Final expense telesales setup: what agents would buy again and what they'd skip

Every month someone asks what to buy to start FE telesales. The list from agents who've been doing it for a while is shorter than the list from people selling courses.

Buy again

• A wired headset with a boom mic. Bluetooth cuts out mid-close. The $60 wired one outlasts the $250 wireless one.
• A second monitor. Lead on one screen, quote and app on the other.
• A CRM with a built-in dialer and recording. Switching between a dialer tab, a spreadsheet and a carrier portal costs you a call every ten minutes. Recording protects you on every "I never agreed to that."
• E-app access with every carrier you're contracted with, set up before the first call, not during it.
• A quiet room with a door. Background noise reads as "call center" to a senior and lowers your close rate.

Skip

• The $3,000 scripts course. The script is: verify the card, ask the health questions, present two options, ask for the bank info. Everything else is practice.
• Predictive dialing on a single line if you're one person. You'll drop calls on connect and burn leads. A multi-line setup that only rings you when a human answers is the right tool, one line is fine to start.
• Fancy phone numbers. A local presence number in the lead's area code matters more than a vanity number.

Numbers to expect the first 60 days. Dial 150 to 250 a day, talk to 20 to 30, present to 4 to 6, write 1 to 2. Persistency on telesales runs lower than face-to-face, so set the draft date carefully and call after the first draft.

What's the one piece of gear or software you'd tell a new telesales agent not to skip?