5 Encouragements for Agents in the Field | 7 Figure Annuity Sales Podcast | Ep. 208

On this week's episode, we're going to talk about summer encouragement.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to this week's episode. This is all about encouragement, which sometimes can be really difficult to come up with.

Yeah, they might have got the wrong guys on here.

Pinky in the Brain, right here. As you can tell, he still has a pink face because we record these in lumps. So let's not be. Let's not be fake about this, you know, and we have to, because I me blocking out two, two and a half hours in a day is very difficult to do.

If it takes half hour, 45 minutes to settle this stuff up, too, for one episode, you better get even. Just knock them out.

Yep. Pinky in the brain.

Definitely in the brain.

And he will never be called brain. Even if he had fair skin and no issues. But of course, he would never have. There'd never be time. He did have issues.

Yeah, I was gonna say. I think I'm past the no issues.

By the way. I cannot stand that cartoon.

I've never even seen it.

Yeah, it's.

I just.

It's.

Even when I was little, I was too busy to watch.

Yeah. I mean, it's got its own cult following. Really? Oh, yeah, it does. Like, you. You would see some. Yeah. I don't know if you should ever go to Pinky in the Brain comcon or whatever they call that. I don't even know what that'd be called.

I guess that's what I get for watching the Roy Rogers show, Bonanza, the Lone Ranger, all those old black and whites when I was a boy.

That's not a bad childhood.

It gave me a love for justice and the good guy to win.

I can definitely. I can see that.

Okay, so summer encouragement. I've had some conversations with agents recently that were feeling some pressure.

You know, who would feel pressure in this business?

I know, right?

I'm saying it with a very sarcastic, sarcastic voice.

So there's a. There's a lot of responsibility.

There is.

And. And if you feel like you're doing more and spending more.

Putting in more effort than what you're reaping, that. That can be.

It's called parenthood. Yeah.

I had to throw that one in. And every parent is laughing about that. You know, think about it. When you have little kids now, of course, there's an enormous amount of joy of just being around your kids.

Right.

And. But, man, when you're in the early stages and all they do is pee, pee, poop, eat and sleep. I mean, and you know, especially as a mom, you know, you're just exhausted. I mean, I remember I used to wake up with my wife at times and man, I, I mean, every once in a while I'd actually get up and shoot. I'd hear her crying and just because she's. Sheer exhaust exhaustion.

I can only imagine.

And I'm like, okay, it's my turn to step up to the plate here.

Yeah.

But you know, the reward is great, you know.

Right.

I mean, every once in a while you get to see, you know, some.

Rewards and it can be the same here where you, I mean, you can go a long time with what feels like spinning your wheels and then finally get some traction.

Yeah. I mean, it took a good three and a half years of figuring out the mortgage protection industry and getting into the annuity world full on. So, yeah, you could definitely say it could take.

I find it interesting too. I mean, the time that you've had in the business, what we do with the academy, we've got connection out there with some amazing organizations, marketing organizations, and one of the, I mean, in both of our opinions, one of the top marketers in the entire country was talking about, even for a marketer, getting ramped up. Right.

Yeah.

And it's like, I mean, the first two, three years.

Two, three, two to three years sex.

And, and I can only imagine that it can be similar for agents.

Well, but the difference with marketers is they get a small percentage of your business. So the speeding up of that is pretty slim.

Right.

When you're an agent, you could get a million dollar deal drop and it's instant. Like, I mean that' what happened with me. I had a million, two and a half million dollar deal and you know, I split it with an agent because this was a life insurance lead and they had knew nothing about annuities so they wanted me to go out and take care of this deal. And we thought it was an IUL type deal and it wasn't. Ended up being an annuity. And so that's still. That was an instant change in my business.

Yeah.

Now it took me another probably two years to get an over a million dollar deal again. But it, it actually probably took longer than that. That'd be an interesting thing to look up. How long did it take for me to get another deal that size after that?

That would be. Yeah, that's numbers I don't have. But I'm sure we can find them.

I don't know if we could. Those, yeah. Tracking systems. Back then, it just, we didn't even track things the way we Track them. Now, we. That's actually only started about 10 years ago where we really started tracking every little detail.

Yeah, I mean, you think about like a. What is it? If you produce over 3 million a year, you're in the top 1% of.

All annuity agents in the United States.

So.

Okay, I need to find. If you guys are listening, though, and you can find that, please email me that. If you can't, I'll send you a free book. I mean, if you can. If you can find that, I'll send you a free book for that and I'll give you 10 minutes of my time to mentor. Yep. And because I've looked, I remember it very specifically. I remember the, uh, the paper that was on, but I cannot find that again. So if you do over a million dollars a year, you're in the top 5% of all annuity agents. If you do over 3 million a year, you're in the top 1% of all annuity agents. And then also another article I'm trying to find that I can't find is show said that 85% of certified financial planners don't even use their own funds and 50% have had a bankruptcy in the past 10 years.

Wow.

I remember seeing those, but I just can't find them. Again, that's interest. I. Those are articles I'm launching. The minions out there. Go on and find them. Yeah, I have great minions. They're just. They're good and they're not ornery. They're all nice. They don't turn purple.

So that's good.

So let's help them not be frustrated. Let's encourage them.

So encouragement wise, I put down five things that if you feel like you're in that, that time, that season, that slump where you're just spinning your wheels, you're spending tons of money on marketing and leads, you're not writing nearly as much business as you'd like to be, and you're just feeling depleted and drained. I got five things, most of which are actually practical things. And the reason that even on an encouragement episode, I chose five actual practical things is because I feel like when we actually start taking steps, we feel the encouragement. We feel the things start to lift a little bit. So number one, hyping you up.

Hit yourself in the head really hard to go wake up till after summer.

Oh, man.

Number two, take a vacation and don't come back till after summer.

These are Chad's five, these are not Caleb's five.

Number three, look into your spouse's eyes. It will Feel like time never stops. Okay, okay, go ahead, go with yours. If that. If you're married, though, and you have a really good relationship, don't tell me that wouldn't encourage you no matter what situation you're in. Okay, well, there you go.

Number one, take the time when you're in a healthy mental space to actually examine your schedule and find ways to optimize your efficiency. I think one of the reasons that things start to feel more weighty than they are, we feel like we're spending so much time is because we lack efficiency in a lot of different things. You kind of live by the mantra seconds count.

They do in the way pennies count.

Yeah. And the way that you structure and organize your entire week is based around making those seconds count, making sure that you're not wasting even seconds. So that would be something I'd encourage you to do. And the good thing is if you're in this situation, they're probably. I can't imagine that agents feeling this are in a situation where they're wanting to ramp up marketing dollars, but they definitely need to ramp up production. So the thought was if they can reach an increased level of efficiency in their business, that they should have more free time to do maybe some free strategies, some free marketing lead generation type thing like door knocking or working old leads or cross selling or just introducing yourself to random people.

I could not imagine doing door knocking. I've heard of agents doing it, and God bless them. Well, especially, what is it, 107 degrees today? Oh, golly, here's the door knocking. You are dead. You touch the door, your hand melts.

You got whole different types of incentives to have people invite you in. And it's just so you can get a little bit of air conditioning.

And when they see you dripping, they're like going, I don't know if I'm letting you in, but. No, but that's a. That's a hard.

It is hard.

But you know what? When I hear someone that does door knocking, unfortunately, most of them I don't see as very experienced.

Most of the time they're not.

But man, to do that, I give them so much credit. So much.

There's a drive there that has. I mean, you know, it's. It's not undriven. Agents that are doing door knocking, they're very driven. It's just maybe a capital issue.

They don't have the. When we're talking about summertime blues, man, I know agents right now in very hot parts of the country that are doing door knocking.

It's true. And it's kind of one of those things that you get to a point where maybe you need to do the unglamorous, you know, to try and get through a season. I know I asked you one time, Chad, like, what would you do if you didn't have it? And you're like, well, whatever it takes.

That is true. You know, but I went, door, knock. Yeah, I'm not that dedicated. I'm telling you, that's a whole nother level of. I'm going to make this work no matter what.

Charge a few hundred bucks on a credit card and make a bunch of flyers.

Try, try $50,000 I had on my credit card. But.

Well, that was, that was a while back.

But yeah, that was. I mean, I, that's, that's what. I lived in Colorado and so I was just trying to figure this out and man, it was tough. It was tough. So different form of desperation.

Yeah. Second thing, reduce unnecessary expenses as much as possible.

You mean I can't get the $9 cup of coffee and then not pay $50 for a lead?

Yeah, yeah, it's, that was one of the things that I, that I kind of noted down was the coffee, the lunch, the dinners, the breakfasts, the. All the kinds of things that, you know, it's largely unnecessary, but it sucks a ton of capital.

It does. And it would be amazing when you do a budget and you realize how many little things take out so much. Oh, yeah, yeah, it's. And like I said from experience, we had to do that to get out of 100, our $150,000 in credit card debt because we had to get very deliberate. We used quick and we just started writing down everything or punching in everything we did. And so I agree with you.

Yeah. So if you feel like you're living above your means, or maybe you don't feel like you are, but if you were being honest with yourself, you'd say that you were, you know, maybe try and simplify the luxuries a little bit. Number three was examine the places in your sales process where the most drop off seems to occur. Right. So I guess example would be if you got leads coming through and you're getting people on the phone, but you're not converting to appointments, you're booking very few appointments, but your phone process probably needs some work. Agreed. On the flip side, if you're booking good, you know, appointment numbers, say, you know, four or five out of ten, that's, that's actually pretty good. But you're not converting very many of Those appointments to deals, it's probably something off in your presentation. So where are those drop off points? Figure out how to improve segments.

Right. Didn't we break that down on the academy into eight different sections?

We do. Not all of them are directly sales process related but we do have, you know, the phone, the phone training. We've got the fact finding, we've got the appointment process, we've got objection handling and all four of those are huge for it. And we've also got leads. We talk about cross selling, we talk about mindset.

True. Yes.

So they all tie in together, but yes. Do you have anything else to add on that? About what was that, Kali? Examine the places of your sales process.

No, it is true. Because when you're more efficient, you know, I mean I used to be a sailor and just when you're going into the wind, you know, you just go off a little bit and you can just a little bit of trimming in the sails makes the boat go faster. And so if you see it look up and you see the sail flapping, you know you're not trimmed. Right. If you see the little tags that are on the sails, they're not going in line with the sail and they're going down. You know, you need to let out or pull it in. And just by doing that a little bit can change the speed of your vessel by quite a bit. So it's important to make sure you're definitely being efficient and you're not wasting.

Right.

I mean think about this. If you went up in a plane and you put the flaps down and you're trying to get up, you're never going to gain altitude. So you got to make sure you got those flaps to where you're not working against what you're trying to do. And often the process is working against you so hard that you'll never get any, you'll never get any lift.

Interesting. That's something worth pondering right there. As business does get written, try and reinvest 20 to 25% and that's a high percentage that is like I think you are between 10 and 15% of, of what you.

Sounds about right.

Would, yeah. Would be, would be spent on marketing and leads. But I say 20 to 25% because the assumption here is that the marketing and lead systems that are currently in place for these types of agents maybe not producing at the level that they should up uptick that we have 140,000.

Per case and mine's 440 per case. That allows me to have a Smaller percentage that I use for my leads.

That's true. But if you can do that, go back into marketing and leads branding, you know, process training, I mean, my goodness, just anything that's going to have some kind of direct impact into increasing production and all three of those things do, and all three of those things will, then that's, that's a good way to, to allocate those funds to try and again get that lift like you're talking about. And then the last one, this one is again a little bit more encouraging hopefully. But it's just numbers. 2 million a year in production, which, that, that's like if you figure about 6% commission by the time. Yes. I don't know what just happened. I like spazzed. If you figure by the time you've got older clients, Mygas, Spias, Short Surrender term products, whatever it is, if you average say 6% over the course of the year, that's 120. Information.

If you have a poor process, I actually did the, did the math on what would I consider poor. And that was $120,000 average case size, which is actually industry average. But compared to what they can be, I think that's low. $120,000 average case size, 40% close rate, which means you literally have you got 10 new clients you're meeting with, you only close four of those ever. That's not very good.

That's meeting with and closing, not leads and closing.

Correct.

Because there's a lot of leads that don't even qualify.

Right. The next one being that the appointment rate is 30%. So you get 10 new leads in. You only ever book appointments with three of them.

Yeah, that's not good.

That's not very good. And if you're paying $350 per lead, that hurts. That hurts. All of those things culminate to on 2 million in production with a poor process, a net after marketing of 70 grand A which again, that's in a lot of areas in the country, not going to be enough. But the point is that's only $2 million in production and a very poor process. So the numbers are there. I think one of the problems though, Chad and I want to hear your thoughts on this. Agents.

Wait, you want to hear my thoughts on something?

I do.

Wow.

I do. I want to hear your thoughts on this.

Ponder this moment and revel it.

Agents, will we when we're talking with agents, we talk about annual production. I want to write 2 million this year. I want to write 5. I want to write 10. But when you look at the way that commissions get paid and business gets written and then things get spent. Rarely do they spend throughout the year with the annual total in mind. And what I mean by that is if somebody comes to me and says, caleb, I want to write $3 million in premium this year, and, you know, gross revenue $180,000 over the year. What I find a lot of times is that the way that they structure their months over the course of that year is not in line with that annual goal. So it's easy to think annually, long term, but then when you actually get down to the monthlies of things, it's harder to stay within that.

Well, especially when you turn your leads off and on and off and on. It just. It doesn't make sense. You've got to look at the end game. If your goal is to do 3 million, then you need to spend 30,000. Was it 3? Yeah, you need to spend 30,000 a year in marketing. If your goal Is to do 10 million, then you need to spend 100,000 a year in marketing. I mean, those are bare minimums. And this is from someone who's been doing this, you know, for a very long time. I mean, I'm coming up on 18 years, actually. I think I did hit 18 years of being in the insurance business.

Yeah.

And I've seen thousands of agents and I've seen them do very well and I've seen them fall flat on their face. And I can tell you by now, this is where there's a major advantage of using us as your fmo. I mean, the reality is, is find me another institution, number one, that has someone who's writing.

The founder and owner is actually in the field.

In the field. Number two, I think I just passed 260 million since 2008. I mean, it may be a little more, a little less, I can tell you. But the fact is, I know what people are going through and I know what it takes for an agent to do well, and I know what it takes for an agent to flop flat on their face.

Right.

That's the reality. And no other marketing organization have I ever seen where you have someone in the field that I can go, hey, you know what? I've tried all these things. I personally tried all these things. I mean, if you're someone who plays football or someone who's baseball or someone who does gymnastics or whatever the heck it is, I don't know if I've ever known of a coach who didn't once play the sport they're coaching in. And so when you have marketers, and God bless them, I mean, marketers are great and they do well, but, you know, even the institutions we partner with, why do they partner with me? Because I'm in the field just like them, and they realize the necessity of partnering with them. And then you have other institutions that they just have a. A bunch of marketers in cubicles making all these calls, and you're sitting there going, wait a second, can I talk to someone who's been out in the field? I'm sorry, we don't have anybody that could do that. Where we do, and the partners we work with do. And so I. You just got to learn there's certain things that work and there's certain things that don't. And I think we can be very successful together, obviously, in this.

Yeah, well. And I hope that those five, like, really more practical things. I mean, they are things for you to actually put Action Step to. I hope that taking Action Step creates an encouragement. But I mean, remember, we are in prime time. I mean, conditions, market conditions right now, the annuity products right now. I mean, you could make an argument that there have been better products before, but what we've got right now are solid products.

I don't know. I like those stacked options. I'm telling you to have those before. So that's really a product we have. There are other institutions that have it, but, I mean, we're one where definitely it's a limited distribution. I'm not going to be one of those people that go, hey, we're the only ones that have these, which you hear, people don't. I know what product that is, but it is a limited distribution. It's not proprietary as far as only we get it.

Right.

But. Well, I think it's that. Right.

Yeah, that's okay for today.

I hope this helps you guys. You have a great day. And of course, happy selling.

Sam.