3 Challenging Parts of this Business Pt. 1 | 7 Figure Annuity Sales Podcast | Ep. 184

Hello, everyone.

This episode we're going to talk about some of the most challenging parts of the annuity business. Part uno.

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to this week's episode. I am Chad Owen and this is Caleb North.

And we are going to talk about.

The most challenging parts of this show.

Really the annuity business in general.

This is a two part series and we will have a sponsor.

We'll figure that out. I'll say something along the way. It's probably going to be one of my other companies.

If you do not have complete branding.

Reach out to increase you dot com.

Right.

And there we can do that. Caleb, of course will be able to.

Hook you up with that because there are still a lot of agents that do not have good branding out there. It's unbelievable. And he still have bobsmithmail.com or bobsmithahoo.com.

Oh, by the way, can you give.

Me $300,000 that I can manage?

Yeah.

No, you don't even have a real email. You know, just trust me with your money. No, you need to be legit first.

Before I move that money.

That's true.

But let's get into our topic.

Yeah. So this week we're going to talk about three things that are among the top six for, in no particular order of the most challenging things. 1. I don't think so. No. I mean, you may disagree as somebody.

Number one, but most challenging thing in.

The world, dealing with Caleb.

Yep. Hey.

I didn't even have to say it, but there we go.

But next week we'll have another three as well. And it's important, bear in mind, these are from hundreds and hundreds of conversations I've had with agents, talking with Chad directly talking with local agents. And these are six of the things that tend to come up the most. You may find something different, but this is what we find. And the first one is the time. Okay. The time that it takes. Okay. And when I talk about time, I'm talking, it can be long hours.

Right. As I'm, as I'm rubbing my eyes and I'm going, oh my gosh, I'm tired. Yes, yes, I know what you're talking about.

And you would say it can be. No, it is.

It is.

No, it is. I mean I last week and then I had the week off before because I was on a business trip and then the week before.

So just for three days, I this app called Life360. Yeah, it tracked.

I didn't know this, but it had little breadcrumbs. Oh my gosh.

I traveled all over the place I.

Went through two tanks of gas, and.

I get average of 630 miles per tank.

Wow.

And I went through two tanks of.

Gas in how long?

In three days.

Oh, my gosh.

Yes. Yes. And I do not have a truck that I built because of gas mileage.

Yeah.

That's not.

It's basically a school bus, but with bigger wheels and tires.

Biden and I just spent what I had. I actually had to fill up my tank and it cut off because it was so much.

And then I had to continue filling.

It up by re.

Swiping my cardigan.

Oh, wow.

Yes.

That's.

Yeah. That's not a fun day.

No.

Well, I mean, I mean, you had fun driving it, but you didn't. Nobody buys a big truck.

You know.

I mean, really it is. When I drive as much as I do, I want to see above traffic.

Yeah.

Some of the roads I go on.

Like, I had a lady flat out tell me, you will not get back out to my property. I said, oh, yes, I will. No problem whatsoever.

And I assume you got there.

Oh, no issue whatsoever. But when you have these, you know, Mercedes or whatever they're trying to get out there, they can't get back into those roads with the big ruts.

So true.

You know.

Okay.

I would say another part of the time thing, Chad. The idea of spending time on your process, improving, becoming a better communicator, learning product, all these different things. When you're like, everything inside of you wants to be in the field. Right. I talk with agents all the time. They're like, man, Kim, I just. I don't really want to spend the time doing that. I want to be in the field. And obviously the time spent in office, getting better, the time spent studying, the time spent in retirement realized agents academy, listening to this podcast, whatever it is, improving your processes, that is. It's gonna translate over. But that's a. It's a hard mental thing for people that are internally real go getters.

I think about this. So everybody successful spends way more time.

In the training part than they do the actual act. I mean, we got Winter Olympics, right?

The bobsled. What?

I don't even know how long a bobsled. Let's just say it's three minutes long or five minutes long, and let's say five minutes long.

How many hours and days and years did they spend training for that one Olympic race or the qualifying or whatever it is?

It's true.

But something in the annuity arena and.

Life insurance arena, I don't know what.

It is, but people think you can have instant success. And I love that saying. It says it takes many years to.

Become an overnight success.

And it's just you have to do that in this business.

If you don't, you're going to be eaten up by the people that do.

That's reality and you deserve it. I mean, quite frankly, you do. If you expect to be able to.

Help people in their retirement situation, but.

You are not willing to put in the effort, then you don't deserve the deal.

Right.

You do not practice on clients. That's you become an expert in what you do and then you're ready.

Well, I'm not an expert.

No, you absolutely can be good enough in this area. If you spend a couple months really diving in, you can be definitely qualified to do this.

But how much energy and effort are you going to put into that training?

Yeah, no, that's, that's so good. And I want to make sure to, that when we talk about these areas of challenge that we also give them a solution to the challenge. Right. How do you overcome it?

How do you get asked by retirement realize agents academy.com or retirement realize financial.com.

Okay, there you go. There's our, there's our solution.

There's our solution.

I love the way that you do schedule bunching. I love the way that you, you bunch your activities together. If you've got calls to make, you bunch that together. Hours, you know, for calls, you're running appointments, you bunch your appointments, you even bunch appointments depending on the area that you're going to.

To the best I can. Right? You know, to the best I can. I have an appointment on Wednesday where it's an hour and a half outside of San Antonio and then the appointment after that is. So it's an hour and a half northwest of San Antonio and then the appointment after that is an hour and a half north, excuse me, southeast of San Antonio. So it's a three hour drive from one to the next. That's not common, but that's, that's, it's.

A rarity the way it played this time.

But when you look at the dollar amounts, you would drive it too.

Yeah, fair enough. But that's a huge thing. And as your schedule gets more and more full, it's going to be increasingly important for you to do them in bunching. Having a call day, having appointment days, having pending business training days, whatever that is. So a lot the time to specific tasks that you need to do to get where you want to be and then stay true to that, to that time slot.

You see, I have two agents that work for me that are in my office and I'll tell them you will be there on Mondays, you will be there during call time. You do not take appointments during that time. Why? I know the importance of it. Where I do have a little bit of grace is on Fridays because Fridays is usually my time for other companies and other things. And if they want to run appointments on Friday, they can. But they're also disciplined enough to where they will make some calls. And this is not part of my personal business business. This is part of my other company that I actually. They run appointments for me. So. But I still have the same standards.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The second thing that I find very, very challenging for agents is the dry seasons. Right. The seasons where maybe the lead flow slows down a little bit, maybe the production decreases, maybe the market's high and so client urgency tends to be more reduced. Maybe pending business flow is starting to get low and dried up and it's.

But if you're interested in that, you don't. I mean, does Camel worry about water? No. When it was at its stop, it drank enough water, right.

And it could go across vast areas.

Of dryness and desert. Why? Because it prepared ahead of time and often I don't. I mean, think about it. When's the last time I've been running appointments a full week that I've had a zero week? I mean, I don't know, I can't think about it. Why? It's because I consistently have leads flowing in, I'm consistently working business, I'm consistently learning. And if I have a slow week, I'm still doing other things in that week to help prepare for the next week or help prepare for the future. So I don't really have dry seasons now.

There was a time, this is probably.

Six years ago where I went a month and a half, I think six weeks I went without a sale and that was like stress. I just want to hit my head against a wall. And there's very. Yeah, because I actually had leads and I couldn't figure out what was going on. Still this day I could not tell you what happened that six weeks time frame.

Well, and I'm sure we have listeners that are going through a season similar or have been through recently or maybe, you know, hopefully not, but potentially on the brink of like.

But I don't think anybody though is trained, has good lead flow, does full.

Fact finders and I don't know of anybody that's in a dry season that has Been for the past two years.

That's good.

So I just don't. And I train thousands of agents. I just don't know of anybody that's in that situation.

So case in point is implement systems, system and process that allow for things to be very systematic.

Correct.

Very, very. Just routine. Very. I mean it is, it's like you're trying to build this like creek almost of just.

It is flow, assembly line.

Right.

I mean you're really putting stuff together the entire time and your end product is to have something that can drive.

Yeah.

And I want that for my clients.

I mean it all goes back to.

What I originally say.

If you genuinely don't care about your.

Clients and genuinely don't want what's best for them, that's going to be tough. But I do, I mean I, I am more than gracious in time and forgiveness and patience when people make mistakes or do things or you know, literally don't pay attention sometimes in appointments. But whenever that happens, I just give more and more education. If I see someone not paying attention, I know how to draw them in.

Right.

I mean you get the guy that's sitting back with his arms crossed and the easy way to do that is you just sit there and go, hey.

Can you look right there?

And they pull forward and they look at that sheet. And that helps me draw them in.

Because this is an important decision.

This is not something you take lightly. So it's just system and process is.

Everything that's so good. I think too it's interesting the way that adversity and challenge, call it dry season, whatever you want, triggers the fight, flight or freeze response in people. Right. Like people can be having.

I don't have a flight and a freeze.

Well, I know that for you it's fights double down, it's work harder, it's nose to the grindstone, figure out what needs to happen to make it, it work. Flat out, end of story. That's what's going to be. But there are people that they tend to lean toward the flight. Man, maybe I shouldn't be doing this anymore. Maybe you should get out of it. It really starts to get a little bit frantic.

I have known so many people that have would just focus on what they need to do and stop chasing all these other things that are out there.

They would be one of the top people out there. Yeah, I mean I've known people that.

Have done that multiple times. I mean, whether it's someone in the Medicare world, the life insurance world, the mortgage world, the long term care world. Whatever it is they chase. And if they realized, if they just focused on the annuity side of things, they would be masters, there would be a lot more high skilled annuity agents.

Out there, male and female, that would.

Just knock it out of the park. If they could just put the little.

Horse blinders on and focus on what they need to do.

Yeah. So good. Well, that's the solution that I put to this problem. If we're going to give solutions as well, it's double down, put more into marketing, spend more time working. But maybe it's a larger percentage of time that's being devoted to improving, building those systems, building the processes, establishing the, the sales process that you're going to use. The. I mean all of it.

It goes back to the thing I said. I always say this, failure is not an option. Especially when I'm in front of someone that needs help.

Right.

Failure is not an option. And I'm the one that is responsible for that.

Well, the third one I know is for this week. The last one for this week is one that I know is near and dear to your heart. It's actually the one that you said you find to be most challenging or frustrating or whatever you want to call it. And it's misrepresentation of products.

And then ultimately leading to incorrect perceptions about them.

Absolutely. You know, it's kind of interesting. There's an agent, this, basically, I have a client that was going to move money. They're trying to decide about it and they had this broker that's a fiduciary and he talked to him and said.

Because I'm a fiduciary, I have to do this. You need to put 10% of your money into crypto. That is what he told the client. I said, that is a flat out lie. I said, as a fiduciary, you have to act as the best interest of the client. But they still have the right to make the decision. And you're not a fiduciary because you tell them that they have to put 10% of their funds into crypto.

That's insane.

It's insane. And then they wonder why people have this perception of brokers and annuity guys. I mean, I've heard people in the annuity world talk about an income rider as if the income Inc. The income account value was the death benefit. And there are a few products that are like that. But the product I looked at go, no, this is not a death benefit. This is a, this is an accounting number used to determine income. This is not a tangible amount that passes onto your heirs when you die. The income can pass on to your spouse, but it is not a death benefit from the standpoint of a lump sum payout. But I know the agent actually has explained it to that way and I just. Why we have that perception. And then you have brokers and bankers that don't understand our products at all. And then they try and explain them or CPAs or lawyers. And I'm going, you don't even understand remotely how this product works. And they put out this misinformation. Sometimes it's just because of pure stupidity and ignorance. Other times it's very intentional because they know that if you move your money away from them, they stop making their fees year after year. So they lose their annuity by misinformation. And they sit in their Monday morning meetings and they get regurgitated stuff from the person who's trained the meeting about how evil annuities are. But they haven't even stopped to take a moment to read anything about it. Yeah, I have spent so much time reading about stocks, bonds, mutual funds, commodities. I mean when crypto came out and it's. I took a while because I was making sure it was a legit thing as far as potentially being something. I spent three weeks getting them at 4:30 in the morning till 7:30 in the morning, studying literally almost every day for three weeks. Why? Not that I'm ever going to recommend anybody get into this because number one, I can't. I'm not licensed to sell those.

And I mean really, crypto, it's not even regulated.

Really, you, I guess you could, but I just won't. But the point is, is I know clients are going to be talked to about this. And sure enough, I had a client that actually had some money in crypto.

And I was like, whoa, that's weird. I study it and then I run into a client that actually has money in crypto.

And that's happened two times in the past month. What would have happened if I didn't take the time to study that I wouldn't even know what I was talking about right now. I know what I'm talking about.

But I like you said, I'm not making recommendations.

I'm just saying I can have a very healthy conversation about crypto and NFTs. Why I studied like crazy. And I do that with any new.

Potential product that's coming out.

Yeah.

And we just got to be diligent.

It's true. In my conversations with agents, talking about what, you know, what's one of the biggest things that you're up against. It's, it's very frequently client perceptions. Very frequently people oh yeah, I hate annuities. I, you know, whatever, whatever. Joe Schmoz.

Do you not like.

Well, that's the problem. You've got things that, I mean, variable annuities that can be annuitized. You know, immediate annuities that can be annuitized, mygas that can be annuitized. And they all get lumped in with every other type of annuity out there under the banner of the word annuity. And they all do vastly different things. So I actually think personally that a little bit of a shift in mindset about that person that says, oh, I hate annuities. If we shift the mindset from ah man, that person, how am I gonna, how am I gonna be able to do anything with this person to. Wait a second. This is an opportunity to educate. Because if they're saying that almost certainly they have an incorrect perception about what they are. Because people that correctly understand fixed indexed and specifically fixed indexed annuities with income riders rarely do they say, oh, I hate those. You know what I mean?

That's so true.

So solution to this problem, solution to this challenge. Know more about the products than the people that are misrepresenting them or the clients that have incorrect percentage.

Don't be afraid to have a. You know, I've many times offered to have a broker say, hey, if your.

Broker thinks, you know, have them meet us here.

Yeah.

Or let's go into their office and.

Let'S meet them and let's talk about what they say these things do. I'll take that challenge up all day long. It's not even challenge. I've never lost a debate when a conversation with us because they can't offer something as safety, security, guaranteed income you can never outlive with no risk to the market. Yeah, yeah.

Well, we're going to talk in a couple of weeks about selling from worst case scenario and how that entails. And yeah, anyways, that triggered a thought.

But hey, I do want to say though because we don't usually self promote.

But I do want to now, you know, if you're watching on YouTube, be sure like subscribe, make comments.

You know, I really, I think we.

Need to start doing that because I want to get this information out to.

More and more people because you know, I make nothing off of these YouTube, period. Nothing.

I do it just because I want to help people. So once again like subscribe and ring.

The bell I think is what they.

Call it so you get notified when new things come out.

And I'm going to start talking about.

That every podcast now because I really want to build our listener base, because I believe, not believe. I know there are people out there giving YouTube videos on how to sell annuities and their dodos, and they do do not represent them correctly.

So I hope this helps you.

You guys have a great day and of course, happy selling.