Best & Worst Life Insurance Leads in 2025 (Ranked)

So what are the best leads for life insurance agents who are selling over the phone? Well, in this video, I'm going to be ranking nine of the top lead sources with a tier list that you can see what the best leads are. They're going to get you the most amount of conversions at the most profitable rate and what the worst leads are so that you can steer clear of them and avoid burning money on terrible leads. So without any further ado, let's dive in. Alrighty. So, ladies and gents, we're going to run through a team tier ranking list for the different lead types. If you guys aren't familiar with how these lead, how these lists work, basically at the top we have S tier, this is the best tier, A tier, B tier, D tier and or C tier and D tier, and those are in descending order of the quality of the lead. So we're going to start right off here with referrals. So referrals. I'm going to put referrals into the A tier list. Now, the thing about referrals as a lead source is it is a fantastic lead source, but it is very hard to scale. Right. Usually referrals works best when you combine it with another lead source. The pros of this is they're free, so it's all profit if you sell a referral. The other thing too is you have a lot of trust that's built whenever there is a referral. The downsides of a referral like I was just touching on is they're hard to scale. Like, you can't spend more on referrals and then get more referrals. They kind of just come as they do. And the other downside is while there's high trust, sometimes the intent of the referral is not as high. Right. So, for example, if somebody says, hey, you need to go talk to my daughter about life insurance. And then you go and talk to the daughter. Well, the daughter wasn't requesting info on it. So while the trust is high, usually the intent is not as high. Referrals, great lead source. Very tough to scale your entire business off of that. I know a few people that do, but it's not like it's. It's kind of tough to do. Okay, I'm going to move this one to the back. Next, we're going to talk about mailers. Now I'm going to put mailers into C tier and I'm going to explain why. So mailers, this is actually how I got my start in the business, is I used to work direct mail. Walmart gift card leads. And just so you know, guys, like with any of these leads, at the end of the day what it comes down to is like how it's marketed because these are all just channels of ways to generate leads. But there's varying levels of degrees in terms of the quality on the lead source. So you can have good mailers and you can have bad mailers, but overall I'm going to put it into the C tier list. And the reason why is like the name of the game with, especially nowadays the name of the game is speed delete, right?

And so your odds of closing somebody go up 900% if you call them within five minutes of them filling the form out requesting information and it goes up even higher if you call them within 60 seconds, right? So speed delete. We all know, we've all heard the stat, you know, from Harvard or mit, whichever Ivy League school it is, we've all heard the stat. Speed delete is the name of the game. The problem with mailers is like I'm sending out this, this piece of paper to somebody's house and then they have to fill it out, send it back. It's got to go through the post office, right? They got to put it back in the mail, it goes through the post office and then comes back to me. And then I call them or show up to their house and try to sell them something. Like, guys, it's 2025, I can open up my phone and have a conversation with ChatGPT, like a verbal conversation with ChatGPT. Do you really think if I'm serious about wanting life insurance that I'm going to wait for somebody to send me something in the mail.

Send it back, wait for the mailman to pick it up, wait for the post office to send it back and then them give it to an agent and then that agent calls me, right? The name of the game is speed to lead 60 seconds or five minutes. Ideally we're talking about like a three week lag time on me getting back the info I requested. So like mailers are not terrible. Like there's people that make money on them, but they're just so freaking expensive for what you get. Like the serious people, the ones that are actually wanting life insurance, they're gonna fill something out with a different type of lead, right? You wanna set your business up where you're catering to the people that are the highest intent, right? I want it to be extremely easy for somebody that wants to buy life insurance to, to get it from you. I'm gonna make my face a little bigger so you guys can see me. So that's why I put mailers in C tier. And usually they're like 40, 50, 60, $70 plus. Right? So actually I'm gonna move this down to D tier. This is a, this is a pretty, pretty bad lead source in 2025. Next thing we're going to talk about is age leads. Right now I'm going to put aged leads. Hopefully you guys like my sense of humor with the photo. I'm gonna put age leads in C tier. Okay. Now the reason that I'm going to do that is because age leads, in my opinion, it's actually pretty easy to be profitable on this just because the cost is so low. And if you get like one or two sales, you can usually break even. So age leads have their place if you're a newer agent who's trying to cut your teeth and really learn. But ultimately it's a, it's a very, it's a low quality lifestyle when you're running age leads. Now, the reason why is a lot of times age leads are also shared with other agents. So, you know, different IMOs have different names for these. They may be called CRM leads where you work. They may be called B leads, second chance leads. There's a million different names, but they're all the same thing. They're just age leads that are resold and recycled. And the reason I put it in C and not D is you can make money off of it for sure, 1000%. I know people that, you know, they spend a couple hundred bucks on this and they make few thousand back consistently. But to do that, you have to make like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dials to see any results from this. And you're gonna deal with a lot more BS than you own some of these other lead types. So next we're gonna look at. These are lead vendor leads. Now again, lead vendor leads vary in terms of quality. You're gonna have high quality lead vendor leads, you're gonna have low quality lead vendor leads. But in general, what I've seen with lead vendors is the incentives are not aligned with lead vendors and agents. So if I'm a lead vendor, my goal, simply put, is to generate, you generate leads at as low of a cost as possible and then sell them to the agent at as high of a cost as possible.

Given that the agent will continue to buy leads. Because this right here, this gap, this is my profit. So the lower I can push down the floor, which is the cost I'M paying as a lead vendor and the higher I can push up the cost the agent's paying, the more money that you make. And the whole lead vendor game is to increase this in the middle. You want to get the leads as low as possible, charge you as much as possible to a point where you still continue to come back. So you make just enough money where you feel, you feel good, you feel good about yourself, but not enough to where they're losing their margin. And that's the entire game of lead vendors. And so for me, like, when you're buying leads from a vendor, it's not a terrible way to start off, to be honest, because it's, it's usually a lot cheaper and quicker. Like, if so some of the other things I'm going to talk about later, like, they may have a more expensive upfront setup, but long term, you're going to waste so much more, so much money buying leads from vendors, in my opinion, because again, it's all about the spread for the vendors. So they're the other thing too, I'll mention with vendors, and I've talked about this in other YouTube videos, is the whole, the whole name of the game as well, low cost leads. So a lot of times they'll do like bait and switch marketing. So this is where you'll get like people that think it's free or if you're running IUL leads, they'll say something about like, you know, create a guaranteed income. And they don't even mention iul. Like, they just try to make it sound as attractive as possible. So they get a ton of submissions of the lead form and, and they sell it to you at a markup. So that's the lead vendor game. That's why I put it in C tier. I don't put it as low as mailers because usually there are some decent lead vendors out there. But just like in general, it's a, it is a dark, dark world. But I would probably put age leads higher than lead vendors to be, to be totally honest. All right, the next thing I'm going to talk about is live transfers. So inbound leads. This one I'm going to put in B tier for right now. And there's a couple of reasons why. So again, there are good live transfer companies and there are bad live transfer companies. But the thing is with live transfers is people, like agents expect this to be like, they, they think like, okay, if I'm getting an inbound call from somebody, like, they're gonna close for sure, right? They're Gonna close for sure. But this is kind of the same thing with the lead vendor, with the leave vendor game, right? Is like with the live transfer game. Let's say I'm a live transfer company. And like, the way I like to always frame this is just think about it like you're the other party, right? Put yourself into their shoes. What is their incentive? What is their goal? If I'm a live transfer company, my goal is to get people to inbound, call the agents for as low as a cost as possible, and sell the live transfers for as much as possible where the agent continues to buy. Right? That's the entire goal of a live transfer company. And so a lot of times the way that they do this is they will. They will basically take aged data and then they will have a team of call center agents calling that age data over and over and over and over, and then they transfer it to you as the agent. That's essentially the game. All right, so real quick, I need to interrupt the video because if you're a life insurance agent, chances are you're doing one of three, three things. You're either buying age leads, you're buying leads from your imo, or you're buying leads from a lead vendor. And chances are you are way overpaying for those leads. And not to mention the leads never even pick up the phone. Well, if that sounds familiar, then give me the next 15 seconds and I'm going to show you something that's going to completely change everything. We just launched insurance agent Freedom School, which is an entire training platform and program that will show you how to fire your lead vendor and and cut your lead cost to 110 of the prices that you're paying right now. This is a program that I used to sell for over $2,000, but right now you can get access for just 99 bucks a month and try for free for seven days. Inside, you'll learn everything that you need to know to fire your lead vendor and cut your lead costs so you can start generating way more profits in your business. Not only that, but whenever you join, I'm also going to give you access to a dialing software that has allowed us to see answer rates as high as 20%. So if you make 100 dials, that means 20 people are answering. So I'm going to include a link down below this video, get access to a free trial. All you need to do is click the link down below and start your free trial to fire your lead vendor, generate more profits, boost your answer rates, and start making More money in your insurance business. Now back to the video. So they get a team of overseas people they call age leads, and then if the person stays on the phone for a certain period of time and they can transfer them over to you, boom, they just made money. They've sold a live transfer. Right? And it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily equate to intent of lead because a lot of times it's data lists. A lot of times they haven't even filled anything out. A lot of times they'll just call like lists of seniors data. And then the whole goal is like, keep them on a phone and transfer them over. So it's not like people, people think that live transfers are the same thing as inbound calls, which is just simply not the case. Right. An inbound call is where someone sees a phone number online and then calls in. Those are actually pretty quality leads, but they're also extremely expensive. So that's why I put live transfer and B tier. There are decent live transfer companies and there's terrible live transfer companies. If you're going to do live transfers, like, you need to be on your shit because these are expensive and you need to be converting a high, high quantity of them. And in my opinion, it's not, it's also not the best way to do the business because it's just not nearly as profitable as some of the other ways. Okay, so let's talk about organic. Organic I'm actually going to put in S tier. Okay. Now the cool thing about organic leads is this is. So what this is is basically like you posting YouTube videos or you posting on TikTok or Instagram or whatever, and essentially like building up a presence of people that know, like, and trust you. And then they, they come and book on your calendar to learn about what you do. Right? Now I've seen people do huge numbers on organic, huge numbers on organic. But the problem is, like with organic, it's harder to scale, to be honest, because you can't just like force more views onto your videos. And it's, it's for a specific person, right? If you're not comfortable posting content or, you know, you don't, like, if you need to make money fast, don't do organic. Right? It's something you build up over a long period of time. This YouTube channel you're watching videos on, I've been doing this since like 2022. So this is like three years of me posting consistently week after week after week after week. And now, you know, I have like 10 agents a day. That reach out to us, asking us to join our agency. But it didn't start out that way. It was a long bur, long, slow process, but it was the. It's the most valuable thing I've ever done is building this YouTube channel, like by far, no question. So if this is something you're willing to do and you're willing to put the time in and you know you're going to be here for a long time, like if you start like a channel talking about Medicare or start a channel talking about Iuls or annuities, like, oh my God, you would just freaking print money with the leads and they'll be so high intent because there's so much trust built. So organic leads are S tier. But most people, even if, even after you watch this, you're probably not even going to start a channel because most people just don't, don't want to do it right. But if you do do it, extremely high quality. Next thing, friends and family. I'm going to put this in B tier. I know this is a lot of people, they run their entire business on friends and family. In my opinion.

It's just like I, I'm not crazy about it. I don't think it's, it's not a bad way of doing business, which is why I put it in B tier. But it's hard to scale because once you tap out your warm market.

Then you're, you're screwed. Right? And there's a lot of business models where they say, hey, sell to your warm market and they recruit people and then sell to their warm market and then you just kind of repeat the process. For some people, that's good. For me, I'd rather just sell the people that actually are looking into the type of insurance that I offer. So I typically prefer not to do this.

But yeah, so friends and family, it's okay. It's not bad. It's all profit, which is great. But you know, it can feel a little uncomfortable if you're not like, if you're not confident in what you're selling. So I recommend like, actually you got to believe in your, in the product you're doing to sell to your friends and family. And it's much harder to scale. So I put it in B tier. Right. Tick tock. Not crazy about this one.

I personally, I haven't done much with Tick tock, but not many people, from what I've seen, not many people stick with it long term. I've seen people like pay a bunch of money for TikTok Setups and then they don't end up continuing to do it like TikTok. TikTok ad setups. Also, there's always this constant threat that TikTok is going to get banned. So I definitely wouldn't like base your entire business off of it by any means. And the other thing too is like, generally you're just going to get lower quality people on TikTok than you will on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. All right? And I didn't even add YouTube. YouTube on here, but YouTube's another option. I like YouTube better for organic than the ads because the ads are, they're, the leads are very hard to generate on YouTube and they're also very expensive. Okay, so I'll just honorable mention to YouTube. So next thing, Facebook. I put this one in S tier. You guys can ignore this. I just added the Facebook logo twice. I put Metta. Meta is Facebook and Instagram and technically WhatsApp as well. But this by far is 100% my favorite way of generating leads. And the reason why is there are, I believe it's over 1 billion monthly active users on Facebook. So there is just a unfathomably endless amount of people on the Facebook and Instagram platform. It's also incredibly low cost to generate very high quality and high intent leads. So we run Facebook ads for a bunch of life insurance agents and we're able to consistently get high quality, high intent leads for under $10 a pop. Right? And these are people that we are clearly advertising. It's about life insurance. They know it costs money. There's no bait and switch BS like you get with a vendor. Like we just fundamentally advertise life insurance and advertise that this is the best place to get it, right? And people fill out the forms all the time, tons of sales being made. You know, I know like the people I know that are making the most money in the business, they're all doing meta ads. Okay. And again, reason why, easy to get started, infinitely scalable. Like you could build an entire agency on meta ads easily, right? I spend like thousands of dollars per day on meta just because there's so many people on it and it's infinitely scalable. So I'm a huge fan of it. Not to mention.

Again, it all comes down to the way you advertise. So with the way we advertise, we clearly mentioned it's about life insurance. If you do some bait and switch bs, then you can get low quality leads. But if you, if you actually advertise the way we do, you'll get very, very high quality people that consistently convert. And you can rely on the leads for a long time and you can scale up to whatever you need. You can pause the ads, you can do whatever, whatever you need to do. With Metta, it's real quick. I'm just going to take a quick like 30 seconds and explain what we do for agents. You can see if it would be a good fit for you. So basically we install our proven lead generation system to help agents scale past $20,000 per month and we literally do all of it for you. So you don't have to do a single thing, you don't have to buy leads, you can fire your lead vendor and you don't have to run ads or do any of the tech setup. We handle everything on the back end so that all you have to do is focus on selling. So basically what we do is we install proven ads that are not bait and switch. So I'll show you guys like kind of some examples. These are examples of bait and switch ads. So like when you get low quality leads, this is why it's because your lead vendor is advertising like this. They basically make it seem like life insurance is some free thing or maybe you're selling IULs, they make it seem like it's get rich quick. And then you wonder why you have leads that are, you know, totally confused on what you sell. So what we do is we run video ads that are like very, very clear. We do some photo ads as well, but it's very clearly about whatever product you're selling. So if you're doing final expense, we don't say it's free, we don't say it's some state approved program. We are just very clear like this is life insurance and we're going to find you the best, best program for you. And if it's iul, we explain exactly what an IUL is, talk about the benefits, talk about why it's different from other things, other things that are out there and same exact thing for term. So basically guys, like if you're looking for a high quality lead source where you can get leads for a low cost, high quality that close at a high percentage, we personally use the system ourselves and we have dozens and dozens of testimonies. You can see them on this YouTube channel. And ultimately like the incentives are aligned. So you pay us to run the ads for you. And we don't make money on getting you low cost leads. We make money on getting you low cost, high quality leads. That's our goal. Because if you see success, you stick with us long term. Whereas with a lead vendor, the goal is to get you as low cost leads as possible and sell them to you at a markup. So just want to throw that out there because obviously you clicked on this video, you're looking for better leads. This is by far like I've been in the industry for about four years. This is by far the best thing that is out there for lead generation. So if you want to learn more about that, there's going to be a link down below this video. You can click on that. There's going to be a whole video that explains how exactly the program works and if it's a good fit. I look forward to working with you, but hope you guys enjoyed the video. See you in the next one.