I am providing detailed information based on working for this outfit for nearly 3 years. The first thing they do is build your hopes up and tell you that you can take home as much as $2,000-$3,000 every week as an Agent and then coerce you into signing a Independent Agent contract that basically idemnifies the company and makes you legally vulnerable. To make things look real good, they will have agents tell you how much money they were making and how great they are doing, EVEN IF they are financially suffering.
When you are finally in the door, they put you through about a weeks worth of training at your personal expense and I remember they used me to train their agents and I wasn't even compensated (mind you this was during a time I still believed in the company). Once you are trained, they put you on the phone as a licensed insurance telemarketer having you contact people who requested information 5-8 years ago! Great for practice I guess, but not so great if you need to start making money from all the expense you endured from the cost of taking the courses, the exams, the state licensing fees, the office rent, supplies, etc etc etc...
When they determine you are ready, they will give you contacts of people who requested insurance information from about 6 months to 1 year ago.in a way, you are graduating to more current information but are still hurting because most of those people don't want to talk to you.By the time an entire month has passed, you are now paying for contact information that is at least 5-30 days current.
This is where they start to nail you. Senior Life Insurance Company OWNS their own marketing agencies and charge the agents anywhere from $15-$29 per contact you receive all depending on the type of contact it is and if you DARE question their lead/contact program, they will either verbally thrash you or terminate your contract for thinking outside the box. The contacts are not even exclusive; more often than not, there would be cases of agents receiving the same contacts or the people being contacted would claim they never asked for information.
No matter the negative outcome from a paid contact/lead, you are still responsible for the cost you accrue in contact/lead charges. You spend about an hour on the phone with a prospective client in fear that they may reject your insurance offer for one reason or another and you are out that money. If you are one of the fortunate few like myself that was able to sell 10 out of 20 leads when the average agent would sell 5 out of every 20, you might make a little profit - at least enough to pay your bills, and then the week starts all over again.
Senior Life Insurance Company implemented a rule that Agents were not allowed to order less than 20-25 leads per week. They use the guise that if you order more leads, you will earn more money and make greater profit; but the truth is, they just want to make that money from their advertising. Imagine a company of 500 active Agents, each Agent spending anywhere from $600-$1000 per week on lead/contact costs - that is a pretty big weekly income for their lead marketing department.
I was promised by my second year in the business, I would be pulling in a 6 digit figure. No matter how hard I worked, or how many hours I put in, or how many leads I ordered - I came up earning only $36,000 in 2010 with my lead/contact charges averaging between $16,000-$20,000 a year and that is not including other expenses. I lost money, and a bank account based on their promises of fame, glory, and financial stability.
The people that make the money are the managers. The managers earn anywhere from 5%-40% override commission on any policy their Agent writes plus 90%-125% commission on any policy they write themselves. Even though managers assume a risk of loss in case an Agent leaves or is terminated by the company, the manager gets to assume that book of business and all commission rights if the incident occurs within the first 2 years (granted anyone can survive that long).
I lost my father in November and took a leave of absence from the company. It was only a few months later in February that they terminated my contract for non-production; a NON-EXISTENT termination clause AND locked me out of $30,000 worth of leads that I had already paid for that was kept on their agent terminal online at their website. If I did anything like that, I'd be sitting in jail!
They don't pay salary, so there is no such thing as a set income because it is all commission and will hurt you and your family. Don't waste your time and money with this company. They are not truthful and are a B - company according to Weiss Ratings (and we were told to tell our clients we were an A rated company).
As they always say at Senior Life, you can believe the man or believe the numbers; but always remember, the numbers don't lie.
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