Chad Owen shares a two-year story of chasing a prospect who ignored his advice, bought the wrong product, then regretted it. His lesson: stop pursuing people who won't help themselves. You can't want to help them more than they want to be helped.
Hello. Chad Owen, Retirement Realized Agents Academy. I want to propose a question. When do you fire a prospective client? Not a client. Once they're a client, they're always a client to me. It doesn't matter how challenging, what circumstances come up, they're always my client. But when do you fire a prospective client? I just had to do this on Monday. There's this client I've been working with with a long time. Basically this is about two years ago. I proposed a really good deal for them, worked perfectly, had nice numbers. It's about a $500,000 deal. And then I met with him three different times and he finally tells me I can't get in contact with him. And he tells me once I finally got contact and well, we went with someone else because we liked the higher opportunity of getting more growth. I said, so what'd you go with, like a variable annuity? And he's like, yeah. And so I'm like, okay, well, I wish you the best. I just got a call from him about, oh, it was two months ago. And he go, we've been very unhappy with our variable annuity. We wish we never would have done it. Can you send me an illustration with a portion of that variable annuity? And I'm like, okay, well this is two years old. We need to find out what the strand or penalty is in it. So I did that. Find out what the actual, if there's any other benefits like income, riders, death benefits, trying to find out if there's a bonus on it, what was the end result? Surrender value. And I found out that I have a bonus product that I could actually beat their account value and make sure that the surrender value plus the bonus would be more than they had. So it was suitable, it was replaceable. And I sent him an illustration. Don't hear from him. I try and reach out to him one or two times. No response. So I just got an email from him on Monday and he said, I know you're probably tired from hearing about hearing from me and could you send me another illustration? And during that time frame, we've seen the market could go up, the market go down. And he was really close. The surrender value plus the bonus was really close to putting him ahead. And I'm just going, this guy is so wishy washy, he doesn't even know for sure what he wants yet. He already made a bad decision. He wants to be out of what he's in. So I just replied back. I said, I'm sorry, Jim. I said, based off of the circumstances Based off of you didn't listen to me in the first place. You're now in a worse situation. You still won't listen to me. You don't trust my advice. And I just think it's better for you to find another agent that can help you with this. And do I want what's best for him? Absolutely. But I've sent, I went and counted, I've had, well, just about a hundred, 100 some odd emails that I've sent back and forth between me and him. I've spent seven hours in appointments with him and I've spent I don't even know how much on the phone. And I'm just like, I can't do it anymore. And it made me realize I probably should have stopped long time ago. In other words, when he even replied back, I know my annuity could have with the bonus could have put him in a better situation. I could have given him a better income rider, I could have given him better benefits with annuity, I had. But I had to realize that I can want to help someone so bad, but if they don't want help, then I can't help them. And I learned this even when I mentor people. I mentor quite a few people and I can't want initially, let me rephrase that. Initially I can want to help them more than they can want to be helped. But there's a point where they have to realize, you know what, I need to do this for myself, I need to do this on my own. I need to make sure I want to become better. And if they do that, I can continue to mentor them. If they can't, no matter how much I love on them, no matter how much I mentor them, no matter how much I want what's best for them, they still make their own decision. They still have their own free will. And so when we're talking about helping clients, whether it's life insurance, whether it's annuities, Medicare care, long term care, whatever it is, any type of sales, you can't want to help them more than they want to be helped. If they don't want to be helped or they want a paralysis analysis, then there's nothing we can do to change that. Now that doesn't mean we don't love them, we don't want what's best for them. But you know what? Every one of my clients, I really want to help them. But it's still up to them to allow us to help them. That's where we once again, you never get into a pressure situation. You never get into forceful. I had a lady yesterday, I could have for sure gotten her to write the application right there, no doubt about it. But I said, do you want some time to think about it? She goes, yeah, I would like to read through the material. I said, perfect. So let's go to schedule appointment for next week. We can go over questions. If you feel comfortable, then. Then we can go ahead and move forward with it. But I wanted her to feel so comfortable. It's not about getting the deal. It's about finding a solution to the problem. It's about. It's a mutual relationship. We want to help, they want to be helped. So I hope that help helps you guys. You have a great day. Happy selling.
