The 70/30 Split: Monetizing Life Insurance for P&C Agencies

I decided to look for people that wanted to buy insurance instead of selling them insurance, and that's what led me to build an online quoting system for websites. So when someone searched for a life insurance quote, they found my website, they'd run a quote, they'd pretty much almost apply for the policy themselves. I'd get them on the phone. It was a lay-down sale.

Hey, hey, welcome back to The Broker's Voice. Andy Neary, CEO and founder of Complete Game Consulting. Consulting. I'm excited today. I've got Brian Greenberg joining me, CEO of Quoteplicity. We're going to talk about Quoteplicity today. Brian, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Andy.

This is, uh, I don't always have guests on who come from the life insurance world, Brian, so this is, uh, I like it when I do because I am one who is a self-admitted failed life insurance producer.

They're different animals. Yeah.

That's how I started my insurance career. But we're going to talk about Quoplicity, and you built Quoplicity after personally writing 7 figures in the business. Um, what led you to building Quoplicity? I got to imagine there was something back then that really frustrated you about the overall sales process.

For sure. I started at MetLife and was selling face-to-face, and it's not fun. It's very intrusive. To be selling life insurance, a lot of medical questions. And the easiest sale I ever had was somebody who I pitched earlier, and one of his family members passed away. It sparked the interest to buy insurance. It was the easiest sale. So I decided to look for people that wanted to buy insurance instead of selling them insurance. And that's what led me to build an online quoting system for websites. And for, you know, over a decade, I was one of the top websites on Google. So when someone searched for a life insurance quote, they found my website, they'd run a quote, they'd pretty much almost apply for the policy themselves. I'd get them on the phone. It was a lay-down sale, and it was— the customers were happy. I had thousands of reviews. It was just a great way to sell insurance.

That is awesome. So, I'm going to admit my own ignorance maybe a little bit. So, the tool was really directed at the end consumer who wanted to apply for life insurance?

Yeah, most of the quoters were for agents. This was for a consumer.

Yeah. No, that's great.

Right. My goal was to answer questions. So, I showed them 50 different companies and everything about the companies, brochures, everything.

You said something that I thought was really important too, which was this was finding people who wanted to buy versus you trying to sell it. And I, I think that's a very important shift. You know, I think when I, you know, personally, I told you I failed. I was a failed life insurance salesman. I think one reason I failed, I was in my early 20s. It's a product you don't technically have to have, right?

Right.

And I think that's where I struggle, was finding that pain of getting to the point that for them to realize they had to have it. And looking back now, I probably would have done it a lot differently back then. But having a tool like this where an end consumer who is searching can just come and apply, what did that do? Like, was there an aha moment when you created that, when you saw what kind of results it was creating?

Oh, absolutely. It was, you know, I was one of the first guys to do it. So it was like a money fountain. Amazing. How many people were going through so much of the process. It was, it was awesome. And no one was, you know, the agents I would hire to sell it, they loved it too because it was the easiest sales they ever had.

Now, point of clarity, I believe if I— you are offering this through life agents today, is that correct?

Right. I sold the agency.

Okay.

They had a nice exit. They left me with all the software that I built, and I've spent millions developing this quoting software. So took some time off and decided to start a new company called Quoteplicity, kind of quotes and simplicity combined. And all the agents, agencies can use the whole system that I've built.

That's great. That's great. Why do you think, you know, I look at all the agents and agencies we serve today at Complete Game Consulting, and you get a mix of people who sell commercial insurance, health insurance, life insurance, DI, personal lines, you name it. Why do you feel like life insurance is still one of the most underleveraged insurance solutions inside agencies today?

A few things. First, I don't think agents like selling it. It's, it's a, it could be a very long sales process. Number 2, it's not like, you know, they legally have to get it, like you said, and only certain things will spark it, right? So whether they buy a house or have a kid or get married or know somebody that passed away. So when that happens, you have to be front of mind for these people. And for some reason, I don't know why, But P&C agents, commercial agents, they don't put on their websites a link to run a quote. They don't put— I don't want to put things, but they don't always include it in their signature that they even offer this. So I think a lot of people, you know, number one, they don't like selling, and two, they don't even let people know that it's an option.

Yeah. Yeah. I think most of the time the reason it's not being sold is it's not being talked about.

That as well, yeah. And it can be a lot easier than people think.

Yeah. You know, I look at most of my career was spent selling health insurance and a little bit of commercial. And there you're dealing with something they have to have, right, if they're a business. And so, you're really trying to sell something they already have and have to have. Where life insurance, disability insurance, very different sale. They don't have to have it. So, you got to find that pain point to convince them why they need it. And now that I am saying this all out loud, it was pretty genius what you did back in the day when you built the tool to say, "Hey, I'm not going to go chase people down. I'm just going to create a landing spot for people looking for it." Right.

But you don't need to create the need for life insurance. It happens naturally and it's very hard to force it.

Where does, you know, when you think about the process of buying life insurance, right? Quoting. Applications, medical, all the stuff that can go into applying for life insurance. Where do you think momentum tends to die in that process? Because it's just kind of like collecting health information in the health insurance side. And within Quoteplicity, is there anything you're doing there to help kind of speed up that path from, call it, interest to final application?

Sure. The momentum usually fades after someone runs a quote. Because they'll go online and they'll run a quote on my website, and then they'll go to someone else's website. They get confused. They get, you know, a general idea of pricing. And then, you know, interest just changes from day to day. So after that, if you don't keep in touch with them, then they're gone.

All right?

That's why in my system, you know, we save the quote so they could always go back to a link and view it again. So we have automations that just continually invite them just to, hey, low, very low pressure. Here's a link back to the quote. Here's a health questionnaire. Here's my calendar if you have any questions. The point being, very low pressure, which makes it a lot easier for the life insurance agents that do it only, that's it. And also for P&C agents, RIAs, and commercial ties.

And you already started doing that there. I'm glad you did. Thank you. Because I was going to ask you, without opening up the demo and showing us the inside, walk us through. So from start to finish, because we get a lot of life insurance advisors who listen to this show, what does that process look like? So I'm a consumer interested, I come in and I look at quotes. What does that process look like for a life insurance advisor who's leveraging Quoteplicity from start to finish?

Are you saying from— as an example, would this be the process for a P&C agent as well?

Yeah, but I would even think more, again, somebody, a consumer looking to buy life insurance, right?

So from the consumer's point—

yeah, let's go from the consumer standpoint. What does that process look like?

All right, number one, they would go online. Okay, they'd be doing some research. Whether they might know you from somewhere else, but they're going to go online, run a quote. Now, when to run a quote, very often you collect name, email, and phone. So then they're a new lead. From there, they're going to get an email, text message, hey, here's, thanks for running a quote. Here's a link back to it. Let me tell you a little bit about the policies. And you kind of hit them for like 3 months. And sometimes, you know, hit them with holiday emails. Just keep it top of mind, always letting them go back to that quote to finish when they're ready. Hmm.

Okay.

From there, they may call. Then it's an easy sale. You know, once you get them on the phone, they don't want to shop very much after that for another agent. As far as the application, the application is kind of a pain, Andy. It could be a long application, and that scares a lot of guys off. You don't need to take the application. You could just take what's called a ticket and all the big insurance companies, you just need to get their, you know, their name, address, maybe the last 4 of the social, and the insurance company calls the client for them. So the client will get a call from a registered representative from Banner Protective or AI Corporate Mutual of Omaha, take the whole application over the phone, then they handle all the underwriting too. So it could be— I highly advise against an agent having to take a 20-page application themselves. Don't do it. It's a pain. Use the tools that these insurance companies have now where they actually take it for you. Or you could always partner with a fulfillment center, a call center. They'll, you know, get an email address of your company, represent you. You get a commission. You could even get on the application. As a writing agent if you're licensed to sell life insurance.

Sounds pretty easy to me.

I kind of jumped between agent and consumer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but that one thing you said there that I thought was interesting is so at the point the consumer looks at quotes doesn't mean they're necessarily going to take much action right at that point.

That's correct.

But what you've built is almost that nurture sequence, right? Where it's like Okay, we know you looked, you are interested, a.k.a. you are a lead, but you may not be ready to buy this moment. But we're going to stay top of mind in your world. So when you are, we're the only one you think of.

It's— people will sometimes buy 6 months, a year later. Mm-hmm. As long as you keep in touch with them, low pressure, all of a sudden something will spark. But it is— it's a lot of work. So that's why it's so important to automate it.

So dare I ask an ignorant question, Brian, and I apologize if I do, but I think about how that process works. And my immediate reaction when, when we started talking was like, okay, let me try to figure out the ideal broker. And I'm thinking life insurance agent. But technically, this is a tool any insurance advisor could be using.

Yeah, absolutely. Look, if you're making your living just doing life insurance, you need a good way to get good quality leads, guys to run. Facebook ads and they're constantly marketing it.

Yep.

Yes, there's way too many people in the P&C or the business that don't do it. All they need to do is put a link on their website.

Bingo.

Quote a quote. That's it. We can give you a widget, a button. You know, there's been stuff over the years. There was Policy Genius was one of the people doing it, but very few. But that's all you really need to do.

That, uh, that is interesting because I think about how many agencies right now are missing untapped revenue opportunities. Not that you're just doing life insurance for the sake of commission, but we, we often talk to benefit agencies about the opportunities they're missing with ancillary products sales, right? And that's what this is. This is, hey, you put a link on your site especially if you're selling a product, I'm thinking of like personal lines, homeowners, and auto. Well, you might as well give those consumers the opportunity to look at life insurance too. Yeah, they don't really have to do all that much work. A, they being the agent, the agency. You've put this product in place that's— to me, it sounds like it does a lot of the work for them.

It's very hands-off. It's not going to be a huge, you know, it's not going to be 100 policies a month, but you You'd be pleasantly surprised that it's, you know, $1,000 to $5,000 extra in commission. Because look, term insurance pays 100% of the annual first-year premium. So if the premium is $100 a month, that's $1,200 commission. It's a nice thing to do with, and just being hands-off. And Andy, let me just say this. We have something that we developed where you can work your old database. So we can give you a link so they could run a quote. Although in that link, you can include their name, email, phone, date of birth, gender, so they don't have to reenter anything to actually see a quote. You could even say, hey, why don't you run it for $250,000, a 20-year. They don't have to press anything. They're just looking at results. So it's, it's really something we want people to take advantage of. We have a few people that are doing it very successfully. Be great if we could expand on that.

Yeah. Sometimes I have to hear things a couple of times, Brian, to really get my grasp, my hands around it. But I'm starting to sense this is a nice little life insurance marketing CRM in many ways.

Yeah. Yeah. You could use it in whatever CRM you're currently using.

Yeah.

As well.

When you were building it, knowing, you know, you spent years selling life insurance yourself, was there anything you were designing against when you were building the product, the solution?

I was designing against being too vague. So you may put just a contact form on your site. Are you interested in insurance? And then they hit submit and that's it. You know, hey, we'll, we'll be in touch. And that was something that too many people did. They still do that. I wanted to avoid— I wanted to actually give somebody actual quotes without making them jump through all the hoops. Just be transparent. Say, hey, look, here's the best companies, here's reviews, here's a link to their BBB and their insurance ratings. This is why one company is better. So the whole goal was to be transparent, not that black box that they're just going to submit a form, wait for a call, get some information.

Well, and I have to believe that the level of that communication, being that a lot of it is automated, has had to speed up the path of policy, not only policy submission, but approval.

Yes, I will say this though. You know, there's a lot of no medical exam policies which are very fast. Yep. Right. If someone's looking for a larger policy, it could take 4 weeks, 6 weeks to get through the whole process because there's an underwriter. It is kind of a bloated product. Consumers do it. Although they could ask for doctor reports, right? Or, you know, they may want to do a— take blood and urine. Does it speed things up? Yeah, I guess so. I think we were doing such high volume that we knew the underwriters and the people at the company, and they wanted to make sure that they served our customers well. Yeah.

Yeah, but I look at that part of that— part of that process is no different to what I said earlier, if you're selling health insurance, you've got to collect, you've got to collect some claims data. You're selling commercial insurance, you've got to collect claims, loss runs, things like that. It's, that's the same thing as, okay, now it's time to get the medical application done, right? Call it a little more personal than collecting loss runs, I get it. But at the same time, that's probably where this process bottlenecks if it does, just like collecting loss runs for a producer, commercial producer bottlenecks at that point.

It's, it's the same thing. Our system is set up to allow them to fill out the information themselves.

Yep. That's perfect. I love that. Now I'd be lo— I'd, I'd love to know your thoughts, 'cause obviously there's not a conversation that goes by that I'm having with agency leaders right now where the conversation of automation and AI and all this stuff, it's in every conversation we're having. Yeah, I gotta believe there's a component of AI inside your tool, but a lot of people are still preaching, but yeah, the more you automate and the more you put AI in, the less human, and, and you're losing that personalization. Yeah, I agree, but I'd love to hear from you. I gotta believe you're still proving the results that automation, even if it does take away a little personalization, which I would disagree, it actually does. You still can't sit on your laurels and think we're going to avoid automation because we don't want to lose the human touch.

Right. One of the things we like to do is populate people's CRMs with a lot of data. So everything we collect flows through. So when you send an automation, the AI or your text or your templates, they're gonna know when they apply. Hey, you ran a quote on this day. You ran a quote for this type of insurance. You ran a quote for this type of, you know, this amount of coverage in this term. You ran, you know, on December 2nd, you ran a quote for term insurance, $100,000 for 20 years. You know, we'd imagine it's something you were looking at, something you might be interested in. That takes a lot of the impersonal part out because, you know, what we find is people will run a quote and you call them up and they won't know who you are because they looked at 5 different, 6 different people. If you could actually carry that data through, they're going to know, they're going to remember, if you will. They're, they're going to be convinced that yes, they did contact you and it's not a scam.

Got it. So this, this actually does become a little bit of a differentiator for that agency who is competing for the attention of that consumer who did go and quote not just their tool, but probably 4 or 5 others, right?

It's not, it's not so cold. It's not, hey, are you interested in buying insurance? Yeah, it's more of a—

let's pivot the conversation now to the agencies who should be using this. And I know we talked about a little bit before, but when you look at the, and the, the agencies that are leveraging a tool like this, my first question would be, when agencies are implementing a tech solution like Quotility. Where do you often see agencies making the mistake in implementing tech?

Number one, they're not getting it on their website. You know, they kind of sign up for it and they have it, although they're not making it prominent. I think you need to make a page on your website for life insurance and, and get it there. I think also people are not putting it in their signature. So you could have the great tech, all right, but if you don't get a customer to see it, it's, it's not going to do anything for you. It's very much like being on the second page of Google. Your office, great service, but you're— nobody knows. So you have to get your web guy, all right? This is a web-based service, you know. You— so yeah, you gotta get it on your digital material.

Yeah, um, it's a great simple way of saying, I think, what, uh, what I see a lot of agencies making the mistake with tech is they, they, they buy it, buy into it, and then not ever leverage it to its fullest capacity. You can't use tech nobody can see. You have to actually put it where people can use it. So who is Define— oh, go ahead.

No, no, go ahead.

I was gonna say, who is the ideal, um, agency? What does the ideal agency look like for you when you look at who you are, who, who is implementing Quoteplicity to its fullest extent? What does that agency typically look like?

You want to know the life insurance side?

Let's start with the life insurance side.

Yeah, life insurance side is we have a lot of call centers. That just generate a lot of leads. There's a big market here for buying leads, but leads are expensive. So if you could figure out how to generate them yourselves, you're saving 50, 60% on the lead generation. So guys are using my system to run Facebook ads or Google ads, Instagram, YouTube ads, and starting them off with the quote because the quote is the first step in getting somebody down the line of buying an insurance policy. Those guys are running, you know, up to hundreds of leads a day, getting them into a CRM system. A lot of them are using GoHighLevel and putting them into something where they get text messages, voicemail drops, emails, all constantly trying to get them to take some sort of call to action. And the best guys are the guys that follow up for like a year. They may, you know, they don't even need to call, but text message. It's amazing. The best agents are really good at text messaging. Very low pressure, but they'll put a picture of themselves in the text string. I don't know. It's just some really cool stuff.

Well, I think what you're getting at too there is how many advisors quit after the first try, right? Somebody shows interest in a quote, they follow up with a phone call, and then that is the extent to which they engage with that potential buyer. The key word is persistency, right? What you said is you have some agents who will continue following up for up to a year from that first point of contact. Yeah, because you have no idea when that consumer is ultimately going to get triggered to say, yep, it's time to buy life insurance.

Andy, I think You're right, a lot of life insurance people fall off because it is hard, especially if you're asking people medical questions and what company to put them in. I would highly recommend a partnership, partnership with another agent or a fulfillment center that if someone is interested in, great, I'll have this, this guy call you. I'm going to hand you over to the expert. I, I don't really encourage you guys to, to dive too deep into the life insurance rabbit hole because there's too many companies and the underwriting, it is, it's difficult. I think most agents fall off because they don't know how to qualify somebody. We're field underwriters. So yeah, the partnerships are out there now. Yeah, they haven't always been, but they are now.

I know we talked about it a few minutes back, but I would love to hear your thoughts. We get a lot of commercial employee benefit agencies that follow us here on the show, they don't focus on life insurance. It's not one of their primary products that they offer. But how could a benefits and/or commercial agency still leverage a tech solution like Quility?

They just need to add that to their product offering. It may not be a huge— it's not going to be your main money driver. Although you're going to capture those customers and it's going to be a nice little free money mailbox money, if you will, coming in. There's another, you know, it's the relationships in this business. So let's say you have a commercial guy and you have the business owners. The business owners are very wealthy. All right, you could refer them to an expert that could sell them, you know, a million-dollar policy. And as the agent, though, I want to be very clear, the agent, you as the referring person, gets 70% and the guy selling it gets 30%. That's how bad these guys want the, the, the commissions. That's what's going on in the market right now. So an overfunded indexed universal life policy, uh, a zero debt type of policy— people where they, uh, use life insurance for tax advantages, I, I would encourage people just to have those referrals lined up.

Yeah, it's a, it's a revenue opportunity inside those agencies. And all they've got to do is essentially add the Quotility link to their website.

Correct. Get them started. And look, that, that term policy may lead to a much bigger sale too. So you could be, you don't know, you could be sitting on a couple hundred thousand dollar commission, especially if you're dealing with large business owners.

Yep. Well, that's my point. I think where I was trying to go there is we look at a lot of agencies who are a hybrid of commercial, benefits, personal lines. What are they doing? They're working with business owners.

Yeah.

And the business owners have provided them, have hired them for the commercial insurance. They've hired them for the benefits. They probably have their homeowners and their toys with the agency. Agencies are missing that opportunity to have the life insurance with them too.

Oh, my mouth is watering on that. All right, to get a referral from someone like that would be awesome.

But it is— this is why it's such an overlooked opportunity. It's again going back to what you said at the beginning of the show. This isn't just about, hey, can I sell life insurance to somebody? It's about how do we show up when they're looking to buy?

Yeah.

And if you've got business executives that have already trusted you enough to give them everything in their life, their commercial insurance, their health insurance, house, cars. Wouldn't it just make sense to have the life insurance with you too?

Yeah. Or have someone you could refer to.

So, well, if somebody is listening in and this sparked them, Brian, to go, all right, I need to know more about this. I need to see a demo of this. What does this look like? What are the best ways to follow you and/or reach out to you?

Go to quoteplicity.com, kind of a play on quote and simplicity. Right on the website, you could run a live demo. You can go through as a consumer what it looks like. I think if you do that, you're going to really get a good picture about how you can leverage it and how you could use it and allow your customers to use it. From there, yeah, we offer several partnerships so where you could be hands-off. If you want. So you don't have to have a pushy sales process. So kind of, we're very interested in targeting your, your listeners, your P&C, your commercial guys. Uh, it's, it's a nice opportunity. Yeah. Just, just run a demo. You'll see. Yeah.

Yeah. If you're looking, hey, if you run an agency, you're looking for another potential revenue stream that doesn't require a lot of work, but could do some good for those executives you do business with. You might as well, you should be taking a look at Coolplicity.

Yeah. You don't want to lose them. You don't want to go into another life insurance.

Just creates more stickiness. We talk about this all the time. We do content for a retirement team right now, and that's their biggest argument. You're an employee benefits producer and all you focus on is employee benefits. But if the competitor has the retirement, yes, you're opening the door for them to talk about the benefits. Same thing with life insurance, right? If somebody else has their life insurance and they also offer products you do, that is opening the door for them to have a conversation and take business away from you.

Andy, I got to ask, you know, you have relationships with mortgage brokers, usually. Yes. Right. You have to. But for some reason, life insurance is overlooked and it should—

I agree. I agree.

It's— it could cost you the client.

Well, Brian, this has been a pleasure, man. Thank you for taking the time. If you're tuning into this show, whether your agency already does sell life insurance or again, you're looking for an opportunity to create some more client stickiness, uh, we're going to put the contact info, uh, for Brian and Quoplicity in the show notes. Check them out. This could be a tool that requires nothing more than you to put a link on your website, and it could create some opportunity for your agency and even more stickiness with your, your most valued clients. So Brian, thank you again. Uh, for everybody else, Brian Greenberg, CEO, Quoplicity. Be good.