Hard-won lessons from scaling a remote sales team at Peachy Insurance and Next Call Club.
Hiring remotely sounds like a dream until you're on Day 1 of onboarding and a completely different person shows up than the one you interviewed. That actually happened to us. More on that in a minute.
Remote hiring for insurance sales agencies has real advantages: broader talent pool, lower overhead, and flexible scheduling. But it also has a specific set of pitfalls that will cost you time and money if you're not ready for them. This post covers what we've learned the hard way at Peachy Insurance and Next Call Club, from the interview process through equipment setup, culture, and knowing when to let someone go.
The number one source of early turnover in remote hiring is a mismatch between what the candidate thought they were getting and what the job actually is.
Remote does not mean flexible. This is a desk job. Your agent needs to be at their home workstation during their assigned shift, on camera, fully available. It is not a job you can do while watching kids, running errands, or working a second gig on the side.
We've learned to say this explicitly during the interview and again in the offer letter. One of our early hires left two weeks in because they came in expecting part-time work with a path to full-time, and we assumed they meant something different by that. A little more direct questioning in the interview would have surfaced the disconnect before we wasted two weeks of training on someone who was never going to stay.
Two questions worth adding to your screening process: What does your home workspace look like? Do you have reliable childcare or other commitments during your scheduled hours? These aren't gotcha questions. They're about setting the role up for success.
Here's the process we actually run, not the ideal version.
Stage one is a prescreen, usually a short phone or video call to verify basic fit. Stage two is a formal video interview. Stage three, for high-volume roles like our SDR position, where we sometimes get 100+ applications a day, is a one-way video interview paired with a written or skills assessment.
That last step is a filter more than anything else. Only about 30% of applicants complete both the video and the assessment. That self-selection tells you something important: the people who skip it probably weren't serious to begin with. The ones who complete it have already demonstrated a baseline level of follow-through.
What are we looking for in the interview itself? Attitude, listening ability, and energy. Everything else can be trained. Someone who shows up sharp, engaged, and genuinely curious is a better bet than someone with a polished resume who interviews flat.
One more thing: use recorded video for all interviews. Beyond the general usefulness of having recordings to review, we once extended an offer, and on Day 1 of onboarding, the person who showed up was not the person we had interviewed. Having video and audio recordings made it immediately clear and gave us documentation to act on. Our HR partner Justworks helped us navigate the situation the same day. It was one of the wildest things we've ever dealt with, but the systems we had in place meant we could handle it fast.
Equipment logistics are more manageable than most people think, as long as you build a process and stick to it.
Our standard setup for NCC remote employees:
Get a company FedEx account. It makes shipping and returns dramatically easier, and it eliminates the awkward "please box everything up and mail it back" conversation when someone leaves.
On the subject of equipment returns: yes, people sometimes ghost you when they quit or get let go. We have employees sign an agreement at the start stating they're responsible for the equipment if it's lost or damaged. On a handful of occasions where someone was unresponsive about returning gear, a formal letter stating we'd contact the local police department resolved the situation quickly.
The internet speed requirement is non-negotiable. We require 100+ Mbps download and 10+ Mbps upload. Check this before Day 1, not after. If someone's internet can't support the role, give them enough runway before their start date to upgrade. Don't find out during onboarding week.
Here's what we use every day across the team:
The call gap dashboard deserves special mention. It doesn't just track calls and talk time. It shows the gaps, meaning the stretches where someone should be working but isn't active on the phones. When the call gap chart shows a persistent problem and coaching hasn't moved the needle, it's time to formalize it with a Performance Improvement Plan. That one tool gives us more visibility into remote productivity than most managers have even in-office. It's also why we don't require cameras all day. The data tells us what we need to know.
For the data and technical side of the team, the toolset matters less than the cadence. Weekly one-on-ones and ad hoc check-ins are critical for anyone doing project-based work. It's easy to feel like you're on an island when you're heads-down on technical work, and nobody's checked in for a week.
We run core shift windows and require team members to be available for at least one assigned shift. Current options are 9-5 EST, 10-6 EST, with 11-7 and 12-8 coming online soon.
We communicate shift requirements during the interview and again during onboarding. We try to accommodate preferences when possible, but flexibility on the employee's end is a requirement of the role. The upside: schedules don't change day to day, so people can plan their lives around them. That's real stability for a remote employee.
The mistake we see other agencies make is treating schedule expectations as an afterthought. By the time you're onboarding someone who assumed the hours were flexible, it's too late. Put the shift windows in the job posting. It filters out the wrong candidates before they ever apply. Setting shift expectations is only part of the equation. Pair that with the right best compensation plan for insurance producers and you'll attract higher-quality applicants.
People get lonely. That's just the reality of remote work, especially in a role that involves a lot of independent calling. If you don't actively build togetherness into your culture, you'll feel it in turnover before you can identify the cause. Remote work requires self-discipline that not everyone has. As we wrote in Choose Your Easy, the hard parts of building something don't go away — they just change shape.
What we do to counteract isolation:
Cameras on during calls sounds like a small thing. It isn't. Seeing faces changes the dynamic of a meeting. It creates accountability, builds familiarity, and makes people feel like they're part of something rather than just logging hours from their kitchen table.
Also worth screening for: people who genuinely want a desk job, not people who want the romanticized version of remote work. Someone who was hoping for a laid-back lifestyle role will be disengaged within a month. Someone who sees remote work as a professional opportunity will thrive.
We don't manage remote employees based on gut feel. We manage them the same way we'd manage anyone: with data.
The primary tool for our sales team is the call gap chart. It shows total calls, total talk time, and the gaps between activities. A consistent gap pattern during business hours is a conversation starter. Multiple conversations with no change is a performance problem.
This approach also makes difficult employment decisions more confident and less emotional. Whether someone is two offices over or two time zones away, the data is the data. We're not guessing whether someone is slacking. We know. When the data shows someone isn't performing, the next step is a structured response. When the data shows someone isn't performing, the next step is a structured response. Our guide on nurturing underperforming sales teams walks through how to handle that conversation.
You will hire people who cannot troubleshoot basic tech issues. This sounds obvious until you're 20 minutes into an outbound sales shift, trying to walk someone through clearing their browser cache over Slack because their quoting platform won't load.
Internet speed and typing speed are the two filters we wish we had applied earlier. Many applicants simply don't have enough of either for a high-volume sales role. Test both before you extend an offer. Slow typing alone can shave meaningful time off a rep's daily output when they're quoting all day.
The practical solution: make sure your IT setup includes the ability to remote into employee computers. When someone can't solve a basic tech issue, and you can take control of their screen to fix it, you save everyone time and frustration.
Remote hiring for insurance sales is completely doable. Plenty of agencies are doing it well, including us. But it requires the same level of intentionality you'd bring to building an in-office team, applied to a different set of logistics.
Get the expectations right before the offer goes out. Build your systems before you need them. Invest in culture like it's a business metric, because it is. And measure performance the same way you would in person, because the data doesn't care where someone's sitting. If you want structured support for your remote team beyond a playbook, our Agency Coaching and Consulting programs are built for exactly this.
If you want to talk through how lead strategy, coaching, or analytics can support your remote sales operation, reach out to the Next Call Club team. We work with agencies at every stage of building and scaling remote teams.