This is a pyramid scheme, pure and simple.
The way it works is you get a list of referrals from three sources:
People who sign up for "child safety kits" from their schools. You will be calling these people out of the blue to tell them that their kits have arrived, and you need to hand deliver them. Once you are in the door, you small-talk with them for 15-20 minutes, explain the kits, and play videos that explain who American Income Life is, and why they also need life insurance.
People who are in a union. You will be calling these people to tell them that you need to talk to them about their union benefits in person. These people are purposefully lead to believe that you are a representative from their union who needs to meet with them because their benefits "have arrived." This is not the case.
People who are actually inquiring about life insurance. This is about 0.0001% of the people you are talking to, and these people usually were just requesting a quote, not an actual salesman to come to their door.
You will spend Mondays and Thursdays, from 11AM to 9PM, doing nothing but picking up the phone and calling the list of referrals. LITERALLY, you will pick up the phone, dial a number, read a script, either make an appointment or not, hang up, and repeat. Also, these referrals will have been shared multiple times with other branches in the area, so it is not unusual to talk to someone who says, "I just spoke with somebody about that yesterday."
Your goal is to schedule an appointment every hour on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. Sometimes, if performance was an issue, they will require you to come in and make phone calls on a Sunday, so your entire week will be shot.
You will be away from home, at a minimum, 12 hours per day, 6 days per week, and you are on 100% commission. They tell you to "grind it out" for the first 6-8 months, and then when the residual income starts flowing in, you can relax, and reap the rewards.
You're told not to worry about how far each appointment is from the next because "your time is more valuable, and these people NEED what you are offering." So you could be in North Dallas at 3PM, and have your next appointment in South Fort Worth at 4 PM.
Each successful meeting takes a minimum of 1 1/2 hours to 3 hours, and the system is so outdated and slow that it's pathetic. Your clients will be itching to get you out of their houses, but are often too timid or polite to throw you out. (BTW- the scripts you are to memorize tell you to tell the clients, on the phone, that the meeting will only take 10-15 minutes).
There is a 26 page script to memorize as you are getting your Life Insurance license. Scripts are pretty standard in sales jobs, so this is more of a heads up that it's 26 pages.
You will put 100+ miles per day on your car, and when you start out, they give the "leftover" leads to you. You will be riffling through a stack of contacts that have been contacted by at least 4 other agents before you (Turnover is ridiculous), and 90% of your phone calling days will be spent hanging up on answering machines and voice mails. There were days when I went through the same stack of contacts at least 7 times, and by the end, you are always feeling drained and tired.
The leads with untapped union members will go to the branch managers, and the child safety kits and poor areas will be filtered out and sent to low level associates.
That's why this is a pyramid scheme. You are not paid unless you make a sale, and if you are only able to bring in 50-100 sales a year (which is not enough to live on), the company has not lost anything because you brought in sales, but you have not brought in enough to personally survive. Your success/failure does not matter to these people because there are a dozen more out there who are lined up to take your place.
Anything you bring in helps their bottom line, but you need to be aware of what you need in order to survive, and be willing to call it quits before you spend a half year in the red.
As a selling point, they will tell you that you keep the residual income from your clients, as long as they retain their policies, long after you are no longer with the company, but I discovered, personally, that this was untrue. After leaving the company, because I was essentially paying to work for them, I noticed an entry in my account that said my sales had been transferred to my manager.
I did not call them out on this because these are just oily and slick people, and you just feel gross talking to them. I'd rather just break off all communications.
Also, and this was fun, after leaving the company, my phone has been bombarded with random life insurance companies wanting me to come work for them, so I suspect these people sell personal information of agents to third parties. (This is not verified, but the calls started immediately after leaving the company, and I had not applied to another sales job since. I have since had to get a new phone because the numerous calls were getting out of hand.)
Needless to say, I would not recommend working for these people. They also have current employees get on Glassdoor and other review sites to write glowing reviews because, as they put it, the company's reputation is being tarnished by a couple of disgruntled employees.
So when you see the 5 star reviews here, make sure you understand that those are from current employees told to do so, and management that wants to make up for the embarrassing reviews. I had to put a five star review on this site while I worked there, so hopefully this helps to cancel that one out.
Also, these guys do a lot of recruiting on Craigslist because it is cheap, and they get a lot of responses from desperate people. If you are contacted by them, you should be aware that the person on the other end of the phone is literally reading a script to get you into the door.
