor.com Mentioned on this episode: feagentmentor.com customizedquote.com needalead.com jenmarco.com leadconnections.com   Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page

Shaun Caldwell makes a great case to implement direct mail in your business.   As the internet continues to provide increasing access to more products, the need for direct mail will grow as means to differentiate brands and sustain existing customer relationships.  In this episode we discuss” In this episode learn: 1. The risks in relying solely on internet marketing 2. The elements of an effective direct mail campaign 3.  What an integrated direct mail approach looks like. People in the episode: Jeff Root: [email protected] Shaun Caldwell: [email protected] Mentioned on this episode: CharlottePrint.com White Pages Pro Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page Want to help improve the show? Want to hear about a specific topic? Just want to leave some ?  

Gregory was recently named one of the 20 most creative people in insurance and has over 20 years of life insurance industry experience going from agent, to home office executive and now as a thought leader for insurance industry innovation. In this episode learn: 1.  Ways to act on your ideas to innovate the insurance industry and get funding to build your ideas. 2.  What’s on the horizon for insurance industry startups. 3.  There’s a systemic problem of insurance companies to innovate and stay current with what consumers and agents want and why they can’t do this on their own.  Innovators outside the insurance companies need to make it happen. People in the episode: Jeff Root: [email protected] Gregory Bailey: [email protected] Mentioned on this episode: Insure VC Pacific Life Prime Melius PolicyGenius Global Insurance Accelerator Insurance Disrupted Conference Angel List The Denim Rivet Podcast Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page Want to help improve the show? Want to hear about a specific topic? Just want to leave some ?

Thom Singer has over 25 years of sales and marketing experience and is the Master of Ceremonies and Keynote for this year’s MDRT Top of the Table event.  We’ll be talking about connecting with people in a technology driven world. In this episode learn: 1.  Why social media isn’t a replacement for human to human networking. 2. How to get people to want to be in your sphere of influence. 3. Misconceptions about what networking is and how to do it more effectively. People in the episode: Jeff Root: [email protected] Thom Singer: @thomsinger Mentioned on this episode: MDRT Top of the Table Cool Things Entrepreneurs Do Podcast ThomSinger.com Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes – Leave us a Review! Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page Want to help improve the show? Want to hear about a specific topic? Just want to leave some ? … Send me a voice message  

Jonas has been marketing in financial services for over a decade, focusing on lead generation and personal branding.  He’ll be sharing with us some tips on building your local brand. In this episode learn: 1.   How to use your email signature to generate business 2.  How to use LinkedIn for local referrals 3.  How you can use Google Alerts in your business. People in the episode: Jeff Root: [email protected] Jonas Roeser: [email protected] Mentioned on this episode: 3in4needmore.com Calendly LinkedIn Google Alerts AgentReview.net Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes – Leave us a Review! Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page Want to help improve the show? Want to hear about a specific topic? Just want to leave some ? … Send me a voice message  

Forget what you’ve heard about targeting Gen Y.  Sophia Bera has built a very profitable business around Gen Y and in this episode talks about how she did that. Sophia is very open and generous with the inside look at her business and how she works with Gen Y.  Lots of great “how-to” information for any financial services business. In this episode learn: 1.   Why Gen Y when industry vets tell us there’s no money there? 2.  Sophia’s path to build her brand and actionable advice to get started on yours. 3.  Why connecting remotely with people is a lot more intimate than face to face sales. 4.  Technology used to build her business remotely and connect with Gen Y. 5.  What fee-only financial planners look for when referring business to life insurance agents. Click Here to View the Full Transcript Sophia: Thank you so much for having me, Jeff. I’m excited to be here. Jeff: Great. Let’s start here by telling us a background in your business. Sophia: I’m an actor turned financial planner which is not the typical career path I guess for financial planners. Everybody is like, “How did you get to that?” My undergrad in theater and women’s studies. I did 15 blank shows while I was in college and I decided that I was determined not to be a starving artist. I would sit in a personal finance section of Barnes and Noble and read every finance and business book I can get my hands on and realized I really wanted to buy a house when I graduated from college. I graduated when I was 21, this was back in 2005. You can do the math and figure out how old I am now. Three months later I bought a house and my friends started coming to me with their money questions. They were saying things like, “Hey, I just got a job but I have no idea how to read my company benefits package,” or, “How did you buy a house,” or, “Can you help me with my student loans. I’m in credit card debt, what should I do?” These were all really great questions and there was really nobody for them to go to to answer those questions and so I learned about this thing called the CFP until I started taking my classes to become a certified financial planner and I wasn’t really sure about it because it was a lot of selling and I really wanted to help people with their money. I really wanted to work with your clients but in my second course I ended up needing my future boss. This guy was working at his father’s financial planning firm and they ended up bringing me in for an interview because they were hiring somebody for their back office and I got my foot on the door, I ended up planning the job which was great. I ended up getting into the profession in 2007 and then taking my CFP exam in 2009 and becoming a CFP in 2010 and then I worked to a couple traditional financial planning firm before I working for a startup for a year, that was based in New York. Then, two years ago I launched Gen Y Planning and now I’m a virtual financial planner for millennials. Jeff: A virtual financial planner for millennials, that is awesome. What age group are millennials? Just for context here for everybody listening. Sophia: Millennials come at this point go until about age 35 but I work with a lot of young gen-Xers as well. People will say things like, “I’m 40, can I work with you or not?” Absolutely we can work together, however I would say that most of my clients are within ten years of my age. I’m 31, most of my clients are mid-20s to early 40s, all of them are actually. I don’t have any clients over I think like 42 and the reason why I really like to focus there is because so many financial planners have been focused on baby boomers and beyond and I really think there’s a bunch of people that are serving that market really well and I wanted to offer something different. When I do have baby boomer clients reach out to me I usually refer them to one of the former firms that I was working at, that might mentor still works at, because I know that he’ll take good care of them and he does great work and that’s something that I’m happy to do. Jeff: You really stick to the millennial Gen Y age group here. You really don’t go outside. If somebody wants to work with you and they don’t fit that mold, you say no and you refer them out. Sophia: I do because I’m really good at working with people when they’re going through a bunch of life changes. People in their 20s and 30s, early 40s, people are getting married, having kids, moving, switching jobs. All of those things are major planning opportunities and for me that’s really fun. When people get into their 50s and 60s they really want somebody to do a social security analysis and figure out what’s the difference if I retire at 62 versus 66, and I have chosen not to use financial planning software and those people need somebody to run these detailed projections and figure out what is the difference if you retire at those different ages or if you work part-time and whatnot. I really want to make sure that those clients are getting the best service that they can and having somebody that really meets those needs and that allows me to really focus on what I’m good at. Jeff: I love that because in the early days in the business, and I’m sure you heard this. I know I’ve heard it. I’m sure a lot of people listening have heard this too. Freshly licensed and getting trained were told by industry veterans that the younger generation, generation Y, millennials can’t be profitable and we shouldn’t target them and here you are. Sophia: Right. Jeff: Yeah, and here you are crushing it in that market. How did you make gen Y profitable for your business? Sophia: Great question. Yeah, and just to touch on what you just mentioned when I would go to financial planning conferences I would say, “I really want to work with young clients.” All the advisors would say, “Why? They don’t have any money.” Right? It was this idea that if you were to target clients in their 20s and 30s they have the time to build up their assets yet so you couldn’t charge them an AUM fee because you weren’t going to make enough money off of them, or because they didn’t have any assets, or maybe they have a negative network or whatnot. For me I didn’t see that as our client’s problem. I saw that as an us problem, like as financial planners, as financial advisors. What I do is I charge, I’m really big on the planning. Some people are really big in the investment. I always say like 80% of what I do has nothing to do with investing. I have become a CFP and I’m really ionate about the planning and I think there’s a lot of planning that goes into things and that really has nothing to do with the asset level that you have or very little. A lot of times if we’re talking about assets, what are we talking about? The 401(k) plan, right, or the Roth IRA that they just started. I decided to charge an upfront planning fee so I charge an initial planning fee of $1,500 to $2,000 upfront. and then I charge a monthly subscription of 100 to 200 bucks a month but right now most of my new clients are paying 149 a month to 199 a month. Jeff: For that monthly fee, did they just kind of get access to you as their life and changes continue? Sophia: Yeah, that’s a great question. I do an upfront financial plan so we have two meetings upfront because I really want to dig into the financial planning. Then going forward, we do a meeting every six months and these are I should say virtual meetings, so Skype meetings or Google Hangouts. They may have unlimited e-mail with me so we continue to address throughout the year. Because what I saw with so many of my traditional firms, clients would only come in once a year and they would really reach out to their planner because they didn’t want to bother them and that all of a sudden there was a ton of things, you know, there’s a ton of fires to put out. Right? Jeff: Yeah. Sophia: I really encourage my clients to reach out to me throughout the year and a lot of the planning we’re doing is putting them into with the right life insurance agent, the right estate planning attorney, the right A. One of the things they love is they get access to my network. They don’t have to stay up late yelping like a estate planning attorney is California. I can just connect them with your sister apparently. Now you’ve learned that there’s a estate planning attorney in California which kicks ass. Jeff: Yes. For those listening right now, my sister is a estate planning attorney. Does it over the internet just like Sophia. All right. That’s my sister. Sophia: Yeah. Those things I think are really valuable to my clients because a lot of my clients are busy young professionals. There’s a lot going on. They have really intense jobs or they’re busy with their families or they’re travelling. There’s a lot going on and so I want to be on their team. The reason that I feel like I’ve been able to build a profitable business off of this and not have a huge focus on AUM or Assets Under Management is because I charge a monthly subscription. For example, I have quite a few clients that have six figures in income and might have six figures on student loan debt from law school or med school or MBA. I wanted to be able to help those clients too because there’s a bunch of planning that goes into which student loan repayment program should you choose, which student loan should you pay off first, what should we do in of putting money into your retirement while you’re also putting money into paying off your student loans, how do we stay for other goals like a down payment on a home or saving up to start your own business someday. I just think that I really encourage people to think about how would you want to pay for this type of service. What I realized was that we pay for our lives monthly why wouldn’t we want to pay for our financial planner monthly, that was the business model I can explain to my clients. Explaining to them that I am going to quarterly deduct fees from your based on how much money you have is actually more difficult for me. Right? Jeff: Yeah. Seriously the way you position that, it is. Sophia: Yeah. What do we pay for quarterly? People like, “I have this one random thing I pay for quarterly.” I’m like, “Yes, it’s a random thing and it’s a pain in the butt because you’re like, ‘Crap, that payment is coming due.'” Right? Jeff: Yeah. Sophia: For me it’s been a really good fit for me, a really good fit for my clients. Jeff: Awesome. Another thing too is because you’re working with people in their 20s and 30s, you basically have the potential to keep clients for 30-plus years. Your long term value of a client has got to be huge if they stay with you. Sophia: Yeah. That’s another question that I get a lot is how much turnover is there, and I would definitely say, “As millennials and young people, you’re going to have a little bit more turnover than you would with a traditional financial planning practice,” but the majority of my clients, 85%, 90% have stuck with me since they’ve started working with me and the ones that I’m left have left after … I haven’t had anybody leave before a year. The couple that have left were a more do-it-yourselfers anyway. They were like, “This is awesome. I got a financial plan. We work through the different things in my financial plan and now I wanted to take it from here.” There’s inevitably some people that are going to be like that but for the majority of clients, they’ve really enjoyed having me on their team and being able to reach out to me as their situation changes because often times in a year they’ll come to me when they’re engaged, a few months later they’ve gotten married, a few months later one of them switches jobs, a few months later they find out they’re pregnant. All of these things are happening in a very short amount of time. Jeff: Yeah. I can attest to that too, working with a lot of people in their 20s and 30s a lot of agents just selling life insurance over the phone. They stay away from that and I just think that’s the wrong move because these people are going to keep buying from me because of all of this life changes they’re going through. They’re going through more life changes than any period in their life. Sophia: Right. Jeff: As life insurance agent, they’ll continue to revamp their life insurance program, add coverage for all these life events. Yeah, I get it. I guess this leaves us to the next question here, how are you getting in front of the millennials and gen Y? What marketing strategies are you using? Sophia: I really took a look out what my blogger friends reviewing so I’m friends with a lot of financial bloggers and they will have this incredible list of people that really love learning about their money and so I took a financial education approach. When I started Gen Y Planning I decided I’m going to blog every week and I’m going to do a newsletter twice a month. Now basically I blog twice a month and I do a newsletter twice a month. Every Wednesday something goes out either a blog post or a newsletter and I think the newsletter is huge. I guess the first part is creating valuable content for free is great because that’s how people really learn to trust you and they start seeing you as an expert in that space and then getting them on your newsletter list. If they enjoy the content that you’re putting out what was really great was that I was fortunate to have because I have this niche of millennials and money, I was fortunately enough to have press be interested in what I’m doing. Right, because I’m not just talking about baby boomers and financial planning and social security and those types of things, I was talking about everything you need to know about your student loan and how to maximize your company benefits. My most popular article on my website is should I contribute to a 401(k) or a Roth IRA and what I realized is people were typing that into a direct Google search and it was pulling up my website. Jeff: Awesome. Sophia: I think first of all it’s like think about what is your target demographic, typing into Google and how you can create content off of that. Then you’re really missing down having a target demographic that you’re working with. I think that that can be really powerful and valuable. In addition to that getting press and for me, I’ve been fortunate. When I started I was answering a bunch of Hair Labs to Help a Reporter Out but for the financial planners that are out there that are also life insurance agents, I really recommend that you the Financial Planning Association because they send out media requests and they’ll send those directly to your e-mail and all you have to do is click respond now then you can respond directly to that media request. I’ve gotten a ton of press that way. Jeff: What’s the website for that? Sophia: It’s financial planning association and I know that there’s local chapters and there’s a national chapter as well. OneFPA.org is the main professional association. One is actually spelled out, O-N-E-F-P-A.org. I really recommend that people get with different associations that are involved and that’s a great way to narrow down the amount of things that you have to respond to but if you’re not a part of that organization I would say, just getting on to, I think the website is Help a Reporter. Jeff: Yeah. H-A-R-O.com, I think it is. I link the both of this in the show notes. Sophia: Yeah. I mean, that was huge for me and what happened was I kept trying to form these good relationships with these freelance writers and these reporters because then what would happen was now they just e-mail me directly. Like today, I have two calls with reporters this afternoon because they sent me e-mails last week and I got them on my calendar for this week. Jeff: Awesome. Sophia: Once you prove that you can be a go-to source, that’s huge. I also had, when I was working up the startup I became friends with the people on the editorial team. Well, guess what? A lot of those people are working at very well-known financial news organizations now. One of them is working at Forbes so I was quoted in Forbes a dozen times last year. One of them is working at Business Insider, so guess what, now my blog is indicated by Business Insider. Others have gone to become freelance writers and I’ve done things for bankri.com, Refinery29. Investment news will tweet to me and say … so I have had reporters on Investment News send me a direct message on Twitter saying, “Hey, Sophia. We’re doing this article about students loans or young professionals or whatnot, do you have time between three and five today to get on the phone and chat?” I really think Twitter is super valuable because that’s where the press is. Then, what you can do is you can take those articles that you’re published in and you then that’s great content for your newsletter. Right? Jeff: Absolutely. Sophia: Sometimes people are like, “Where do I put my newsletter?” Here’s what I do, I think it’s helpful to have a formula so that you’re not having to think like, “Ooh, what do I say in this week’s newsletter?” Instead, this is what I do. I do an opening paragraph that’s a little bit about me, what’s going on in my world; a lot of times I go to conference, maybe some tips from recent conferences that I’ve gone to. Then I link to my most recent blog post and I have a sentence about that and then I have an around-the-web section and it’s links to different things that I’ve been quoted in recently, or podcast that I’ve been on, or a TV segment that I’ve got on or whatnot, like a new segment. At the end I have a little fun stuff section and it might be a productivity tool that I think would help a lot of busy, young professionals, or something fun about millennials and money, or an infographic that I saw that I thought people would like. Jeff: You can do that because you’ve narrowed down the people you work with. You know what they want. You can do that at the end of all encoming newsletter anything. Sophia: Right. Jeff: That makes a lot of sense. You do a lot of media stuff and you explain how you got some of it but is that how most of your clients are finding like in the media and then they come to your website? Can you give us maybe an example or two of how some of your clients found you? Sophia: A lot of them have found me from reading different articles that I’ve written or that I’ve been quoted in. There’s an article on Top Financial Advisors from millennials and I was listed as one of them so some people will specifically cite that that they found me on money moneyunder30.com from this article. There’s also an article called ten questions to ask when choosing a financial advisor that Laura Shin interviewed me for for Forbes, so some people have cited that as well. Those would be like two articles that I’ve been fortunate enough to get a lot of perspective clients out of and a few of them have become clients. The other things is Google Search. I’m the top Google search for financial planner for Gen Y and financial planner for millennials. That’s kind of unique because I work virtually but if you type in financial planner it localizes your search. If you’re an insurance agent, for example, that is working locally, wants to have a local presence but wants to be able to work virtually like a hybrid. I know a lot of financial planners that do that. I would really recommend that you work on your Google search so that when people type in the term life insurance agent often that you come up. Jeff: Right. Sophia: It’s making sure that your name, your phone number, your business address are consistent across all of these different things. It’s making sure you have that information on your website. On LinkedIn make sure your phone number and your website are on your main page of LinkedIn and that people don’t have to link in with you to see your phone number. Jeff: That’s a great tip because I’ve recently been reading about how people use their LinkedIn profiles. A lot of people think there’s no value in there but you can pretty much treat it as a sales page. Sophia: Yes. Jeff: With what you said, your phone number, everything about you and that’s kind of change the way I thought about LinkedIn. Sophia: If somebody meets you at a networking events. Let’s say, they’re out one night and you go to this thing and you’re like, “Oh, yeah. That Jeff guy.” They just like type in your name into Google. One of the first things that pops up for most people is their LinkedIn profile. If they’re trying to say like, “Hey, I want to connect you with a client of mine,” and they’re trying to find your number really fast and your LinkedIn profile pops up and they can’t find it because they have to link in with you first before you can see your phone number and whatnot, that’s kind of a pain. Jeff: Yeah. Absolutely. I think that’s a great tip right there and I don’t even have my phone number on my LinkedIn page. I’m going to do that right now. Sophia: I got that tip from a marketing person a few years ago and I just thought, “Oh, why don’t I think of that?” That’s so basic and it’s so simple and yet at the same time, like how many people could make that really small tweak and it really increased the number of people that will reach out to them. Jeff: Awesome. Mostly your leads, your inquiries are from a lot of the stuff you do in the media which comes from putting out free content, your newsletter, and then from there it gets, you know, media press and then basically I think you said you’re going to conferences, you’re on Twitter, you do a lot of this responding to Financial Planning Association and Help a Reporter Out and it kind of snowballs from there. Sophia: Yeah. I’ve been really fortunate that I’ve been able to just, you know, I don’t pay anybody to do my SCO, I just have tried to write a lot around the topics that I’m really ionate about. I’ve been fortunate enough to get a bunch of press in that process and to just try to be really helpful and friendly towards the press so that they keep coming back. Right? Jeff: Awesome. Sophia: I think that it’s absolutely something that other people can do and can build in to their practice and I think that there’s a lot of ways to … Going to conference has been a big thing for me and so I try to go to some industry conferences and a lot of conference outside of my industry. It’s amazing how many of those have led to future client and so I really think that there’s something valuable about meeting people in person but then being able to build that relationship online because people are busy. They love that they can have a meeting with me at 7pm on a Tuesday night or 10am on a Saturday morning and that’s something that they don’t get from their local financial planner that has an office in downtown after they take a half day off work, drive a half an hour to their financial planner’s office, sit down with them for an hour or two and usually get a thing of a hundred pages of charts and graphs that may or may not mean anything to them and then get in their car and go and have to take another half day off of work to make all these decisions about their life insurance for their financial planning stuff and be really overwhelmed by that. If you could just make that process easier for people and not include a hundred pages of charts and graphs, and not have to make them drive anywhere and just meet them where they are virtually. I think it’s such a better experience for the client. Jeff: Absolutely, let’s talk about that, the client experience because financial planning was out meeting face to face is something still pretty new. Same thing with selling life insurance over the phone, it’s still very new. Knowing that you work remotely, is there anything you do that your client respond well to? Sophia: Virtual high fives. No, I’m just kidding. Well, I always think it’s funny because one of the push backs I get from financial planners is they don’t work as much in the virtual space is, well, I just think that there’s something important about shaking the client’s hand and them coming down to my office and whatnot. What I think is that it’s actually a more intimate experience for me and the client because I’m meeting then in their homes. I cannot tell you how many people’s babies and puppies I have met. I am meeting them where they’re comfortable. They’re letting me see into their lives where it’s their home and to me that’s really special. They’re telling me intimate details about their financial situation. People are more comfortable talking about sex than they are about their money and so you’re asking people to do this really revealing thing and get financially naked for you. Once they do that, they’re not going anywhere fast. That, I think, is like the relationship is usually pretty sticky because they’re really opening up to you about intimate details of their financial life and I think that meeting them in their home virtually can be a really cool experience. I also think that, to me, it removes the power play as well so I think a lot of financial planners like having the mahogany desk and driving the fast car and having the fancy downtown office. What I found is that my clients really like that they just get to know who I am more and that I am really there for them and it’s not about my image. They also realize like when I was interviewed on the Tropical MBA Podcast, one of the things Ian said is, “I like that I’m not paying for your mahogany desk.” Jeff: That’s funny. I that. Sophia: That was so funny but it’s so true. A lot of my clients are world travelers and so am I. We talk about travel a lot. We can relate to each other there. A lot of my clients are first generation immigrants. My dad’s first generation. People are really hard workers, self-made. Some of them are young entrepreneurs, some of them are young lawyers, doctors, young professionals and I love that I can just be myself and nobody cares what kind of car I’m driving. It’s those types of things that used to be big status symbols for financial planners. It just don’t matter to my clients which is awesome. They actually like that I’m not charging them $10,000 for a financial plan because I’m not saying, “Well, I have to make my overhead and my fancy downtown office. To me, I think the client experience is a lot different by working virtually and I think that it can be an even closer experience. Because my clients know I travel a lot, what’s really fun is sometimes I end up meeting them when I’m in other cities, when I’m out of conference and I’ll reach out to them and say, “Hey. I’m actually going to be in New York this weekend. Let me know if you want to connect.” It’s so funny because people are like, “Then you have a client meeting?” I’m like, “No.” Then I take them out for brunch or bench full of pasta. No, this is fun stuff. This is us hanging out and meeting each other. This is not like let’s talk about your 401K. We can do that over Skype whenever we want. Jeff: The way you said that makes so much sense. It is so true. There is something powerful behind speaking and communicating with somebody on their own time, where they’re most comfortable. You do get to see a lot of these raw things that not many people get to see as well so I get that. You work virtually, like all of us, what are your favorite business tools? You mentioned Skype, is that how you handle most of your meetings? Sophia: Yeah, Skype or Google Hangouts. A lot of my clients have Gmail e-mail addresses so I just love sending a calendar invite and just saying click, meeting at the time of the call. I really like Boomerang for Gmail. That’s been really helpful in of following up with perspective clients. Do you know that tool? Jeff: Yeah. Basically you’re up at midnight and you send a reply, you can schedule it for the next day so they don’t think that you’re up late at night. I know there’s that and then you can Boomerang them back into your Inbox, right? Sophia: The other reason I like it that I probably use it more often for is because let’s say that I had a great perspective client call and I might say, “Hey. Is it okay if I follow up with you on Friday and then if I haven’t heard from you.” They’ll say, “Yeah, Friday is great. We just need a couple of days. I want to talk it over with my significant other, let me think about it for a few days. Friday sounds great.” Then I can schedule that e-mail to come back and I can even check a box that says, if no one responds, boomerang on Friday or boomerang on Friday no matter what, like regardless. That’s been really helpful for just having those nice touch points with people because sometimes I realize I just may get bad about following up with perspective clients. Just having a boomerang back is a great way for me to like, “Yeah, I talked to them last week. I want to follow up with them.” They were really cool and they’d be great clients. I know that here is where they were at with things or something will say, “I’m starting my new job in a couple of weeks and I really want to get my first paycheck before I start working with you so I know what my new net pay is or whatnot and I can boomerang it to come back in a month and say, “Hey, how’s the new job going? I just wanted to touch base because I know we talked last month and you said you were starting your new position. I hope everything is going great. Let me know if you’re ready to move forward with financial planning.” Jeff: Awesome. Instead of setting a calendar date to make a phone call, if you’re communicating via e-mail, it’s the easiest way to do that. Sophia: Right. Then, I also use a CRM called Less Annoying CRM. You can do reports and stuff. The reason I love it is because it’s ten dollars per per month. If you’re running a solo shop and just need a great way to keep track of your client notes. Let’s say you have a phone call with a client, you just want to type up a bunch of notes, put them in your CRM, you can link their e-mails to it. You can link documents to that file. You can have all their information there. Their name, address, phone number, all of that stuff. That’s a great tool as well for people who are looking for what’s an affordable CRM system that I can start using right away. Jeff: Cool. That’s great. I’m going to link to that in the show notes as well. Any other tools? Google Hangouts, Skype, Boomerang, your CRM, any other tools that you use? Sophia: Man, I use quite a few of them and I don’t even realize. Here’s a good one. I had been going through Jaime Tardy’s Millionaire Hustler course and she has a great podcast called the Eventual Millionaire. Jeff: I love that podcast. Sophia: Really? For those of you who are into podcast and looking for another good one, Jaime interviews millionaires and Eventual Millionaire is awesome. She has this new course called Millionaire Hustler because she’s a business coach and she does a bunch of great work with a lot of millionaire and so this was a great way for her to create a course to help people who were really getting started building their businesses or want to take their businesses to the next level. One of the things her first week of the course is all about productivity and being a productivity ninja. One of the tips, it’s so small, it’s helped me so much is get the Pomodoro app for your cellphone. The Pomodoro technique for those of your who don’t know, is where you work in short 25-minute chunks and then you take a five minute break or a few minute break and then you go back to working for 25 minutes and then you take a short break and you do this throughout the day. I realize that I’m much more productive when I use that app because I have a tough time starting things but once I start them, I usually knock them out a lot faster than I think that I’m going to. This was a great way for me to start working on a financial plan. It’s going to take me five hours to do this financial plan. Instead I can just say I’m just going to start on the network statement. Then, boom, the network statement is getting knocked out. Then, I’m just going to start on writing the financial plan. I got through a third of that. That didn’t take as long as I thought it would. That’s a great tool and something that’s really improved my productivity and I can also look at it and see how many … When you complete the 25-minute segment, a Pomodoro is a tomato so a little tomato is filled in and it’s so stupid but I can just quickly glance and see how much work like how productive have I been today? It’s an easy visual way to see that as well. Jeff: Now, that’s great that you brought that up. I know a bunch of entrepreneurs who use that method to get things done. They even have groups where they get together in groups and work together. Everybody takes five minute breaks and all that. Sophia: Nice. Jeff: Let’s see here. I want to touch on something. You’ve kind of said before when you refer life insurance business out because you’re the only planner, you don’t write them life insurance for yourself. What do you see only planners look for in a life insurance agent to refer business to? Sophia: I love it when people keep me looped in on the process. “Just copy me on e-mails as we’re going through so I know where we’re at and the application process,” or “Do we get the quotes yet?” That’s something that’s really helpful is I’m really looking for people that are good at follow through and that can own that process but then, keep me looped into the process. Then, somebody that’s really educational based. There are so many people out there that use … I just have a perspective client call recently with this couple and they’re interested in moving forward as clients and they’re awesome and they spoke to somebody. They spoke to a life insurance agents at one of the bigger agencies that has the word mutual in it and there were a lot of fear tactics that were used to try to influence them buying life insurance. That was just not an effective strategy for winning this clients’ business. I’m really looking for people who do not use fear tactics to see to my clients and are instead really interested in educating my clients on, “Hey, Sophia, had us run quotes for 20-year and 30-year term life insurance policies, $500,000 policies for each of those and we’re just going to talk through the quotes and take a look at these and can give a recommendation based on the quotes that I had run.” Jeff: Okay, great. Do you expect that if you refer somebody, let’s say, a 20-year term for $500,000 to life insurance agent. They actually sell them a 20-year term for $500,000 so don’t try to up sell them, right? Do you expect that as well? Sophia: Yeah, you try to sell my millennial clients full life insurance and I’m going to punch you in the face and make sure that everybody on the internet knows to never go to you again so don’t do that. Don’t be shady. I think that’s pretty common sense but there are some sketchy people out there. I know it’s not your listeners. Here is the thing, most life insurance agents suck at doing any marketing. You don’t have to be the best in this base, you just have to be better than more people that are selling life insurance. It’s like financial planners. Most financial planners don’t have blogs. It’s not that my Gen Y Planning blog is the best financial blog out there, it’s that I have a freaking blog, and that I blog every week, and that I have a newsletter, and that I do it. I really encourage people that are interested in building their online brand to just be consistent and just be helpful and educational and friendly. You will get so much business because people want to work with people who they trust and they want to work with people that they trust and they want to work with people that have an expertise in that area. I just would say, I think a lot of people sometimes let fear hold them back from, “Do I really know enough about this specific thing?” For the most part it’s like, you do. You know a lot more than the average person out there. It’s just finding great ways to explain these complicated life insurance products or these complicated financial planning words and breaking them down in a way that makes it simple. I think if you can do that you’re going to have a ton of business. Just to be really honest, trustworthy person, you’re going to get so many clients from people, when you tell people things like, “I could sell you this but I’m not going to because you don’t need that right now. Now, once you have a couple of kids we’re going to need more life insurance. You’re going to need that but right now you don’t need a policy that big. Jeff: You just need to be better than mediocre. Just like you said there’s really not much to it. I want to circle back to what you said earlier is that agents, financial planners, they just need to do the work. Everybody is so scared. They want to talk about this strategy. Well, I don’t know what to write about, I don’t what do this, just start writing. Just start doing something. These things happen as you go along. You basically learn as you go. Is that how you learned? Sophia: Yeah, I think that as an entrepreneur, there are so many things like if people would have warned me like, “Oh, you’re going to have to figure out this thing.” I would have been terrified. It’s good that you don’t know everything that you don’t know until you get into it, right? Because otherwise you wouldn’t do it. It’s really just, I think that there are so much amazing opportunity to be able to educate people about life insurance, to be able to educate people about their money, to help people make these complicated financial decisions. The internet is making that way easier for you to connect with people that would have never walked into your office before. I think that we’re reaching a whole new group of people that never knew that they needed this. Think of all the uninsured people that are out there and now the internet is allowing them to find you. I just think that it’s such an amazing opportunity that we have ahead of us. I know it’s a really exciting time to be part of the financial services profession because I think we’re really shaking it up by doing things online and doing things like podcast and just think of all of the cool things that are coming on to the market that are going to be coming on to the market in the next five years that we’re going to change things again. To me, I just think just taking the small steps and doing them consistently and knowing that there are so much that you can do that it’s easy to be paralyzed by that so I would just say start. Start with something. Start with getting a website together. Start with updating your LinkedIn profile. Start with your first blog post. Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. Let’s end it off there. If someone wanted to refer, say, a gen Y client over to you, where should they send them? Sophia: Yeah. I would love that. Please send them my way. A couple of things, if you want to connect with me via e-mail, if they would rather have an e-mail introduction, you are more than welcome to do that then I’ll know where they came from. My e-mail is [email protected]. That’s Sophia with a P-H and Gen Y as in Generation Y, not as in Jenny spelled bad, so [email protected]. Also, one of the things that I do is I allow people to schedule a 30-minute free strategy session directly on my website. All you have to do is send them to genyplanning.comschedule and they can click on perspective clients. I asked them a few questions upfront. They can choose a time on my calendar that works for them and we can go ahead and get them on the calendar. That’s my last tip that I would recommend. If anyone is interested in scheduling an easier way to schedule client meetings or perspective client meetings, I think it’s so important that you have the ability for people to schedule a perspective call with you directly from your website. I used ScheduleOnce for that. I think it’s just scheduleonce.com. It’s like 20 bucks a month. This tool has saved me five hours a month or five hours a week of going back and forth with people saying, “Hey, does this time work for you? What about these two times? Okay, that one doesn’t work. Somebody already took that time.” That’s my other tip is get ScheduleOnce or get some sort of scheduling software. I like ScheduleOnce because there’s a pop-up if you’re scheduling across time zones that makes them choose their time zone right away. Jeff: Awesome. You’re just oozing with value for everybody today. Sophia: Well, thank you. Also, to touch on when people refer people to you if life insurance is part of the plan, of course you’ll refer that product back to them, right? Jeff: Absolutely. Sophia: I’m not going to refer that out to anybody else. If they’re like, “Hey, I want to connect you with Sophia for this.” I would love to continue working with them for life insurance because it sounds like they’re already doing a great job. I want to keep building their team. It’s just like people come to me and they already have a life insurance agent they’re working with that they’re really happy with. Let’s just go back and get quotes for more life insurance now that they had a baby rather than go to somebody else if they really like the person they’re working with. Jeff: Cool. Well, Sophia, I love what you’re doing with your business. You’re innovating, you’re doing a lot of cool stuff and thank you so much for sharing your insights and being with us on the episode today. Sophia: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a blast. Have a great week. People in the episode: Jeff Root: [email protected] Sophia Berra: [email protected] (@sophiabera on Twitter) Mentioned on this episode: GenYPlanning.com HARO Financial Planning Association Tropical MBA Podcast Eventual Millionaire Podcast Pomodoro App Google Hangouts Skype Boomerang LessAnnoyingCRM.com ScheduleOnce Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes – Leave us a Review! Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page Want to help improve the show? Want to hear about a specific topic? Just want to leave some ? … Send me a voice message

Glenn Cooke is a life insurance industry veteran that uses marketing and technology to make life insurance easier for consumers to understand and purchase using his own twist on online marketing and building his own systems. In this episode learn: 1. How Glenn generates leads online for his agency 2. Importance and tips Glenn uses to increase conversions from website visitor to lead on your website. 3. How and why he builds most of his life insurance agency technology himself. Click Here to View the Full Transcript Jeff Root: All right. So it’s my pleasure to have Glenn Cooke on the podcast. I’ve actually interacted with Glenn back in 2007 on the life insurance forum he actually built, and we just recently reconnected, and I just had to get him on this podcast. Welcome to the podcast, Glenn. Glenn Cooke: Hi Jeff. Thanks for having me on. Jeff Root: Of course. Let’s start here. You have a very unique background in the business before starting your online life insurance agency. Tell us about your background and how you got started. Glenn Cooke: Sure, well my original intention was to become a programmer. This is back in the eighties, and I was just an absolutely horrible programmer, so I ended up doing tech at an insurance software company, and that’s led me into doing a lot of insurance software kinds of things. I spent a bit of time working to be trained as an actuary at a head office of an insurance company. Back in the nineties, I actually presented to the vice president of marketing a proposal on websites for insurance brokers at the insurance company I was working for, and that got turned down. So I actually left my job at the insurance company, struck out on my own and started doing websites for insurance brokers around about 15-18 years ago. Did a lot of work in the U.S. market. Sold websites and online turn quoting systems and [inaudible 00:02:57] optimization services to insurance brokers. And about seven or eight years ago I determined that the American market is relatively competitive. The Canadian marketplace is both five years behind what you folks are doing down in the U.S., and I just transitioned my business away from providing websites and services to brokers, and took that knowledge and created my online life insurance agency up in Canada, and it’s just a much easier marketplace because it’s much less competitive. Jeff Root: So you’ve had your Canadian agency for how long now? Glenn Cooke: In the range of about seven years, I think. Jeff Root: Okay, great. And in that length of time, I mean, being online in Canada five years ahead of the curve, from what you’re saying, you’ve probably done a lot of business the past seven years. Glenn Cooke: I have. I personally have a few thousand clients. All of my clients I have sold non-face-to-face; I never see clients. It’s all from my home office. We live in a rural location; I’m not even centrally located anywhere. And all of the leads I work off of our website. That’s exclusively the source for our leads, so I’ve generated that volume of clients just off of my website and over the phone. Jeff Root: I love it. Glenn Cooke: Currently we have about, well, not about, we have exactly three brokers and one person, who share the leads with us. And we are in the midst of transitioning to a wholesaler type of business arrangement, where we’re acting as a general agency for other insurance brokers. And, again, one of the draws we’ll be providing is leads off of our website. Jeff Root: So let’s talk about how do you generate leads for an agency? What’s your main strategy? Glenn Cooke: Well, and this is kind of pertinent, because folks … You get reading on the internet, and it’s just an overwhelming amount of information as to how to generate a lead. There’s kind of two ways to look at marketing and lead generation, and anyway, one is, you actually push yourself out to people who aren’t specifically looking for insurance, so that’d be a direct mail blast or something like that, which you can also do that kind of promotional marketing on the internet. Alternatively, and this is what we do, we try and get a front of people who are, on their own decided that they were looking to research life insurance. And those are the people we target. As a result of that, we’re targeting people who are doing research on life insurance. Consumers who are looking to buy life insurance. And the end result of that is, there’s really only one place where that happens. So if you’re a consumer, you’re sittin’ down, lookin’ for life insurance, where are you going to go? And the answer is you don’t go to Twitter, you don’t go to Pinterest, you don’t go to Facebook. Nobody is looking for life insurance on Facebook. Some people have success with those venues, but it’s extremely limited. The best place to get life insurance leads, if you’re developing them yourself, is Google. That’s really the focus, because it’s where all the consumers are. Jeff Root: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Absolutely. So- Glenn Cooke: So that’s what we do. Jeff Root: What’s your main strategy on Google, then? I mean, what have you found that works for you? That brings in all your leads? Glenn Cooke: Okay. Well, in of … The short answer is you want to be on the front page of Google. But what a lot of people miss is, if you go Google a variety of topics, there is probably a half a dozen different ways to get on the front page of Google. People think you need to rank organically, in the regular listings. And that is certainly our focus currently. We’re moving away from that, which, we’ll go further into that in just a sec, but there is, if you want to search on Keurig coffee machines, as an example, you’re going to see a whole bunch of ways to get on the front page of Google. There’s Google Images, there’s Google News, there’s the organic results, there’s pay-per-click advertising, and there’s also something that’s called the three-pack or the seven-pack. Which are the local listings. If you do a search on something like life insurance brokers in Austin Texas, Google will try and find people who are physically located near you in Austin, Texas, and they actually parachute that lock of brokers’ websites right into the front page. You beat all the organic rankings, all the big guys, by getting into those local search results. And they call ’em the three-pack and the seven-pack because Google usually lists three people or seven, and it’s that listing where you get the little map on the side, is where you can click on and get the broker’s address. Right now, we have been focusing on what is called the short tail. So big search , like “term life insurance,” “life insurance brokers,” and stuff like that. Very very hard for an independent broker to rank on those search on any country. So we are rapidly expanding into doing local search engine optimization. We are going to start recruiting brokers and putting their office, their physical location, as one of our locations in Google’s eyes, with the expectation that when somebody types in “life insurance brokers” in Toronto, or Edmonton, or Calgary, or Vancouver, that our website will show up as having a location in that area. Not in the organic results, in that little seven-pack that gets us bumped right onto the front page. So 2015, 2016, that is one of our strategies going forward, is the local [SEO 00:07:47]. And that is probably the easiest strategy if an independent broker wants to get started, forget getting ranked organically initially. Go after local search engine optimization. Much easier, much less competitive, and you’ve got a big advantage because of your physical location. Jeff Root: Right, and you’ll probably get less leads just doing it local if somebody s you under local to you, they’re going to have a high conversion rate because they’re local. That in itself has value. Glenn Cooke: Absolutely. Now, in of numbers, numbers are all over the place, some folks say they don’t have much success. The yardstick, or the measurement that I use is one of my brokers on his own does very well in a city of about 200,000 people, and he tells me he gets three to five leads a week, plus a couple of phone calls. And they are excellent leads, because they’re not just looking for life insurance brokers, they’re looking for somebody in his city, and that’s him. So they’re absolutely wonderful, wonderful leads. Jeff Root: Right. And, to rank for local, it’s completely different than any sort of organic, you know, the typical search engine optimization that we do. Can you dive a little bit into that? What that entails? Glenn Cooke: Absolutely. Now, I’m still working on being very successful in the local SEO field. However, there are some fundamentals that aren’t that difficult. You need to set up a Google+ page and tell Google your physical location. They’re going to mail you a postcard, so that verifies your actual address. Second thing is, on your webpage, you want to indicate the hours you’re open and your location. Again, there’s a website called Schema.org. S-C-H-E-M-A.org. Schema.org will generate some code for you that you can put on your website. It’s HTML code that sits in behind things, maybe your developer will need to do this for you, that will specifically tell Google on your website your physical location, and the hours that you’re open. You can dictate that to Google right on your webpage using the code from Schema.org. So that’s the first thing, is set up your website, tell Google where you’re physically located. That guarantees to Google that you are in fact where you’re located. The next thing is, you need to go through a bunch of directories, local directories, you want links from other websites that are relevant to wherever you’re located. So if you’re in Austin, Texas, I would start doing searches on businesses in Austin, Texas, and seeing if I can find websites that have directories of local businesses. Yelp, Yellowpages, all these types of large business directories, very good places to get into. One of the things you need to be careful about is that you address is formatted identically across all of these websites, because Google’s going to pick up your address in all of these websites, realize it’s the same person or the same business, and again, give you more preference in getting ranked in the seven-pack of local search engine optimization results. Jeff Root: Awesome advice. And I’ll add here, that, I think they call it the NAP, the name, address, phone number. You need all those to match. If you’ve moved, you need to update that somehow within the directories. What about agents that don’t have an office that they can use? Do they recommend they use their home address for… Glenn Cooke: Absolutely. Jeff Root: Okay. Glenn Cooke: Absolutely. No reason why not. I use, again, we’ve got phone calls and leads coming in all day long, and our physical location is our rural home. I have a home office, we don’t have an external office anymore, and I’ve just had to Google mail the postcard to my office. Jeff Root: Perfect. Glenn Cooke: Forgive me, my home office. People don’t drop by typically, there’s little danger of that. People that are looking for insurance on the internet … The location is really for Google, not your consumers. Consumers typically aren’t going to walk up and knock on your back door and say “Can I buy some life insurance for ya?” Anymore than they would if you had a retail storefront location. I mean, that’d be nice, but clearly doesn’t happen. Jeff Root: Right. Okay, perfect. So there’s local, what about long tail? You’ve focused on a long tail I’ve noticed as well, with some of your websites. Glenn Cooke: Absolutely. Now, let me just define what long tail is, and a little bit about search behavior. When you graph the number of people that do searches on certain search , a lot of people, tons of people will search on a term like “term life insurance.” Not very many people are doing searches on “life insurance brokers in Austin, Texas,” so searches like “term life insurance,” “life insurance brokers,” that get a lot of searches on a few narrow search is called the short tail, or the fat tail. The long tail is all these little search that collectively generate a ton of traffic. Like I think it’s actually over half the searches these days are on these long tail search , and they’re much less competitive, so rather than trying to get 100 or 100 visitors off of one search term, like “term life insurance,” very difficult to do, instead, you focus on one visitor from 100 search . Much easier to do. So you start getting searches on “term life insurance Austin, Texas,” “life insurance brokers Austin, Texas,” “how much life insurance does a stay-at-home mom need?” All these secondary, minute search . Now the cool thing about doing that is, first of all, it’s much less competitive, much easier to rank on these things, and finally, these long tail search are where consumers actually convert. The research kind of phase starts with a consumer typing in “life insurance,” they do a bit of research, then they realize they’re looking for term life insurance, they type in “term life insurance,” then they do some more research and then eventually they’re looking for somebody who does term life insurance in Austin, Texas, and they do the last search, which is going to be something like “term life insurance brokers in Austin, Texas,” and that’s bang, if you show up there, that’s where you’re going to convert. Jeff Root: Right. Glenn Cooke: So, these long tail search , it’s just a matter of volume, small volume on a lot of , but they’re extremely high converting , and they’re easy to rank on. Absolutely where an independent broker should be focusing on. Jeff Root: Absolutely, and I’ll add to that to, as far as long tail goes, people search the darnedest things. We get people … Google and Bing, they sometimes on what the search are to their website, maybe like 98% is cut out from analytics and everything, but they do some , and when you look at some of those that are ed on, I mean, it’s stuff like “life insurance for fifty-eight-year-old male with multiple sclerosis in Denver, Colorado.” Glenn Cooke: Absolutely. Now, if you’re going to overwhelm this, I wouldn’t personally do this, Jeff Root: Right. Glenn Cooke: But I have seen it done, where people will put up articles, 500-word articles on “life insurance for over-fifty-year-olds,” “life insurance for over-fifty-five-year-olds,” “life insurance for over-sixty-year-olds,” and they just kind of broadcast across all those search , because absolutely people type that kind of stuff in. The stay-at-home mom example that I used earlier, “how much life insurance does a stay-at-home mom need?” Sometimes in the long tail search term you’ll find some absolute gold. And many years ago, Prudential, in the U.S., put up a calculator on how much life insurance a stay-at-home mom needs, and I thought “hey that’s kind of a cool calculator,” so I did an article on our website talking about a similar topic, “how much life insurance does a stay-at-home mom need?” I got a noticeable amount of traffic off of that search term. It’s not a search term that everybody targets or even necessarily knows exists, but there’s a substantial amount of traffic on that term as an example, and there’s plenty of more examples like that. Jeff Root: And I’ll add to that. All of my traffic, from all my websites and I can vouch for other people in the business, it’s mostly long tail. You know, we’re hitting those long tails. The long tails, anybody can rank for. Anybody. Glenn Cooke: That’s correct. Absolutely. And again, that’s exactly where the local search engine optimization and the long tail stuff, that’s what an independent broker should be targeting, because you can have some level of success doing that. Very easy, not that expensive to do, you can do a lot of the stuff on your own without assistance just by doing a bit of research and a bit of leg work. Jeff Root: Absolutely. All right, so let’s shift gears here and now that we’ve talked about how to get people to your website, now that they’re on your website, let’s talk about conversions. When looking at a website, what’s the first thing you look for at a life insurance website to make sure it’s a high-converting website? Glenn Cooke: Okay. This is the easiest thing you could possibly do, and it’s the biggest mistake almost everybody makes. And, let me just phrase it in sales terminology. Everybody who’s done business face-to-face knows that at some point you have to ask for a sale. If you sit at a kitchen table and do your presentation, and never quite get to the point of saying “are you ready to sign for the life insurance?” The consumer never will. On your website, the conversion is not … You’re just going to need to refocus on what a conversion is. A conversion is not the purchase of life insurance. On your website, the sale is the conversion of a visitor to a lead. So what you’re trying to do, or the “sale” on your website is “I want their name and phone number or name and email address,” so when I look at a website, the first thing I ask myself is “Is this website asking for the sale?” Are you specifically asking for their name and phone number? So it’s very obvious, the most visually obvious or important element of your website when I look at it needs to be you asking for the sale, which means you asking for the name and phone number. If you look at your website and the biggest thing there is not “give me your name and phone number,” you’re doin’ it wrong. Now, the reason this is so important is this can have a huge impact on the number of leads. And this, again, goes back to a fairly traditional sales funnel type of approach where people know that, in the traditional marketing strategy, you need to speak to 100 people to get 10 visits to get one lead, or, forgive me, one sale. That’s kind of a traditional type sales funnel. In the online world, if you get 100 visitors, and 10 of those convert into a lead, you might make one sale. If you want to get two sales, the automatic reaction is “well now I need to get 200 visitors. I need to double the number of visitors from Google.” That’s very, very hard to do. Instead, what is much easier is take the same 100 visitors and don’t convert 10 of them, convert 20. So that conversion aspect on your website is completely in your control, you can [inaudible 00:18:17] it, you can play around with it, you can do stuff with the same 100 visitors, so rather than taking 100 visitors and pumpin’ ’em up to 200, take the same 100 visitors, just create a much better-converting website, again, by asking for it, and that will generate more leads and, thus, more sales. So one of the keys is, again, as I mentioned, you need to make sure that your website is specifically asking for the sale. If you visit the top-converting websites, that’s the focus of their website, is “give me your name and phone number.” The other thing that can help and this is much less focused on, but it’s something that I do with some level of success, is, the question now for the visitor is “Why are they going to give you their name and phone number?” And there’s a lot of things that go into that. Some of it is authority. Are you a member of the Better Business Bureau, do you have certificates, or media presence, or a nice-looking website, or that kind of stuff. Do they like the look of your website, and does it look like somebody they want to do business with, so that’s one thing. The one thing that a lot of folks overlook is why is somebody going to give you that name and phone number? The most immediate answer to that is “because you have some sort of insurance quoting system.” You’re going to give me your name and phone number, I’m going to give you quotes from 150 life insurance websites. And there are a number of online life insurance quoting systems you can plug into your website. Final Expense, I think [inaudible 00:19:34] Quotes has a website that lets you plug in Final Expense quotes, Compulife has a plug in quoting system. These are all reasons why. But if you can do some thinking about additional reasons that other people aren’t doing as to why a consumer might give you their name and phone number, you can get some surprisingly good lead generation. Now, I’m going to give you one of the things that I do. I don’t reveal this up in Canada, this is kind of one of my little trade secrets. But in Canada, we have multi-policy discounts, so if we have a husband and wife, they get a bit of a discount if they both buy policy together. I’m not sure if that’s the case in the U.S. Jeff Root: Yeah, it’s not. Glenn Cooke: But in Canada, it’s absolutely the case. Okay, so in Canada, what I do, is something I’m doing that other people are not doing, is I have my regular quoting system, and then I have a little link at the top of every single quote that says “click here for more discounts if you’re quoting two people,” which almost everybody is; it’s normally husband and wife or a couple. So I get a lot of leads coming off of that, but then I get more people clicking on the “I want more discounts” button, filling in a name and phone number, and that’s them specifically asking me to give them a call. Those are the, you want to cherry pick leads, those are the best. So, you need to think about additional ways on top of insurance quoting systems as to why somebody might fill out their name and phone number. That’s one example. You might have a link for “click here if you’re hard to insure,” or “click here for a personal call,” or “click here for top ten reasons why you should buy life insurance,” or something. You want to give them back something that other people aren’t giving in exchange for the name and phone number. The more you can do that, the more conversions to leads you’re going to get, and, therefore, the more sales you’re going to make. Jeff Root: Great advice, and I’ll even add to one of the value ads you can give beyond the life insurance quotes and all that, is if you’re targeting a certain niche such as, say, diabetics, you can build a lead capture that asks a couple diabetic questions that say “Hey, we help diabetics. What’s your A1C level? How many years have you had diabetes?” And so on, so they know it’s a specific form for them, they’re more likely to fill that out over anything else out on the web, because nobody’s asking that question up front. It’s kind of an added layer of trust. So you can kind of get specific with really any niche. Skydivers, SCUBA divers, any health condition really, if you are targeting a specific demographic of people. So that’s just one thing that popped in my head … A way to take it beyond life insurance quotes and asking for the sale to get that conversion. Glenn Cooke: Absolutely. And this, Jeff, what you’re suggesting ties in to kind of everything. I actually have a friend in Pennsylvania that does exactly what you’re talking about, and this also ties into long tail, because searching for life insurance on diabetics is long tail stuff, they hit his website, it’s very authoritative because he has lots of information on diabetics and the impact on life insurance. He talks about that a lot through a variety of articles which makes him very authoritative, and then he’s got a form that says “here, if you’re lookin’ for more information or want a personalized consultation by phone, click here and give us further information on your diabetes,” and then, again, we’ve got an absolutely wonderful lead that’s got a high probability of converting into a sale. Jeff Root: Awesome. Really good advice here. Let’s move on I want to make sure we cover this other topic before we finish here, and you have a programming background and one of the things that I ire about your business is you’ve pretty much built everything yourself. You’ve designed and built everything yourself. You’re not going out there and purchasing all the software that I’m purchasing. You’ve pretty much figured out “Okay, this is the way I want it. This is how I want the process to be. I’m going to build it myself.” Can you talk about that process and your advice on kind of creating your own systems? Glenn Cooke: Absolutely. Well, the first thing is I was a programmer back in the eighties. I was not a good programmer. I was a horrible programmer. So that’s nice that I have that background, but I’m not any sort of programmer at all. What I have is a bit more of a business analysis experience. I know how to speak to programmers in that they can understand, but that’s not even that necessary. Most programmers these days know that they have to translate business speak into programming speak. My concern with buying prepackaged softwares is, it’s a couple concerns I have. The first one is, I don’t have control. If I want new features, it’s very difficult for me to add them. If I’m speaking to a big company and I say “I want this done,” they’re not going to do anything. If I do the code myself, or have it created for me using a programmer, if I want to change, if I want to tweak something it’s very easy to do. I pick up the phone or send an email to my programmer and say “Please make this change,” and I get the change the next day. So it’s very, very customizable. The second concern might be price. These days, and just to compare back to 15-20 years ago, 15-20 years ago I was paying programmers 150 dollars US. That was per-hour. That was the competitive rate. Today, if you go on Craigslist or something like that, you can find local programmers probably as cheap as 30 bucks an hour. Programming isn’t that expensive. So the key to doing it yourself is, or one of the keys is make sure you document every little thing that you can think of about how you want it done. Mock up some screens. Say “when I push this button, this is what I want to have happen.” And that’s exactly what I do. For everything on our website, it’s all customized, forgive me, the basic website is on a WordPress platform. That’s what we use, which is what most people use, but beyond that, everything else is customized. And that’s right up through, to, and including graphics. A number of years ago, I just got tired of the same stock image that every other website has, and we no longer use images that I don’t specifically own the copyright to, and again, surprisingly inexpensive, I found a local graphic artist. He charges me 35 bucks an hour, and designs all the graphics or web design that I want. So as an example, when I write blog posts, and this is one thing that makes my website better, all of my blog posts have a custom image inserted into them. I didn’t go out and get a stock image to fit an article on ten-year term life insurance. I had my designer create an image just for ten-year term life insurance that’s actually got my copyright information right on the image, so nobody else can take it. And again, that adds authority. Very inexpensive. I can have my developer, forgive me, my artist, develop 10 or 20 images for 10 or 20 blog posts to the tune of about 30 dollars. Jeff Root: And especially with websites like Pinterest and so on, some of these things, if you have a really good image with a really compelling message, you know, an image that strikes emotion, not a stock image, you can generate some traffic with those. Glenn Cooke: Absolutely. Now, actually, if we could just go on a bit of a tangent, it’s curious that you mention Pinterest. One of the world-renowned search engine optimization experts is a lady out of, coincidentally, Texas, called Sugarrae. That’s her online name, it’s S-U-G-A-R-R-A-E. Her name is Rae Hoffman. Her website is sugarrae.com. Last week, she released a 16-dollar eBook, I think it’s about 15 pages, that talks about how she got something like 50,000 back links just from Pinterest. Not even using Google. And I bought the eBook. I haven’t implemented it, but it’s something I’m absolutely going to try before the end of 2015 is to see if I can increase my traffic using Pinterest. It’s not even so much I want the traffic from Pinterest, but if the traffic from Pinterest gets me additional back links from people’s blogs and websites, then those links then help me rank in Google. My expectation is when I do something in Pinterest, once I figure out how to do this, I will be hiring probably my daughter’s best friend from high school, who’s a bit of an amateur photographer, and I’ll throw a few hundred dollars at him, have him take 50 or 60 pictures on different topics, family, Canada, finances, just stuff like that. And I will own those images for a very, very low amount of money. And then I’ll tack on some phrases and everything will be completely custom, and copyright-owned by me, which means consumers will notice this stuff, that it’s not the typical stock image stuff that some of you pay five dollars a month for access to. Jeff Root: Awesome. It’s those types of thoughts and action that really make a difference in why you see a lot of these websites, your websites, our websites, ranking. Is taking action on stuff like that, or constantly testing new things, whether it be marketing, whether it be technology, whether it be, you know, anything really. Conversions. It’s constantly testing and figuring out what works and do the things other people aren’t doing. Let’s get back to the third-party software and everything. Glenn Cooke: Yes. Jeff Root: So, can you give me examples of some things you’ve built for your agency? Just doing it yourself, that you really can do with purchasing an out-of-the-box piece of software? Glenn Cooke: Absolutely. So, I created a, well on our website we have four different quoting systems. We have life insurance, critical illness insurance, no medical exam life insurance, and travel insurance. For the life insurance, I use Compulife to backend the quoting engine, because they’ve got the rates and it’s far easier and cheaper for me to pay them. But the [inaudible 00:29:27] generation component is done by me. The critical illness calculator, again, that’s backended. The data is pulled from Compulife, but we’ve put a wrapper around it that compares not just s, because that’s sure enough easy to do, but we also compare product features, and the coverages, and the contract conditions of critical illness policies from the different companies. So that’s very much an addon. There’s about 25 different conditions that are covered in the critical illness policy in Canada. I’ve got every single one of them defined for each company, and that shows up in the actual quote. It’s a lot of additional information they don’t see in any other critical illness quoting system on the internet. The travel insurance quoting system we built from scratch. It’s not that hard. I had five companies send their rates in an Excel spreadsheet, sent them to my developer, told them how to calculate the s, I gave them specific examples, and said “Here’s what I want. I want this drop-down, this image,” and so the travel insurance quoting system is ours, and again, the no medical exam, which I think in the U.S. you guys call final expense, that was done from scratch. I actually went personally out on the internet to a lot of the big companies’ final expense systems, and I just spent like an hour on each website running quotes and marking down the data. I actually scraped the rates from a lot of these companies, popped them back into our website, and then had the programmer develop the quoting engine. The quoting engine for the no medical exam stuff, it might have cost me 500 dollars to get done, just to put it into perspective, it was not a huge, huge image, and I get a lot of traffic off of that. I think I’m the only [inaudible 00:31:07] candidate that quotes more than one company. We’ve got about 50 no medical exam, final expense policies on our quoting system, and I don’t think anybody else in Canada even has two. And we rank very, very well for that, and get a ton of traffic from it. So those are all examples of the kind of thing that we’re doing. Now, let me just give you a counterexample. Jeff Root: Sure. Glenn Cooke: So, in our agency, because we’re all virtually distributed, the brokers we use, we work with, are all not local to me. Some of them are 500 miles away. And they need to interact with our person and the insurance companies and all that sort of stuff, so we have a CRM. That is, we maintain here that our advisors used to [inaudible 00:31:48] the leads into it, and the leads get distributed out to the brokers, they work that through their calendar, also in the CRM, and then they coordinate with sales and stuff, with our person also through the CRN. So I’m using an open-source, off-the-shelf package currently, and I bought a module that lets us use our phone system in a much more effective manner. It just gets our brokers all aligned and focused in making calls in a much easier fashion than if you didn’t have this module. So I’ve paid for that, and it’s not a custom module. I pay the company, they sell just the module to integrate into the CRM system. And I needed to make some changes. One of the changes was as dead-obvious as the system sorts from oldest task to be done to newest, so if I’ve got a task in 2016, that’s the task that I see first. Every time I pull up the system, I have to resort it, hit a button, so it gives me the stuff I want to do today. I called the company; they’re not really interested in making this change. So we’re moving towards our own CRM where we’re going to take our knowledge and build a system that gives us all of the phone capabilities, where it keeps our brokers online, it just says “Okay, here’s your first phone call for today. Start calling. Start calling these leads.” That’ll all be done custom. We’re also going to have a custom email drip system in there that the broker will be able to say “Okay, I want to drip on them by phone. Call them by phone, put it in my calendar, start calling.” Or shovel them over to the email drip system. And the third thing we’re doing that I’m expecting to have a lot of success is we want to drip on them by SMS text. Lot of people under the age of 40, everybody knows this, they just don’t answer their phones. We get a lead in, we pound the heck out of it, we call, we call, we call, they never pick up because they’re 38 years old, and they’re just never going to pick up the phone when they see a phone number they don’t know. If you text them, you can increase the volume of conversions from leads to sales because some younger folks will respond to texts. Not everybody, but again, it’s a numbers game. So we ran a text where we texted ten leads that we’d tried to reach by phone and couldn’t. We texted ten of them. Two of them responded. Jeff Root: Wow. Glenn Cooke: So we took ten dead leads and we gave ourself two free leads. So this is all the kind of stuff we’re integrating into our client management system that we use in-house, and that’s all got to be done custom. Again, developing time, this is a fairly large task, probably a bit bigger than most independent agents would do. But it’s not outside the realm of a small agency to build this, because that’s all we are. And it’s going to cost me low, low thousands of dollars. I’m expecting a budget of about 2,000 dollars to build a complete CRM system using a developer. It’s not that expensive to do, and I have full control. My advisors say “Hey, I would like this sorted. I would like this report. I want this. I want that.” Very, very easy to do. I just pay the developer 50 bucks an hour and an hour later, for 50 dollars, I’ve got the change made. Jeff Root: Awesome. Awesome. It makes you so flexible with anything that you have going on, because you don’t know what your market is going to bring you tomorrow. You don’t know, you know, the challenges and the bottlenecks in your business that you can kind of create by automating it with software. And that makes you so much more flexible than any other agency out there because you have the skills and the knowledge, and you know, willing to take the risk to build the stuff out yourself. Glenn Cooke: I absolutely think at the agency level, absolutely. Right now, from what I’ve seen, the software that’s out there … Just because we’re a smaller niche market, there’s not a lot of players building out this kind of custom stuff that we use in our day-to-day practice. We’re stuck using more general software from Microsoft or whoever, which isn’t targeted at the insurance industry. So absolutely. It’s very inexpensive these days. It’s not that complex as long as the advisor spends a bit of time defining. That is probably the biggest hurdle you’re going to go over, and the easiest thing to fix all your problems is define what you want as specifically as you can before you have it handed over to the developer. The more you define it in clearer , exactly what happens every time a button’s pushed or what you want to see, the cheaper it will be, and the less bugs you will have. Jeff Root: Great. Great advice there. All right, I think we’re going to cut it up here. We’re running out of time. Glenn, thanks so much for being so generous with all the information you’ve given us. I mean, you’ve given us a lot of actionable advice. I know a lot of agents are going to see a lot of value in this episode. Hopefully we can have you back in the future, and I appreciate you coming on the show. Glenn Cooke: Thanks for your time, Jeff. I appreciate it. People in the episode: Jeff Root: [email protected] Glenn Cooke: [email protected] Mentioned on this episode: Schema.org Lifeinsurancecanada.com FEXquotes Compulife WordPress Pinterest SugarRae Pinterest Study Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes – Leave us a Review! (Here’s How) Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page Want to help improve the show? Want to hear about a specific topic? Just want to leave some ? … Send me a voice message

Taylor Pearson is a digital marketing consultant and has spent the last 3 years meeting with 100’s of entrepreneurs from around the world helping them with their businesses.  He’s been a huge influence on my business through a mastermind we take part in and we’ll be discussing ability and a excerpt from his new book, End of Jobs. In this episode learn: – ability through forming a mastermind…and how to form one. – Learn about “Expected Value” and how it relates to entrepreneurs (and our business). Click Here to View the Full Transcript Jeff Root: Taylor Pearson: Thanks for having me on, Jeff. Jeff Root: Of course. Let’s start here with a little bit about you and what you do. Taylor Pearson: My name is Taylor Pearson. My background is in digital marketing consulting for about the past half decade. I’ve worked in digital marketing either as a freelancer consultant in the agency or with a company. Over the past year, I have transitioned to working just on my own as a consultant and then moving into scaling that up and doing some more writing and publishing as a way to promote and generate leads for that. Jeff Root: Awesome. When you say writing and publishing, you’re actually coming out with a book, right? Taylor Pearson: I’ve got a book coming out the end of June. Jeff Root: Cool. We’ll get to that later in the podcast. I initially asked you to be on here because I had a request from an industry magazine to answer a question asked by a new agent in the business. Instead of writing a long article about that, I figured I’d talk to the person about masterminds. I’m going to read the question verbatim real quick so we can get some context here in the problem we’re solving here. The question reads, “What is your ability method? As we all know, advisors often fail because they do not hold themselves for the things that must be done to succeed. What do you do to ensure that you hold yourself able, and that you are held able to your goals and activity?” When I got this question I knew right away for me it was our mastermind. You and I have been masterminding for over a year now. On the phone every single week consistently. You’re the expert in this. You put it together, you run it. I’ve heard you talk about it a lot. Let’s get into that. Tell us what a mastermind is. Taylor Pearson: A mastermind is based around this idea that came from a book called Think and Grow Rich which was published probably a hundred years ago now. This guy named Napoleon Hill went out and he basically interviewed the most successful people of his era, so Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller and all these industrial titans to try and figure out what their secrets to success were, so to speak. One of the things he noticed was all these guys hung out together, and they all competed with each other and used each other for ability. They had this mastermind trust of other individuals they relied on. They could go to and say, “Here’s what I’m going to accomplish.” They had these people both to help them accomplish that, like sort through and talk through those challenges, but also those people to keep them personally able to actually getting the work done. The mastermind concept today, our mastermind and other masterminds I’ve run, are based around the same premise which is get a small group, usually four to six people, who are motivated and commitment and smart. Set up a weekly call, or some people do it bimonthly. Set up a regular recurring call to get in one place and have goals which you set for yourself that everyone else in that call holds you able for. That’s the basic breakdown of a mastermind. Jeff Root: Yeah. I can tell you that every week you and I and everybody else on our mastermind call, we talk about what we’re going to accomplish this next week and what we accomplished over the previous week to hold ourselves able to what we say. I know I hate getting on that call if I didn’t do what I said I was going to do. You know? Taylor Pearson: Yeah. I think it’s a natural tendency, or what most people seem to naturally believe, is you should just be able to hold yourself able. I’ve tried that so many times and never been able to do it successfully. Peer pressure and social pressure just works extremely well. There’s a lot of times where I will do things I don’t necessarily want to do whether it’s making a bunch of cold calls or something that otherwise seems unsavory. I just don’t want to get on the call with five other smart dudes that I respect and be like, “Uh, I didn’t do what I said I was going to do.” It’s like that’s far more embarrassing than actually doing the work. Jeff Root: Totally. Yeah. What would you say are the major benefits to ing a mastermind? Taylor Pearson: I think one is what we’ve been talking about which is that ability. If you set a goal, you said, by next week I’m going to accomplish either X … I like to have it be something that’s either falsifiable so it’s an event. I’m going to do this and then I’m going to send this proposal or I’m going to make X number of calls, fifty calls, a thousand calls, whatever it is. You have something which you can either definitively have or have not accomplished, so the ability portion is big. Then also problem solving. A lot of times it’s very easy to get caught up in your own head thinking about one way to attack a problem. If you air that problem out to other smart people in your industry who are thinking about the same stuff, they can help you sort through your own thoughts to figure out the solution a lot faster than you doing it on your own. Jeff Root: Absolutely. For me, also it helps me to keep aiming higher on top of that. To make sure that the stuff that I claim I’m going to do or that I want to do, that it’s not just easy stuff that I know I can knock out in a couple of hours. It pushes me to aim higher and pushes everybody else in the group to aim higher as well. Also, one of the things too is, in our mastermind … I can only speak for us. We all run different types of businesses. We’re all sales/marketing guys. That’s the foundation of what we do, so we share a lot of the same things. I tried to get a life insurance mastermind together and it didn’t go too well. It just felt like the dynamics were off. I had a couple of life insurance agents flat out tell me they didn’t want to share some information out of fear of another life insurance agent stepping in on their market or one of those things. I almost think it’s good to find people outside of your actual industry, for us life insurance agents at least. Find other entrepreneurs that are also sales and marketers. Do you find that to be the case? Taylor Pearson: It’s often the big, big, wins come from outside the industry. If you stay inside your own industry, everything flows together. If you look at technology start-up web pages, they all look the same and they have the same format. Everyone is copying everyone else. It’s only when someone comes in from the outside and brings out those big ideas. I look at what you’ve done in life insurance. You were in these internet marketing industries, and you’ve brought a lot of that innovation into the life insurance industry. That wouldn’t have been possible if you had just stayed in your own industry. Jeff Root: Absolutely. It all happened really a few years ago meeting up with our group. I think I met you in Thailand almost two years ago now. Since then my business has completely morphed. I used to be a decent internet marketer. Now it feels like I’m a bad-ass internet life insurance marketer. I feel like I’ve figured some things out. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I didn’t get out of the life insurance industry and ed some masterminds and learned from other businesses besides life insurance businesses. Taylor Pearson: Yeah. I’ve been feeling that a lot lately. I’m always seeking to broaden those horizons. What is it that I don’t know I don’t know? Jeff Root: Um-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Let’s say you’re a life insurance agent and you want to get started in a mastermind, get this ability thing going, learn from other businesses, teach other businesses the things you know, that type of thing. How would somebody go about reaching out to people to a mastermind, other business owners? Taylor Pearson: Sure. I always start with personal friends, people I’ve met in person, personal relationships. I would sit down. I would make a list of five people who I know personally who are … I think the important things seems to be some sort of shared values. If you’re trying to start this new venture, new business, new endeavor, having someone else who’s out there trying to do something ambitious and make something happen, who are the four to five people that come to mind you can think of that are on a similar path. Then sit them down and just explain this concept. You can either send them this podcast, or there’s plenty of resources online about masterminds and what they are. Say, “Look. You know, I think I want to make this happen. If you’re committed to making something else happen, let’s get down and let’s make it happen.” I generally find three people is plenty. Four to six seems to be optimal. Jeff Root: Um-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Okay. As far as structure, for somebody that’s never done a mastermind before, would you recommend the same as ours? Taylor Pearson: Yeah. The structure I like is a weekly call for one hour set on a recurring basis, so just pick a consistent time. We do ours at the end of the day Thursday, which seems to be a good time because it’s towards the end of the week when everybody is getting a little bit more reflective. It’s also not on a Friday if people are trying to get out of town or it’s a long weekend or whatever. Have it be a recurring call. Then everyone starts off. Say there’s five people on the call, four people would do just a quick update. That’s three to five minutes. All you’re going to say is your progress towards you goals from the last week. Last week you set out eighty-three percent of our goal. What’s your progress towards that goal? If you have any big problems or big opportunities, something that’s come up, bring that up. Then if someone wants to dive into that, you can do it after the call. Have the bulk of the call about forty to forty-five minutes for one person to be on the hot seat, which is to really go deep into one person’s problems. You’d have five people on the call, four people would give a three to five minute update. Then one person would come on and they would, make sure they prepared for the call, spend twenty or thirty minutes talking about some of the biggest problems in what they’re working on then. Have everyone, that collective intelligence, work on helping them solve that problem or take advantage of the opportunity, whatever seems to be more pressing. Jeff Root: Right. I cannot tell you how valuable that has been for my business at least. Being in the hot seat seems intimidating, but to get on problems that are in your head that you really can’t get out, just articulating it out loud to another group who are asking questions and probing, that in itself helps you maneuver through a lot of these challenges in your businesses and a lot of these limiting beliefs that you might have as well. Taylor Pearson: I think a lot of people, I know this was true of me, kind of hesitate because you’re like, “Oh, this is going to be embarrassing.” It is. I think almost every time I get on the hot seat, I feel embarrassed. I’m like, “Oh, why haven’t I figured this out?” Or, “This sound stupid.” But it’s always eventually helpful. Every time before I get on the hot seat, I’m really nervous before the call for thirty minutes. I’m like, “Oh, God. What are these guys going to say? This is going to sound so dumb.” Every time it’s immensely valuable. Jeff Root: Yes. Absolutely. Okay. Cool. I think we’ve covered masterminds there. I want to get into your book. It’s called End of Jobs, which is an amazing read by the way. I read it last night. Why don’t you give us a little bit of a summary of what it’s all about. Taylor Pearson: The book is called The End of Jobs. The big picture summary is that what is going on at a macro economic level is that the factors which are moving in the macro economy, primarily globalization and technology, are making jobs as institution more competitive and less profitable. Those same forces are also making entrepreneurship more accessible, safer, and more profitable than ever. It’s kind of a 21st Century career path guide in that sense. Jeff Root: Yeah. I could talk about so many things in there. Your book is completely relevant to what’s happening in the life insurance industry. Our industry is going through a distribution transformation right now. Life insurance has been sold belly-to-belly for over a century. Within the last fifteen years there’s been a trend to consumers buying online and over the phone. Right now it’s about a 50/50 split according to the latest stats. I really love the piece in your book that … There’s a lot of pieces in it, but one that’s sticking out right now, and it’s relevant to me because I am a former poker player, and a lot of former poker players are becoming entrepreneurs because they get the map and understand EV, or expected value. I’d like to talk about expected value because a lot of life insurance agents are scared to invest in their online marketing and acquire the next generation life insurance agent skills that are becoming more and more important. The internet marketing, just the online presence. I don’t think many of them understand expected value. Can you explain what expected value to you means first? Taylor Pearson: Yeah. Let me give a bit of background about expected value. The concept is, if you look at poker players, let’s say you’re playing a hand of poker and there’s one card left to be shown. Let’s say you think you have a twenty percent chance to win that pot, and the pot is worth twenty thousand dollars. You have a twenty percent chance to win. If you multiply that out, there’s a one in five chance you win twenty thousand dollars. Your expected value in that case is four thousand, twenty percent times twenty thousand. It it costs you a thousand dollars to see that last card, it’s a good expected value bet for you to pay a thousand dollars to see that card. If you could do that a hundred times, you would end up on top. Paying a thousand dollars for four thousand dollars is a very straightforward proposition. It’s very easy to convince people to do that. One of the psychological biases we have as humans, and this is from some work a psychologist named Daniel Kahneman did in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, is that we tend to be more loss averse, which is when we see this possibility that we might lose something we tend to avoid really quantifying the probabilities of losing it and what the implications are. A lot of times people will up on those opportunities, even though they have a positive expected value, just because they’re afraid of losing a little bit. As it relates to entrepreneurship, one of the things I noticed around a lot of my entrepreneurial friends, people we hand out with, was a lot of them were former poker players. They had gotten into entrepreneurship because they saw the same math playing out that maybe you start five ventures and four of them lose, but the expected value is high enough that in the end you still win. Jeff Root: Um-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. That’s what stuck with me about expected value in your book was that while no individual opportunity is guaranteed to pan out, like an agent pivoting to an online or phone sales, systematically pursuing opportunities with a plus or positive expected value means you’re going to find success over time. You go way deeper than that in your book, but to me that translates to life insurance agents in that you know where the industry is headed. We’re reading the statistics. We know we’re doing our research online. Consumers are doing their research online. It’s a positive expected value move to make a pivot right now. It’s the right move, but it may or may not pan out. That’s okay. If you keep with it and keep making those moves, eventually it will pan out. That’s what I took for it with a lot of the way our industry is thinking right now and making this pivot to online, expected value is a great concept. Taylor Pearson: The thing that the poker analogy doesn’t really capture, but that is perhaps more significant, or the two things are, one is that part of what the internet has done is it’s made these bets a lot cheaper. If you wanted to go start up a business twenty years ago, you were buying real estate and you’re making all these capital intensive you had to pay a bunch of money to get stuff. That’s not true. I suspect your first internet marketing ventures weren’t very successful, but they were also probably relatively cheap. You buy a domain name for fourteen dollars. Compared to putting down … If you want to open a store at a physical location where you’re g a two-year lease for thousands of dollars a month, even paying well over five thousand dollars for a one-time website, is much, much, less expensive. The other aspect that’s not captured is you get better. You learn from those failures. Each time you make that bet, your probabilities increase. Jeff Root: Yeah. Like you said, it’s so much easier to start a business because of the internet and technology right now. Like you said, the costs associated with it are a lot lower so your risk is a lot lower too. There’s just so much upside because the internet is connecting us to everything, to everyone. I think that was the next section in your book after the expected value was how technology is eating the world. Taylor Pearson: Yes. Very much so. One of the original subtitles was The Dying Middle Class, which I eventually changed. Part of the implication is the middle class is definitely dying. I think the popular reaction to that has been telement it and try and prevent it. It’s just not really going to work. The nature of technology and what’s going on is that the middle class is going to die. My encouragement to people is, it’s going to die so exit up. If it’s going to disappear, get on the right side of the chasm that’s forming. Jeff Root: Right. Right. Not diving deep here, but in a broader sense it’s seeing how much safer it is to choose entrepreneurship over a job or doing things the way they’ve always been done because of everything happening in our economy right now. Taylor Pearson: Right. I think that’s the new ground I wanted to break, that was the message that I thought wasn’t getting told, even by a lot of entrepreneurs, is that because of what’s going on in the economy, because of the changes that are happening, everyone is going to have to become an entrepreneurs eventually. The way we’re headed with technology, and the way we’re headed with globalization, is that all these roles which are clearly defined where someone is giving you a system which you are in charge of implementing and you’re not, in fact, creating or innovating the system yourself, those roles are going to either move overseas to where the cost of labor is very low, or they’re going to be turned into software. You’re going to have to do it eventually. Is it better to actively invest in it and prepare yourself than let the forces happen to you and be in a situation where you’re not prepared. Where someone is laid off or they have some event like that where all of a sudden now they’ve got lifestyle overhead. They’re paying a mortgage. They have a family to . Now they’ve all of a sudden got to develop this entrepreneurial skill set. Jeff Root: Right. I think I was reading somewhere recently about how some of the top skills for future generations are either being in technology or being in marketing. Either of those two because you can’t really replace either of those two. That’s just where it’s headed. Taylor Pearson: There’s an economist from Georgetown named Tyler Cowen. He spent a long time studying all this. His assertion is basically that. There will only be three “industries” or roles in the future, which are selling technology, marketing technology, or building technology. That’s pretty much all that’s going to be left. Jeff Root: Makes a lot of sense. I can dig much further in this. I don’t want to give away your whole book. Where can people find you and read more about what we’re talking about, End of Jobs and so on? Taylor Pearson: You can find me at Taylor Pearson, you just type it into Google. My URL is taylorpearson.me. The book is on Amazon. It is called The End of Jobs. Jeff Root: Perfect. I’ll link to all this in the show notes at selltermlife.com. Taylor, that was awesome. I appreciate you coming on the show and sharing your wisdom with us. Taylor Pearson: Thank you for having me on. Thanks everyone for listening. If you want to ask questions, please feel free to reach out. Jeff Root: Awesome. Thanks, Taylor. People in the episode: Jeff Root: [email protected] Taylor Pearson: [email protected] Mentioned on this episode: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill TaylorPearson.me End of Jobs by Taylor Pearson   Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes – Leave us a Review! (Here’s How) Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page Want to help improve the show? Want to hear about a specific topic? Just want to leave some ? … Send me a voice message

Patrick Pegram, also known as “Skipper”, is a 30 year life insurance industry veteran and has to be one of the most experience mortgage protection experts out there. There’s a lot of hype around the mortgage protection life insurance market and Patrick gives us the truth on what you can actually expect and how to best work this market. 2:35  MetLife and Century 21 partnership in the mid-80’s 14:50  Sell to their immediate need, don’t do a full needs analysis. 27:00  Current mortgage protection data and lead discussion 35:40  Data examples – Statistically why NAA (and other MP outfits) can’t realistically work.  NAA is in the lead business, not the life insurance business. 43:05  Cost per lead and what seasoned mortgage protection agents are doing. 50:15  Why it’s difficult to sell mortgage protection over the phone. 53:00  Many mortgage protection sales are final expense products.  Top agent that does $500k+ does a lot of final expense. 55:30  Live search of mortgages in 1 state and how many leads can actually be generated.  (great perspective) Click Here to View the Full Transcript Jeff Root: All right, let’s get to it. Today we have Patrick Pegram, from Legacy Insurance Group. Welcome to the podcast, Patrick. Patrick Pegram: Thank you for having me, Jeff. Glad to be here. Jeff Root: Yup, great. Why don’t we start with some background about yourself. You’ve been in the industry for, what, 20-plus years, right? Patrick Pegram: Yeah, actually, this is my 30th year in the business. When you start measuring in decades versus every other year, it starts to get real real quick, but actually I started young in the insurance business, only a couple years out of college, so I then ed Metropolitan Life, a career agency, as you all know, every familiar with that name. A couple of things happened there right when I had ed. They actually had bought a real estate company we all know, Century 21, and they had envisioned a insurance agent in every Century 21 office. At the time, they had a big property and [inaudible 00:03:03] division at Metropolitan, and they wanted to sell homeowners insurance, because in the mid-’80’s also with [inaudible 00:03:11] came a deregulation where brokers, banks, could start having an insurance license. Their vision was to basically have a split commission with an agent to the broker, so we could sell homeowners policies and eventually, again, the mortgage protection, as it was termed. They called it mortgage insurance back then. It worked out really well. They had a very good system of training life guys as P&C guys, so we were extremely well trained on the P&C side, and did pretty well. Myself, I was in the Detroit/Toledo, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan area, in between the two cities, and I had three real estate offices, oh, within probably a five-mile radius, maybe six, of each other. It was a nice area south of Detroit, and as a young man, I was still in my early, mid-20’s, and it gave me an opportunity to get a high volume of insurance. Yes, I had to split a whopping 50% life commission with a broker at 70/30, and the same thing with P&C, but it in turn gave us a lot of volume at the time of business. We walk around today of, “How are we going to get leads, how are we going to get leads?” Well, each office generated about 50 to 70 closings a month, and I had three of them, so I had 200 new prospects a month to sell homeowners and life insurance to. That kept me extremely busy, obviously. I was very typical, six days a week, typically worked on Saturdays because that’s when real estate sold a lot, and on Sundays. I usually took a Monday off, and lived, breathed, and did everything with Century 21 Insurance Services, as they called themselves, which was a division of MetLife. Had a wonderful career there, I was the number one producing agent in the company, and also at the top five Metropolitan nationally for life insurance. The whole system was, I was a very organized individual, and I had a way of basically endearing myself to the broker, because it still had to build on relationship building. An agent couldn’t just get thrown in the office and they had to do business with you. You still had to woo your way in, because what you were selling is not how they really make money. Jeff Root: Right. Patrick Pegram: They make money on that nice one percent, two percent they’re making on the closing of a $100,000 house. Their 30% on a $350 at 20% commission, being the whopping- Jeff Root: 60 bucks, yeah. Patrick Pegram: -nothing, so you can’t jeopardize … You had to find your way to endear them, and one of the ways back then was Metropolitan came up with a good way of doing a homeowners policy with instant issue, where I could provide a death page for the mortgage company to accept and close. That wasn’t really available a lot back then, instant issue. It was a lot of handwritten binders and stuff. This was an instant issue setup, which was unique. Now it’s commonplace, today, but my laptop was an old 200 … What’s it called, a 286 from IBM. The battery was the size of a car battery. It had a six-inch screen. This was big technology back then, and we were able to do a lot of policy issues right inside the real estate office. I had a routine where I was just bouncing from one office to the other, making sure they got their closings, and we basically did about one out of every three homes closed, or sales done, in that office. I was able to bring on board with Metropolitan, which is a huge percentage, roughly about 60, 70 new homeowners policies per month. Jeff Root: Wow. Patrick Pegram: Mind you, an agent is usually going to do simple, small office that’s your mom-and-pop agency, like a State Farm, they’re lucky to do that many in a month, of themselves, and for a big office, most of the time it’s between 20 and 30 of them. Here I am, just one little guy, bouncing between three real estate offices, doing about 70 a month. I was really cranking it out, and basically that’s all I did, is to get in the door, meet them, get them a policy, put a little bug in their ear about mortgage protection, covering themselves, and basically let the mortgage close. Let everybody make their money, they gave me the relationship, and then I just basically worked the book of business afterwards, and would see these folks at night a lot of times. Obviously, most of them were just home buyers in their 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s, so you had to see them at night. It was really all about covering their mortgage at that time. Now, that was an easy sale because I’ve already established a relationship with them, and they let me in, and I was basically the first one to talk to them about it. Over time, I’ve learned that that is the key to mortgage protection. The first person to talk to them about it usually wins. Out of all those homeowners policies I sold, at least 75% of them bought mortgage protection from me. Jeff Root: Wow. Patrick Pegram: That means I was first in the door, and they all bought. Now, back then, mortgage protection is like what [inaudible 00:09:13] fully underwritten, decreasing term, and I think the biggest term level was five-year term, on a level based. Most of the time, it was a decreasing term program, or whole life with a five-year term rider. You’re looking at that type of program that you were selling, and it was very easy to sell. Now, mind you, mortgages where I was at were a lot of first and second time home buyers back in the day, where you had a starter home of $50,000, so I was writing a lot of small policies; but then I’d talk to the people, and I ended up converting a lot of those policies a few years later, when I was still at MetLife, into UL’s because they needed additional coverage; or I’d talk people into buying a UL right off the bat. Again, $100 a month was always the simple asked. It depends how young they were. I had a simple rule, I had a 90/10 rule. If they were in their 20’s or 30’s, 10% had to be maybe permanent, and 90% had to be term insurance, just because of affordability and to make sure they had the coverage. I learned that early in my career, that it’s more important to have the coverage they need at a young age than what they want. Everybody wants to save for retirement at 20 bucks … I mean, at age 25, rather. That person could put 40 years into a UL at 12% interest rate, or 10% at the time that they were getting, and those illustrations look fantastic. Obviously, they didn’t stick around that long; obviously, the rates went down to four percent 20 years later, but that’s what you did back in the ’80’s. I never did, I always did it at a smaller percentage rate to illustrate, but the main point is it was easy to convince somebody to put 100 bucks away to save for retirement back then. They would do that at the … probably at detriment of covering themselves for what they really needed. I learned that early in my career, to make sure somebody was covered properly, rather than selling a high-priced, high-commission product like UL, making sure they at least had a five-year term policy that covered their basic needs of replacing income. Four months into my career, I had somebody buy a policy from me. They loved the idea of I used to do an old story called the “hundred man story,” and I’d sell somebody on the idea of putting $100 a month away. They loved it, went over their budget. They really could only afford 60 bucks at the time, but that only bought the guy about $70,000 worth of insurance, and he was a young man with three kids and the wife was at home. Realistically, $60 could buy him $400,000 of coverage. Now, as a new trainee, you have your manager, and so they’re telling you, “Sell him the UL, sell him the UL.” I said, “Well, he needs the 400,000, not the 70,” so I told her to get the hell out of the house while I finished up the term policy. I was very determined, because I was a young man with my father who died when I was two years old, so my ma struggled for raising me in the ’60’s and ’70’s, and so I understood, put myself in their shoes, and I determined I would never let that happen to any of my customers. Unbeknownst to me, three weeks later after the medical was done and they issued the policy, the man turned his car over on the freeway and was killed. The ironic thing about that is I’ve stuck to my guns, and understood how important a term insurance is. This is a story I tell a lot of people, whether I’m recruiting somebody or, these days, I would just tell a customer something that’s very moving in a sales presentation. The bottom line is, is I know it meant a lot to that family personally. I seen them through that tumultuous time, and the funny part is is all three of those kids graduated from college. Jeff Root: Awesome. Patrick Pegram: With the money that we were able to put aside for them, plus the living expenses and making life easier for them, they had enough money to go through college. I kept in touch with them for 25 years. I think the last few years they lost touch, because they’ve got their own lives, and the mom was still alive and remarried about ten years later. It’s a nice story that I use, especially in the selling situation, of how having the proper protection when you’re young is important, versus just being sold on a great idea, saving, saving, saving. You still need to do it, but people need to get a habit of spending money on certain things. It helped me in my selling career, obviously, with mortgage protection, because I could sell that story in a mortgage protection selling situation, and I’d sell it every time. It was a pretty simple thing, especially if I got a little pushback. The MetLife program did a couple of things for me. It told me that with volume, being first in the door, that’s how mortgage protection is sold; and having a good story attached to mortgage protection like the one I just mentioned is also helpful, because it’s an immediate need sale, not a total valuation sale. A lot of times, agents that are taught in the fully underwritten market, they’re doing a needs analysis. They’re doing the full financial overview. Well, if they were actually interested in that, they would never have sunk the [inaudible 00:15:14] that you have sent in for mortgage protection. They’re interested in an immediate need, impulse buy decision. Now, that doesn’t mean you’re not going to do that a year from now or two years from now, but they’re impulse buying right now, and that’s why that card or mailer is sent to you. You have to basically take into that it’s a immediate need, immediate sale type situation, and it’s an impulse buy, so you have to design your presentation around satisfying what a customer wants versus more than what they need. You’re job as an insurance salesman is obviously to make money, but you’re establishing and , or a client, with that customer, that first sale. We have a little saying in our office here at Legacy Insurance Group, which is my IMO, is, “Every time you make a sale, all you have is a customer; but when you make the second sale on the house, that’s when you get a client. When you make the third sale on a house, that’s when you have a client for life.” That is true to form in almost any situation, if you been in the business a long time. Clients are golden, referrals from clients are golden, and when you just have one sale or a quick in-and-out, they’re just a customer, which means they’ll just go with the next guy down the line that talks to them. Working your book is extremely important to be able to have that relationship and cross sell into other product lines, cross sell for doing a financial needs analysis or overall insurance review. They’ll invite you back in if you’re doing something, because they already have that relationship with you. Jeff Root: Right, and that’s true- Patrick Pegram: Something like one-time … If you treat them like a one-time, one-and-done sale, then they’re going to feel like that, and that’s not what you want to do in the long run, and that’s what you see a lot of. Jeff Root: Yeah. That’s a really good point. Patrick Pegram: [crosstalk 00:17:18]? Jeff Root: No, yeah, I was going to say it’s a really good point, and with internet life insurance leads, it’s the same thing. If somebody’s requesting a $250,000 policy, and an agent wants to be the consultant and the financial planner and try and sell them a lot more, when really you just need to get in the door. The way you’re saying that you sell mortgage protection, give them what they need, they’re trying to cover their mortgage, that’s what they want, give it to them, establish the relationship. I love that approach. You’re simplifying things, and you know that the long-term value of this is going to be a lot more than what you’re getting today. Patrick Pegram: We call it relationship building. You can’t have a relationship unless there is some type of exchange, or obviously a purchase being done. Once that is done, then you can build on the relationship. It’s like your first date. You can’t build on a relationship unless you have a first date with a girl, or a guy. It’s no different. I was lucky in the ’80’s to meet a gentleman who was up and coming as a motivational speaker. You all know the name Anthony Robbins, or Tony Robbins. He and I met in 1985, when he was basically nobody at the time, so it was a lot more fun back then to get to know somebody. We’re about the same age, and about the same height, and had a lot of the same [inaudible 00:18:50]. The guy was brilliant at [how-ing 00:18:52] how to relate or build relationships, or understanding how people think. I learned a lot as a young salesman off of him, and to establishing certain rapport and skills with just relating to people and listening to people. The one thing I’ve been able to do is correlate this a lot with insurance. Most insurance men talk too much. They don’t listen. That’s the difference. When you start listening to your clients, they always tell you what they want. That’s it. When it come to mortgage protection, they’ve already told you in one way. Now, I’ve been continuing mortgage protection throughout my entire career. It’s never been my number one way of making money, but it’s been a part of an overall life insurance and commercial insurance strategy. I continued on with MetLife until the 1990, and decided to leave them because they had, as any company does, when they got a good thing going, especially a large one, they screw it up. They decided to merge the field force with Century 21 Insurance into MetLife field force, and as soon as that happened … All MetLife cared about back in that time period is burning and turning their own book of business. It was all about selling life insurance. P&C was lacker slot. In fact, I went to the Detroit region, where they had 175 agents in one office, and there was one guy selling P&C. He hated it when I came there, because now I was competition because he had no competition. It was a thing that they didn’t realize how much money could be made in P&C, and I just turned it out and blew that guy out of the water. I mean, this guy’s doing about 60,000 a year with just P&C and another 60 in life insurance, and I come in and do 60,000 in P&C in the first two months. They just couldn’t realize, and they saw the checks coming in, and MetLife was full of the guys back then that were managers getting ready to retire, and they were just all about building their last three years of … That’s how their retirement programs were looked at, is their last three years of income. It was all about any kind of first year commission. Anyhow, they started screwing it up. I didn’t like their burn and turn philosophy, so I left MetLife. In the meantime, during all of that, I also was building a large business in the group health market. I liked working with business owners, and happened to bump into quite a bit with these real estate folks, and just started talking to other businesses and started selling health insurance. Really enjoyed it, and so I left MetLife. I left a lot of money on the table, almost a half a million dollars in first year commissions that hadn’t been paid yet. That’s a tough thing to do, but I had already built up an [inaudible 00:22:03] group health agency, which they gave … They condoned it, they didn’t care because I was making enough money for them. At least that nailed it up enough where I could walk away and still have a decent revenue coming in, and that was a residual type income benefit, which gave me about $100,000 a year, which was pretty nice. It gave me an opportunity to walk away from MetLife and still have money to pay my bills, and I hadn’t even turned 30 yet. It was a lot of work, went into doing all of this, but what I found is I ended up going into helping out a friend of mine that was needing a lot of group health insurance. He owned what they call today a PEO; back then they called it an employee leasing shop, and they really didn’t have a clue what they were doing. Another gentleman I knew had a small payroll company that I basically took over and moved him out, and I founded a company back then that specialized in a one-stop-shop approach to group health, Worker’s Comp, the whole bit. That’s how I made my fortune, if you want to say it anywhere. I continually managed to do mortgage protection in my local area as part of the overall theme of what I do on that. Made a ton of money in every angle, but I learned in this business, as I learned each product, learned everything, we keep writing business from different areas. I was a full lines agent, obviously, property, casualty, and life insurance and health insurance, and group products, and 401K’s. I did it all in that area, but I did it in phases. I learned the product, then added it to my portfolio and became very good at it. It was never an all-at-once type of thing, but having this overall majority, it did pretty well on the life insurance side with the payroll company because I was doing a lot of business owners, and it taught me how to really sell a lot over the phone. I had one year personally I did over 3,000 businesses over the phone, never met a customer. Jeff Root: Awesome. Patrick Pegram: That took a lot of work and talent, but they trusted us and I attribute that to a lot of what Tony Robbins had taught me about listening skills over the phone. I know you can make money over the phone and establish a relationship, but it’s not the same in in the life insurance side versus a payroll company [inaudible 00:24:37] a relationship, because I added health insurance, Worker’s Comp and business insurance, buy/sell agreements with the owners. I added so much where there was so much day-to-day that the relationship built over time, where when you sell life insurance over the phone it’s just a one-and-done sale. You try to establish a relationship, but it’s difficult. When you have a business relationship with a business owner, and it’s every day they see your name, that’s a different story. I learned a lot of things during that time period that I applied for that business, and then again, another thing I learned from MetLife was branding. I learned how to brand my company, brand what I did, and MetLife, at the same time back when I started with them, they also bought Snoop. Sometimes, being at the right place at the right time, as a young man it taught me how powerful a brand can be by simply being the old Metropolitan stuffed shirt, briefcase toting guy one day, and then the next day Snoopy’s my boss and Charlie Brown’s the CFO. People lightened up all of a sudden. It lightened up their entire image by that simple purchase, and being able to brand themselves with Snoopy and the Peanuts characters. That stuck with me as a built my other companies, so I always was important about branding. Mortgage protection itself, as we started branding a little bit more on the mailers, I built a little bit of an agency in the Michigan area and we became very good at it. Never more than five guys, because I wasn’t interested in really building anything. I was more interested in personal sales. I always tell folks, “Personal sales is where you make money, not recruiting,” and boy, am I horrid at that. I made a fortune at personal sales, but never came close to what I made at recruiting somebody. Jeff Root: I will second that. Patrick Pegram: Yeah, it was a lot of things, and I enjoyed a 26-year career in personal sales and I actually retired until my wife kicked me out of the house and said, “Hey, go get a job, you’re driving me crazy.” I called up a friend of mine and got back in, and that’s how Legacy started back in 2010, the end of 2010. Came back into the business to try to teach folks what I’ve learned along that line, and mortgage protection, as we’re here to talk a little bit about that, I want to shed a little truth about mortgage protection that a lot of people don’t know, and that is where the money’s coming from, where the money’s at. Now, back in the day when guys like myself and my age group were doing mortgage protection, we had to do it on the only underwritten market. You either went to your local county, got the list of people who just closed, and recording in the … I think it’s called the [lie-ber 00:27:41] index in the county, and you got those names. You either wrote them down or you had to pay somebody to do it for you, or I think the county would give you a copy, but it was $1 a page. It was really crazy stuff like that. Usually, you hired some high school kid and taught him how to do it, and he wrote them down in every county, just so you can get those letters off every week to each individual person before somebody else did. A lot of footwork, that’s part of the prospecting method that you learn as an insurance agent. Then you had a chance to go in with your company and fully underwrote it, and make a sale. That’s prospecting. Now, direct mail and everything has developed a lot in the last 15 years for mortgage protection, but the data gathering hasn’t. It still is just I would say the last ten years has become automated, where most of the counties are now tapping into a simple automated system where people can get that information through witness gatherers. Now, the companies that do list gathering, there are a ton of them out there. You’ve heard a lot about TransUnion, Experian, Acxiom. These are data gatherers, but they’re actually not good places to buy mortgage protection data. That’s not what they do. They only update that data once a month, which means they’re buying it once a month and then putting it in there. You have to go to a data gatherer that specializes in new home sales and mortgages, and they’re few and far between, and as I will attest to, we don’t give out that information. It’s not cheap. It’s not like buying a list of names to go door knock from somebody. It’s about six, seven times more in cost. Jeff Root: What do you look at for mortgage protection lead, as a cost per lead? The way you do it, with this updated data? Patrick Pegram: The cost per lead, I’m going to get into that in a little … I don’t believe in buying mortgage data on a per lead, cost per lead basis. That’s something that some IMO’s and … I could name names, and everybody would know who they area. Jeff Root: NAA. Patrick Pegram: Specialize in mortgage protection. I’ve had a lot of their offshoots. They’ve had a lot of people leave NAA, start their own IMO’s up, basically taking that information. Basically, everybody, the general knowledge is there, but there’s actually an enormous cost, up-front money that needs to be paid to actually get leads, where most individual agents can’t afford to do it unless they’re just sitting there locally doing 100 to 200 first class mailers a week like I used to 25 years ago. Those guys still are the biggest bulk of mortgage protection agents, getting their data locally. They’re just trying to get one or two leads every other week to do mortgage protection to make a life sale. They’re part of their overall prospecting for life. It’s still going to be seminars, or it’s going to be speeches at the Kiwanis Club or the Elk and all, things along that line. They’re going to do what they’re going to do to get in front of people for their networking situations, and mortgage protection’s just one extra thing to get in front of more people. They’re going to be getting referrals, they’re going to hit those referrals up for insurance, and so on. Those agents that do that mortgage protection business are actually probably the most successful at it, because they’re really looking at it as a local scenario. They’re not going out like NAA does and have guys take 40, 50 leads with them and hit Charlotte, North Carolina or Nashville, Tennessee or anything like that in a group, and they’re going to hit a bunch of people up at that time that just bought their mortgages, and they’ll bring in some big closers and bam, there’s 25 sales, and then they’ll move to the next state. [F-V 00:32:03] has sold a lot that way, too, and that’s great, but the local guy that’s plugging in, that their county might only have 100 mortgages closed in a month, they’re not going to get that many leads for mortgage protection. That’s just part of their prospecting method, and they’re going to try to talk to those people as much as possible. I know one guy that he just buys a list of names from me, and he door knocks his county because there’s only about 300 people in his whole county that have a closed mortgage, and he still writes about five mortgage protection policies a month for door knocking that as part of his overall strategy. Again, it really depends on … But the data is extremely important, because now with the computer age, the data is gathered pretty much near every major metropolitan city. It’s really, you close the mortgage on a Monday, the county records it on, say, a Wednesday, and it’s available to me on a Thursday. It doesn’t pay anymore to send somebody down to the courthouse, when I can buy that data from a list vendor, that gives me the data basically 24 hours after it’s been recorded in the county. Jeff Root: You’re getting it before anybody else really does, right? Patrick Pegram: In most situations. Now, you’re biggest competitions are going to be real estate companies that have built insurance divisions. The scenario I gave you before with Century 21, MetLife sold that company long ago, and there’s a [inaudible 00:33:44] competitors that are large in each state. We have a company called Real Estate One here in Michigan that’s dominant now in Michigan. At one time it was Century 21, but now it’s Real Estate One. They have probably a good market share of the closed mortgages in the metropolitan Detroit area, and they have their own mortgage company, they have their own insurance company to sell homeowners policies to, and now they’ve got their own life division. They’re doing all that business and getting in front of people, yet it till takes an exceptional individual to work hard to be able to make a lot of sales, so whether you can control that at a corporate level at a real estate company, I don’t know. I don’t see it. It still takes that exceptional individual to make a ton of money. We’ll see how that goes. I honestly think it’s the data. You get it quick before everybody else, and then we mail it out. Now, what makes us different, Legacy, NAA, SFG, that’s a lot of initials at you. Those guys, they’re all doing one thing. We’re mailing everybody as much as possible. Now, NAA will go in and mail an entire [inaudible 00:35:04], stay where all the metropolitan areas where most of their agents are, and they just mail it, whether they got an agent ordering it or not. Same thing with a lot of the bigger companies. We do the same thing, and it’s basically how fast we get that letter out to that individual and how fast we can fulfill the printing, the putting the information in a envelope, and getting it off to the person, whether it’s first class or third class. [crosstalk 00:35:30]- Jeff Root: Do you find that the first one in wins, or is that how it usually works? Patrick Pegram: The first one in may or may not win. Here, I’ll give you a simple … We keep track of the numbers. Any metropolitan area, I’ll use something simple, Baltimore, Maryland. Here’s an area that’s very close to a couple of major metropolitan areas. Baltimore, it’s close to DC, so that area there. That information for those counties right around these metropolitan areas are instantaneously available, but because of the population is so high, there’s a lot of insurance agents, and NAA and everybody else is also mailing to these areas. You close a mortgage in one of these areas, Baltimore might generate itself, the county and the city, maybe 2,500 mortgages for the entire month of February, 2015. Now you’ve got a bunch of companies mailing to that same area for 2,500 mortgages. Now, the rest of Maryland might only get another 1,000 to 2,000 mortgages. That one small, condensed area, there’s only going to be that 2,500. That’s true in almost every state. Right around the main cities, within a couple counties, that’s it, that’s where most of the mortgage closings are. Jeff Root: Right, so 2,500- Patrick Pegram: In rural areas, they’re not closing. Jeff Root: You have 2,500, and your response … There can’t be that many leads. Patrick Pegram: At best, depending if you’re one of the first three in the house, and the first person might look at it and just toss it aside and forget about it. Let’s say they get the first letter comes in, it comes from NAA, they look at it and they set it down, and then they get my letter a day later. They go, “Oh, yeah, I thought I just had this,” but now open it. They all look the same pretty much, and the letters all look the same. They’re reading it, and then they’re interested, and then they’ll put it in. By the time it’s three days later, and everybody has ed the pack, now it looks like junk mail and they’re going to toss it. It really is about being one of the first three in. Now, just on what I know about direct mailing, if you’re one of those first three you’re probably averaging about a one percent return. The mailers are very specific, and people know exactly why they’re sending them back. There is no smoke and mirrors with mortgage protection, it’s pretty blunt. “Do you want life insurance to protect your mortgage? You want disability insurance to protect your mortgage? Send it back.” It’s pretty simple along that line, so to expect more than one percent is ridiculous; but if you’re running a little late, you’re fourth or fifth in the house, you’re probably going to be around a half of one percent. That’s a big difference, especially when you’re in Maryland. Think of this: If I am in NAA or anybody else, I’m going to give you the big secret here. I’m mailing to an area of like Baltimore, and I’m going to get one percent on 2,500 mortgages the entire month of February. That’s 25 leads. Jeff Root: In all of Baltimore. Patrick Pegram: All of Baltimore, Baltimore County. Now, I know they have more than one agent near there. [inaudible 00:39:21], they boast they got 10,000 agents nationally. They’re right out of North Carolina, not too far away, and same thing with one of their competitors that started off as … It used to be NAA manager, SFG, they’re also in North Carolina, and they’ve got people in the same area. Here you are as a company, you’re only getting 25 leads, so how you going to split that up between 10 agents, 15 agents, 20 agents? Jeff Root: It doesn’t make sense. The numbers don’t work out for these [crosstalk 00:39:52]- Patrick Pegram: Here’s the secret. These companies, they’re not in the insurance business. That’s an after effect. They’re in the lead selling business, just like any other vendor. What they do is they sell these leads over and over and over again. What these companies are buying old leads that haven’t been done, but they get these young people that they recruited for some pie in the sky, “You can make $200,000 if you just sell this lead” thing, and what it is is what they’re using young, or newly converted, agents to do is they’re financing their leads. People that have never had any sales experience in the business, they’re buying these leads thinking they’re going to get rich. They can’t make a sale, and then they sit on the shelf for the one or two experts that are in the area that really know how to sell, will buy at half the cost. It’ll get resold three or four or five times. They’ll make all the money back, plus some, and they’re going to clear out on this. They’ll sell them anywhere from $60 to $25, and then down to 10 or $15 if they’re really a month or two old, and been bought or sold three or four times. I’ve seen them go and sell six-month-old leads, too, that haven’t been sold yet. You can get some luck with aged leads; it’s been proven that that happens, it’s just a lot of work. You look at their leader boards, and they’re all guys that could do 30 and 40 and $50,000 a month in sales, and you’re a young guy coming in like, “Yeah, I want to do that, so I’m going to buy all the leads I can,” not realizing that they’re getting all fresh leads, and you’re not. They’re getting first crack at all the fresh leads, and you’re getting … Basically cherry picking. The guys that really sell are buying fresh leads, and then whatever they don’t sell, it goes back into the bin and is resold and regurgitated three, four, and five times. If you can make it with them, you’re a lot less than one percenter. They have 10,000 insurance agents at NAA; 100 only produce more than $10,000 in a month. Jeff Root: Wow. Patrick Pegram: That isn’t something that I brag about. What it is is, agents are basically financing leads, and that’s the dirty secret. How do they do that? They know they’re buying leads, they’re paying them commissions, they’re recruiting, their commission levels are low to begin with, so they have to hire employees who letting them buy leads that are cost efficient. In reality, a vendor that can get the data and send it out on a daily basis, on a per thousand basis, it’s going to cost you over $600 a thousand to do this type of mailing. If you want to break it down, you get one percent on a thousand-piece mailer, that’s ten mailers divided by 600, that’s $60 a lead. That’s what it costs. A seasoned agent, somebody that knows what they’re doing, they’ll be able to sit down with eight of those ten and sell at least three-quarters of them. Out of ten leads, you’re going to probably walk out with six applications to a guy that knows what he’s doing. To a new guy, they’re going to do half of that, and now it becomes, “I had a 60% commission, can I keep affording to buy leads?” That’s the reasoning why people get in and out of this business so quickly. NAA and the other companies, they’re only care about recruiting because recruiting is about your unit. It’s not about the individual, how well they do or how well they are able to add customers anymore. It’s whether or not that manager can produce, not the individual can produce. The manager just keeps regurgitating one body after another. If his goal is to have ten applications, or $10,000 of in his downlines, he doesn’t care if he has one agent do it or ten, as long as that [inaudible 00:44:41] is producing. They have multiple units, and multiple layers; there’s too many middlemen. That’s where all the commissions go. In reality, you’re selling simplified issue products nowadays, because there has to be enough commission to pay the IMO and the seven downlines they’ve got before you as an agent start up. Jeff Root: [crosstalk 00:45:04] quickly. Patrick Pegram: [crosstalk 00:45:04] difference. Yeah. You get paid quickly and you get issued quickly, and the pricing is about three times more than what you can get if it’s fully underwrited. Now, [inaudible 00:45:16], it may be 50% more, but in reality, you’re selling simplified issue term, and it’s going to get replaced within the next couple of years by somebody, and it’s usually when they start listening to those quotes online, on those TV ads, or maybe the get a mailer from one of Jeff’s guys on the internet, an email or something where you’re doing some advertising. They do a search engine optimization where they can get a quote online, and they type in that $200,000, 20-year term policy, and it’s $22 a month. They’re going, “Wow, man, I just bought my mortgage protection at 125,000, it’s 45 a month.” Jeff Root: Yeah. Patrick Pegram: That’s double the fact, so they … A responsible person’s going to replace that insurance eventually. Now, mortgage protection is not sold to responsible people, otherwise they wouldn’t do impulse buying. Jeff Root: Interesting. Patrick Pegram: Whether or not they’ll get replaced, all of them, you don’t know. What I’ve seen in the business, if you sell them properly, fully underwritten first, that client’s going to keep that policy a long time and you got a client for life that’s going to convert that policy, add to it, whatever it takes. The difference is is if you’re going to drop mail, you need to sell simplified issue because you need the commission, because you’re going to basically have to pay for that mailer. A lot of us have done final expense, and it’s the same way if you’ve got to replace that. Now, the people are a little bit better, and the persistency is a little bit better than final expense, obviously, so you don’t have those issues as much, and the sales, the return on your investment, is higher, and the overall picture is higher; but there are very few companies that offer and cut out all the middlemen in the mortgage protection- Jeff Root: What is your go-to product right now? I’m sure this changes every once in a while, but what is your go-to product today? Patrick Pegram: Oh, it does. It does. I was very big with Assurity, but we put them aside because of their rate increases, but you could get a non-[med 00:47:38] product up to 350 at a what they called “select rate,” which was between a standard and preferred rate for most companies that are fully underwritten. You could get a decent rate just about fully underwritten, and non-med. They had about a 50% rate increase for guys over 40, so we had to replace them. Our current go-to, and has been for a while, is Baltimore Life. A couple of reasons for it. There’s a lot of commission in that product, they’re pretty well priced from 10 to 30 year term, or 15 to 30 year term, rather, but they’re also pretty good on their liberal underwriting. I’ll give you an example I just happened to happen to dig. Last night, one of my agents called me up, it was after hours so they weren’t able to call and get a risk assessment. A gentleman had cancer five years ago, it was throat cancer, they did surgical and radiation, no chemo. Stage II cancer, no big deal. Well, most term companies, even simplified issues, aren’t going to take it, especially if it’s within five years. Baltimore has a pretty case-by-case, liberal side to it that will take the case, as long as it wasn’t Stage III or higher, and that he’s a non-smoker, since it was throat cancer. They wrote it on their standard rates, under their simplified underwritten product called Home Secure term, which is a typical simplified issue, it’s table four standard type of underwriting, so they have some liberal situations there; but they put some stipulations on it, and then they have some nice underwriting there. We really like them, and the commission and the pricing is pretty much right on, especially with people that are under age 50. We enjoy using them. Most of our agents start at 100% commission with them. I say that because most NAA agents start at 60 with them. We offer just as good of leads [inaudible 00:49:48] and everything like that, so it’s a little different scenario, because our system, our model, is to cut out all the middlemen. There’s only one level above you, which is the [M-G-A 00:49:58], and that’s it. They don’t have that, so … Jeff Root: Yeah. I want to clarify, too, that you’re running all these leads locally, because there’s a lot of internet life insurance agents listening to this podcast. You’re talking about running these direct mail leads locally, right? Patrick Pegram: Yeah, yeah. In your state, yeah, where you’re at. Face to face type selling. I found that it’s very difficult to make a living today with mortgage protection over the internet, or over the phone. Right, when using direct mail. The reason for that … Yeah, because they’re using direct mail, and the cost of the lead to get is just too high. You can’t make money on doing a protective life drop [inaudible 00:50:44] type of situation, a fully underwritten. You can’t make money on $30 a month, I’m sorry. The lead costs you twice as much, so you just can’t make that kind of money. You have to look at simplified, face to face for it to work. Now, some of the companies like Baltimore allow you to do a phone app, like a voice signature app, so they’ll do that too. There’s a lot of companies, a lot of … Most of the companies have internet e-app situations, you can do that with Mutual of Omaha, for instance. You can also do it with … Foresters allows you to do [I-go 00:51:28] apps along that line, so [inaudible 00:51:30] of the fully insured. You can do a lot of e-apps and have people sign things and do it over the phone that way. You’re just going to have a hard time closing at much, but if there’s specialists on the phone and really listen, I’m sure you can make some money at it, or give it a whirl on that line. Again, the selling process, the impulse buy, you’re certainly not going to close six out of every ten leads over the phone. Jeff Root: Okay. Do you direct mail within a certain radius of somebody’s location, or is there any rhyme or reason to that? How far would you go, I should ask ask well. Patrick Pegram: Our company is very protective of territory, because we don’t resell the leads. They’re exclusive to the agent. You cannot have more than a couple of agents in every state, so we don’t have everybody working mortgage protection only. Most of our guys are working both mortgage protection, final expense, or one of our other markets. Like I said, the way I did it for 30 years after I got out of MetLife was I just made it as part of my general prospecting of what I did every day to make money. If an agent does that with mortgage protection, they’ll make money; but it can’t be- Jeff Root: Your only lead source. Patrick Pegram: You can’t rely on it. It can’t be your only- Jeff Root: You need several lead sources. Patrick Pegram: Exactly. It’s a lot of work, there’s only a couple hundred agents in the country that can make a living off mortgage protection alone. Now, my top agent now, he does about a half a million dollars a year, but he mixes it between final expense and mortgage protection. A lot of mortgage protection sales result in final expense sales, because you get a lot of leads back of 60 and 70 year olds that are refinancing 25, 40, $50,000, but their health conditions warrant that they can’t get term insurance, but only [inaudible 00:53:24] whole life. Jeff Root: Interesting. Patrick Pegram: We come up with a new process years ago, we call it payment insurance. Instead of paying off the mortgage, you get enough insurance to make your payments for two years. That way, you got a $70,000 mortgage, but the payments are 700 bucks a month, so you just do 700 times 24, there you go. You got $16,800, so you can write a 17 to $20,000 policy to make payments for two years. It’s all [F-E 00:53:59], and that’s something that they something they can afford. That way, and the way you explain it in our presentation is, you’re helping your family get through the process of you ing, and at the same time they’re able to make the mortgage payments and then get the house on the market, maybe three to six months later, and sell it at the right price and not have to be burdened with the house going into foreclosure or anything. Everything’s paid for. Then your house will sell at the right price within two years, and it basically is going to have the same result. In that situation, why pay off the mortgage for somebody that’s 65 years old? Just do payments and then sell the house, and then pay off the mortgage that way. If there’s a profit to be made, then that’s the estate, or whoever does the executor of the estate is able to split it up that way. There’s a profit. In essence, you’re helping somebody by giving something what they want and need and afford, and still have the same result. We call it selling the payment, not the mortgage. It’s just a different approach to mortgage protection, but you have to look at two-thirds to three-quarters of all your closed mortgages in the state are going to be refi’s. Jeff Root: Are you mailing to those refi’s as well, or just new home mortgages? Patrick Pegram: Yes. Jeff Root: Okay. Patrick Pegram: Yeah, they’re mailing to refi’s as well. I’m going to log online right now, I’m going to do a simple count of how many mortgages there are in a particular state. What’s a good state for your listeners would be? Jeff Root: Do California. Patrick Pegram: California, okay, that’s going to be the largest state, and so they’re going to have the most mortgages closed than any other state. Let me see here, it’ll take me a second, but what I have found is even with that large situation … There we go, I’m going to do a monthly here now of California for the month … Let’s see, we just ed March, so let’s do the entire … Today’s Thursday, so all the numbers are up to date. Good. I’m going to put a minimum $10,000 mortgage, because that’s what I usually do as a minimum when I’m looking at the list. There’s a lot of mortgages that are sold under 10,000 that are simple transfers to relatives, like $1 sales, $2 sales, stuff like that. You want to do at least $10,000 as a minimum value, so that will get rid of about ten percent of your mortgages that are just simple deed transfers. The total mortgages now over 10,000 for the entire state of California … There we go. Okay, in the entire month of March, California closed 55,614 loans over $10,000. I think you got about 40 million people in California? Jeff Root: Mm-hmm. Patrick Pegram: There’s only 55,000 mortgages. Now, if I was to mail that entire state, those 55,000 people in the month of March, and I got my one percent return, that’s only 550 leads in the entire state. Last I checked, California’s a little bit bigger than Delaware. Jeff Root: Yeah. 550 leads for NAA agents out there, they can starve. Patrick Pegram: Exactly. You’re never going to gather that many leads together in one state. The only way to do it is to start lead banking, selling them, reselling them, and reselling them. Believe me, there are companies that sell me software for me to actually put these leads into a PDF file, and allows an agent to go in, see how many are in a county, buy the leads right then and there. They’ll stay in his lead bank for 30 days, and then boom, they’re moved right back into the open market if they haven’t closed. Jeff Root: Wow. Patrick Pegram: I mean, there’s actually companies that sell that software right now. I’ve seen it, it works great if you’re selling leads all the time to your insurance force as an IMO, so when you see this as a mortgage protection guy, you just have to be wary of those IMO’s out there. Now, we can get the mail quicker out than anybody that’s doing it individually, so we’re going to get the most leads; but if you do it for an entire state, and if you get enough in mail … Everybody that buys leads from a vendor or fulfillment house, they have to mail at least a thousand pieces of mail. For them to do it on a daily basis, so they’re first or second in the door, they’re not going to be able to do that within a small radius from where they live. Jeff Root: Yeah. Years ago, when the mortgage protection days … NAA used to be pretty hot. There used to be a lot of leads coming through, because there were a lot more mortgages, right? Patrick Pegram: There were a lot more mortgages. Back in the day, even from the refi market, there used to be about six to seven times that amount of leads. California, I seeing a half a million a month of closed mortgages back in the early 2000’s. In Michigan right now, we’re doing about 15,000 a month, and I when it was over 70,000 a month, back in the heyday. You could make a living and do a lot of mortgage protection over there, because there was just more mortgages being sold. Yeah, it just faded away with the amount of mortgages going down. For most of all, refi’s are through the HARP program, which is a rate refinance for people that are upside-down in their mortgages. You’re getting people that are already in financial stress that are getting these mortgage protection letters, so a lot of people are thinking mortgage protection is back. Well, in reality, the housing market still isn’t back. Even new home sales are down, and the biggest key in the factor that you’re going to see is what’s called … Not new home sales, but existing home sales. That’s an economic factor, and you’re not seeing existing home sales, I don’t care who you are, in any area where existing home sales, that means one house to another, when you’re working at about 20% at that [inaudible 01:00:57], 15% of your mortgages. That’s not an economy that’s robust, and that’s the way it is, almost the entire country except in Texas and the DC area. Pretty much everybody else, the housing market just collapsed in California over the last six years. Where I would buy a three-bedroom ranch in Michigan for $120,000, $150,000, basically any Midwestern town would do that, they were 500, 800,000 in California back in the day. They were outrageously priced, and now those houses are down to about 250, 300 in California, so you’ve gotten the market adjusted, obviously, to the home values; but it’s still, the economy isn’t that great in California, still. Don’t listen to the lies in Washington, the home market isn’t there. You cannot make a living on selling mortgage protection on its own, but you have to deal with an MGA that can do volume mailings, make it affordable for an agent to buy leads at cost. Jeff Root: And know what they’re doing, and can train you to sell it. Patrick Pegram: Exactly. Exactly. It has to be a situation where you’re looking at it as a cost basis. If you’re making money off your leads, you’re not an insurance MGA, you’re a lead vendor. It’s simple as that. If you can break even, do volume, break even, that’s it, then you’re concentrating on putting skin in the game with your agents by making sure they’re succeeding at making sales, because that’s the only way you can make money. If they can’t make sales, you can’t make money. I like that approach, that’s my personal approach [inaudible 01:02:53], because I was a producer for 26 years. I would want the guy that’s working with me on my success to be dependent on my success. For me, I put myself in a situation where I mentored a lot of young agents now, and I teach them everything I know, and I know a hell of a lot because I was very successful as a personal producer, so why not tell that to every young person that’s working in our agency? That’s just a given. I think that’s what you have to look. It doesn’t matter, it could be the guy next door to me, but the point is is finding an MGA that you like, you can work with, that can be a good mentor, can teach you something, and does enough volume in mortgage protection so they can do the leads right. There are not many. There are a handful out there, and the ones that do are not going to give you a fair commission, and [inaudible 01:03:56] that. Look toward just below street for a commission for simplified issue product, which is between 90 and 100% first year commission on a term product. Like I said, we give out 100 on Baltimore Life, I think 90 to 95 on Mutual of Omaha. Might be 90 with American Amicable, they have a good product but they don’t pay as much in commission to the IMO’s, so in essence the agent doesn’t get out, but they have a great rate for 10 and 20 year . For simplified issue product, sometimes you take a little less to have the best product. At least you’re still making decent money. Jeff Root: Real quick, I had an agent ask me this, too. I asked a few people if they had any questions for you about mortgage protection. You just mentioned 10, 20 year , so his question was, “Are you trying to cover the whole, if they bought a 30-year mortgage, the whole 30 years, or a shorter period, say ten years, to lower their and just get in the house before the next guy quotes them?” Patrick Pegram: Well, here’s my experience talking, because I’ve seen it over 30 years doing this. Most people don’t stay in their houses for more than seven years. They’re in and out. Now, that was true all the way up til about six years ago. Since then, people are going to be stuck in their homes for a long time, and with the rate refi’s, they’re going to be in their homes a lot longer. There’s no cross-town purchases of the next house with a little higher value. Those days are gone. It’s going to be 10 or 15 years before we see that again. What you’re looking at right now is people are realistically, in my opinion, you’re going to be in those houses at least ten years, maybe more. If you’re selling mortgages 15 or 20 years long, cover the whole term. Jeff Root: Okay, good. Patrick Pegram: Stay away from products that are return of . I think the only value in return of is that 30-year return of , and I have yet to see anybody stay 30 years in a mortgage. Yeah, mortgage rates are extremely low right now, but I don’t see anybody even staying in a mortgage for 30 years. They’re going to sell that house and move on to the next house. The bottom line is is return of is a gimmick, just like a lot of them things. You’re going to see the pricing be about 50, 60% higher, or even doubling, on a 30-year term, and it’s going to be on a 20-year term, forget it, it’s almost going to triple the price of the base policy. If you got a $30 a month base policy price, you can expect to see a $100 . Jeff Root: Got you. Patrick Pegram: Just to get return of in 20 years, because they need more money, so effectively get that time value money to get that money back in 20 years. Now, you’ll see a 30-year term return of plan be about 60 bucks, versus a 20-year begin 120, 110, $100. That’s how difference that ten years makes in the time value of money. Personally, I would rather sell somebody a UL product that would … wants to put some money into a UL at that point instead of return of . At least that money can be used at that point, but that’s a little bit more sophisticated purchasing, and simplified products mean simplified training and simplified agents. A lot of agents don’t know how to sell an IUL, or even a regular UL. They know how to do the simple stuff, so the guaranteed UL, term insurance, and the non-par whole lifes, because it’s that simple to underwrite, that simple to do an application, and that simple to get it paid. Jeff Root: Right, got it. Patrick Pegram: There are very few agents anymore that really know what they’re doing training wise, so that’s another reason to get into an MGA that offers good cross-product training, to let you know what life insurance is really all about. Jeff Root: Got it. Patrick Pegram: Get good experience along that lines. That’s my opinion, anyhow. Jeff Root: Yeah. Patrick, thank you so much for all your insights here on mortgage protection, and the industry as a whole. You have probably the longest-standing mortgage protection experience I’ve ever heard of. I don’t know, that’s … Did I just call you old? I don’t know if I did that, I’m sorry if I did. Patrick Pegram: Well, I am, I just turned 52, so I’m not that old. Jeff Root: Okay. Patrick, if people wanted to get in touch with you, where can they find you? Patrick Pegram: I’m very easy, I’m on the web at legacyagent.com, is our site for Legacy Insurance Group. An agent can go down at the bottom of the home page and basically click on an e-book, we call it the agent brochure. One about one of the things that we promote, which is success through partnership. All of our agents are partners, our success is building that partnership with everybody. They’ll get a good idea, most of the agents can just go to the content page and send me a quick email. They’ll see my mug on the page, and I’ll be more than happy to chat with them and tell them a little bit about what I know. I give my information freely to any agent along that line, so feel free to email me, call me. A lot of folks know me as on an insurance board Twilight, and so they can get some information there. That’s something I’ve used for a while, and more than happy to help anybody that wants to give us a call. Jeff Root: Awesome. I appreciate your time, sharing your wisdom, and I’ll talk to you again soon. Patrick Pegram: Sounds good, Jeff. Thanks for having me. People in the episode: Jeff Root: [email protected] Patrick Pegram: [email protected] Mentioned on this episode: Legacy Agent Legacy Agent Brochure (e-book Patrick mentions) Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes – Leave us a Review! (Here’s How) Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page Want to help improve the show? Want to hear about a specific topic? Just want to leave some ? … Send me a voice message

In this episode we interview a life insurance underwriter.  We’ll keep the life insurance company and underwriter name anonymous so the interview can be as candid as possible. We ask a broad range of questions from what it takes to become an underwriter, what their average case load is, if cover letters really help.  and common questions many of us have.  Get to know the thought process of underwriters and the underwriting process to place more cases! Click Here to View the Full Transcript Jeff Root: Hey life insurance agents, you’re listening to the Modern Life Insurance Selling podcast where we provide the tools to help you grow a more profitable life insurance business by selling online and over the phone from anywhere with an internet connection, even if you’re alone in your quest to build your life insurance business, just know that there’s a community of life insurance agents at SellTermLife.com connecting and helping each other grow their businesses from home offices, coffee shops, and beaches all across the nation. Welcome to episode number 39 of the Modern Life Insurance Selling podcast. I’m your host Jeff Root, and today we’ll be speaking with an underwriter from a life insurance company who will remain nameless. I thought it’d be a cool episode to do a Q and A with an underwriter without giving away the company name or the underwriter’s identity so he can be as candid as possible with us in his answers. Hopefully, this episode will give you a better understanding of underwriting and of underwriters in general. We’ll talk about stuff like how to become an underwriter, typical caseloads, how many cases they’re working on at a single time. What they’re evaluated on, and we’ll also ask questions our community came up with as well, but first, like always, if you like what you hear and are listening in iTunes or Stitcher, please leave us a review. Also, if you have any questions or would like a topic covered on the podcast, please use the send voice mail tab over at SellTermLife.com. All right. This is going to be a straight Q and A, so let’s get to it. All right, welcome to the podcast. Underwriter: Thank you. Jeff Root: I usually start with an introduction of sorts, but we’ll keep this interview anonymous, so let’s just start with what it takes to become an underwriter. Is there any schooling for what you do? What’s the typical path an underwriter takes? Underwriter: It’s all over the place. We’ve had people who do the more conventional, finance, e-con majors, we get BATs, business majors of all stripes. You also get people who might have been former nurses who just got sick of the hours. I think someone I work with is also a pharmacist. They just got tired of that whole gig. It’s all over the place. We have people who used to work with field reps as assistance reps, stuff like that. It’s a wide and varied range. You don’t know from person-to-person what you’re getting. Jeff Root: Okay. Is it typical a more analytical person who pursues underwriting or is there a typical type of person you see that becomes an underwriter? Underwriter: Yeah, they’re big on the whole analytical, time management side. That’s what they’re like. I’ve always felt that they should pursue the kind of agent [versus 00:02:37] work in the field more because one of the big things you get at the end of every case is that you have to sell the rating to the field. That’s kind of a problem if you don’t have any experience with selling yourself. Jeff Root: Is your position tied to how many cases get placed? Underwriter: Not placement necessarily. We usually use it by how many cases are either approved, declined, so how many you’ve taken your last action on. Jeff Root: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Underwriter: That’s one of the bigger things, so it’s not necessarily placement. They can’t always track those because sometimes commissions are paid all year long it’s done suit your [tail 00:03:12]. Jeff Root: Yeah. Underwriter: It might be placed for a year, and then all of the sudden they drop off, or it might be 6 months and they’re gone. Jeff Root: Okay. How are underwriters evaluated in their jobs? Underwriter: It depends on the company. You could be based on a number of cases you approve or decline every month. Certainly, there’s an element of accuracy. That’s a tough one, though, because if you do audits, you get a ten-case, twenty-case audit, however many you care to. That means you have to pull somebody else out of production, so that’s someone else not doing work and having to go over your cases. They like to keep track of agent satisfaction on this. It’s a big key for them. If they’re consistently getting calls about your ratings, your decisions and the time you’re taking on cases that’s a giant problem. If you’re taking two weeks to go over a set of records that’s not really that complicated, then, yeah. Jeff Root: You’re caught. Okay. Underwriter: It’s going to be an issue for you. Jeff Root: Yeah. Okay. What is an underwriter’s usual case load? Underwriter: That’s going to be carrier-dependent. I know for us they usually wanted to keep us around about 80 to 95, but with end-of-the-year and they’re trying some new things with my specific work place I’ve seen people around 150 and some approaching 200. Yeah, it’s all over the place. Some carriers don’t mind if you go a little bit higher if you have lower amounts because you’re not waiting for as many requirements. Some carriers if you have to wait for those higher dollar amounts and higher requirements they don’t want you going above 100. Jeff Root: Okay. Are you supposed to blaze through as many cases as you can? Are you supposed to just push the process along as fast as you can? Underwriter: Within reason. Some companies have it down to, “We think you should be able to review so many cases per hour for your initial look-at or initial walk through.” Some cases have even, I believe, actually [tied through 00:04:56] what they believe their average underwriter can get through an APS and other documentation task for. It just really depends on the carrier and what their expectations are. Jeff Root: Got you. Okay, so I guess the question we have here that we took from the community. We asked our community a bunch of questions that they would ask an underwriter if they had the chance to. A few of the questions here, we’ll start with one, is, when underwriting times are slow all around for a company … We get some companies that sometimes take two to three months just on average. It’s not just because of one case that the APS took forever or whatever. Is it because of caseload that you guys are getting just bombarded with cases? Is it you got short staff? Is there anything else that it can be? Because it seems like every once in a while carriers take months for decisions on average. Underwriter: Right. Those are two of the big ones. Caseloads can get in your way. Sometimes you have ten or fifteen cases just to follow up on and look at and prod the field and say, “Hey, I’m waiting for this information. Do you have it?,” or, “Do you have any further information about when you might have it?” You can also be waiting for the things on files. You can order discretionary requirements that might need time to take in. MIB code details might need time, public record checks, things like that. Financial requirements, those can take extra time off your day, too. It can also take a whole bunch more time if you’re having to talk to reps about your decisions, so a twenty minute phone call sometimes, or just bouncing emails back and forth and just saying, “Well, this is the reason we rated you,” and, “Well, why is that? When did you find this?” It’s back and forth. You come out and you do one thing, and then you see a reply from this person. You don’t want to leave them hanging, so you reply again to them. It goes back and forth for what feels like for ever, and it’s only ten minutes, but it’s ten minutes that you’re not looking at this other case. Jeff Root: Got you. Overall, I know there’s times where that happens. For example, I’m not going to call any companies this year, but there is one company this year that was taking on average ninety days from application submitted to an actual decision. That wasn’t just one-offs, this was everybody that was submitting cases to this company, and it’s a big company. It happened to another big company earlier in the year. We’re wondering why those happen. We understand the delays because of all the reasons you just mentioned, but as far as that goes, do you have any insights to that at all? Underwriter: It could be carrier-specific. When you get APSs, you usually order through a couple of different copy services, so there could have been a breakdown in relationships there. Jeff Root: Okay. Underwriter: I know that a couple of different places that we get records from we expect them to take at least four to six weeks minimum without breaking a sweat. Kaiser Permanente is one that’s notorious for that. Jeff Root: Yeah. I’m sure the VA as well. Underwriter: [crosstalk 00:07:46] KP records and, yeah, VA records are all of the [peach 00:07:49]. If they’re not slow, then they’re totally disorganized, and you have to deal with it that way. It could be a host of things going on. I would expect something like it’s a caseload/requirements-gathering type of thing. Jeff Root: Okay. All right. Next question here to shift gears a little bit. Why don’t life insurance companies give agents underwriting guides that you work from? Not the field underwriting guides we get, because they’re often broad and vague. They’ll say, “Diabetics table two to four.” I know there’s underwriting manuals you guys work from, whether it’s a Swiss Re manual or your own proprietary manual. How come agents don’t get access to that to submit more accurate ratings when they’re submitting business? Underwriter: A lot of companies feel that’s their secret sauce and how they come to their decisions. They don’t feel like it’s a giant CIA secret that it’s going to get out about it. A lot of companies actually play from the same playbook. It’s really expensive to write standards, so a company will actually buy a standard from somebody else, and then they use their own experience to color the ratings. Jeff Root: Ah, okay. Underwriter: It’ll look a little bit different than, let’s say, Swiss Re, Munich or somebody else wrote, but it’ll just basically be cosmetic. It’ll be a face lift to the original rating manual. It’s prohibitively expensive to write them on your own, but when you do have them … I think the bigger concern for home offices, though, is that they don’t want every history they get on a certain thing, say, like depression, to look the exact same every time. [crosstalk 00:09:19] exactly, and cleanly into this bucket, and we can accept it every time. It’s just a major miracle that we have no ratable depression histories. Jeff Root: Yeah, so like adverse selection. You’d get a bunch of people with depression coming to you guys. I get it. That makes sense. Underwriter: We don’t want you to reverse-engineer a rating. Let’s say you did have someone with a depression history come in, and they don’t have any other reason for the rating aside from depression, and all the sudden it’s like, “Whoa, they are pretty highly rated.” You look down and it’s like, “Oh, to get that highly rated they must have had some suicidal ideation or a gesture or something like that,” it’s like, “Oh, well, we didn’t exactly want you to know that.” Jeff Root: Got you. Underwriter: Also, the other thing that can happen with that is sometimes people call things when you’re taking the medical that they aren’t. Take depression, sometimes your client might call it depression, but their doctor thinks that it’s actually bipolar. We might be calling it depression in our communication to you, but it’s actually bipolar on the records, and that’s the standard we use to rate from. Jeff Root: Okay. Got you. All right. Another question here is, do cover letters really help? Can agents actually provide extra information that could sway a decision? Underwriter: I believe so, and I know it’s gotten around the company I work for that someone said to one of our underwriters that, “Oh, you guys don’t read cover letters anyway.” I’d really like to find out who started this odious lie because I read them. Sometimes they might not be contributory. Sometimes it might be, “I want want to put everything on this billing information,” or, “I want to put everything on this certain payment method.” That really doesn’t tell me much, I’ll skip that. People who work in our billing department sort that out. I believe they generally help. They can sort out a difficult financial situation. If you have some additional information to give I usually don’t mind it. You do have to be careful with it. I did have one case where a rep said that this couple had smoked marijuana, and about three months down the road they were coming in and he rated them full-blown tobacco. He didn’t have to because come to find out all they were doing was just ingesting it. I don’t have to give you full-blown tobacco. We have a class in between, but I can’t give you non-tobacco. He put a little bit of a different situation on it than it could have been. Jeff Root: Okay. There are some situations. We write cover letters for almost all of our high-risk cases where there’s information that isn’t asked on the application, or isn’t taken on the medical exam just to make sure you have that information. For example, a common one is if we’re dealing with an over-weight person, but they’re a body builder, they’re very muscular, we’ll try and include a picture of them. You can see that they’re not over-weight because of the way they eat, it’s just because they’re muscular. In situations like that, is that something where it would help in looking at the build? All you would see is numbers, right, height and weight without seeming that? Underwriter: Right. Yeah. The BMI number, yeah. Unfortunately for us, it’s the theory of BMIs, I like to call it. They way we have to explain it to people is that, irrespective of how muscular you are, the vascular [inaudible 00:12:24] in your body, so the [inaudible 00:12:25] has to work harder to get the blood out to you. That’s the way we try to explain it to people. I would imagine with some carriers that you can maybe buy back some credits, maybe try to negotiate a better class or negotiate a better reconsideration. If you included a picture and said, “Hey, this guy is not just sitting on a couch all day eating bon-bons. He’s working out and …” You don’t have to tell me that he benches 320 and squats five and a quarter. Jeff Root: Yeah. Okay. All right. Does it make you relate or connect to a case better? I know you said you could have anywhere from 80 to 95, 100 cases, whatever your caseload is. To know that if you describe why they’re buying the coverage, even if there’s an image, or any sort of information on top of what you see every day. I’m sure you see lots of medical records and exams come though and reviewing lots of applications to make decision. Does it help in humanizing an application? Underwriter: Yes, I believe it helps. Jeff Root: Okay. Underwriter: It could be explaining a financial situation, juvenile cases typically have them. Grand dad wants to cover wants to cover all eight of his grand kids. It’s a nice little thing and helps you link-up everyone else’s cases and make sure that the financials don’t get underwritten differently, which can be a real pain because sometimes you get these older clients who have a lot of money, and sometimes the kids maybe not have the adequate coverage to go along with value standards. Then all the sudden you’ve got some people going in one direction on the case and you’re trying to keep everyone unified and not confuse the rep as to why you have these eight juvenile cases, but two people want to decline because of not having enough coverage on the parents, and two are all right and … Yeah, at least it keeps everybody together sometimes, too. Business cases can be like that, too. You have a whole bunch of people coming in for KP, or there’s a business purchase coming in for a couple of different entities. That can help out, definitely. Jeff Root: Okay. Great. Underwriter: Sometimes the entities don’t totally get together. Say, they have a couple of different restaurants, but they’re all incorporated under different LLCs. It might be the same person running the said LLCs, but if we don’t know that we just view it as two different businesses. Yeah. Jeff Root: Okay. Got it. Makes a lot of sense. Thanks for clarifying that. Another thing is quick quotes, do you pay attention to quick quotes when they’re attached? Underwriter: Yes. They way I view is as with agents, if you say there’s coverage, there’s coverage, so you’re bound by your word and your verbal communication. I guess because I used to work in the P & C side and the sales side too in some capacity, not for that long, but enough, and I taught pre-licensing. Basically, if I put it out there I view it as, I don’t want to say like a live grenade, but essentially it is because someone can pick it up and run with it. Yeah, I take them seriously. It’s your word, and you can be put on it, so, yeah, you have to be very careful with them. We also have other systems, too. There are phone call questions that come in that you can be held to. Informal applications are also another one. Yeah, we take them seriously. Jeff Root: Okay. Do you really consider them a tentative offer, then? Underwriter: Yes. Jeff Root: Okay. Great. Underwriter: Like I say, I hate to make it sound like a bad analogy, but it’s almost like a like grenade. You have to watch out, and make sure that you don’t get too casual with how you underwrite it. If you know it’s bad, at least start it off in a neighborhood that you feel comfortable with saying, “Hey, I don’t think it’s getting better than here, but I don’t think we’re getting worse than here.” Jeff Root: Right. Okay. Do most underwriters handle the quick quote desk, or is it typically a couple of underwriters that man that, they’re hired for that? Do you guys have to, I guess, go on a rotation on who’s going to handle all these quick quotes that come in daily? Underwriter: Usually they just get mixed in and shot back out. They’re considered parallel to your regular work day. Jeff Root: Okay. Underwriter: Yeah, they’re the quick and dirty version. Jeff Root: Yeah. No, it’s good, that’s good. Let’s move to a few risks here. I know some agents had some questions. How come most life insurance companies will only cover 70 to 80% of an SBA loan? Underwriter: An SBA loan to most companies tells you that it’s a newly-established business. Say it’s a person who’s been running restaurants for twenty years, and he’s just going off on his own or starting a new venture. If he’s doing SBA it tells me that this isn’t totally him. It’s someone who’s just starting a new business. We would want to limit our risk on newly-established businesses that way. I know some companies don’t care. They’ll just look at it just in income perspective up to a certain amount, up to sometimes maybe even just a million or even two million. That would be their limit for just saying, “Yeah, this is just income consideration, and we’ll take it.” The other thing is, too, is maybe you can blend that in, just say that, “Yeah, we’re coming in for business purchase and key person on this,” and just fudge the rest of the whole and call it even. Jeff Root: Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Underwriter: Yeah, SBA tells me that it’s a newer business. That might be why some companies are a little bit hesitant because they might not stay enforce as long. Jeff Root: Okay, got it. All right. Are there any risks that you’re seeing that underwriting is getting more aggressive on, industry-wide, your company or industry-wide right now? Underwriter: Sure. For the good, I think some depression and anxiety things are starting to come down. They’re starting to see some of those risks aren’t as necessarily as bad as in the past. I think that might be getting a little bit better for some carriers. Going the opposite way, I think you’re going to start seeing more family history, especially with cancer, going in, developing. The big ones are going to be- Jeff Root: Developing in a good way or a bad way? Underwriter: In a bad way. They’re going to start paying more attention to people’s family histories of cancer, in particular only the real hereditary ones, because all the studies are coming out saying colon, ovarian and breast cancers those are going to be the rough ones. If you have someone who’s medical records say literally every female member of her family has had breast cancer, that’s going to be a bad day. It’s also going to depend upon when they were diagnosed, if they died early-on from it. That’s one that you might have to start watching out for when you start asking for family history sections. You’re going to have to pay attention not only to the cardiovascular ones, but there’s going to be stuff, Huntington’s and Marfan and all the other fun disorders and now certain cancers. Yeah, that’s one I think that’s going to be coming into the forefront. All the studies are saying that hereditary risk is much more now. Jeff Root: Okay. We’re also hearing around, I can’t really say where I’ve heard this, but we’re seeing fully-underwritten approvals come for HIV-positive people. Have you seen that at all? Underwriter: Yes. I know in our company they’ve said that in the next fifteen years they think it might go industry-wide. It’s something that’s going to be highly-rated, and you’re probably not going to love it, but it could happen. Yeah. Jeff Root: It’s insurable, and that’s a huge step. Underwriter: Yeah, because now it’s not five years and you’re done for. It’s people that live twenty, fifteen, thirty years even. It’s down to the medication management, and you can set a mortality curve to that, at least. It’s just a question of being able to keep up on your meds. Jeff Root: Got you. Underwriter: Again, you might not love the offer, it might be small. It might not take more than a few hundred thousand and maybe, probably, a limit of 250 for that retention limit, but at least it’s something for them. Jeff Root: All right. That’s a lot of good information. One last question here, there’s a lot of improvements with medicine and people living longer. There’s different studies coming out for all these different health issues where life span in increasing, people are getting better. Do you think the life insurance industry reacts pretty quickly to these? Do you think they’re slow-moving, or what’s your take on that? Underwriter: They have to wait for mortality to roll in and wait for the numbers to roll in. Their medical study can show it, and then they have to revise and go through studies. They might see the study and then it might be another year before they can officially make the standard change happen. In some cases the medicine isn’t necessarily making people live better. Like, diabetes medications for type-2, it’s basically keeping you on an even keel. It doesn’t improve anything, but at least if you stick to it and you stick to a diet you’re not losing a foot. Yeah, it’s a good thing that’s going on. I certainly don’t mind it, but it’s not something that we can just be like, “Hey, the average life expectancy in the U.S. has exceeded another three years beyond what it has,” or what have you. “We can lower rates by this much,” or, “We can lower rating on this disorder by so much.” Jeff Root: Right. Underwriter: It’d be nice if we could, but it’d be definitely way easier to place some of these issues. Yeah. I think with some of the issues that we see, especially like the type-2 diabetics, you get a lot of that in the middle-age population. I think that’s going to be something that messes with mortality curves for a little bit here. It’s going to be something that we’re going to have to consider with benefits, especially waiver of and some other things and for ratings. It might get a little bit better for some people, but I don’t know if it can necessarily get to a place where reps feel it’s better. Jeff Root: Got you. Underwriter: The carrier might feel good about it, but the field might not. Jeff Root: Yeah, makes sense. All right. Awesome. Thanks so much for all your insights here. I really appreciate you coming on here and accepting our invitation to be on this podcast. I know that you clarified a lot of stuff that our community and a lot of our listeners will truly appreciate. Thank you so much, again. Underwriter: Glad to be of help. Thank you. Jeff Root: Now for a peek into our community of life insurance agents over at SellTermLife.com. Here are some of this week’s hot topics. This week in the community, and to stay on the topic of underwriting, I shared my process of working with impaired risks. It’s my seven-point process I use every single time that helps me find the best rates available and also place these cases. Other agents also chime in with their editions as well. It’s just a great resource that I spent hours on for anyone that wants to be better at placing higher risks. We also talk about how to handle those prospects who want you to email quotes. It’s tough to send accurate rates without speaking with someone on the phone. I personally won’t send rates via email without a conversation or them emailing me my qualification form which I share in this thread. Every agent is different. We all chime in with our best practices of handling this situation where your prospect just wants you to email quotes and doesn’t want to get on the phone with you. We also share our predictions for 2015. There’s a lot of great technology coming out. There’s some life insurance software getting millions of dollars in VC funding, and new non-med products coming out. It’s going to be a very exciting year to be an internet life insurance agent. To the conversation and discover how you can use modern techniques to sell more life insurance, work more efficiently and on your own , head over to SellTermLife.com. We’ll see you back next Thursday morning for another value-packed episode of the Modern Life Insurance Selling podcast. People in the episode: Jeff Root: [email protected] Mentioned on this episode: Recent Action in the Sell Term Life Community: I share my 7 point process I use every single time that helps me find the best rates available and also place these cases.  Other agents also chime in with their additions as well.   It’s a great resource I spent hours on for anyone that wants to be better at placing higher risks. We also talk about how to handle those prospects who want you to email quotes without ever speaking with you.  Many of us chime in with our best practices of handling this situation. We also share our predictions for 2015.  There’s lots of great technology coming out.  There’s some life insurance software getting millions of dollars of VC funding and new non-med products coming out.  It’s going to be an exciting year to be an internet life insurance agent. Learn how you can get access to these discussions, a powerful community of like-minded life insurance agents, and much much more by visiting the SellTermLife Community. Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes – Leave us a Review! (Here’s How) Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page Want to help improve the show? Want to hear about a specific topic? Just want to leave some ? … Send me a voice message  

This episode covers the current state of life insurance marketing and the magnitude of the opportunity in front of us for 2015 and beyond. As we close out 2015, there’s a few opportunities agents haven’t fully grasped that I’ll also cover those in this episode. Click Here to View the Full Transcript Jeff: Hey, life insurance agents, you’re listening to the Modern Life Insurance Selling podcast where we provide the tools to help you grow a more profitable life insurance business by selling online and over the phone from anywhere with an internet connection. Even if you’re alone in your quest to build your life insurance business, just know that there’s a community of life insurance agents at SellTermLife.com connecting and helping each other grow their business from home offices, coffee shops, [inaudible 00:00:30] all across the nation. Jeff: Welcome to episode number thirty-eight of the Modern Life Insurance Selling podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Root. Today will be a solo podcast talking about the current state of life insurance marketing and the magnitude of the opportunity in front of us for 2015 and beyond. As we close out 2015, there’s a few opportunities agents haven’t fully grasped that I’ll cover in this episode, but first, like always, if you like what you hear and are listening in iTunes or Stitcher, please leave us a review. Also, if you have any questions or want any topics covered please use the send voice mail tab over at SellTermLife.com. All right, there’s a lot of life insurance agents out there taking baby steps or on the fence to making the move to bringing their businesses online. If the latest LIMRA stats saying that eighty-five percent of consumers do some sort of research online and fifty percent of consumers purchase online and over the phone don’t convince you, let me reframe it for you. Agents are grossly underestimating what’s actually happening in technology today. We are experiencing the single biggest culture shift in US history. It’s going to change the way we sell life insurance and it’s already happening and agents are taking advantage of this today. In every industry, not just insurance, there is wealth being created like we’ve never seen before because of the massive shifts in the way business is done and technology advancements. Any time there’s big societal shifts like this there’s a lot of money to be made. Decades from now, in my opinion, agents are going to look back at our time period and comment on how lucky we were to be able to take advantage of these shifts. In the life insurance industry agents are either thrilled with what’s happening with technology or scared out of their minds. I could hear it in their voices when I talked to you agents on the phone. I can sense it in the emails I’m getting. No matter what side of the coin you fall on it all comes back to value. Do you provide value for your client beyond anything else out there? Do you value your client’s time? I can preach about the opportunity and spit out LIMRA stats about the opportunity ahead of us for hours, but it all comes down to you and what you can provide your clients. Let’s get down to how to take advantage of these big shifts. There’s a lot of agents make the move online with nothing that differentiates them from the rest of the industry. It’s scary for me because a lot of these agents are going to fail. It’s just like the saying, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Simply building a website with no marketing direction is a waste of your time and money, and I see agents doing it all the time, spending a thousand, two thousand, three thousand dollars on a website, adding some content and waiting three, six months and saying, “Hey, why am I not getting any leads?” Before you make the jump to get in front of this tidal wave of consumers headed online to research life insurance, think about what value you’re providing. Why would a prospect choose you over any other agent out there without ever meeting you face to face? What makes you memorable so they’ll come back to you to purchase life insurance when the time is right? I like to compare it to a social outing. When I’m introduced to five new people and ten seconds later I couldn’t tell you’re their names. Even after I shook their hand, looked in their eyes and said, “Nice to meet you” I forget their names. However, if there is someone that stands out from the crowd because of a common interest I always their name because I have a clear motive why I wanted to their name. Make sure you have that differentiating factor that will make a consumer you when they’re ready to purchase life insurance. What do you do well? What segment can you serve best, and can you articulate clearly how you can help that segment? What are you doing that no one else is doing? Highlight and focus whatever value you provide. That’s how you set yourself apart. Simply putting up a generic website saying you can get the lowest term life insurance rates, that’s been done. It’s been done. It’s out there. That’s not going to set you apart. Beyond the value you provide it’s important to value your time and your prospect’s time. Beyond the health of my family and friends my biggest asset is my time, and I bet it’s the same for you and your prospects. Let me ask you an off topic question, and this will all circle back, it will make sense. Do you get annoyed when somebody calls you on your cell phone? Think about it, you’re going throughout your day. Somebody calls you on your cell phone. You look at it. Are you a little bit annoyed that this person is actually calling you? If you’re one of those people who get annoyed, and I would hate to it it but I’m one of those people too, I would guess that you’re up to speed with technology, because technology is in a place where somebody shouldn’t be bothering you on your time. Think about that. This is what’s happening right now in our industry. People aren’t as receptive to phone calls as they used to be. I in the ‘90s loving to get phone calls, but now the telemarketing has jaded our view of answering our phones, and it’s so easy to communicate on your own time online via email or text, or whatever your preferred communication method is, it’s harder to get people to open up on the phone. We need to communicate with customer two-point-oh differently and on their time. We now live in a world where information is available twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. People aren’t communicating only during business hours now. I can’t tell you how many after hours email conversations with clients I’ve had this year. Guess what? I email them back immediately, even if it’s after hours, because I’m working on their time. They’re ready to communicate so I’m ready. I know I will get their business because I communicate on their time. It’s almost like consumers are beginning to expect us to be available on their time, and if we’re not they will find someone else who is. I think that’s one of the reasons why [Leeron 00:06:51] from previous podcast episodes, he pulls in several applications per week, and even more leads from his website chat from the weekends and late in the evenings, because he understands and respects other people’s time. We’re also having luck ing people who never pick up their phone or return emails or phone calls by texting them. That consumer obviously prefers to communicate by text and so that’s what we have to do. Is it convenient? No, we don’t like it but we’re on their time now and technology is pushing it so that we have to communicate on their time. Am I saying you need to be on point twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year? No, but you should figure out a reasonable way to be accessible to your prospects and clients on their time. The internet has made it so consumers almost expect a live person to be available by phone, chat, or email at 8:30 at night after their kids go to bed. That’s when they are able to go their research. That’s when they can get online. If you don’t do it someone else is. Think about how you’re communicating with prospects and be receptive to their preferred mode of communication. Let’s shift gears a little bit and let me respond to the question, how are these independent life insurance agents crushing it online while I’m struggling to generate a few leads? It’s something I talk about with agents daily. Right now there’s a widening gap of successful agents becoming even more successful. Then on the flipside there’s even more agents struggling to make it. You want to know that one theme that makes one agent better than the other, why these successful agents are becoming more successful and more and more agents are struggling to make it? Besides work ethic and investing in their business, they actually market in the year we live in. Most agents aren’t marketing in the world we live in today. I look at agent’s websites and rarely do I see a mobile optimized site. We’re seeing over thirty-five percent of our traffic to our life insurance websites from mobile devices, tablets, smart phones, whatever. I see general rehashed content everywhere. Nothing is new anymore. Everybody is just rehashing, rewriting the same thing and ripping each other off, rewording it. I have agents emailing me from their Gmail, AOL, and Yahoo email s. I see websites that look like they’re from the mid ‘90s. I found the reason agents aren’t marketing in the year we live in today is either time, money, laziness, or lack of education, and all those reasons are simply excuses. Every agent needs to be marketing to today’s consumer and this will always be evolving. I’m constantly changing the way I do business. It may seem wishy-washy to some agents, but I’m just keeping up with what consumers expect. Our industry is archaic. The value of traditional prospecting and traditional media today is nowhere near as valuable as it was ten years ago. TV, radio, and email all still work, but not to the affect that they used to. Think about it, do you ever watch a live TV show anymore? I know myself and nine out of ten of my friends don’t. That’s what DVR is for, right? We record it and we watch on our own time, fast forward the commercials. Do you read every email in your inbox? I don’t. I know most of my friends don’t. I back in the ‘90s I read every single line of every single email. Now I don’t because the marketers have infiltrated our inboxes. The attention of life insurance consumers, it keeps shifting. Right now we’re all in a battle for attention. You may be the nation’s best life insurance agent, but if you’re not getting attention it doesn’t matter. With that said, there is ROI in anything that people pay attention to, and that’s what every agent needs to focus on. What are people in your target market paying attention to right now? That’s what you need to figure out and that’s where you need to market. Right now, where are the eyeballs and ears of your target market? It’s going to be different for every market and once you’ve figured that out … I don’t have the answers to where your target market is but let me share with you where I believe the biggest opportunity in 2015 and the next few years lies. It’s not SEO. It’s not Pay Per Click or any media buying that we’ve been talking about in previous episodes. Those all work but I think the biggest opportunity and the most important thing any life insurance agent or business can leverage is data. If you have a current book of business, leverage that data first. Too many agents are casting a wide net to try and generate brand new clients, brand new leads, just cold from their marketing efforts. They’re not adding any depth to their books of business by going after referrals or cross cells. Facebook, LinkedIn, in other companies should be viewed by all life insurance agents as data providers that you can leverage, not that social media platform your children are obsessed with, spending hours a day on. Those are great data sources. Be absolutely tactical and surgical in using the data they provide can yield big results. I know it seems so abstract to ninety-nine percent of you, and that’s a good think because not many life insurance marketers are using data to effectively market. What do you do with data? That’s a strategy you need to come up with yourself but be intentional with it and know that you need them to care about life insurance. I know agents absolutely dominating niches from data sources they found. I’ll give a few examples. There’s a lifestyle risk an agent I know is targeting. I don’t want to out the risk as that would just be bad business and he would be very upset. He inquired with an association that the majority in this risk belonged to about advertising on their email list. He found out there was already a life insurance agency advertising that was paying them a hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars per year to to that list and they’d been doing it for three years, so it must be working. That’s an agency who found a data source and its obviously working really well for them. I know another agent who is writing applications every month from a Facebook ad campaign. He uses Facebook’s dark post. Those posts don’t show up on your page or news feed. He drives targeted traffic to his website through these dark posts. By targeted traffic, I’m talking his ideal demographic which I won’t say here, but I will make up and example so that you get the gist here. Let’s say he’s targeting scuba divers that are thirty to fifty-five years old. They’re married and have children. You can get that laser targeted with Facebook ads. You can learn Facebook ads in a few days too. We actually have a comprehensive course in our community on how to do Facebook ads. Another example and I’ll give an example that I’m doing right now. My agency is personally working a referral source where we’re getting, on average, a hundred and thirty leads per day with a niche medical telemarketing company. We convinced them to simply ask a question after they help their clients; “Would you be interested in speaking with a licensed agent about securing life insurance for your family?” If they say yes their information gets pushed to our CRM. This is simply leveraging the data of this company. Those are just three examples of data to grow your business. I can do a whole episode on these but I could never give any details so I won’t. I’ll just say that there’s a lot of data out there that can be sliced and diced to your target market. This is simply marketing in the year we live in. These agents understand that traditional media and life insurance prospecting methods are becoming more and more outdated. Technology is changing the way consumers communicate with us and how we need to get their attention. The agents that understand this and figure out their target market will continue to work these methods while other agents are still sitting with their website with a few dozen articles written, and wondering why they aren’t getting any of this action these other agents are seeing. Let me leave you with this; you have a life insurance license and you have experience helping families secure life insurance. You may even have a great website, but guess what, that entitles you to zero new clients tomorrow. You have to earn them through getting people’s attention and that takes patience in era where everything is about instant gratification. Agents aren’t willing to give their precious time to research and understand their target market. Learn some new marketing skills. You’d rather spend three thousand dollars on a nice looking website and expect prospects to appear out of nowhere. It doesn’t work that way. If you want to explode yourselves in 2015 and beyond, ask yourself these two questions, which we touched on earlier. Number one, are you providing extraordinary value to your target market, the type of value where people you? Two, do you market and communicate to this target market in the year we actually live in? In other words, make sure you are evolving with your market. Marketing, technology, and communication have changed and will continue to change. This is my challenge to all of the listeners listening to this podcast. Jeff: Now, for a peak into our community of life insurance agents over at SellTermLife.com, here are some of this week’s hot topics. Jeff: This week in the community, we’re discussing LIMRA’s report of the future role of call centers, which is basically us, since we’re all selling over the phone. The report predicted that within five years, communication by phone will decrease, while the use of online chat, email, and social media will all increase, like how we talked about in this episode. We also have an ability mastermind call forming, where agents can open up about their struggles and challenges in their business and get from the group on a live phone call. I’m a part of one of these and it’s been very helpful for my business, to not only get help with my challenges, but to learn from other people’s challenges as well. There was also a very recent update that lowered Google search engine share in favor of Yahoo results. It’s just crazy how updates to technology can affect landscapes. It shows just how fragile relying on certain traffic sources really is. This was just a minor, minor change, but it’s a reminder of how things can change in an instant. We discussed what happened in the immediately bumps or decreases in website traffic a lot of us received. Jeff: To the conversation and discover how you can use a modern technique to sell more life insurance, work more efficiently and on your own , head over to SellTermLife.com. We’ll see you back next Thursday morning for another value packed episode of the Modern Life Insurance Selling podcast. People in the episode: Jeff Root: [email protected] Mentioned on this episode: STL Community Facebook Ads Training Recent Action in the Sell Term Life Community: We discuss LIMRA’s report on the future role of call centers which is basically us since we’re all selling over the phone.  The report predicted that within 5 years communication by phone will decrease while the use of online chat, email adn social media will all increase. We also have an ability mastermind call forming where agents can open up about their struggles and challenges in their business and get from the group on a live phone call.  I’m a part of one of these and it’s been very helpful for my business to not only get help with my challenges, but to also learn from other peoples challenges. There was also a very recent update that lowered Google’s search engine share in favor of Yahoo.  It shows just how fragile relying on certain traffic sources really is.  We discussed what happened and the immediate bumps or decreases in website traffic a lot of us received. Learn how you can get access to these discussions, a powerful community of like-minded life insurance agents, and much much more by visiting the SellTermLife Community. Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes – Leave us a Review! (Here’s How) Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page Want to help improve the show? Want to hear about a specific topic? Just want to leave some ? … Send me a voice message  

This week we have Bart Catmull, President and COO of Sagicor Life Insurance. Bart and I have a conversation about Sagicor Life Insurance and the no medical exam life insurance marketplace.  Specifically his thoughts on where it’s going and challenges it faces. Click Here to View the Full Transcript Jeff Root: Hey life insurance agents, you’re listening to the modern life insurance selling podcast where we provide the tools to help you grow a more profitable life insurance business by selling online and over the phone from anywhere with an internet connection. Even if you’re alone in your quest to build your life insurance business, just know that there’s a community of life insurance agents at SellTermLife.com connecting and helping each other grow their businesses from home offices, coffee shops, beaches, all across the nation. Jeff Root: Welcome to episode number 37 of the modern life insurance selling podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Root. Today we’ll speaking with the president and COO of Sagicor Life Insurance about his company and then we’ll tap into this insights on where he thinks the non med life insurance marketplace is going, and just talk non medical life insurance in general. If you’re not familiar with Sagicor Life Insurance, they’re one of the best non med life insurance companies to arrive at the moment, or our agency’s favorite non med carrier. That’s for so many reasons that we’ll discuss in this podcast episode. First, if you like what you hear and our listening in iTunes or Stitcher, please leave us a review and if you have any questions or would like a topic cover on a future podcast, please use the send voice mail tab over at SellTermLife.com. All right, so today we have Bart Catmull, president of Sagicor Life Insurance. Bart’s been with Sagicor since 1999 and in my opinion, is leading one of the more progressive life insurance companies and we’ll dig into that today. All right, welcome to the podcast Bart. Bart Catmull: Glad to be here Jeff. Jeff Root: All right, so let’s kick this thing off by telling us a little bit about your background at Sagicor. From what I’ve read I see you’ve had a few positions there before becoming president and COO right? Bart Catmull: That’s correct. Actually I’ve been with the company since 1999. At that point in time it was under a different brand and in 2005 it was acquired by Sagicor financial corp which is a Barbadian life insurance company that’s been around since the 1840s. It has a wealth of history and being with, ing friends and family. I started out as the chief financial officer and held that position until 2006, which time I became the chief operating officer and then have held that position and title until today. I became the president, I guess last year. Is that right? I had to think about that one. Maybe it’s been two years now. Time flies when you’re having fun and we’re actually … It’s been a great experience with me. I love the company. I’ve seen ups and downs with the economy and the world in general but we’ve weathered the storm and are growing dramatically. Jeff Root: Awesome. We love the company too and I’m glad to have you on here. I’ve made it known that I’m a huge Sagicor fan and in our private community, and one of our most popular threads is our Sagicor thread with agents sharing their experiences and the reason we’re riding so much Sagicor business is you guys have a such a well priced non med product and easy application, fast decision times, which in most times is instant, and you have a non med [inaudible 00:03:33] to top it all off. You guys make it really easy to send you business and the non med market has been so stagnant for so long and you guys in my opinion are the tops of the non med market. What do you see as Sagicor’s biggest strengths in the market right now? Bart Catmull: I think it flows from our beliefs and it’s important to understand if somebody doesn’t understand why they do something than they’re not going to do it very well. It all stems from our belief that we’re here to serve our friends and family and neighbors. We’re here to make things simple and straight forward and we’re all about long term solutions. As we looked at the marketplace, we felt that one of the areas that we could really have a major impact in the lives of our friends and family neighbors was on those lower face amounts. When I say lower, it’s I mean, on the term we go to $400,000 and on the guaranteed UL it’s 250, so it’s not that low but we really wanted to make a difference there. We know that we all want to have in this day and age instantaneous, almost instantaneous results. It didn’t make sense for us at that level why someone should have to wait around six weeks for a decision. We live in a day and age when there are significant amounts of technology and information available to make decisions that you shouldn’t have to wait that long. We took a platform that we had internally and looked around for partners that on the technology side that had similar philosophies as us. We said, “Listen, let’s make a change here.” Our goals was to have everyone have the advantage of having our best underwriter on their best day 24/7. That’s what we set out to do. When we talk about non med, we wanted to do something different that I believe, the questions that we ask, the information that we get whether it be from a potential policy holder or from outside sources provides us with the information that we need to make a very knowledgeable decision in a few minutes. It can be as quick as a few seconds but definitely within a few minutes. We can make that decision and give that policy holder the peace of mind that if they have done everything that they’ve been asked to do and have been truthful in their responses, and pay their , that they’re going to have a policy in place within 24 hours. It’ll be in place. They’ll be covered and their family will be protected and it just takes one thing off their table that they have to worry about. Jeff Root: Yeah, and the way you guys do that too is so seamless. One of the biggest strengths that I see with your product is you have different health classifications, preferred, standard, rated pricing options on your non med term. That is huge because you can take a wide range of people and be competitive in different situations. Bart Catmull: Exactly. If you look out there and the industry statistics tell us that most of the life insurance that general public has comes from their employer. They’ve got a group policy that their employer has just given them. That’s great except that all of those group policies are taking into that there’s healthy and unhealthy people and they’re mixing that rate. While it’s easy, the employee doesn’t have to do anything. They didn’t have to have any picture or prods or anything that they needed to do. It can be expensive. It’s kind of a stealth expense, but it’s expensive. What we wanted to do was provide them with quality coverage, great benefits and come as close as we could to the ability to basically, a pricing of a fully underwritten product without the expense of incurring … To go out and do the medical exams and all that. That’s what we set out to do. That was the direction that I gave the underwriters and the actuaries was okay, figure this out. It allows us, what they’ve done I think is great in that it allows us … Somebody’s got great health, they’re going to get a great rate. If somebody is a little, they’ve got a few issues health wise, they’re still going to get a good rate and they’re going to get an answer real quick. That’s an added benefit to them. Jeff Root: Yeah, absolutely. I feel like the no exam life insurance market took a step back from what was available to agents four to five years ago until you guys came in. We had HSBC go all the way up to 500,000 with an instant decision and consumers could apply online without an agent. Same thing with RBC Liberty Life, except they had a 250K cap. I guess my question for you is, I know you guys are doing this right now but why aren’t we seeing these types of products on the market right now? Bart Catmull: I think that … One reason why is from a re-insurance standpoint, the re-insurers are just getting up to speed. Pricing of the products is always an issue. The technology is just coming into play. I think that you have to have companies who are willing to be innovative to look out there and look at information in a different way, work with partners who … Some of the partners we worked with in developing this were just starting out. We saw the benefit and the expertise that they had in their platforms that made us excited and said, “Hey, you know what, we’ll take a chance with you. We’ll work on this together and come to a common solution.” I also think it takes individuals who are knowledgeable on technology as well. I fully expected that yes, the marketplace is going to grow in this area because everyday new technologies come into play that allow us as an insurance company to analyze risk better which then provides the opportunity for us to provide that benefit to policy holders and providing improved products at better rates. Jeff Root: Awesome. Where do you see no exam life insurance going next? You guys have already implemented this technology, lots of new technology coming out. What’s next? Bart Catmull: I think there’ll be uses in expanding the product line for products that maybe in the past didn’t lend themselves as easily to the no exam basis. I think that over time we’ll be able to provide this service at higher issue ages. Older issue ages I guess, is what I should say. Right now the technology’s so new and things are working that we have to keep some limits on it to be able to understand the risk and ensure that we have properly reflected it. I think the next step will be that fully automated experience where it makes it seamless and that policy holder can receive all their information electronically. I think a perfect example is on the property and casualty side. I don’t get a hard copy of my policy anymore and most of everything I do is all electronic. I think that we’re, the life insurance industry is probably a few years behind the property and casualty side but we’re getting there. Jeff Root: Yeah. Do you see Sagicor ever plan to have a consumer facing web application that agents like myself or anybody listening to this podcast can market, where consumers can apply online themselves. Bart Catmull: We’ve been discussing that with our agency force and looking at doing that. Yeah, I expect that that’s where everything is going. Everything’s an app now. Jeff Root: Yeah. Right. Bart Catmull: At some point we have to get there. The key is that life insurance is still one of those things that is normally not bought. It is sold. There is a discussion that has to happen, and people still feel very comfortable and need to have those discussions with someone that they feel comfortable with to kind of validate that yeah, they’ve got the right amount of coverage. Jeff Root: Right. Bart Catmull: Once again on the property casual side, you know that the state is mandated. You have to have this, at least this. Jeff Root: Right. Bart Catmull: We don’t have that in the life insurance side. Jeff Root: Right. Bart Catmull: For the most part someone needs to talk to someone and say, “Hey, I’m thinking about this, is that enough? Do I need more? Do I need less? What do you think?” While there are some that are moving to it and say, “Hey, I feel comfortable making the whole decision.” For the most there needs to be that interaction with an agent at some point in the process. Jeff Root: Right. Bart Catmull: Then determining how you reflect that in a forward, consumer facing application has it’s technical challenges that we need to work through to make sure that that person who’s helping that individual along gets that cred. Jeff Root: Got you. Understandable. Anything on the horizon for Sagicor at the moment? I know we talked about where we see no exam life insurance going next, but for Sagicor specifically, anything coming up? Bart Catmull: We’ve got some … We’re going to have some announcements here next month in regards to new product offerings on our [inaudible 00:14:07] writing platform, so we’re excited about that. Jeff Root: Awesome. Bart Catmull: We’ll have some additional ones early in 2015. We’re not going to sit on our laurels. We are pushing forward, not only on the technology side but then on the underwriting side as well and the rules that it and ensuring that we’re staying on the cutting edge of what’s out there and available to us. Jeff Root: Where do you see room for improvement technology wise in our industry right now? Bart Catmull: Number one is making it easier for the policy holder to get their application in, to complete the application. There’s still room for improvement, even in our system in regards to the questions that are asked and the information that is reviewed. I think that there are huge opportunities on linking the underwriting decisions with the medical information that is available online or electronically. We’re doing some of that now. [inaudible 00:15:14] writing is a prime example of what I consider the first stage and then the next … There’s some steps that are going to happen that will move this thing forward by leaps and bounds. When you look at where we are, I expect when you look where the industry is today and compare it in five years you’ll say, “What was going on? Why were you doing it like that back then?” We will have changed our direction. Jeff Root: Yeah. I know those improvements in technology will be well received because just looking at the statistics and I’m sure you know this too. [inaudible 00:15:48] Foundation I think last year did a study that found that over 50% of consumers that purchased life insurance in their survey went online. With these non med products, it just makes it easier. They’re looking for these types of things now and so as technology grows I think the life insurance companies that are the most progressive are going to win a lot more of those cases. Bart Catmull: I look back and I bought my first whole life policy when I was 23 and once again it went to … We were expecting our first child and so once again, everyone knows or most insurance, life insurance is purchased because of some type of change in your life, marriage, somebody es away who was close to you. You see what the impact was. You have a birth in the family. Whatever it may be but that’s what causes people to do that. We do need to do a better job at, as an industry and as individual companies in ensuring that the message is out there so when they are looking for … They have that event and they go out to the internet to look to try to find an answer to that problem that they have, our solutions come up and it’s easy for them to read and understand, to look at it. One of the changes that is occurring now and will continue to occur and gain and more traction is the whole video concept. I have, half of my kids like to read and the other half disdain it immensely. I was with my son the other day and he was working on a go-kart we had and I said, “What are you going to do? How are you going to fix that?” He goes, “I don’t know, I’m going to go out to YouTube and figure it out.” That mentality. We can’t fight that … The companies that fight that are going to no longer be in business and as industry if we fight that we will become very non relevant real quick. We’ve got to step up and ensure that they get what they need. Jeff Root: Absolutely. We’re coming up on the end here. Bart, I just want to thank you for taking the time to us on the podcast and share all these insights. This is a really good look into some of our favorite products. What really is pushing the industry forward technology wise is these non med companies like yourself and just using the technology that is really like you said, a few years behind some of the other insurance industries out there. Bart Catmull: I think the other thing Jeff, one of the things that we’re looking to is the ability to not just be a non med company, or not be just an annuity company but to use the technologies to provide quality at all levels. If you need a fully underwritten product, you find somebody who needs a $2 Million policy. We want to use these technologies that are being perfected in the non med area to be able to move those to those fully underwritten arenas to provide quality products at good, fair prices in a time horizon that makes sense. Once again a fully underwritten product, it doesn’t make sense in today’s world to have that take six to eight weeks to issue. Jeff Root: Yeah. I totally agree. Bart Catmull: That’s where we’re as a company, we feel like we’re not just a non med company. It’s not just about [inaudible 00:19:45] writing. It’s not just about our annuity products that we have. It’s, we want to provide that full suite of products so yeah, maybe this individual started with us as they bought a simple term product that they needed it when they were in their 20s but as they move along they’re going to need to grow. We’re going to continue to provide that simple straight forward solution at every age and every need that they have so that as an agent you’ll feel comfortable recommending them to us. Are we always going to be the cheapest? No, but I guarantee you that we’ll always provide that quick quality service, that smile over the phone that you know you can feel comfortable with and providing that recommendation to your friend and family. Jeff Root: Right, and that would be hugely well received in the agent community. Like you said, that six to eight weeks, that needs to be worked on. I can’t wait to hear more about this and see what you guys do in the future. Bart Catmull: We’ll definitely be looking for those things coming from us here in the coming months and in the coming years. Jeff Root: Awesome. Bart Catmull: When we move this technology forward. Jeff Root: Awesome. I know myself and most of our audience really appreciate sharing your insights and everything that you’re doing over there at Sagicor and I appreciate you coming on the podcast. Bart Catmull: Appreciate it, Jeff. Anytime. Jeff Root: Now for a peek into our community of life insurance agents over at SellTermLife.com, here are some of this week’s hot topics. Some of the community action this week involved a few great opportunities for agents just making the move to selling remotely. A few examples, there was a starter website for sale at a ridiculously low price that was already generating leads. An agent within our community decide to focus on his two core websites and gave an agent the opportunity to purchase the site that he had been ignoring awhile, which is a great asset for any new agent at a price most agents could afford, and the website went quick. Another example is I personally hired several full-time agents from the community who are writing several applications per day now. My offer will be Live on SellTermLife.com in the future, but for now the community is providing me with enough talent to work as many leads as they can possibly handle. This is a great opportunity because this is how I started out. Learning the systems, getting the experience of working 25 plus new leads per day just to learn how to sell and to get comfortable with selling over the phone. This will be a great launchpad for a few agents that are in the community that are just kind of making the move from selling face to face to selling remotely. There was also a topic on optimizing for impact. In other words agents spend so much time on building a beautiful website or writing a great article but not enough time on optimizing their website or content to get people to request quotes from you or to you. We talk about best practices to do this. We also discussed why many agents are focusing on content marketing and SEO as a foundation for their business, but not solely their whole business. To the conversation and discover how you could use modern techniques to sell more life insurance, work more efficiently and on your own , head over to SellTermLife.com. We’ll see you back next Thursday morning for another value packed episode of the modern life insurance selling podcast. People in the episode: Jeff Root: [email protected] Bart Catmull Mentioned on this episode: Sagicor Life Insurance Recent Action in the Sell Term Life Community: Some of the community action this week involved a few great opportunities for agents just making the move to selling remotely.  There was a starter website for sale at a rediculously low price that was already generating leads.  An agent decided to focus on his 2 core websites and gave an agent an opportunity to purchase a site he had been ignoring…which is a great asset for a new agent at a price most agents could afford.  I also personally hired several full-time agents from the community who are writing several applications per day now. There was a topic on optimizing for impact.  In other words, agents spend so much time on building a beautiful website or writing a great article, but not enough time on optimizing their website or content to get people to request quotes from you.  We talk about best practices to do this. We also discuss why many agents are focusing on content marketing and SEO as a foundation for their business, but not SOLELY their whole business. Learn how you can get access to these discussions, a powerful community of like-minded life insurance agents, and much much more by visiting the SellTermLife Community. Listening Options: Subscribe via iTunes – Leave us a Review! (Here’s How) Tune on Stitcher Radio Grab the RSS Feed here Or use the player at the top of this page Want to help improve the show? Want to hear about a specific topic? Just want to leave some ? … Send me a voice message