Habits of Successful Life Insurance Telesales Agents

Todd Ewing has the most direct to consumer telesales experience that I know of in the industry and he shares his 7 habits of successful life insurance telesales in this episode.

At-A-Glance Success:
* Produced over $1 billion in premium
* Supervised over 500,00 paid policies
* Created and built 3 start-up agencies

As an Executive Insurance Consultant, he’s helped the top Direct Marketers, BGA’s and IMO’s grow and improve both top and bottom-line results.

As Corporate Officer, he helped Transamerica, SelectQuote and InsWeb, Inc. produce record revenue.

In this episode learn:

1) How to effectively develop rapport over the phone.

2) How to differentiate yourself with your value proposition

3) Master qualification and underwriting

4) How to present the rates and what to do in what Todd refers to as the “critical moment”

5) And much, much more.

(The training starts at 21:00)

Click Here to View the Full Transcript

Jeff Root: Welcome to the podcast, Todd.

Todd Ewing: Hey. Thanks, Jeff. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you and all the good folks out there.

Jeff Root: Yup, so why don’t you share with us what you’re seeing out there in the industry and then maybe go into a little background about yourself.

Todd Ewing: That sounds great. Thanks, Jeff. Hi, everybody. My name, again, is Todd Ewing and it’s a pleasure to speak with you and present and convey some proven techniques to help you grow your business. First, I want to thank Jeff for the opportunity to speak with you. I really appreciate this chance, Jeff, and hopefully we’ll be able to generate some great results; short term and long term.

Jeff Root: Pleasures all mine.

Todd Ewing: Yeah. For everybody out there you probably heard there’s tremendous momentum in our industry around technology and new catalysts of change. InsurTech and in tech companies are popping up everywhere and deep capital is being deployed to reinvent the life insurance arena. Buzz words like innovation, disruption, and transformation are really permeating the landscape for insurance carries, EGAs, IMOs, financial institutions and direct marketers. The direct to consumer experience, D to C as you’ll hear it often referred to is really the paradigm shift for increasing sales.
The consumer and consumer experience, that is known as CS, is truly paramount. It is the kind of new success; knowing who your consumer is, how they operate, what modality in which they want to transact business and how they’re looking to protect their family in terms of the greatest value. When I say value I don’t simply mean the lowest price. I never want to get into price wars because ultimately you’ll lose that battle. There will always be another carrier, the faster gun in the west, that comes up with a lower two cent price per month. We need to look at the overall picture of creating the greatest value for the consumer.
Before I jump into this maybe I can give a little background on myself. I’ve been in the industry for twenty-five plus years. My first real job out of UCLA when I graduated was working for a little company at the time called SelectQuote Insurance Services; probably all hear of that.

Jeff Root: We’re all familiar with them. Yup.

Todd Ewing: Yup. The ubiquitous ads, believe it or not, just … Some of the commercials that are run are ones that I wrote and helped produce fifteen, sixteen years ago when I was there. I guess they legs. In my opinion they’re getting a little stale, but hey, it still makes the phone ring so … My first job was at SelectQuote. I had the good fortune of being promoted fairly quickly to an agent.
I’d never sold life insurance door to door, face to face, knee to knee at the kitchen table. It was all new to me and my training literally was one night. The office manager and president’s wife gave me a huge journal like the Bible. It was an enormous binder. It had all the under writing guidelines in there. She said to me, “Memorize these and you’ll start selling tomorrow.” That was my training.

Jeff Root: Wow.

Todd Ewing: I got on the phone and and my very first day, for whatever reason … To this day I’m still not certain why I was able to be so successful. It just was intrinsic. It was a native talent for some reason. My first day I sold ten applications over the phone.

Jeff Root: Awesome.

Todd Ewing: The most in the history of SelectQuote to that point, they’d been a business for six years, was four in one day. I was the eighth agent to be on the floor and for the next, and this is me patting myself on the back kind of breaking my arm doing so, that I lead the company every day, every week, every month, every year for three and a half years in sales. In fact, they actually had to create a new comp line and take me out of it because I was skewing the numbers so badly. Then after three and a half years I totaled over eight thousand pay policies sold over the phone. One day I sold thirty-two applications.

Jeff Root: Oh my gosh.

Todd Ewing: I think it still may be a record. Back then the carriers were not what we know today. They weren’t the usual suspects. It was travelers, and Midland Mutual Life, and Jackson National, and Federal Kemper which had so many different names, right? The [inaudible 00:04:15]. We didn’t have the luxury of being known to the consumer. It was a brand new experience so we had to create trust and value, unlike today where you go online and type in term life insurance in Google and there’s literally pages and pages, thousands-

Jeff Root: Right.

Todd Ewing: Of people that claim that they can sell [inaudible 00:04:35]. This was before Al Gore invented the internet, right? People were transacting business all over the phone and it was kind of a cumbersome process but in reality it felt so new and unique to the customer they liked, even back then, not having to go face to face with a stranger or disclose personal financial and health data to a friend or relative. That anonymity was to our advantage. After selling I had the opportunity to move into management and quickly rose to the vice president of sales and marketing for SelectQuote. I ended up staying there for thirteen years. It was a great ride, loved it.
This is back [inaudible 00:05:17] when the internet was starting to come online. We developed an internet team within a whole internet platform. We called it [inaudible 00:05:26], the web team and quickly fifty percent of our volume came in through the web. We grew from eight agents when I first started to over eighty agents and our premiums and revenues literally quadrupled. We had a great ride. We became the known direct marketer in the state and they always say, “Imitation is the greatest form of flattery.” A ton of companies started popping up there after trying to do what we had accomplished at SelectQuote.
From there I had an opportunity to literally move out of the San Francisco Bay Area and join a company called InsWeb. The CEO called me there, and founder, and said, “Hey, we’d like to move into the life space. You’re just the guy to help us build and start a new one. We want you to teach us everything; direct to consumer marketing, direct marketing, as well as how to close more effectively over the phone.” They already had a P & C, property and casualty, company selling home and auto. I was brought up there to build up a whole new life division for them. We did that and introduced all new carriers and …
Really the transformation that occurred there for me was I wanted to do something a little bit different. I just didn’t want to build a better mouse trap than what we’d accomplished at SelectQuote. We started selling … This is cutting edge back then, we started selling universal life policies over the phone. That became transformative. SelectQuote, in the thirteen years that I was there, the highest premium, the largest case, was fourteen thousand dollars. At InsWeb, in our third month I had a gentleman, one of my agents, sell an eighty thousand and a forty thousand that went paid in the fourth month.

Jeff Root: That’s pretty typical nowadays now that everybody is use to purchasing online and over the phone.

Todd Ewing: Right. Back then it was a challenge to try to get the trust and have people submit payment of that large-

Jeff Root: Yeah.

Todd Ewing: To an unknown company. Today people are buying houses and cars online.

Jeff Root: Yup.

Todd Ewing: That’s fairly commonplace. Huge opportunity to do that. We’re also selling non med products which were kind of cutting edge back then as well. I was looking for quicker cash flow and a better consumer experience so we did both. One of the other unique things that we did, and it’s still available out there, I’m shocked my how many direct marketers don’t do this now; that is when you look at a website and you have to go enter your data: you put in your date of birth, you put in what state you’re in, how much coverage you’re looking for, the term length, yadda ya.
There’s almost always an empty field there. It’s a blank field where you, the consumer, have to enter in how much coverage you want. Occasionally there will be a health