Don't Make THIS Mistake As A New Insurance Agent

In this video, I'm going to be showing you the three deadly rookie mistakes that beginner agents make that can ruin their lives, finances, and even marriages. Now, be sure to stick around to the end of this video, because I'm going to be breaking down the most common mistakes that rookie agents make. How you can avoid making those mistakes to see massive success in the insurance industry and not become a failure like so many people do. If you haven't met me yet, my name is Tim Shooker. I run a company with my business partner named Julian. Basically, we're on a mission to build a $100 million insurance agency. So I'm going to share with you guys some of the things that I've learned across the past few years of selling insurance, coaching hundreds of agents with selling insurance, and, you know, kind of some things that we've learned along the way of building an agency. So let's start with mistake number one, which I call using the Force, right? So what does that mean? Why am I bringing a Star wars reference in here while I'm about to show you? So what a lot of people do, and I'm sure you've probably heard this mantra before, is they'll go with this whole philosophy that, like, life insurance is sold, it's not bought, right? Like, people are only gonna buy this thing if you twist their arm and hold them against their will and tell them how, like, their grandkids are gonna starve if they don't buy it, right? The thing is, though, this is a line that is only, like. The only reason that you've heard this is because imo's just pushed this to try and convince you to bang your head against the wall cold calling a dead lead list, right? The whole mantra of like, hey, you know, you have to just, like, pressure people into buying. It's all complete bs, right? There's people that are actively searching for life insurance every single day, right? And what you'll realize is, like when you start doing a sales job, if you haven't already done a sales job before, is you only have so much time in the day, right? So the output, right, how many sales you make, your production, your income, all that stuff, it's gonna be determined by two different things. Your effort, which is like the time that you actually put in and then the leverage that you have, right? So, for example, let's take two different people. Let's say one person is going all out. They're, you know, calling a thousand dials a day. Or we'll say 500 dials a day, they're making $500 every single day. But they're just calling like some random list that they bought online. It's not actual real leads. It's people that maybe opted into some random thing online six months ago. Right? Let's say you make $500 a day. Let's take that person versus another person that makes $200 a day. But this person is calling leads that have just requested information on life insurance. Who do you think is going to make more sales? Well, it's going to be the person that's making $200 a day with more leverage right now, if the person making $500 a day all of a sudden started calling the list that it opted in was actually interested, well, they would crush everybody. But at the end of the day, right, your output is only like your effort is only as your effort only matters so much that you have leverage. Right. If you don't have the leverage, you're basically just pushing a rock up a hill and it's going to roll right back down. So high effort is 100% required, but it's only going to get you so far. And if you have low leverage, and if you're calling people and trying to convince them as to why they should buy life insurance when they have no interest and no intent, you're not going to be making a lot of money. Right? And that's ultimately a hard pill to swallow because a lot of people are kind of sold that dream that you can just sit at home and call a list, and all of a sudden everyone's going to answer and want to buy. But you really do have to have smart marketing, and you have to be targeting the right group of people in order to. To have a scenario like that, right? And this kind of brings me to my point that, like, if you're calling people, trying to convince them why life insurance is even important in the first place, like, you don't have any marketing. Because the job of marketing is to convince people why they even should want the product or to find people that are interested in the product and bring them to you. And then you're supposed to help people make a decision and take them over the finish line. That's the job of sales. So a lot of people might hear me say this and they think, hey, you know, Tim, that sounds amazing. I would love to only talk to people that actually want life insurance, but that's not really possible. And yes, you're right to an extent, but here's the thing. Your marketing can really carry the torch A lot of the way for you, right? If you're targeting people that are in pain, if you're targeting people with the right messaging and if you're nurturing them along the way, it's really not that hard to get prospects that are ready and itchy to buy and wanting to talk to you, right? So there's 100% a better way. Your marketing should be so good. The sales is actually not that hard. So a couple ways to do this, right? Finding a niche that is in desperate need of what you have to sell and fill the gap, right? So an example, we've helped a bunch of people in term final expense, Iuls market and do all kinds of things like that. Some really, really solid niches or markets that we found are truckers. Like these people are on the road all the time. They see accidents, all that kind of stuff. They're more in pain with wanting life insurance, cops and then also sick people, right? Like if you have cancer and you've gotten declined for life insurance a bunch of times, if I see an ad that says I can get life insurance with cancer, well, I'm probably gonna click on that ad and I'll be more interested and more likely to buy, right? The thing is in capitalism, in the free market, this is a quote from Milton Friedman. No exchange will take place unless both parties benefit. So as much as you can try and, you know, sweet talk Ms. Jones into signing up and giving you a checkbook and buying life insurance, like, it's just not going to happen. It's not going to be sustainable over the long term. If you're not talking to people that already have intent and talking to people that are interested, you're basically just burning daylight, right? With the rise of AI and technology, like, if you're not able to find an efficient way where you have prospects coming to you, you are going to get eaten alive by competition. Right? People are going to be using chatbots. There's already AI appointment setters that will call your leads and then do live transfers for you. Like all this stuff is happening right now. If you're doing it the old way, you're absolutely screwed. So that's mistake number one, which is essentially just trying to force life insurance down people's throat and just slamming your head against the wall and not working with any intelligence or any efficiency and just calling random people instead of calling people that are interested. Mistake number two is being a jack of all trades and a master of none. So over the last two years or so, I've been on a lot of calls with agents. And one of the questions that I ask everybody is, what product do you sell right now, whenever I ask this question, I get hit with a multitude of different answers, but majority of the time it's them listing out seven different types of insurance. Like, oh, well, you know, I sell Iuls, I sell final expense, I sell term, I sell medicare annuity. I'm like, there's no way you're selling seven things at a proficient level. When you told me your goal is to make a hundred grand, like you can freaking walk backwards and have a blindfold on and make 100 grand. In the financial services industry, like, if that's your goal and you're selling seven things, something's not adding up, right? So the problem is people will either be, they'll say, oh, I'm selling seven things, or they'll just say like, oh, well, I always just do what's right for the client. Like, I'll just, I'll just have my client's best interest at heart. It's like, cool, that's good. But you should, you should have your client's best interest at heart regardless. But you selling seven things and not having a specific thing you're focusing on, you're only hurting yourself. So basically the antidote to this, what you really need to do is master one product in one market before if we're expanding, right? So let's say you sell term insurance to truckers, or term insurance to cops, or final expense to people with asthma or whatever it is, people that are having trouble getting accepted. Whatever, whatever your market is, right?

You have to pick that one market and just master it before you try to go and attack a bunch of different things. Like if I'm doing term insurance for truckers, if I all of a sudden go and try to sell aca like I'm. My focus is split. So the nice thing about the insurance industry is there's so much money in it that if you just pick one thing and stick with it, you can make six to seven figures. Easy, right? Not easy, but it's simple, right? So just find one market, stay the course, become a master at serving it, and you'll be a six figure producer before you know it. And all of these, like big agencies that you see that have, you know, they sell this and they sell that, and they'd say that you need a sell everything so you can serve your client. Like, they didn't start off and they didn't get rich doing 15 different things. They got rich doing one thing and then they started Branching out. So really like your most valuable asset is your time and your focus. So if you can focus on one thing, become a master at it, you can do all the cross sells and all that stuff later, but like you can go really far just doing one product and just mastering it. So cross selling is okay, but it really, really sets a lot of people off course. Right. And let's get to our last mistake here. Mistake number three is actually gonna be following the herd right? Now, have you ever heard the saying, don't take money advice from broke people?

Well, the problem is a lot of people are taking insurance, selling advice from people that are broke, people that don't write any business. Right. The sad truth is that most of the people that I talk to, agents, they're not even making 50 grand a year selling insurance. Most people that are just getting into this, they have all these lofty goals and these dreams of, oh, I want to make 100k to 250k, whatever. But the thing is like most people never actually hit that goal. And the reason why is every single agent follows the exact same path. They're like lemmings, like the little birds or whatever. I think they're rats, some kind of rodent that would like just follow other lemmings and run off of a cliff. That's the equivalent of like what, what's going on in the insurance industry. Basically everyone will just buy a lead list, they'll overpay for these crappy age leads and they'll just strap themselves into a chair and put a fricking feeding tube in their mouth so they don't have to get up for hours and just call and call and call and call until they decide that this is not for them.

It doesn't make any sense. But that's what everybody before them has done. And so that's what they are told to do and that's what they think that they have to do do. Right? This is basically the equivalent of marketing in the stone age. It's not really going to get you anywhere, right? So whenever you see a bunch of people doing the same thing and failing, run the opposite way, right? They're all doing the same thing. They're all calling the same list. They're all calling the same people. They're doing it for hours a day and nobody's really making money. And even the people that are seeing success, when you look at their bank account, it doesn't that. So my recommendation is, or at least like my take on this, the reason that I think people have to do this is they're trying to do sales without having any marketing, right? Because when you look at it, if I go out and buy a list of a bunch of names and numbers that haven't requested any information from me, the only reason I would do that is because I don't know how to get leads, I don't know how to get people to request information from me. So naturally.

What would logically come to your mind is like, hey, what is the problem I need to solve? Well, the problem you need to solve is how do you acquire leads and how do you get customers? So either do that yourself or find. If you just want to be like the closer, the salesperson, which ultimately like full transparency. The model that we're trying to build at our agency is where we provide all the leads and then people just come in as closers, right? So if you want to do it on your own, you want to be the marketer and the salesperson, you have to become a good marketer to have the opportunity to sell. Otherwise you're just going to be stuck doing the same crap that everyone else is doing. Or find an agency, find an IMO that's going to provide quality leads for you and do the marketing on your behalf. So you can just be a closer and focus on being an agent and being a salesperson. But if you try to just be the agent and be the salesperson and not have the good marketing, you're screwed, right? I see it happen all the time.

If you're watching this and you're one of those people that's maybe getting recruited to an MLM and you think you're just going to build a rah rah your way to success and walk up to people in the grocery store or cold call random people. It might work for a little bit, but where we're headed with, with all the AI and all the technology and everything that's coming into play and people wanting to be educated instead of sold, that salesperson is going to go extinct. Like, it's just the way that it's going to be, right? So ultimately, breaking down these three deadly rookie mistakes, I'm just going to kind of run through them real quick just to kind of recap. So again, mistake number one is using the force, right? That's basically trying to grunt your way to get people to buy, right? So you're trying to convince people that have no interest in insurance to buy insurance. It doesn't make any sense. You're wasting your time. You need to solve the marketing problem and find people that are serious and looking for insurance or at least have that pain point. Right? Mistake number two is trying to sell all of the products at once. Pick one product, pick one market and stick with that and then expand later on. And then step number three or mistake number three, not step number three, don't do any of these. Mistake number three is following the herd. So just because other people are wasting thousands of dollars on crappy leads doesn't mean that you should do it. Just because other people are calling age lead lists for hours and hours a day does not mean you should do it. At the end of the day. The most important thing is that sales is a function of marketing. And if you don't have marketing, you just have really crappy sales. So with that being said, that's going to wrap up the video. Those are the three mistakes. Do not make these mistakes. As a brand new insurance agent, make sure that you're able to either partner with somebody that's going to do the marketing for you or or really master that skill on your own. Especially with the way that things are going with the FCC laws when it comes to leads. You really just have to have this piece of your business dialed in. What's going to be a long, long, hard road for you. So with that being said, thank you guys so much for watching this video. If you guys want to see a video of a live sales call where my business partner closes a deal of somebody saying they have to think about it, then you're going to click this video right here. Without any further ado, I will see you guys in the next one. Peace.