How Hard is a Career Selling Life Insurance?

How Hard is a Career Selling Life Insurance?

On the bright side, selling life insurance offers a few benefits difficult to find in other careers. First, life insurance sales jobs are abundant and easy to find. Second, commission percentages are very high compared to other insurance sales, such as health insurance.

Best of all, life insurance agents get paid commission renewals for as long as a sold policy is in force. This creates a passive income stream.

However, even when you locate a good prospect, the product itself is hard to sell. People are loath to discuss or even acknowledge their own mortality. Moreover, unlike a new car or cellphone, life insurance provides none of the instant gratifications that leads people to make impulse purchases.

However,

1. The majority of life insurance companies classify their agents as independent contractors. They offer neither base salaries nor benefits. This means an agent can work a full week, but if the agent puts no sales on the books, they go without a pay-check.

The upside to not being classified as an employee is the company cannot force you to work set hours, you set your own schedule. That said, life insurance sales, particularly during the first few years, requires working a ton of hours if you want any chance at making a decent living.

A few companies offer employee status, which comes with a small base salary and benefits. Agents at these companies are held to rigid production quotas. Miss your monthly sales target more than once or twice and you could be shown the door.

2. Finding qualified life insurance prospects is fraught with difficulty. Even with harnessing the power of the internet, good leads are hard to come by. Lead vendors abound online, but most of their leads are nonexclusive, meaning they get sold to multiple agents.

Exclusive leads, when you can find them, are very high in price. Your close rate, meaning the percentage of leads you actually sell, has to be phenomenal just to break even with exclusive leads. And employers who provide leads almost always make you take a lower commission in return.

For these reasons, many life insurance agents drum up business the old-fashioned way: cold-calling and door-knocking. These methods still work, even in the 21st century, but being a successful insurance agent requires a lot of perseverance and very thick skin.

3. Even when pitching to the most-qualified prospect, do not assume you have an easy sell. Life insurance is a very difficult product to sell. Simply getting your prospect to acknowledge and discuss the fact they are going to die is a hard first step. When and if you clear that hurdle, your next task is creating urgency so they buy right away.

This is also difficult because the product provides no instant gratification and leaving the appointment without signed paperwork almost always means you have lost that prospect forever. The client may be sincere when they say they will think about it, but chances are they will not give it five minutes of thought after you walk out the door.

On the flip side of all of these difficulties, there are benefits too.