Greener Grass?

Free at last!  I started down the path of being an independent health insurance agent with great enthusiasm and determination.  I was ready to be my own boss and I knew that the skills I had acquired would serve me well. Little did I know I was treading in more dangerous waters and this new sense of freedom and lack of structure had my new health insurance business going off course like a ship without a rudder…

I knew I would have to get busy generating new health insurance leads and dedicated quite a bit of my financial resources towards that end.  I also started signing contracts with every health insurance carrier that I could find.  I thought I was going in the right direction but when these two things combined, they caused a major roadblock for my business.

First, because I did not leave any money in reserve for health insurance marketing, I was now dependent on selling a good number of policies from the initial health insurance leads I would generate.

Second, because I contracted with so many companies, I had too many policies to learn and manage.  All of them had different quoting systems, underwriting requirements, and benefits.  Needless to say my appointments suffered because I ended up confusing my prospects or, even worse, being confused myself.

I tried to compensate by trying new methods of marketing such as direct mail, buying cheap telemarketing lists, and using networking groups to generate health insurance leads.

Direct mail worked but it took a lot of time for leads to trickle back in.  Telemarketing lists were cheap but very phone intensive to generate any health insurance leads at all.

Networking was slightly effective for a short while but as people moved in and out of the group it was difficult to maintain contacts so I gave it up.

I was making more on each health policy I sold but I was selling far fewer health policies.  It was also costing me much more to generate health insurance leads and I had nothing to fall back on…

next:  Short Term Hope