Your "Dead" Leads Are Worth $270,000 (Stop Ignoring Them)

We know for a fact that almost any agent who's been in the market for over three years has at least a database of a thousand leads. A thousand leads is worth about $270,000 in commission. That's just sitting there waiting for you. It's just like a chest of gold that you're just ignoring that you and your bills stacking up right.

Hey. Hey. Welcome back to the accelerate your insurance sales podcast. Andy Neary here, CEO and founder of Complete Game Consulting. I'm excited. Today I am joined by Michael McMillan, President of Financialize, one of the most forward thinking voices in the insurance and lead generation industry. Michael has spent over two decades building and scaling high performance, high performing sales operations, helping thousands of agents grow their business through smarter systems, technology and data. He leads several innovative brands including Annuities.net which helps consumers connect with licensed professionals to sell, secure their retirement income and life policy express.com a digital first plat platform simplifying how families shop for life insurance. Under Michael's leadership, Financial Eyes has become known for transforming how insurance leads are generated, verified and converted, bridging the gap between advanced automation and real human connection. I'm excited to have Michael. Welcome aboard.

Hey, appreciate you having me here today.

This is going to be a fun episode because what we're going to focus on today is scalability and lead generation and it's something that everybody in the insurance industry wants to know more about. How do I open more doors and generate more leads? We, we actually have a program we provide through our services that where we do social media content for people. We make sure we're building, they're building the brand every day. And even through that program we get pushback. Like why am I not getting any leads from the content? We're like, well you got to still put a little work in to actually generate the leads. But I think what they're going to learn from today is you guys are doing a lot of good things to help put leads, give them leads on a silver platter. But before we get there, I actually want to start here, you know, offline. I asked, we have all our guests fill out a form. And one thing you said that really just perked my interest because I want to know more. When you were in your 20s, you weighed 420 pounds.

Oh yeah.

If you're watching the video right now and looking at Michael, this is not a 420 pound dude, but you lost 200 pounds over the course of 15 years. How the heck did you do that, man?

Yeah, it was, it was a journey, to say the least, right? I mean, we, I mean, I should say with me. I. So in 2009, I kind of hit this moment, right? And I. I'll never forget it. I was at a conference actually, and I was sitting there listening to a speaker who eventually became my mentor, a guy named Jack Daly. And Jack was talking about. He's a sales speaker, so he's talking about sales and all this. But he had this comment about how if you can't control yourself, how can you control a sale? And I still to this day can remember him hitting us with that. And I remember after this speech, I was back up in my room and I was just kind of sitting there. I was just in my room by myself and. And across the room I could see the scale. And I, I mean, I don't know why, it kind of like said something to me, like, I should have step on that thing. And mind you, at that point, when you're, when you're that big of a boy, you know, scales have, have one number. It's err. Right? It's not, it's not. And. But when you're, it's kind of like when you're that big, you just, it kind of gives you protection because you don't have to visualize that number. Well, that day I stepped on that scale and lo and behold, it was like, I guess a lot of big boys lived there or something because it said a number. And I'll never forget, it was. It was actually 421. It was actually what it was. And it just kind of smacked me in the face and went back to Chicago where I was, where I'm from and where I was living back then. And it took me a while to kind of put my head wrapped around it, but one day I finally just clicked and I'm like, you know what? I got to do something about this. Like, I'm going to die like early. And I'd been talking to Jack a lot at that point and we'd been starting to foster a relationship and I said, you know what? This dude's in his, you know, 50s, 60s, running triathlons, Ironman and all that stuff. Like, I, I gotta, like, if I can't do this, who can, right? Like, I mean, this is ridiculous. So I put it on Facebook. I just said, everyone, like, hey, you know what? Next year, because it was August, I'm like, next year I'm going to run the Chicago triathlon. And that was.

And you were £421 at this time.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Wow. So over the course of the next year, I. I succeeded, I failed, I did a lot of things. I. But the big thing is I joined this group called CES Chicago Veteran Sports. And, like, I still remember the faces of all those guys, like, freaking out when they saw me. And I. But I went through it and I. You know, a year later, at 310 pounds, I crossed the finish line, the Chicago Triathlon, which I'm just going to sit here and tell you right now, if any big people are out there, like, thinking about doing this, like, crossing a finish line at £300 sucks on so many levels. Like, my back was shot, my legs were destroyed. But my mentor came. He actually flew in to do this with me, and we got this great photo. I'll have to send it to you, of him and I finishing in front of Buckingham Fountain. It was an incredible moment, and that's what started it all really was showing myself I could accomplish something if I just am willing to put in the effort to do so. And so, you know, over the next few years, I just kept after it. I had some, you know, made some good things, did some bad things, and, you know, up and down, up and down. But, yeah, man, I mean, you're talking about 20 years later, almost, It's. I've kept it off. I've, you know, I. My lowest, I was about a buck 98 or. Sorry. No, sorry. 201. It was my last. 201 was my lowest. But I've completed four different marathons, more triathlons than I could count. I actually competed competitively in an age group at one point, Sentry rides ultras. Like, I've done all of that stuff. And yeah, man, it was. It was a journey. But I tell everyone is, if anything endurance sports will teach you, especially having been a big kid all my life, is it teaches you what it means to grind and what it means to literally have to put in the work to get the reward at a later time. Right. Just because I crossed the finish line, that's one thing. But the real reward and being able to play with my kids and doing all that, that came years and years later. And that's what it teaches you. It teaches you patience, and it teaches you how to grind.

I love that, man. That's why I wanted to start with that, because I'll even go back to what you heard Jack say, right? If you're in sales, for example, where you're physically in front of somebody, don't think for a minute how you Physically, look, doesn't determine the level of credibility you have. Oh yeah, it's a big deal in sales and, but, but what I'm actually really admire is you see a lot of people who do go through a weight loss journey, but very few keep it off. Yeah. And in fact, you not only lost that amount of weight, but have kept it off ever since. And I, my knees started to hurt when you talked about doing the triathlon because I've never been that, that, that big. But I could just imagine the pounding your knees took running, running the, the, the run portion of the triathlon.

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's like nothing. I mean, when you're that big, you just, you don't really feel that weight until that kind of bump. Right. And I mean, and luckily I was always a swimmer. I mean as a kid I was a swimmer. So the swim portion's always been decent for me. And I mean, hey, listen, fat floats, right?

Well said. So I was a chunky kid and a swimmer as well. So I, I, I respect that, man. Well, let's, let's talk about financialize your company. You know, if you listen to the intro, I did say, hey, your, you know, company does generate leads in the annuity and life insurance space. But I think the conversation we're going to have today applies to anybody selling insurance. And one of the reasons you founded FinancialEyes was to tackle poor quality leads and outdated processes in the industry. When it comes to lead generation, what gaps did you see in the market and how does your platform address them?

Yeah, so just clarify one thing. So I actually took over Financialize actually just in May. So a gentleman named Kevin is actually the founder of it over 20 years ago. And I mean, but I can speak to him very easily. I mean, what Kevin saw was, is he looked at the space and he saw a very clear need for agents who needed leads because the agents who were buying leads were being successful. If you looked at the mdrt, the Million Dollar Roundtable and you looked at top end producers, there is a consistent, there's a consistent trend there which is they're purchasing leads to help them take beyond their natural markets. Right. And it's just, it's consistent throughout the mdr and of course the old school boys, listen, I know they're going to fight back on that and comment to death about how no natural market's the best. And I'm not disagreeing with that. But you have to compensate it some way. But where the biggest issue was is especially into the digital world, right? As you get into Covid times, Covid changed the game forever. Right? You got into this digital landscape to where your biggest competitor wasn't chucked down the street, it was the nation and anybody who was licensed in your state now and it really made the playing field very different and lead gen had to step its game up. But actually it got worse. I mean you get all the Instagram scammers, you get all of this stuff. And where Financialize really set our bar was we were never going to sell low quality leads. We just, that was our bedrock and still is our bedrock to this day. And with that is what we focused on. We said, well, how do we do that? Well, we made it simple. We're going to hire us call center agents who work for us and we're going to phone verify all of these people and if we don't phone verify them, we're not going to sell them. And the other part was thinking as a salesperson, I don't want my lead with five other schmucks trying to sell my, my client and distracting them from getting a deal done. Who's that's going to help them? So we're going to sell one to one and that's how we do it. And that pairing of exclusivity with verification is really, it is the secret sauce of financializing has been and it's just we've perfected it over a 20 year period to make it to where it is today. But I will say on all that though is today especially since I took over, one of the big things I installed in our company was what we call our North Star. And our North Star is a our agents win, we win. And that is how we focus everything we do from our blog posts to our videos to like literally everything goes through that filter. And if it's not going to help our agents, we don't do it. It's that simple. And sometimes it's us taking a haircut on things or it's us having to go and you know, hey, we did something wrong. I mean, hey, we're just human and let's make it up to you. How do we help you? Maybe it's, you know, we're going to make it right in many different ways, but it's how we make your agency go forward and that's how we look at volume.

Well and I think to back up your point, because I'm sure there's a lot of lead generation services out there saying we provide the highest quality leads, but I think only 22% of your leads actually pass verification. So with as much as you're willing to share how talk about that a little bit because again I think everybody would say we provide high quality but that's a pretty low number. And I'm a big, we preach quality over quantity. Not any lead. You got to have the right leads. 22%, a pretty high fail rate. Why is that important?

Yeah, I tell everybody is for your success should never be measured by success should never be measured by your wins. It should be measured by your failures. Right. Like you have to look at that in that scale we actually look at as a success when we're that low. And honestly if I could bring it lower, I potentially would if I know it increased quality to a, you know, measurable amount. You know, so what we're doing is this, I mean we're, you're talking about everything from digital verificationing, skip checking, we're looking at financial auditing. And then on top of that the big boy is phone verification. Right. I mean anybody can text or email someone and get a response back. That doesn't mean it's a qualified lead until you have literally spoken to that person or at least gotten two way communication to say yes, this is the investable amount and ask the next question like our agents, what they trust us with most. And I would say and mind you, I'm a licensed agent myself, right. I've done this walk. The thing I, I heard the day one, one of the things I first changed when I came in because I saw great quality, I wanted to make it amazing quality and I said let's do it. I'm like here's the easiest way. When a person tells you has their 401k, is it liquid? We didn't ask. So now we ask. Right. And so what does liquidity mean? Well are you 59 and a half or do you have or are you out of that current employer so we can roll over that 401k? If not that money's not accessible. So again it changes the dynamic. And that's where you know our education on what we call our LAS team, it's our lead activation specialist. Those, the education on that team is what helps our agents get what they need out of these leads. And that's how we, we measure it. It's just making sure that that quality is always at the utmost. Because listen, anybody can sell leads for a year. It takes a special kind of patience to be able to sell leads for a decade, let alone multiple decades.

Well said, well said. Yeah, I think One of the core factors you bring up, and it's a conversation I just had with my business coach this morning, is everybody's trying to automate everything, right? And any insurance agent out there would love to automate the lead generation process. We get challenged to automate the lead generation process and we're trying to figure it out ourselves. But you also preach that there has to be a human touch, has to remain in order for lead generation to be successful. And I agree with that. How can agencies, so what advice would you give to agencies, leaders out there who are trying to generate more leads for their producers? How do they balance automation and retain the personal connection to make it effective? Because we've got to have the human touch in there.

Absolutely. I mean, just to put an exclamation point next to that, right. Is, I mean, I tell everybody, especially in life and annuities, you're talking about the two most sensitive topics of a human being's life, their life savings and their death. And really, I guess you go into their legacy as well. Right. And so, you know, with that, you, you've got to remember that is just purely human. There's nothing robotic about that at all. So what we pay attention to, so, you know, we've got a service that actually works through that, which is, you know, making sure that we're following up with our, with agents, leads and such. And with that, we have to strike that balance carefully as well. So it's, how do you balance out that AI automationing with that human touch? And, and what we found, and when we went through this, it took us months to actually get this thing built. What we discovered was identifying those key human moments, right? Where is those specific moments that really needs that emotional connectivity of trust? Where are those? So when we laid out our customer experience journey, and we laid out every step and every email, every text, every phone call, we identified key moments that was going to be critical that we needed to inject that human voice and that human touch into it, whatever it may be. And that's how we pay attention to it, even to the way we hand off the lead to the agent back into the agent. We had to make a choice, I mean, just an easy one. I could either chose to put it into a schedule and send it to them, or I could chart it. I made the investment, we did. We spent a lot of money to increase the technology set to where we now do warm transfers with those leads and we at least can offer it. And the reason we did is because we saw, we increased conversion at least I mean, conversional rates up to almost 30% by just doing a warm handoff and handing it from our LAS team back into the agent. So the person had that human to human touch all the way through versus an appointment, cold appointment, which is now you're just the name on a calendar. So it's just identifying those key moments, those, those, those trigger moments that are going to make that impression and really change the dynamic of that relationship you're building with that person.

Well, and talk about, expand on that a little bit because that warm handoff is really, really important. But I think another thing you guys do that probably makes you a little different than other lead generation programs is it's, it's, it's. You have lead exclusivity.

Yeah.

Which means you're handing a single lead to a single producer. This isn't a shared lead system. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean I, back in the day, actually going kind of my way, way back machine. There was a company out there called Buyerzone. I still remember those guys. And this is in the B2B world I come from. And you know, I remember being one of their first customers and they were very upfront with it, right. They're like, we sell your, we sell this lead to five companies and it's only those five companies. Back in those days, I was like, this is fantastic. But what you end up finding is you're competing with yourself half the time because it's speed to lead and who can get them to them first and who can basically blot out the rest of them. And it's just this weird competitive environment. When I came into insurance and started doing insurance, I did everything. I was just your typical newbie. I was like, oh, I got life, I got health, I got pnc, I got it all. And I'll never forget buying my first lead. And I call this guy and he's like, he goes, you're the 11th person to call me in the last hour. And I was like, oh God, here we go. Right. And I got read the riot act, you know, and I finally, I mean, I got the guy to laugh a little bit because I'm like, I'm like, well, at least we, at least, you know, you got a lot of people's attention. I'm like, it's better than going on insta where you could just post it to nothing. And he just, you know, start cracking up. But my point is, is agents need to create relationships. And if your lead provider isn't starting that relationship, the right way you're fighting against the wrong thing. Like I actually. You want to hear a scary thing right now? This open enrollment season has been a complete and utter fricking disaster. We actually have. We. So we track the senior market very closely. Right now we found out that the average senior is. Is receiving between 6 and 700 phone calls on average per day. Not per week, not per month, per day. I mean, you want to talk about destroying a market like this is the problem, right. And then you got guys like us who are just trying to verify that you asked us to call you, but we can't get through. Right. And so we're having to go through other means, which we've already figured it out. But this is the problem when you start going into non exclusivity is because it just. It's making the problem worse because every sales guy thinks we're the top. Right. But we're not. We're. We're just. We're all just normal people.

Yeah. That I hope. You know, what I've heard so far in this conversation that I hope sales leaders and executives have heard as well, is one, yes, there are opportunities to create more lead flow generation without your producers having to do the manual work. However, you can't just chase any lead. You still want high quality leads. When you're looking for a service like financialize to help you do that, you got to find one that has a high failure rate. You said only 22% of the leads you create pass. And the point here is you don't want to just be handing producers any lead. It's got to be high quality. And I love that because I've worked at insurance agencies, Michael, where they. We had a cold calling service, right?

Oh, yeah.

Book appointments for us. It was great. I'd have appointments on my calendar, but honestly, probably at least half of those meetings I went to, they didn't even want to be there in the first place. And I started asking a question as a result of it. What intrigued you to take the meeting? And it wasn't uncommon for them to say, well, the guy on the phone won't let me off the hook. So I said yes. Okay, great. You don't even want to be here. I might as well leave. And. And I think that's really important for people to hear. Like lead generation isn't just about spamming and seeing how many leads you can create. It's about handing that off to somebody who's an expert at it, who's creating and handing you the right leads.

Absolutely.

So with that said, let's, let's go a little deeper into I think your newest program, which is lead revival.

Yeah.

Which is a, is a way agencies can really. What do we want to call, rekindle old leads. So, so talk a little bit about what is lead revival and how is it changing the way producers and agencies are thinking about old leads which they might consider dead leads.

Yeah. Yeah. So the lead revival actually was born out of, funny enough actually my own agency that I have. Right. And I, it was so inside of our agency. I mind you, I come from the call center and technology world. Right. So I'm a technologist who has built mega call centers. Right. I mean I've had tens of thousands of agents over my career and one of the things I learned back in the day was cause I knew who I was when I was a starting sales guy. Honestly, I was really not good at follow up. I was lazy as a good salesperson should be. Right. And it's, the reality is, is in the insurance space and we've got so much research data we did on this is that over 80% of producers will only call a lead twice and then give up. And they'll, then they'll also love to count like emails and text as maybe even part of that. Right. And picking up the phone seems to be like, like looking at kryptonite to most of these sales guys these days. Right. Like, I mean I was, I came up, luckily, you know, I'm an 80s baby, right. So I was brought up in the 90s world of like smile, dial some more and if you don't like it, then get the hell out. Right. I mean that was the sales world I came up in. So I'm not, you know, but long story short with all this is that we know where the world is with this and we know agents, especially agents who've been in this market for at least maybe a year or so are sitting on enormous databases of leads. But they just don't know how to really work them, nor do they want to work them. And in our opinion they shouldn't need to work them because I don't want my agents focused on prospecting and doing all that. What I want them focused on is how to help their client get the best solution. Because if I can help them do that again, it's how do I help my agents win. That's all I care about. So get, become the best in the chair. Don't get the best at calling on the phone and getting your prospect engaged. So that's where Lead revival came from. So what lead revival is, is we took. So with Financialize we already had enterprise grade systems. That was one of the things. When I came in and took over as president, I was, I was so happy about it because we have the call center infrastructure, we have all the email automation and all these systems already there. And so I decided, I'm like, you know, wait, can't we just segment this out for each agency to get that same thing? And over about a four month period, we figured out how to do it. So now an agency can sign up, you go to myleadreviable.com, you sign up, you go through the spiel and then what we do is we load that agency's brand, we load in all of their information in there and then we call on their behalf. So literally when our team is dialing, they call with the agency brand, which is helping with brand recognition. We're sending out email automation, we're sending out text, we're doing social media, direct messaging, and we're doing all of these things to help re engage the leads. We have found that on average it's actually much higher. But we know for a fact that almost any agent who's been in the market for over three years has at least a database of a thousand leads. A thousand leads in an annuity and life blended world. So not just one, but you know, because those all blended in there is worth about $270,000 in commissions. So for every thousand leads, you're looking at 270 grand. That's just sitting there waiting for you. It's just like a chest of gold that you're just ignoring that you and you have bills stacking up, right? And that's what we built it for. And since launch last month, I mean the, the, I mean the number of agents flock into this is incredible. And because they understand that we've already proven that we can get older people. I jokingly tell people, once you're in my spider web, there is no getting out, right? Like this is, it's not happening. It's like when Frodo got stuck in the spider and this spider got him. At the end of the day we're that same way, right? Once you're in our web as a consumer, we got you. And that's what agents need. They need that someone who's going to be that tenacious so they can go do their business, which is their businesses and calling their business is helping people. And that's what we're here to do. And that's what lead revival is built for.

Well, and I'd love to know again with as much as you're willing to share, because I think when I think of our clients and people in the, in any realm of the insurance industry, they all have a list of cold leads sitting somewhere that are probably just. They're doing. They're. They're not. You know, I've seen lists as old as five to six years ago.

Oh yeah.

And, and they're trying to revive that list. And, and it's just not working. These people have no clue who they are. When you look at again, what lead revival does, or just advice for an insurance agency sales leader who is just trying to figure out how you revive old leads, what are some key elements they need to consider?

Yeah, this great question actually. And this is something we talk about with our agents a lot, especially through our agent educational channels. I mean, the biggest thing I will tell every agent is this. No matter what revival, whatever program you run to start trying to get those old leads to age leads to engage, the first thing that all of us are dependent upon is what is your brand, right? Like how well have you managed your own brand? If you've done a crappy job at managing your brand or like you're not even on like Google business spaces or you're not on any. You don't even have local presencing. Can we work and can we operate? Absolutely. We're gonna still show roi I mean, because I know what our numbers are. I mean we're 11 to 13 times on our investment. So I have a lot of wiggle room to make mistakes. Right? But if you have brand like you actually invested, you've actually become part of the chamber, you've done all these things to digital branding. It just makes my life a million times easier. So what I always will. And I shouldn't say I. Our team really invests in our agents to show them how to do that. Right. Work with. If you don't know how, work with a specialist who does know how. Let them teach you how to get in front of the press, how to actually start getting backlinks through like real sources, not your. Just your buddy's plumbing website who says, oh, I use these guys too. But how to actually start boosting your band presence and your brand authority. And a lot of that just is making sure that you got someone who knows what they're doing with it. And once you get that understood and there's investment there and some not can't even afford it. Right? The things you can Afford is just to be authentic, right. Is at least be out there and showing your authentic self in some presence.

Right.

And start taking some things so your consumer can know who you are digitally. Right. Shoot some video, put some stuff on social and be real and filter, filter, filter, filter. Like, don't be overly real. You gotta be real to a point. Like, you gotta make sure your political views don't need to be for everyone's point of view. Right? Like just let's be real. So that's point one. And I think it's so critical on that side of it. The second part too is no matter how old a lead list is, at some point they wanted something. And we've proven that time and testament. So just for an example, right now, actually this week, my team is actually working. We work back our old leads that we had. So we decided to pull up a lead list from 2012. Yeah, 2012 was in the rocket today. And they had. We had about 62,000 leads sitting in there. We actually converted almost 17% and revived them into our own business. Right. This is my own internal age lead list that we have actually revived. And that's with little effort. We actually didn't do much on that because we know they were qualified, they meet all of our standards. But also too, just so you understand, and this will be the last thing I'll say on this, is that an agent needs to know who, who their consumer is. Yeah, right.

Yep.

You, if you just think anyone with 200 grand and some kind of savings is your consumer, you are deathly set up to fail. Right. Or anybody who has just bought a house is all of a sudden your, your, your market. Because you can sell a mortgage protection or a business who has over 20 employees and you can sell them commercial protection. That is wrong. Like that is the worst thing you could ever do. You need to know I work with teachers because I have an educational background. I work with construction companies because I know their world and I can, I've walked in their shoes. You've got to have a niche and start in a niche that is as specific and tiny as possible, and then grow it into something bigger. And the more you do that and the more niches you can actually get yourself into, the more successful your agency will become.

So what I've heard, and I want people to hear this, and yes, I am biased, is for lead generation to be even more effective, especially with old leads, is you got to have a better brand presence, you got to bring value to them, and you've got to be able to get locked in on who your ideal client profile is and that's who you need to be targeting. This isn't a spray and pray approach here. This is high quality. Leads only get developed if you know who you're going after and you build some kind of brand presence they recognize.

Absolutely love that.

And I think you said from an ROI perspective, yours is around 11 to 13x. Did I hear that?

That's right. Yeah, that's right. So I mean especially. Yeah. And of course, as you get into different markets that we were service. I mean our primary markets that we're so well known for is of course, life and annuities. As you.

I was going to ask you. Can I, can I pause this real quick and ask questions as you go into this.

Yeah.

With what you're doing. So someone might say, well, great, Michael. Yeah. You're doing B2C with life and annuity leads. Can this same approach be done in a B2B setting?

Yeah, so let me answer that first, then I'll move to that question. So I come from B2B. Right. Like if, if you actually look up me and you look at my background and what I'm mostly known for is B2B high performing sales teams. Like I consult with companies all over the world still to this day on how to create massive high B2B sales organizations. I was at a company called ACS that later sold five nines. I've done a lot of things in the B2B world. This approach absolutely still is the same thing. Because even us, right, we're a B2B company. I don't like. I sell to agencies, but I also sell to IMOs. I work with carriers. So we, our sales company is a B2B company. The product we sell is B2C. Right. Yeah. But the approach is exactly the same. Now I'll put some caveats just so everyone's wondering. On the B2B world, I teach what's called the squeeze method, which is. It's been something I learned a long time ago, which is you need to work from the top and the bottom and then put pressure in the middle for your. For the person who's actually gonna ultimately buy from you. So if. And that all comes from brand presidency. The way a CEO gets to know you is because you're everywhere. The way the lower part gets to know you is because you're educating them. And the more your brand is compressing your brand into that company with your education and your presence, the person in the middle, the director, the vp, whoever they Are is going to get into a situation where they cannot not make a decision, which is you. And that's what led me to back in the day, you know, I have, I have almost, I have roughly around. I think it was when I ended that B2B my call center world. I was just around four and a half billion in contractual sales over my, my sales career at that point. So yeah, it means a lot to me on the B2B side. So I won't go too far down that, that gambit. But yes, you can do it.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask you a couple questions in a minute here just on sales leadership because you've had a lot of success leading sales teams too. But one more question about lead revival because you also have a 100% show guarantee.

Oh yeah, yeah.

One thing I know about advisors in this industry is they love guarantees. How are you able to create a 100 show up guarantee rate?

It goes back again to what our North Star. Right. If our agents are not winning, we're not winning.

Right.

And making sure that. And I know I had. So I, I made every mistake. I kind of tell everyone all the R and B that's in the in, in lead revival came from my own agency back in the. When I first started, I bought overseas call centers. I tried to do it myself and I failed miserably. And the reason I failed was because I didn't hold people accountable to making sure that my people show up. Typical booking teams will only get you about anywhere on the low end. 30% high end is about a 55 to 60% show up rate. We put this in place because we wanted to tie our success to each other. So we, we made it simple. We've got a nominal fee which basically barely covers my overheads for actually doing the work for you. All of my success comes in our success fees. And if I can't get a person to show up, then what did I do? I didn't earn that money, so I don't charge you for it. Cause again, all of our stuff is month to month contracting. Because again I similar. I don't want my agents to ever feel like, oh God, what did I just tie myself? No, I want you to say, look, in one month I submitted X number of apps which has equal revenue to this and my commissions. I'm working on house money. And that's all I tell people. And my real goal, I mean to be truly fully transparent is at some point I can deplete your lead list so much that guess what? You're going to need leads. And I just happen to know a company who sells leads. Is it self sustaining? Yes, absolutely. I mean it is very self serving of me. But it's for my agent's best interest because at that point you should be rolling in commissions at that point. And buying leads is a no brainer at that point.

Yeah, absolutely. One sales leadership or sales coaching question related to lead revival. You've worked with thousands of agents. What separates the ones who thrive with lead revival and take full advantage of it versus those that again invested in something but just didn't put the effort in to get the result?

Yeah. I would tell you is the agents that we see who see success out of this are agents who are plugged in. And what I mean by that is who are paying attention. So they understand is when we like for instance, if we're going to do, if you choose to let us do warm transfers to you, be available. I mean we've, I've had agents who've wanted us to warm transfers. We can't get a hold of them to save our mortal soul. Right. And we turned it off on them. We're like, no, we're not doing this to you because you, you suck at answering your phone. And even though like we gave you a phone number that literally we told, we tell our agents, this is actually our agent training, we tell them when you save our phone number and put in the, you know, the car id, how you put the customer answer or die. Or like my life depends on this call. Just to give you the psychological understanding of us calling. Right. And people don't answer their phone like be available and communicate. The other big thing is communication similar if you've got bookings, then put them on your calendar. Is it that hard to tell me when you are not available? Like what's so difficult about clicking on your calendar and booking some timeouts? That's the two. I mean honestly, those are number one. Number two, be available and control your skills.

And they sound obvious, but the reason I went. Amen. As you said. The second one is it blows me away how many people even have stuff on their calendar yet don't look at their calendar and run what Your calendar is your judge and your jury.

Absolutely.

So one, get it on and then two, follow your calendar.

Absolutely.

That spoke to my heart. Let's go big broad picture on sales real quick before we dive in. I'm going to actually have you share personal story which I love you shared offline. Then I'm going to go into some rapid Fire sales leaders. We have a lot of them tuning in here. You've trained a lot of them. What advice would you give an insurance agency sales leader right now when it comes to recruiting or training producers to put them in the best position to win?

Yeah. I would tell you is the first thing is first is assign them a mentor, day one. And do not let them, let them go. There's every company, every imo, every carrier has their own little spiel with this, right? And some are like, oh, 10 deals and you're done. Or five deals and you're done. No, you're done. When you don't suck. Right. You got to be able to. Like when I was, when I was running my sales operations, one of the things I did is I told everyone we go through a three step model. And this three step model depends on how fast you go from being greedy, sucky to actually a sales guy. This could take one month, this could take a year. I don't care because I'm going to make this worth everyone's wild. And insurance space is easy. We have mdrt. It's a magical system. Like, I wish I had MDRT in all my other business worlds because it's so simple. Five points of 20% and you get 20% based on what you do. Like, how simple can this world be? So guess what, Greenie, you come in, what are you going to do? You're riding shotgun. Like, you're going to ride shotgun. You're going to sit there, you're going to shut up and listen for a second, right? Maybe a couple of calls. One, two calls. Right. If you do the lead gen, though, and you create the lead. Okay, great. Guess what, you got 20%. Oh, you actually nurtured the lead and did something. Now you're at 40%, right? Oh, you actually spoke and fogged the glass. You're at 60, et cetera, et cetera. Right. But my point is, is make sure those mentors also are getting that other side and they should be. And don't start doing the stupid things of like, oh, the IMO is educated. No, you as an IMO are really not doing much anymore. It's the leader who's doing it. But you have to be invested. The biggest problem right now in the insurance market is what we all know 2/3 of our industry is about to retire or die.

Big transition coming. Yep.

And if we do not start getting these old timers raising up the next gen faster, we are going to be facing a really major problem. And we're already seeing it. I Mean, listen, there's only so many Tom Hegnas and, you know, Roy Stars and all these other guys, you know, this talking heads of the markets out there. We've got to raise this next generation. That's part of what we're trying to do. But we need the mentors. And I would say is find a mentor. Stick to your mentor and don't ever let them go.

Well, and for the. The sales leader, not only give producers a mentor, identify the right mentors.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Because, you know, I started my career at a captive insurance company and I remember for the first six weeks there, I just did ride alongs.

Yeah.

And I went to different district, different territory, different, different, you know, different producer and just rode along and saw what they did. I'd do that for six weeks. So I absolutely get that. That I agree. Mentorship is massive, and a recruiter is not a mentor.

And that's lesson.

Great point. Well, we're gonna go into the get to know Mike here a little bit before we wrap. This has been awesome information, man. I hope if you're listening in right now, lead gen is paramount in the insurance industry, but you can't take it lightly. You can't go completely hands off to Michael's point. There is a human component that always has to be there, especially as we enter the realm of AI being a bigger part of lead generation. But there's a lot of people who tune in, Michael, who are entrepreneurs, probably have kids that have that same mindset. Share a little story you shared offline. I was blown away. Your daughter, I think, 13 years old.

Yeah.

Has become a hell of an entrepreneur. Talk about that a little bit.

Yeah. So you know, my kids, when you're. When you're in sales and marketing, one of the things your kids get to see is they get to see everything. Right. And it's funny, I. Every once in a while, my kids will still even hit me when I go to board meetings or whatever with like, all of a sudden they hear my board talk and they're like, they're like, dad, what's a tap table? Like is. Or when I'm, you know, when I'm blowing money on something I shouldn't be. Is that fiscally responsible, dad. So. But that's. That's always a gut check moment for me. Thirteen. But my daughter. Yeah. So my daughter we. She had expressed interest in kind of what I started to do with online websites and such like that. So I started showing her some things like, hey, here's. I got her canva certified because she, you know, she really liked the, you know, how to design things we got into. We were moving our company to Webflow from WordPress, which is a whole different topic, but the greatest thing we ever did as a company. And I started showing like, hey, look, this is how easy it is to create a website now. And she's of course 13, so she loves influencers. And I told her, I'm like, listen, you need to start making money off of this if you're going to do this. Like you're blowing money, like you're blowing your time, which I consider money on dancing in front of your phone, other people's songs to help make them money. Like, I just don't understand it. Like just, just the businessman in me does not understand the ROI in this at all. So, yeah, so we, I chilled her, I'm like, look, here's how you could do something like, why don't you start offering kids who want to be influencers and specifically their parents an opportunity to start actually doing this? And so she has and she's, you know, she's building this little business from this of like how she can help create, you know, marketing and presencing for these potential up and coming influencers for these kids and sell it to them. And she's been able to monetize it to a pretty good, good perspective. I mean she's, she'll probably within her first year, you know, be one or track to six figures on it and, and be able to really see something out of there. And the key on it is that she made it very simple for herself. It's a passive business as she's learned how to use automation, where the human approach of this, going back to our other part, is the relationship aspect between her and the client and understanding what the client's wants and dreams are and also helping educate them on what results really should look like and the time spent to achieve those. No one's gonna be Mr. Beast overnight. You're gonna take years and years and years of hard effort. And I'll tell everyone, just for all the parents out there, including myself, if you really wanna teach your kids how sucky it is to be an influencer, show them their schedule to become an influencer. You want to talk about the gut check moment for people. My daughters, both of them have wanted this until I showed them. You have to, you have to film a minimum of three videos per day, every day, plus editing. And that editing portion probably pretty much negates the whole concept. I want to do this usually within about a Week.

Well, I Hope people are 13 year old making six figures. This is success because of all the things we have available at our fingertips today. Success has never been easier in a way, but it still requires the work ethic, the consistency, showing up every day. I absolutely love that man. I hope, I hope people heard that. You know, you can make money doing almost anything today as long as you put your, your mind to it, you stay focused and you stay consistent. So that, that's awesome. Well, let's, let's get to know you a little bit before we wrap up. I'm gonna ask you some rapid fire questions. I'm into habits, discipline rituals. You've had a hell of a journey and with your weight loss. Let's start with morning routine. What does the typical morning routine look like for you?

Yeah, my morning routine is actually one of the most important things in my life. When I wake up every morning, one of the things that I learned from another gentleman I work with, I've gotten a chance to know, I've become friends with is I wake up in the Word every day. So the first thing I do is grab my Bible app. I wake up, look at the, you know, verse of the day, and I spend some time in the Word. It's very important for me now at this point in my life to be connected to my spiritual life. It's something that's very critical to me. After that I, after that I really make sure I dive into my family. I make breakfast every morning for my family. I make my kids lunch. As you know, every day we get up early. I mean, we're up at 5:15 in the morning every single day. It's not a late start family. We get moving and then from there it's really getting my mindset. Either some, a walk or some kind of movement to get myself moving and then starting to get my day going. Email, if you notice, is one of the last parts of that day. And social media has zero portion of my morning. I used to wake up to a slave to my communication and phone and I refused to do so. I always told everyone, you have to first protect your brain and get your mindset and then you can start your day.

I love that. What are you reading right now? Any books you recommend.

So it's funny, I love this question. Actually, I just forced my team to read this book now too. One of my mentors, he got me reading this older book. It's called the Goal. It's about manufacturing specifically, it's required reading for most MBA programs. So a lot of People have probably seen it out there and read it. Um, I will tell you, maybe because I just have such a marketing and operational bent. To me, it was one of the most impactful reads I've had in probably the last year and a half to two years. And the reason for it is because if you can at least get your brain out of the fact that they're talking about manufacturing and understand it, how it relates into your business, the impacts are enormous. And for us, because we deal in enormous volumes of leads, right? I mean, we're talking. I don't deal with like tens and twenties, at least. I've been talking tens of thousands of leads that we deal with per month. And the goal showed us inventory issues and how. That we were making mistakes and how to improve them. So, yeah, I definitely highly recommend your. Anybody to read the Goal.

And you said the goal.

Yeah, it's called the goal.

Perfect. You got a more. You got an hour here to do a workout. What's your workout of choice today?

So in the back in the day, I'd be very much a. I'd tell you I'd be swimming for probably 30 to 45 minutes of that and then do some type of weight training. I have swapped that. Now I'm much more on the weight side of it. I'm lifting. Usually for me, it's still keeping my lower body still in good shape. So a lot of squats, a lot of all those, kind of. But I focus most on weights now. I injured my hip in a triathlon, so partially why. But now that is starting to slowly pivot backwards. I have decided to come out of retirement on the triathlon world. God, I can't believe I'm about to admit this. I'm someone's podcast. So at 45, I decided I am going to finish my first Ironman. I got injured getting ready for my first Ironman. It's taken me a number of years to come back, but I've decided this year that I'm declaring it to the world at 45.

Declaring it on. On podcast, national TV, national audience. I love it. No, I've done three in my lifetime, man. So I respect that. That's awesome. How about afternoon? You got an afternoon to yourself. What are you doing? What are you spending that time doing?

Well, if it's a Saturday, my Tennessee Bowls are on and I'm yelling at a tv, there's only. There's only one team in our family, and it's orange and white and it looks like a creamsicle. So it's that's on a Saturday. Outside of that, I'm in North. So my therapy is cooking. I am. If you actually go on my personal Instagram page, you're gonna think you just found a chef's page and not mine. My grandmother was a baker. I am. I love to cook. And the more complex, the more ethnic it is. Our family is like the UN Family. My wife is Korean. My grandmother's from Mexico. My grandfather Scott. I mean, like, we're literally behind 57, a normal, typical American family. So our cuisine is relevant, and that's what we do, man. We cook. We love to cook. And that's. And being in a family who's trying to maintain weight is not always the easiest. So you can imagine being physical is another side of it.

I get it. I get it. Well, last question, man. Why should I hire a Financialize?

You want to hire Financialize specifically for the fact that if you're looking for high quality, exclusive leads that you know your business can actually scale from and manage an actual model of your business from that you can depend on year in and year out and know that your model will give you a return on investment. On our annuity leads, it's typically between 6 and 8x year over, year that over. For the last 20 years, we have proven with all our thousands of agents that we work with in life, it is relatively the same. And if you need someone now who can actually also step in to really step aside, step alongside of you to help scale that business to get that consistent cash flow of leads from the leads you've already generated. That's where Financialize is. We're really the enhancement to your own business model to come alongside you to make sure you're being a success.

Michael McMillan, everybody. That was. Dude, that was awesome. Thank you for my. Thank you so much for being here.

Appreciate it.

I think, everybody, if you're tuning in right now, that was a little lead Gen Master class. So whatever. Take Mike, take what Michael said. Run with it. If you want to reach out to Michael, Michael, if somebody wanted to reach out, learn more, what is the best way to get in touch with you?

Yeah, if you're looking for leads, come to financialize.com. if you're looking for help with Lead Revival, you go to my lead revival.com and see everything you need to have there. And of course, if you're looking to get a hold of me, I'm all over LinkedIn. That's my place of choice. You can always feel free to reach out to me. I pride myself on always being available to people who need help.

Awesome. Be good everybody. Great conversation, Michael. That's all we got for this episode of the Accelerate your insurance sales podcast. One of the most valuable things you can do to help us and other new potential listeners find our show is for you to rate them show and leave a review. So as a special bonus for you, if you leave us a review, take a screenshot of your review and send it to me as a DM to my LinkedIn profile. I will send you a free copy of our LinkedIn Diamond Playbook, our proven four step strategy to grow your business on LinkedIn. So go right now, leave us a review, screenshot it, and send me a DM on LinkedIn. Also, please share this podcast with anyone you think would enjoy it. That's it for now.