Insurance Agent Recruiting Funnel: 65 Applications in 50 Days

The Challenge

Pinnacle Life Group and Pinnacle Nation are growing networks of independent insurance agencies. Every agency needs new agents, but recruiting ran almost entirely on referrals: unpredictable, impossible to forecast, and not something that could be turned up or down. Job boards brought the wrong candidates. What the group needed was one repeatable recruiting funnel that any agency in the network could plug into, managed centrally, producing applications week after week without each agency owner becoming a media buyer.

Method: $4,626 of Meta ad spend across three recruiting campaigns between October 8 and November 27, 2025, reconciled line by line against contact records in GoHighLevel. A lead is a unique CRM record attributed to a paid campaign. An application is a completed structured form, not a webinar registration. Best-round figures are the strongest single campaign round for that metric.

What our clients are saying

Trevor McAleesFounder of Pinnacle Nation27k followers

Serge built our recruiting system from the ground up, ran the ads, and drove a steady flow of quality leads at a low cost per lead that turned into real booked appointments on our calendar.

Mikey CavaleryVP of Sales at Pinnacle Life Group17k followers

Serge's team moved fast, communicated constantly, and stayed on top of every detail. If you need funnels and automation built by someone who actually delivers, this is who you call. Highly recommend.

Timeline

What we built

1. Paid social campaigns across Facebook and Instagram, targeted to sales-experienced candidates rather than general job seekers.

2. A recruiting funnel that opens with an opportunity webinar instead of a job posting, so candidates qualify themselves before anyone spends time on them.

3. A structured application capturing licence status, years of experience, current occupation, current income and target income.

4. CRM in GoHighLevel, with every applicant tagged to the agency and the campaign that produced them.

5. Six campaign rounds across two brands, each rebuilt on the previous round's data.

Funnel Pages

Ads only work if there is somewhere for the lead to go. We built the full path: a webinar page that earns trust and captures registrations, an application page that pre-screens candidates, and a network-wide agencies page so any Pinnacle agency can plug into the same funnel without building its own. Try Evergreen Webinar Session.

It got cheaper every round

Recruiting campaigns do not perform on day one. Meta needs volume before it learns who to show the ad to, and creative needs real data before you know which version earns applications. Cost came down in every single round, on both brands, and it fell hardest further down the funnel.

A completed application was the handoff point. Each one included licensing status, sales experience, current occupation, and income, so the agency received a pre-screened candidate ready to be interviewed, not only a name and a phone number.

Where the applications came from

Creative mattered more than format. The strongest single creative turned 18.7% of leads into applications, the weakest managed 5.9%. Video and static finished within a point of each other overall, which means the winner is found by testing, not by guessing.

Creatives

Video & Graphics

We produced 14 ad variations across three creative waves for both brands: short-form video and static graphics built around one message, "Work anywhere. Earn more." Each wave was cut based on what the previous one taught us, so by round three we were running only the formats and angles that had already proven they convert.

14 ad variations, 3 video and 11 static
~71K people reached
115K impressions
±2% difference in cost per lead between video and static
~8x gap between the best and weakest creative on cost per lead

Video and static performed almost identically on cost, so the format mattered less than the message and the hook. The spread between our best and weakest ad was nearly eight to one, which is why we launch several variations per round and reallocate budget within days instead of waiting for a monthly report. Two of the round-one statics carried the highest lead volume of the entire campaign and stayed in rotation through the final wave.

The young end was cheapest

We did not choose an age and target it. An opportunity webinar draws a wider range of people than a job posting does, so every age band Meta offers ran from the first round, and the cost data decided where the budget went.

By age band, a lead from 18-24 cost $8.74 against a $12.09 blended average, and 25-34 came in at $10.25. From 35 upward every band lands within a few cents of that average, so the discount is not a gradient across age: it belongs to the two youngest bands and stops there. That is the case for running the full range before narrowing it, because the band most agency owners would cut first turned out to be the cheapest one to reach.

Outcome

By round six the campaign was producing applications faster than the agencies could process them. The bottleneck moved from lead generation to follow-up: reviewing applications, running interviews, and onboarding needs a dedicated recruiter working the pipeline daily. We paused paid acquisition so the group could build that capacity. The takeaway for any agency group: the ads are the easy part once the system exists. Budget for the person who works the applications.