Pros
You could make money as an insurance sales person if you got a lot of life insurance clients, but that's about all the positive comments I can muster.
Cons
At Insphere, a health/life brokerage that carries several insurance companies (health, life, and LTC) you're on your own. The company is going through huge changes and transition and it's a tumultuous place to work. They've lost a lot of established agents who saw the writing on the wall, and new agents are left to figure out how to be an agent without any real help. My first issue is as an agent, you're supposedly an independent contractor and can create your own business, but you're dependent on Insphere's internal structure for support and information, which is a mess. Maybe established agents can navigate the systems, but new agents are struggling to understand it all. Secondly, training: As a new agent, support is minimal to non-existent. Personally, I haven't received any real support, and absolutely zero training in the field. I don't know anything about sales, but they hired me anyway, and told me I was "trainable," but then there was no training. Each time I've asked "What's my next step?" I've been told to make a list of businesses, pick up the phone, and cold-call. That's precious little help to a brand new agent because you can't really call a potential client and discuss a product or a process you have had no real training on. I asked to go on calls with my manager, but was given a weak-as-water reason that I couldn't go with him. Instead, I was told to make calls from a stack of paper leads that were already days old, to get appointments that my manager could go on, and that my manager would come and make the sale for me, and I could have half the commission*. And when I've tried to get any manager into a conversation, they are always so busy and scattered that they seemed annoyed that I was there -- they can't get their eyes off their cell phones or their fingers off their texting long enough to engage in a conversation. *It turns out, managers have had their base salaries taken away and need to go back onto commission. Also, they don't pay for your test materials to take your state licensing exam, they don't pay for the exam, or for your license. In short, they don't sponsor you at all. I've put $500 into my materials so far, and the only way I'll get it back is through taxes next year, if I'm lucky enough to make enough money to be able to claim any deductions. You also have to pay some carriers to be certified to sell their plans. As far as learning each carrier's products, there are two or three hours of firehose-style information dumps on you for each carrier, then you're left with a stack of brochures and marketing material to sort through that provide no usable information or instruction for agents. And third, commissions: For health insurance, at least, they are a joke. One health carrier pays $5 a month for an individual health plan. Another pays $10 a month. The only reason I got into this business, naively, was to help freelance professionals get health insurance. I thought it would be great to sell a product that people really need, that they need help understanding, and that I could make a decent living on at the same time. What a slap in the face and a rude awakening. At $5 and $10 per sale, there is no way to make a living. The incentive, therefore, is not to sell individual health plans, but to sell group health of life insurance instead (for life, they only have one carrier, so it's not like you're a true broker with just one carrier to sell.)