You Recruited Your First Agent, Now What?

Recruiting agents to your downline is the next step to growing your Medicare business. It helps you scale and increase revenue by making commission on more than just the policies you sell. As an upline, you make commission on the policies that the agents you recruit sells as well.

However, recruiting a good prospect is just the beginning of onboarding and maintaining agents in your downline.

Be sure to check out our recent blog “How to Grow your Medicare Business Through Agent Recruitment” for more information on benefits and how to recruit.

Once you have a new agent, it is important to help guide them through contracting and training, and support them during the learning and sales process with resources for training, compliance, marketing and sales. Obviously, these agents will be independent agents and it requires a lot of work on their part, but if you want them to be successful you will need to provide necessary tools and support that will enable them to start selling asap and keep selling. The support and resources you offer will greatly improve agent success and prevent agent turnover in your downline.

Continue reading to see examples of how you can support your agents. These are specific examples of how we help our agents throughout various areas of Medicare sales.

NOTE: If you are not already an agent with us, then CONTACT US ASAP to join our team so you can offer our tools to your new recruits. We make many of our tools available to use for your recruiting efforts.

Contracting

Contracting is the first instance where you should assist your new recruits. As you already know, getting contracted and certified is a big process that takes time and has many steps that can frustrate a prospective new agent. As the new agent’s upline, you should help ensure this process is as straightforward as possible so your agents can achieve a high completion rate. We did this by creating an online step-by-step guide that walks our new agents through the process of requesting contracting and completing certifications to obtain their writing numbers. By creating this process, we have not only provided a benefit to our new agents, but we have also reduced the amount of questions and increased the ratio of agents that complete contracting. Our online contracting guide is available to all our agents and the new agents that they recruit. If you are not already an agent, then CONTACT US ASAP to join our team so you can offer our tools to your new recruits.

If you recruit a prospect who doesn’t already have their insurance license, then they will need to obtain that prior to contracting. Check out our post on “How to Get an Insurance License” to help guide your prospect in the right direction.

Training and Compliance

Considering all the guidelines and compliance on what you can and can’t do with Medicare, your new agent is bound to have questions and need continued training. You will need to make yourself available to answer your agents’ questions. The questions will be more numerous in the beginning when they are new, but they will reduce over time. We stay ahead of the questions by making sure our agents have training easily available. Luckily, there are many training classes that are being presented directly by the carriers. We make it easy on our agents by listing all these trainings on our website calendar, with links directly to the training registration. Check out our training calendar HERE. We also keep an eye on changes in the industry and send out email updates on areas undergoing changes or to clarify confusing subjects.

Sales Technology Resources

This will make a difference when a prospective agent has to choose between you and the other guys! We offer a FREE Turnkey Marketing Platform that gives our agents access to an all-in-one Contact Management System, Lead Management Tool, Quoting Tool, and Electronic Enrollment Tool. If you are already an agent on our team, this tool is available to you and to all the agents you recruit. Not everyone can offer a Turnkey Marketing Platform, especially for FREE. We changed our upline to one that provided more sales support to our agents, including this Turnkey Marketing tool. If you are looking to recruit, make sure you are under an agent that can offer this for you to use for your agents. If you are not part of our team and want to offer this to your recruits then make sure you CONTACT US TODAY to learn more.

Marketing Support

Marketing is the key to sales! After guiding our new agents through contracting, we make sure they have support to get started marketing right away. Since we have successfully marketed and sold Medicare for many years before we started recruiting, we have a great deal of knowledge and materials to pass on. You should do the same! Here are a few examples of how we support our agents. The more of these you can implement, the more successful your agents will be at selling policies.

Marketing plan It is no big secret that Medicare is confusing! Knowing who to market and when to market them can be confusing. Since we have spent many years marketing, we created (yes, another) guide that gives our agents a timeline based on when and how they should be marketing. You probably have your own techniques that you can use to create an easy framework to give your new agents. Share your knowledge so they can be successful for you! We go into some detail on “How to Market your Medicare Business” and “Medicare Marketing Do’s and Don’ts” on our blog.

Co-Marketing Reimbursement If you are an agent under us, then you are benefitting from co-marketing reimbursement. You should be offering the same benefit to your agents. This is not uncommon with independent insurance brokers so if you are not offering co-marketing then there is a good chance your competitors are! People are more likely to market if they have some form of reimbursement available. Remember, they are selling Medicare under you so any money they use to market and sell policies are providing you with a ROI too. If you are not getting co-marketing reimbursement from your current upline, then you should make the move to one who will (we do!).

Marketing Materials Can you offer pre-designed marketing materials? Many agents have created and use marketing materials for themselves. You can offer these materials to your agents by simply adding their information. This is exactly what we do for all our agents so they can get up and running as soon as possible. We designed business cards, trifolds, postcards and flyers that our agents can add their information to for printing right away. This eliminates the time and expense for them to design these pieces on their own. We offer this to all our agents as well as the agents they recruit. If you do not have pre-designed materials, then making sure they know where to access the carrier marketing materials will help.

These are a few of the main areas to help your agents be successful. Do you think this is too much? Think again. The more you have to offer your agents then the more successful they will become. Our agents get the support they need so we have very successful agents with an extremely low agent turn over rate. As a result, we continue to grow right along with them.