Western & Southern Life Reviews

Cons

The workload was at times overwhelming

Cons

Starting salary is $615 a week and decreases at 6 months. Then again every 3 months for a two year period. According to new hiring incentives, if commission goals are not met, reps are let go. This may be a way of letting go of bad apples, and active reps putting in effort may still be able to continue. Salary will be lost however. You must pay for and pass your state life & health insurance exams before starting. Expensive study material is provided by the company at no cost. You are required to study for your Securities Intro Exam, Series 6 & 63 while having to make “launch appointments” with family and friends, approach businesses, and do lunch & learns with said businesses. To put plainly, the lunches are hard to set up as they are not interesting and are a requirement to reach incentives. All this means studying will be done on personal time. To make good business, you will be working all times of the day. You work around client schedules, they do not work around yours. This is the expectation and reality until you are established. You will sacrifice time with family and friends to find your footing in the business, if not permanently Most company training is based on old school sales approaches and stiff, unnatural scripts that don’t work well with most younger people. You will have to develop your own style. While welcome in my office, may not be in others. While I personally handled this well, it is a commitment many are not open to making or just unable to do. With under a year of being with the company, I’ve seen many fail to pass their state exams, denied the job due to poor credit and others unable to pass their SIE (which is a difficult test), which will also cause the loss of salary. The only con that personally effected me is that unless you have a very large network of friends, family, former coworkers, community members, old classmates and so on, you’ll be relying on cold prospecting. In the past, it was a hiring requirement that you were able to list 200 contacts to start your prospecting from. Keep in mind some companies still require this. W&S has basically no training or advice on building a practice this way. Luckily I have managers and colleagues helping me feel out the process, but I can’t guarantee that at other offices. Also the company laptop they give you is nearly a decade old and slow as crap.

Cons

Unfortunately, as time passes, the push to get registered harmed the experience, and slowly but surely management sours on those who are not registered, unless you were top sellers. It was also encouraged to "lose sleep if you aren't making sales" by upper management, and harmed my personal view on myself and my ability to work. Cons: -Salary goes away after a few months if you do not become registered (and is gone fully after a few years). -PTO comes from a fund, not a general paid time, so may have a day off with no pay whatsoever. -Weekend call sessions that are unpaid if you do not get a sale that day. -Favoritism from management can begin to quickly form, and if you're not it, you'll claw for survival, and may even have them talk about you to co-workers in a not positive light. -If you aren't a favorite, you'll be discouraged from helping coworkers, albeit subtly.

Cons

I feel that the training made me be set up to fail every day. I learned something that contradicted what I was trained on or something that I should have been trained on. There’s a lot of misinformation

Cons

Pay, poor leadership, burnout, high turnover rate

Cons

No option for hybrid work/life balance

Cons

Upper management located in Ohio basically and how they don't like negative comments about their products not working correctly. The underwriters are EXTREMELY conservative and will rate everyone they can or deny them but yet these people get covered elsewhere for half the cost. The compensation is not the greatest and you have to fight tooth and nail to make sure they are paying your commission correctly instead of whatever they want to pay and if you dispute it, they pretty much laugh in your face. They really push you to get fully registered within the 1st year even though the exams are difficult and still want you to hit their incentives at the same time.

Cons

not training to really launch ur career

Cons

Did not like the medical insurance plan, aggressive sales tactics are encouraged, declining base pay for first 2 years if sales goals are met.

Cons

Management team pushes you, instead of assisting and encouraging you. You are given lists of existing customers to contact behind other agents who have worked these clients in front of you. You are pushed to sell to your friends and family ‘natural market’ . Management is not very helpful with answers and solutions and is largely inexperienced,