Are you keen to start a career selling insurance but not sure which agency to join?

Perhaps you’ve even scheduled an interview with Modern Woodmen of America, but you’d still like to find out more about how their agency really works.

If this describes your situation in any way, have a look at the review below!

Don’t worry if you haven’t been tested for your insurance license yet. Today, my job is to answer as many of your questions in this unbiased Modern Woodmen of America Agent Career Review.

Let’s get started!

PS: Check out my insurance sales jobs reviews of other agencies for more information.

NOTE: Are you an aspiring or new insurance agent looking for more insight into how the insurance sales industry works? Check out my Free Insurance Agent Resource Guide.

Quick Navigation Article Links

• • About

• • Products

• • Leads 101

• • Getting Paid

• • Scam Or Legit?

• • My Thoughts

About Modern Woodmen of America

Modern Woodmen of America was established in 1884 in Lyons, Iowa, by Joseph Cullen Root. As a member of several fraternal societies, Root wanted to create an organization that would protect families after the passing of a breadwinner.

Modern Woodmen is a member-owned and operated fraternal financial services organization with more than 750,000 members across the country. Modern Woodmen is the nation’s third-largest fraternal benefit society in terms of assets.

It has three wholly-owned subsidiaries: MWA Bank, MWA Financial Services, and Modern Woodmen General Agency.

Today, the company is headquartered in Rock Island, Illinois. It has over 1,500 representatives in 48 states.

Modern Woodmen representatives provide financial products to help members protect their families. The sales help fund member benefits in addition to various social, educational, and volunteer programs.

The members of the society have access to a variety of benefits, such as scholarships, hardship assistance, and discounts. There are no specific requirements for becoming a member.

Products Sold And Market Focus

Modern Woodmen offers a broad portfolio of products through a career distribution system, including:

• • Life insurance (whole life insurance, universal life insurance, and term life insurance)

• • Annuities (fixed annuities, immediate annuities, and variable annuities)

• • Investments (mutual funds, brokerage services, retirement plans, and college savings plans).

They also promote supplemental products as Modern Woodmen of America benefits. Brokered insurance products not issued by Modern Woodmen include:

• • Disability income insurance

• • Dental and vision insurance

• • International life and health insurance

• • Long-term care insurance

• • Health insurance

• • Group employee benefits

• • Group voluntary benefits

• • Impaired risk life insurance

• • Medicare supplement insurance, and

• • Medicare Advantage and prescription drug plans.

There are no online quotes for Modern Woodmen products. Quotes are only offered as part of the process of becoming a member.

The company’s two primary target markets are middle-income families and small businesses.

How Leads Work

Modern Woodmen’s website doesn’t provide any information on how its agents find prospects.

If you are a new agent working for Modern Woodmen, you will most likely have to start by cold calling for prospects or work with friends and family for referrals and sales opportunities.

It’s up to every individual agent to increase their pay portfolio. If sales are high, management will usually provide leads as compensation for your work.

How Getting Paid Works

Modern Woodmen doesn’t publish its commissions for agents. However, if you work with them as an independent insurance agent, you can expect to be paid commission.

Is It A Scam, MLM, Pyramid Scheme?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfQiJ8Db6xo&t=21s

Modern Woodmen is not a scam. It is a legitimate company with a long presence in the industry and strong financial ratings. It has a superior A+ rating from BBB and an excellent A rating from A.M. Best.

This is not a multi-level marketing (MLM) business opportunity or pyramid scheme. The company doesn’t have multiple layers of agents, mentors, and trainers and is not suitable for agents who are primarily looking to recruit.

My Thoughts

Now you know a little more about how a career selling insurance with Modern Woodmen of America works, I’d like to provide my experience and knowledge as an insurance agent since 2011 and as an insurance agency owner since 2014.

How to Generate Leads

In the many years that I’ve recruited insurance agents nationally, I’ve run across agents that have worked for Modern Woodmen of America. And, for the most part, they say they like the company.

Still, one of the common complaints that I hear is that Modern Woodmen doesn’t provide much of a lead system for agents to tap into.

For example, I spoke to an agent recently who used to work with Modern Woodmen. When I asked about lead generation, he said his manager told him to talk to people to find prospects to sell to. As far as marketing and prospecting go, there wasn’t any more advanced training beyond that.

Why is this a problem? At the end of the day, selling insurance is all about seeing the people. This is a famous phrase in this business. And it simply means that to be successful at selling insurance, you must have some sort of marketing and prospecting system in place—a system that gets you in front of qualified AND interested prospects.

If you don’t have any kind of system in place, your number is up. You risk failing in this business if you don’t have enough people to see.

This is why it’s vital before joining any organization to investigate how that insurance agency will help you pitch to enough prospects. Without a scalable, proven lead generation system, your days selling insurance are already numbered.

Now, you might be thinking, “if it’s so crucial, what counts as a substantial lead generation strategy?” Well, in my final expense agency, for instance, we focus on buying direct mail leads, Facebook leads, or television-generated leads on a high enough basis that keeps the agent busy all week.

While the agent has to invest their own money into our system, it is a strategy that has been proven to work.

Either way, whether or not you pay for leads or generate them for free via cold prospecting, seminars, or whatever, it’s critical that every agency has a system in place that teaches agents how to find prospects. Why? Because without it, failure is imminent.

The Woes of Working With One Carrier

While Modern Woodmen is indeed a great product and offers reliable service to their clientele, there are undeniable difficulties when you only have ONE product to sell. In a sense, you are pigeonholed as an agent when there’s no opportunity to sell with other carriers. Here’s why.

No matter the type of insurance, with only one company at your disposal, the underwriting and pricing you can offer are restricted.

In other words, whether you’re selling life insurance, health insurance, property, or casualty insurance, the vast majority of the time, it won’t always be the best option in terms of underwriting or pricing.

There are likely other products available with better pricing and underwriting flexibility.

Moreover, the outcome of a one-product sales strategy, while simple to learn, could have a potentially devastating impact on your business. Let me give you a better example of what I mean.

There are a couple of organizations that are one-product carriers. They teach agents to sell their particular insurance product and no other.

Unfortunately, both of these companies are also expensive with limited underwriting terms. In the long-term, any insurance agent risks losing this business to better-priced insurance companies with more flexible underwriting.

In fact, as a final expense agent myself, I’ve replaced dozens upon dozens of those policies simply because I could get more coverage for my client at the exact same price.

The moral of the story is this. Don’t put yourself in a position where you could risk your business model due to limited carriers.

This is why I operate my agency as a full brokerage offering a complete suite of different insurance products for my agents to work with. Having options is usually considered a good thing. And in our case, it definitely is.

When we have more carrier options for our clients, we have a better chance of securing the lowest price available in combination with the best underwriting terms. This greatly reduces the number of replacements thanks to our competitiveness and increases our client satisfaction.

All in all, that means more of the business we write sticks. And we earn more because the quality of our business is better.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed reading my article on how Modern Woodmen of America works and now understand how a career with this particular agency operates.

I recommend all new and aspiring insurance agents do their due diligence before joining any insurance sales opportunity. That’s why I put together a Free Insurance Agent Resource that may be advantageous to you.

Moreover, if you’d like to learn more about how my agency works as a second opinion or comparison to Modern Woodmen of America, there’s more information on my FAQ page.