How to Work Insurance Leads: The Only Two Things That Move Your Income

I was in Los Angeles last month when an agent asked me the question I get more than any other:

"Tre, how do I write 40K on fresh leads?"

He was running inbound final expense calls and wanted to "transition to a more qualified prospect."

So I asked him what he'd done up to that point.

Not what leads he was buying. What HE had done.

Because here's the part nobody wants to hear about how to work insurance leads: the lead is the one variable every single agent in this business shares equally — so it can't be the reason some write $40K and some write $4K.

Somebody out there is pulling a 90-day-old lead off a spreadsheet and writing a case with it today.

Somebody else got that same name fresh, called once, got voicemail, and decided the leads were garbage.

Same lead. Different agent. That's the whole experiment.

Over the past 4 years we've helped well over 700 agents issue-pay $40,000+ per month, and I've never once seen it come down to a magic lead source. It comes down to two things. If you're stuck somewhere between $5K and $15K months and you're shopping for a vendor to save you, this is going to sting — and then it's going to show you exactly what to do Monday morning.

Let's hop right into it.

Thing #1: Self-Accountability (The One Everybody Skips)

This is the hardest one, so people skip straight to step two.

Most agents are not transparent with themselves.

They can't look in the mirror and say "I'm the reason these leads haven't closed." So they project it onto the lead, the vendor, the system, the market, the weather.

If you cannot be accountable, nothing else in this article matters — because every fix I give you will get blamed away too.

Watch how fast the story changes.

You buy a new pack from a new vendor and you start out HIGH. Energy's up, you dial everything, you write business.

Six weeks later: "the leads got bad."

No they didn't. Your frame got bad. You stopped doing the thing that made the first pack work, and nobody wrote that down anywhere, so the leads took the blame.

Here's my honest position on it: Agent Lead Lab is not going to get you to $40K. My leads, my staff, my system — none of that is the determining factor. There are agents writing $100K months who have never bought a single lead from me.

So the real question isn't "are these leads good."

It's "am I going to figure out what it takes for me to be successful working this system?"

Yes is on you. No is also on you.

And one more thing on accountability — you lose clients the same way you get them. If somebody clicked an ad to save five dollars a month, they'll leave you over five dollars a month. If you want business that sticks, go find a demographic that's WORKING. People who are hard to reach because they have jobs. You can't demand a better client and then complain about the effort that better client requires. Our breakdown of which lead type matches which demographic walks through exactly who you're calling.

Thing #2: Actually Working the Lead (Not "Calling" It)

Here's a question nobody can answer: what determines the moment a prospect picks up the phone?

You don't know. I don't know. It's unknowable.

Which means your job isn't to predict it. Your job is to be the one calling when it happens.

You don't call a lead a set number of times. You call it until they pick up.

When I say "call them three times a day," some agents hear a ceiling. It's not a ceiling. It's a floor, and it's a low one.

Here's what the first day actually looks like on a fresh lead:

• Lead comes in at 8:20 a.m. — call at 8:20 a.m.
• Call again at 8:30.
• Call again at 9:00.
• Call again at 10:00.
• Call again three hours later.
• Keep going. Different times, different days, FaceTime audio, text.

"You're calling them too much."

How? They raised their hand. They opted in. This is not cold calling — cold calling is bothering somebody who never asked. A lead is a person who literally typed their information into a form asking for help with life insurance.

If you believe it's weird to call an opt-in ten times, that's not a rule. That's a limiting belief, and it's costing you deals. The same people telling you "kick rocks, I didn't fill anything out" are the people getting closed 30, 60, 90 days later — by somebody else. That's why our post on whether old leads are bad or just worked wrong exists.

And here's the line I keep coming back to: how can the leads be bad when most of the people never picked up the phone?

Tell me how. Genuinely.

If you get the majority to answer and they ALL tell you to kick rocks — okay, now we have data. But six pickups out of a pack and a verdict on lead quality? That's not analysis. That's an excuse with a spreadsheet taped to it.

The 20-Lead Math That Ends the Argument

Let's run it with real numbers instead of feelings.

You buy 20 leads at $50 each. That's $1,000. A $50 lead in our catalog is a mortgage protection or niche IUL lead — published average commission $1,800 to $3,000.

You work them properly, so 15 of the 20 pick up.

Of those 15, say eight tell you to kick rocks, hang up in the intro, "I didn't fill anything out." Fine. That's B2C. That's middle-class America, not business owners.

That leaves seven you get all the way through the presentation. You lose one on banking, one backs out. You close five. Worst case, you close four.

Four deals ÷ $1,000 spend = $250 cost to acquire a client.

Call it $2,000 average AP per deal. Four deals = $8,000 off a $1,000 spend.

That's an 8x return — and the only input that made it possible was pickups.

Not hot leads. Not magic. Pickups.

Change one number: let only six of the 20 answer because you called each one twice and quit. Now you're closing one, maybe two. Same leads. Same price. Same vendor. The margin disappeared inside your dialing habits.

If you want this tracked properly rather than guessed at, go through the 5-number funnel audit most agents skip and find out where your pickups are actually dying.

The Trap: Pestering Without a Reason to Call

Now let me name the failure mode of my own advice.

"Call until they pick up" is not permission to be a nuisance with nothing to say.

Dialing a lead eleven times and then fumbling the first fifteen seconds is worse than not calling at all — you burned the contact AND the lead cost. Volume only pays when the conversation on the other end holds up. If your pickups aren't turning into presentations, the problem moved downstream and you should fix the intro that's getting you hung up on before you buy another pack.

Work the lead relentlessly. Then control the call.

Some Hard Questions Worth Sitting With

How many times did you actually dial your last pack — not "worked it," actually dialed it?

Do you know your pickup count from last week, or just how the week felt?

If somebody pulled your call log right now, would it prove you worked those leads, or would it prove your complaint?

And if the answer embarrasses you a little — what are you going to change tomorrow at 8:20 a.m.?

FAQ: How to Work Insurance Leads

How many times should I call a life insurance lead?
Until they pick up. Practically that means four to five attempts a day on a fresh lead — immediately on opt-in, then 10 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, three hours — and continued attempts across following days at different times.

Is it too aggressive to call an opt-in lead 10 times?
No. They raised their hand asking for information. That's the opposite of a cold call. The agents closing those same names 30 to 90 days later are simply the ones who kept dialing.

Why do my leads stop working after the first few weeks?
Usually your effort dropped, not the lead quality. New vendors get your best dialing energy. Compare your call attempts per lead from week one to week six before you blame the source.

What's a good cost to acquire a client on $50 leads?
Around $250 per client is realistic when you work 20 leads properly and close four. Against a published $1,800–$3,000 average commission, that math works long before you need a "better" lead.

The Bottom Line

Nobody's coming to save you, and there is no magic lead.

Take accountability, then work the leads until people pick up the phone. That's it. That's the secret sauce, and it's boring on purpose.

It's never the leads. It's always you — which is the best news in this business, because you're the one variable you fully control.

Want help building a dialing system that actually gets pickups? Book a strategy call at agentleadlab.com/schedule-a-call and let's look at your numbers together.

— Tre