Pros
I was with NY Life for just over four years. Quality Council Agent my second year, Executive my Third and was prorata for Executive again this year. It's a great career for those looking for a change and who like to help people. Fabulous training program designed to help you enter into a sales career. You set your schedule. You get to help people. Great career agent model.
Cons
Too much training. My first 3 years I averaged 15.7hours/week in mandatory training sessions that occurred 3/week. Including drive time I spent 22.7hrs/week in red time. This amounted to an uncompensated part-time job. Upper management lacks oversight/control over Managing Partners Training strategies and implementation of training programs. No email CRM system is available for use (without a ton of red tape). In today's age of content marketing it's mind-boggling that a partnership with an e-system like MailChimp, SalesForce doesn't exist. Drive sales, but don't give your agents the technological/marketing tools to cost-effectively and time-efficiently market their brand. NY Life misses the mark when integrating/aligning brand marketing at the Agent/RR level. There's a huge disconnect and I'm still utterly baffled by the sheer number of things NY Life could be doing, could be providing its agents and hasn't - not even an inkling of a clue that these "no-brainer" systems are absolutely necessary in building a book of business. In fact it's what motivated me to apply for the Strategic Marketing position that I accepted. It's why I'm leaving NY Life. Confusing/unfair Underwriting practices. Lack of transparency. They push high annual Whole Life premiums and when you write those cases your commission is gutted. On a $70k annual premium I earned roughly 12% in commission. It was peanuts and certainly even 35% could've changed my life and greatly enhanced my business.
