Pep-Rally Crooks
Posted by newagentsolutions on June 9, 2008
I had now been a health insurance agent for one month and was having better results than I had started with, but I was going to have to start producing more business to pay my bills. I noticed a group of several agents, all of which had been with the company less than a year, were making really good money and turning in many applications each week, yet they didn’t seem to be working very hard to do it.
They were always at the weekly sales meetings which took on the tone of a pep-rally and they were always near the top in the national news letter. The head manager would cheer them on and pass out $100 dollar bills to them. We attended a regional conference and two of those guys got up on stage with a company VP and walked off with a combined total of $7000 in cash. I wanted to know how they did it because I wanted to be one of the ones getting big bucks the next time.
I just figured that because they were producing so well that they were being given the best leads. They formed a pretty exclusive group and were kind of stand-offish and I could understand that because if everyone knew how they were getting the numbers they always seemed to hit, that would be cutting into all those good leads I figured they were getting. They seemed to party pretty hard and still out produce agents who had been there for years and even the managers. I had a couple of experienced agents (one who had been a manager and one who had been in the agency over five years) tell me not to get mixed up with them.
Initially I just figured that these older agents were disgruntled because they were not making the enormous sales that this group of newer agents were making, but something happened that made me start thinking differently about this group…
Two of the new agents that started with me began hanging out with this group of agents and immediately started producing an unreal amount of sales! It seemed like they started closing every appointment they went to. When I asked them what they were doing differently the became somewhat defensive. this struck me as odd because until they started partying with this group, they were doing much worse than I was. Something just did not seem right, but their miracle sales technique was about to come to light.
It all started with a personal beef between the agency manager and the ringleader of this group of agents. He wanted a promotion and when he was told that he had to wait until he was with the company a little longer got very angry and started telling all the other agents that he was starting his own agency and was starting a lawsuit against my agency in order to be able to keep his commissions and book of business. He was true to his word as his whole group (including the two agents who started with me) all left and started a lawsuit.
In return the company started looking at all the policies that had been issued to their customers and found some disturbing information: all of the applications were missing social security numbers! Also all of the applicants were listed with no medications and in perfect health!
These agents were intentionally leaving off social security numbers on applications in order to circumvent the Rx database, and this in return was causing a quick issue of the policy instead of the underwriters requesting an attending physicians statement. Most of their customers had no idea that this was what these agents were doing and the complaints started rolling in when they started using their coverage only to have it rescinded because of their past medical records.
The state department of insurance soon stepped in and these agents were in serious trouble…
This whole chain of events had several unexpected consequences that directly affected me and the other two agents that were still there that started with me…
