Every Lead (Old and New) Is an Opportunity | 7 Figure Annuity Sales Podcast | Ep. 127
Podcast conversation (Chad Owen and Caleb North) focused on maximizing value from sales leads for annuity/retirement advisors. Core messages: treat every lead—old or new—as an opportunity, prioritize deep fact-finding and stewardship over simply buying more leads, and build/own the client process to capture higher average sales per lead. Practical claims and examples (budgets, average sale sizes, follow-up counts) are cited to support the advice.
Questions this video answers
Typical average cited: $130,000 per client; Chad's average: over $390,000 per client.
About $22,000 to $25,000 per month for leads.
A $4 million deal from a lead that was two to three years old and had been called 13–14 times.
Chapters
Hey, everyone. Welcome to this week's podcast. Appreciate you joining us. It's very important to always take a little bit of time out each week to do training, to refresh what you know and actually learn what you don't know. I mean, I hear people ask me this all the time. How do you know so much about so many products? It's because I do a little, a lot of the time. Sure. So I'm studying a little, a lot. I don't usually have two, three, four hours of training sessions. I take 15 to 20 minutes quite often to study new things. And that's how I know a little about a lot. It's kind of funny because we had a dishwasher break and I just literally went onto YouTube, figured out how to do it, replaced it, and it was that easy. I'm not a plumber, not even remotely. And so the reality comes into what I had something I had to do in front of me, so I learned. And YouTube University is incredible. I can do almost anything there. And I just have to have the right equipment and I just need to have the aptitude to be able to learn something new. So study, study, study. So what are we talking about today?
Yeah, we're going to talk about leads and some pretty fun topic. I know we all love to talk about leads, right?
Everybody wants to talk about leads all the time.
Oh, yeah. But we're going to talk about using the leads you have, maximizing the effectiveness of those leads, when to buy more leads, and maybe even when you shouldn't buy more leads but actually work on something else. So some interesting ideas it is.
The funny thing is, is I have people ask me more and more, where can I buy more leads? How can I get more leads? How can I get. I can't recall the last time I've ever had anybody ask how can I make the most of the leads I already have.
Right.
In other words, what if the average annuity sales 130,000 per client? My average is over 390,000 per client. I'm using the same leads as everybody else. I hear the same ones repeated over and over. Why? Think about this. I'm doing triple the amount of volume per lead. So do I need to go buy more leads? Not necessarily. Right?
No.
Do I have a little bit smaller of a lead budget? Because I'm making the most now, balancing this out. I burn through leads like crazy. There's if you have under 50,000 emergency funds and savings, 50,000 investable amounts, I just don't meet. So that's a Lot of leads. Because even the scrubbed Internet leads go down to 25,000.
Right.
So those are ones. If you don't have a hundred thousand in total amounts, I just don't meet. Sure. So I burn through a lot of them. But the reality is I still get 390,000 plus average per lead. Absolutely. Because of the fact finding I know how to make the most of the leads. So I don't need a whole bunch more. I just need to know how to utilize every lead that, I mean, it just makes sense.
Right.
I mean I spend about, I can't remember the exact numbers, but it's about 22 to 25,000amonth leads. That's my budget. Okay. That's a lot. That's a lot. I remember when $500 a month was a lot for a lead budget, but that's what I did. Now granted that was what, 16 plus years ago? Almost 17 years ago. But I'm looking at going now I look this go, hey, it's not a big deal. Why? I know my return on investment for leads is going to be skyrocketing.
Absolutely.
But that's because I make the most of every lead by doing full fact finders.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And I want to go back just a little bit, Dick, back to when you were starting out. You talk about, sometimes you talk about using B and C leads. You found a bucket of leads in the corner, you started calling those walk us through, tell us that story first and then kind of walk us through what you did to actually get sales with us.
I'm actually testing a new lead system now. That is that the person that I'm working with has said, hey, you know what, we have some leads that are three months, six months old, a year old. Would you want to get them? I said, absolutely. Yeah. And so I'll let you know how that goes. But I don't look at ABC leads. I never even separated them. It was all in the same group of leads. I didn't have A leads, B leads, C leads. Because here's just the mindset. Well, here's my A leads. I'm going to work real hard. And here's the B leads. Ah, man, there's a C leads. Your clients going to pick up on that.
Right.
Your client's going to know that you're, you're. Oh, he must be not that enthusiastic or excited. No, it's because you started going, these are seed leads. They're not going to be any good. It just doesn't make sense. I mean, there's a side of me because I have agents I help. If I made calls on certain leads, I should just block everything out and see what the response would be. That'd be a nice study.
It would be a good study.
Yeah. It would be. A good study is like if you remove the date, you removed any notes off of any leads, and you redistributed how many would get closed versus how many didn't get closed. I'm not going to do that.
That would be. I, I have no doubt in my mind you would see a huge success rate if you didn't even know what the date the lead was. If that person thought that agent thought every lead was brand new, you would have a much higher success rate.
Right. And you're talking about somebody that may be using older leads and new leads mixed together. Take the data out altogether so that your mindset is, hey, this is a lead, a leads, a leads. A lead is a lead. Right. I mean, and granted, leads, a lead, a leads, a lead.
Meaning that they're all, they're leads. That's what they are. And if you call them with the same fervor, you call them with the same level of enthusiasm, you call them with the same excitement, in theory, you should be able to do business with those older leads the same as you do the new leads. And you've done that.
Absolutely.
And so that's why we want to talk about this. When should an agent actually consider buying more leads? What in their process is kind of a KPI, a key performance indicator, so to speak of. When would be a good time for an agent to actually branch out and get more? What do they need to be doing with the leads they have currently?
So there were three people. One was given ten talents. Five, and one was given one. The master came back. The one who had ten now had twenty. The one had five, now had ten, and the one who had one still had one. Which one deserves more?
Yeah, yeah.
The one who took care of them. Yeah. So the reality is, if you really make the most of the leads you have and you need more leads, then buy more leads.
Sure.
But if you're blowing through leads, not taking care of them, and not being a good steward of what you've been given, then you're not going to make it. In this business, the agents that do really well are the ones that consistently make the most of the leads or the process they have. They have a process in the system. And this is why we get so many people signing up with retirement realized financial. They actually have me running appointments just like you every single week having to do the same things just like you. And it's one of the only, if not the only, IMO marketing organization that I know of. So if we take our process, okay, my system and process, you have a marketing organization where the principal owner actually still runs appointments three days a week. Monday, excuse me, Tuesday through Thursday, I make calls on Monday, have a complete full training system, very interactive of everything I do with every handout, every document I use. And we have access to crazy amount of lead systems that you can actually use to where you can make the most of it. So this is why people are joining us like crazy right now. Because you don't see that.
Right.
And I mean this with the utmost respect. But if it's hard for someone who sits behind a desk all day to try and explain to you how to become better when they've never been in the field experiencing like you do, I have some incredible marketers, I really do. And they are very helpful. They're great in case design. I hardly ever call them for case design. Why? I want to be involved with the client situation. I want to be the one that knows their case. And if I constantly am having someone else do my case design, my illustrations, then I'm not that involved in my client. Right. You know, if, if you have someone who builds a car from ground up, they're going to know every little thing. If something breaks, they don't need to go and call a help center saying, hey, this is the noise the car is making. What do I do to fix it? My son in law is, my favorite son in law is a mechanic, the other one, and he actually can listen to an engine and he can probably diagnose what's going on with that. If you're doing your own case design, your own lead systems, your own calls, your own follow up, your own pending business, you're going to be able to hear when something doesn't sound right and make the most of that opportunity. So yeah, I got a little sidetracked, but that's really what it comes down to.
But that's a good little rabbit trail for us to chase here a little bit because it is important that the agent has that time invested into that part of it. Because I've noticed too in your process how little you rely on your marketers. I've just seen it, it's not common at all. And yet you're riding 25 to 27 million a year consistently. And this has been the last two years. Now that you've hit those numbers in A row. And I can't wait to see what the rest of 2021 has. But that said, you're not relying on them. You're doing that part of your process yourself. And I feel like, I've noticed it actually gives you more time to be able to do the other things as well. Like it actually expedites your process because if you were sending things in the amount that you're sending in the time you would have to wait to get back, it would actually end up slowing you down 100%.
So. And it's also once again knowing. So you have two sets of parents. You have one set of parents that they have a nanny. The nanny takes care of the child all the time. Okay, okay. The other two are working. The nanny takes care of the child. Then you have another set of parents. They're really involved. They know what their kid likes, doesn't like. They know what a certain cry sounds like. They know when a kid needs something, what to do, what, once again, just what they like and don't like. Which one's going to have the best relationship with the kid when they grow up?
The second one.
The second one. So if I'm constantly nannying out my clients, right. Having them take care of my client's situation, that's really good. They're not going to know the relation or be as, have as great of a relationship as I will because I am step by step along the way with my clients.
Absolutely.
So if there's a little cry, I mean, all parents know, there's different types of cries. You can tell all what your kid is feeling by the way they're crying. You know, if they're five, six, seven years old and they make a particular cry sound, you know, ah man, they're just, they're not that bad. Or if you, oh, did you fall down? You know they're crying or you just go, hey, oh man, that was funny. And then he bounced right back up. But if you hear them cry really hard, you can tell by the cry where the pain is or what type of pain it is. So I'm paying attention to my client clients to hear the sounds they're making verbally and non verbally on what hurts and what doesn't, what makes them happy and what doesn't. I don't nanny my, my clients off to a marketer.
Yeah, that's very true. And, and you've reaped the rewards of that. And that's just the reality of that situation is when you do the work on your end to do that part of the process, you reap the rewards for that. And so I think that's amazing. I do want to loop back around to leads because one of the things we talk about a lot is obviously.
We'Re talking about leads. Yeah, okay.
Obviously leads play an important role. Right. They're vitally important. But you often talk about they're not the most important. What is the most important?
Well, let me ask you this. I mean I've trained you now for what, two years you've been with me. And so if I was to ask you what would be more important, the lead or how you treat the lead?
I would say how you treat the lead.
Yeah. So is it the lead or how you know how to find out what that client needs?
It's how you find out what they need.
Absolutely. So everything comes into. What does the client need? The lead is a opportunity. But what are you going to do with that opportunity? There are flat out some people I know I can't help my least favorite appointments when I meet someone in their six mid-60s, mid-70s. And I know there is no way they're going to be able to retire. There's just no way they think they're going to. Especially when they have bad health issues. And you know, man, this person is going to live a miserable life because they don't have enough money to survive off of that. One of the worst things I ran into in 2020, a guy was $100,000 in his emergency funds and savings 50 some thousand in his retirement. He's 62 years old, he's retired to health wise and he makes $1,200 a month Social Security. He just bought a home that requires 2400amonth in payment. And I'm going that doesn't include all his other stuff.
Right.
How quick is he going to burn through that $150,000?
No, it's going to be quick.
And he can't go back to work because he has health issues.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah. So that's a heartbreaking. That's a heartbreaking situation. It's hard to not carry those ones home. I try and say remove the emotion from the situation, but there's certain times you just can't. There's no way. Yeah, but I would say absolutely making the most of each situation with the lead. It's not about getting all these leads. Yes, leads are important, but if you're not taking care of leads and you're not making the most of each one.
Right.
And you're not doing your due diligence and you're not being a good steward of that lead, you're going to run into problems.
Well, and we've worked with agents before, and we work with agents now that they're calling leads 20, 25 times, basically calling until. And this isn't in a row. It's not like they're. This is, this is, you know, over time, but they're calling that many times the same individual, until the individual says, yeah, I want to, I want to meet with you.
30Th and the 40th time they're getting. We just had a big deal. My biggest deal last year was from a lead that was called 13 or 14 times. And it was two years old. Right. And two or three years old. Yeah.
And that was a $4 million deal.
Yeah. And so when, when people call lead twice, three times and throw it away, I'm like, what? What are you thinking? You're crazy.
And that's why they think, oh, I just need more leads. I need more leads is because the, the time and the effort isn't, isn't always being put in on that end. So call your leads more. Do it.
Absolutely. 1. Once again, don't treat them as an old lead.
Right.
Every lead is a brand new lead. If you have not talked with them or, or even if you have talked with them and they're not ready yet, when you call them again, it's still new.
Right.
You cannot tell me their situation hasn't changed in some way, shape or form, because, I mean, if you just went through 2020, your situation's changed different. So everything's changed in 2021.
Absolutely.
So that being said, even if you called them two years ago, everything's new now.
Absolutely.
So treat it that way.
100%.
Yep.
Good deal.
That it?
That's it.
Wow, that was easy. You guys have a great day and happy selling.
