Best Q4 Practices | 7 Figure Annuity Sales Podcast | Ep. 312

Welcome back to this week's episode of Seven Figure Annuity Sales Podcast. Caleb north here with Chad and Chad. I'm excited for today because we're talking about fourth quarter, and we're already a month into it. So here we go.

That's your Texas education math right there.

We're in fourth quarter. No, we're actually well into fourth quarter.

We are almost a whole month into it.

Yes, exactly.

And all things that should be. I mean, should be being done already or things we should continue to be doing. But, I mean, here's the deal. At the end of the day, we get into the holidays, and agents all of a sudden start thinking clients don't want to meet with them. They all of a sudden start thinking that, oh, we're just going to coast on through it. And you know what? It's because of agents like that that agents like you end up having the best quarter of their year.

Yep.

Yep.

I like it when.

I mean the fourth quarter for. Go ahead.

Clients aren't. I like it when agents think that clients aren't going to meet with them because that just means they're meeting with me then. So it's like, I mean, I say this every single year. Anybody who wants to meet with you between thanks and Thanksgiving, give or take a week on each end, or anybody who wants to meet between Christmas and New Year's, once again, give or take on each end, a week, they are serious. And that's it. They want to do something. Is something triggered. I got to protect my money. I got to get out of the market. Hey, this is New Year's resolution. You know what? My. My belly's getting fat because I ate too much turkey, but my money's getting thin because I risked it in the market with the vultures. So, I mean, you know, so some eat turkey, some eat vultures. You know, it just depends who you are.

And you're. You're absolutely right, Chad. I feel like this is something we talk about every single year. And. And truth be told, there are certain topics that just seem to be kind of constant things that come up. We talk about fact finding all the time. It's in our trainings on Fridays on these podcasts, like, just because it's. I mean, it is the heartbeat, the lifeblood of the sales process.

Well, I can tell you one thing if you.

Here's something I do want to say. You know, if you've been listening to these podcasts for. I mean, some people have been listening for years.

Sign up for the academy. Sign up for their architects because when you look at what these agents are doing, this last webinar we had was phenomenal. And you're watching these guys get into the seven zeros, which have never been in seven zeros before. They always rank six zeros of annuities. And. And now they're getting to seven zeros, and I have a couple people chasing me, and I'm like, okay, you know, granted, they're chasing me like 25 miles behind me, but, you know, I'm not going to mention your names. Jesse. But, you know, we're not going to. Jesse's going to love that. So, you know, but, you know, they. They grow and they learn and they thrive in this. And I do have to have a balancing statement, because I do feel a little guilty. Jesse, with his aum is keeping up with me. So just so I can say that to balance it out, because that's what Jesse will say. He'll go, yeah, but my aum is keeping up with you with the annuities. I'm like, that is true.

But Jesse could take a whole year off and make. And make what you make on annuities.

That is not true. That is. You know what, that's how. No way.

With the aum.

No.

Once it's built up like that.

Oh, once it's built up. I mean, if it's built up real high. But yeah, you get.

You get to 100, 150, 200 million in AUM.

Yeah, you can do really well on that. Yeah, that is true. And that's, you know, I am slowly, you know, as you guys know, I don't do aum, and I. And I won't. But I do have a company that does, and Jesse heads that up. And so we're slowly moving stuff that direction because it is. I mean, you can. Not everything in a risk product has to be a crazy risk. There's things that are pretty close to protected. So I do. Yeah, he's helped me shift over a little. So I can't even call it the dark side anymore. It's just a light gray.

The big. And here's the deal, there's really great advisors and agents out there that use AUM for what aum should be used for, and they use annuities for what annuities should be used for. I mean, Jesse's kind of a case in point in that where he uses annuities to do what nothing else can do, and that's generate the guaranteed lifetime income with upside potential, no risk to the market. It doesn't matter how Long you live to create the retirement income that people need. But then you still have to have, for suitability purposes, money that's liquid money that's available to you. And so it's like, well, is that going to be written with somebody else that's going to, you know, maybe try and undermine my annuity sale, or am I going to just go ahead and capture the AUM as well? And that's his methodology for sure, using those buffered ETFs. For those of you guys that, that do aum, even with retirees, look into those buffered ETFs. Now, I, you know, I'm not gonna speak on them one way or the other, but I can tell you that relative to other risk products out there, there's. They're supposed to be lower risk and still provide some. Some upside potential. So anyways, check them out. But.

And the thing is, is I have to tease Jesse a little on something. It's so hard to find something to tease them about with you. It's just so many things all the time.

Oh, I try to. I try to lobby material.

You purposely throw things out there. Oh, yeah. Okay. But, yeah, fourth quarter is almost always my biggest quarter. I mean, it just, yeah, every once in a while I think like one year at a $9 million May. And so that obviously throughout the quarter, but for consistency, the fourth quarter is the best already this quarter. We talked about this on, on the webinar that we did with our agents about how it's a $200,000 deal that turned into $1.65 million deal because of good fact finding and finding a solution to the problem. And the guy loving the problem. I just got off the phone with him, and he's helping me. Like, he's going, okay, I've liquidated everything in Fidelity. I liquidated everything in Schwab. Go in and send in the forms. But, you know, he had a $30,000 annuity and a $70,000 annuity. And why didn't someone get the $1.65 million annualty? Because they didn't do good fact finding. They didn't find exactly right. A problem definitely didn't have a solution. They were order takers. And now I really like this guy. But, you know, so that's, you know, and then I have. So I probably have 1.7 on a million on for the month, which is not a phenomenal November or, excuse me, October. But, you know, there's a lot of things going on, and I totally expect November and December to be very big.

Yeah, yeah, well, and they always are. Every year. We're kind of in a unique, in a unique environment now where we've. It's an election year, which I think can cause people to kind of do one thing or the other. I think it can cause stagnancy and it can cause big movement as well.

You're a numbers person. Look at, look at. What was it? 2020 was an election year as well. So what, what are my numbers on 2020 the last two months?

Let me get it pulled up here.

Now, granted, there was a very.

Challenging situation that happened after that election. Let's just say that.

Yeah, well, we can look at all the election years going back to 20 to 2010. So we've got 2020.

We can't do 2020, 2010, because I was literally just getting. Well, you could still look at the top months.

Yeah. So.

20.

This is the beauty of keeping track of numbers, people. I mean, that's, that's, that's so important because you start to compare things and you start to see trends and it's important to know what you're coming into. I mean, if we never track numbers, I'd never know how great November and December were.

Yeah, 2020 was the year you had your nine plus million, $9.4 million May. So that, that definitely made Q2 your far and away best. Yeah, Q4 was number two.

Okay.

After that, then you've got 2016.

And your Q4. This another election year obviously blew away everybody else. Your, your monthly average back in 2016, Chad, this was back when you were writing. I mean, you had a 15 and a half million dollar year. I think you did that by June this year.

Yeah, that's true. Isn't that crazy? That just. I want to encourage people because I'm actually even embarrassed because I'm looking back at 2010. 2010, my November I did 700,000. My December I did 424,000. You know, and then in 2016 I did 1.8 million 2000 in November, 2 million 100,000 in December. Then 2020 I did. Let me get back over to that number.

2020, I did. Oh, oh, I know those. This one doesn't really count because 2020 is when I took a huge time off in November and December, so. And yes, and we had some pretty heavy Covid issues there.

Yeah. But 2016 was. Q4 was by far and away your best quarter that year. Your second best by over $400,000 per month on average.

Isn't it interesting how literally you can see the breakthrough happen on 2019. The 2018, I actually did about almost 19 million. But 2019, I did 26 million. 2020, I did 26 million. 2021, 26 million. And then 2022, I did 38 million. So it's interesting, the jumps up. So 2022, I did 38 million. Then I did 31 million. And then on track this year, I'll probably do, I would say 31 to 34 million this year. And so it looks like once I'm literally an indexed annuity, once I hit a certain level, I rarely go back. So 2022 is a phenomenon because we had a really big fall. So you had a lot of people that were really scrambling trying to get out of the market. So you know that that was an interesting scenario. And, and we'll see that again for sure. But you're right. I mean, 2023, I did over almost 4.2 million in November. I did 2 million and 2.2 million in October, 4.2 million in November, and almost 4.2 million in December. So that's very encouraging.

So here's what's interesting, Chad. You look at 2018 to 2019, you jump from 18 to 26. Okay? That was when we really started rolling out retirement realized Agents Academy kind of big. I think that was the first. The first iteration. You had annuity Agents Academy before that. But I think that was the first iteration of retirement realized Agents academy was in 18 into 19. So what are you saying?

You're actually the reason why I'm doing better? Is that what you're trying to say?

We had a revamp in 2022 of the Academy, and you went from 26 to 38.

You're setting me up for this one, so. Because what I do became my guy, you know, that's why. That's what you want me to say, right?

I think there's a correlation between training on what you do and why you do it, and the impact that it actually has subconscious, consciously in production. It's like the, the, the more you articulate what you do and why you do it. And I think this goes for anybody, right? So if you're writing $5 million a year, there's an element of growth that could be achieved just by training somebody that maybe is writing a million a year and you can help them get to five, right? So there's something about regurgitating the things that, you know, that help solidify it and I think increase confidence and increase capability. It almost makes it more automatic.

I talk about, you know, how Important is when you're not doing well to go revisit the basics. And when I'm doing training, I'm constantly revisiting the basics because I'm going back to how did it start, where did it. Where's the middle, where's the. The end, you know, kind of scenario. And so, yeah, that is quite interesting how that was. That's what is when we did the revamp. And that's why we constantly are repeating things, too. Every year we talk about the last two months is the biggest two months usually you'll have in an entire year.

With Christmas and Thanksgiving still being a very real thing.

Well, for sure. I mean, I. Maybe the week between Thanksgiving of Thanksgiving, I might run one or two appointments. It's very rare. I have a busy schedule there. But they're usually big if I do. And they're usually even shoes. Same thing with between Christmas and New Year's. That's kind of where I shut down. Unless I have someone that says, hey, I really need to do something. And that's when we do that. But if you notice, dang, this summer was actually insane. Caleb. I did 4 million in June, 2 million in July, and 5.5 million over. 5.5 million in August. I'm gonna have to work my tail off to get that to beat that quarter.

You progressively wrote more every month from January to June this year.

Boy, that is interesting. You're right.

Because January, July, you had some time off, and then August, you picked it back up. It's kind of interesting. It was like. Kind of like an acceleration this year.

It's funny because that's why I always look at my vacations. It's not, how much did the vacation cost as far as the expenses? How much did it cost as far as time off?

Yeah.

You would have to go on something pretty crazy for the vacation to cost more than just the missed business.

Well, you know, and me, there's no way I'm going to spend $400,000 on a vacation. It's just. It's not. I mean, even if I. If it's a really nice vacation and we get around 30, 35, 40,000. If it's like a really. Like we're doing something crazy. I don't even know if we've ever done anything like that. Probably the most I've ever spent on a vacation is about 25,000 when I took my entire family to Europe.

That's.

And that's still really good price. Yeah, but, yeah, that. I don't know, man. That's. I Just. I don't know if I could. I know someone right now who's doing a trip to.

Bora Bora, and it's like $30,000, and I'm just going, oh, my gosh, it's for two people.

That's crazy.

Yeah, I'm not quite there, but it'd be good. It better be good, man. But I'll tell you, I think, you know, people just need to understand, and we're not, as, you know, we're not throwing out numbers to brag. God, no, we're. No way.

Totally.

You know, there's what it takes for. To get to where you are. It takes a lot of time, energy, and effort and. But, man, it's so great when we start to see these build it. To me, it's like, you know, remembering what I had to go through to get where I am. It takes a lot of effort, and it takes a good team. I mean, Caleb, I joke around all the time with you, but I. I say this. How many times have you heard me say, you are the top three marketers I've ever had in my entire life?

And that's, you know, that's over 330 million in written production since I started, since 2008. And I'm telling you, you're one of the top three markers. And that's why if somebody asked me, I was talking to an agent the other day, and they said, you know, who knows more about products, you or Caleb? And I'm like, I don't know. That's tough. Because we know in each of our areas, you definitely are more geeked out on the index side of things, you know, like how the index functions and all the stuff that really doesn't matter, you know.

But to you, it does. But, you know, to see where you went in every Christmas or every fourth quarter, it's nice to realize, you know what? I'm doing better than last year, I'm doing better than the year before that. And if we leave you with anything for this entire thing is number one, don't worry about fourth quarter. It's going to be phenomenal. Just keep your leads coming in. If you don't have a good lead system, we do. I'm using them. Reach out to Caleb. These are. These are. We've been working hand in hand with this group.

Yep.

And it's phenomenal. It actually includes our training. So it's the first time I can really sit there and go, oh, my gosh. Like, I actually, you guys know this. I was struggling for leads, and now I'm going. Okay. Oh, no, we're good. We're good. I got a stack like this high right now, and I don't need any more leads right now, so I need to work the ones I already have. But the beauty of this is I literally can place a call and say, Hey, I need 25 more leads. I need 40 more leads. I need 50 more leads. And then I've got them in within three weeks, four weeks. I've already got that order filled. And, you know, that's where it's. I can sit there and go, there's no reason for me not to succeed because now I have people I can get in front of. And.

But, you know, and the real difference in the fourth quarter. Oh, thanks, Chad. But the real difference in the fourth quarter is just the way you choose to work leads versus the way other agents choose to work leads. And that goes for you specifically, Chad, but then also for the listeners. You can work leads like every other agent and coast through the end of the year and see no business, or you can actually keep the pedal down, keep working. Obviously, take off the holidays and enjoy the holidays with your family, but that doesn't mean that all of November and all of December is a bust. There's a solid four, five, six weeks in there. Six weeks. Realistically, of the eight that are fantastic opportunities to keep running business when a lot of other people are not. So your competition is lower, and the opportunity is just as good as ever. So keep. Keep the pedal down.

Yeah. I mean, the way I look at it is if I do as good as I did the last two weeks of. Last two months of last year, if I do that, I will. I'll actually hit 34, 35 million. And, you know, this has been a challenging year, so, you know, it's been. It's been a tough one.

If you. If you hit what you did last year In November and December, 8.3 million, you'll be.

It'd be 34 million.

Oh, not including.

Yeah.

You haven't recorded what I did last week.

I was. It'd be. I was gonna say it might top 35.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it actually would because you haven't recorded last week and I gave you those numbers, like, five days ago. I don't know why, but.

I think it was, like, one business day ago.

Okay, you're right. You're right. Only I work on the weekends. I didn't this weekend. Okay, well, I hope this helps you guys. I know it's all over the place. And we went a little long. But you know what? That's what we do. We're not this polished, you know, perfect little group. We're just not. We love having fun, and we love sharing our success. So I hope this helps you guys. You have a great day, and happy selling.

Sam.