Lead Generation Strategies for 2024 | 7 Figure Annuity Sales Podcast | Ep. 278

Welcome Back to the Seven Figure Annuity Sales podcast and happy 2024 new year. It's. Well, it was a. It was a good break.

It was a good break.

A little break. Rest, hopefully. Hopefully restful.

Work through the end of the year. Yeah, this is, this is. Like I said, this will be. I probably will not be taking a vacation until April, so that means I'm gonna have seven months without a vacation. I haven't done that in 12 years. But just, you know, we have. Go ahead.

I'm sorry.

Well, I thought you were. No, I'm never done. It's with your big old head. What is up with this? What is up with, like your. Right. You know, how do I have to do that? I have to like move. You must be like 2 inches from the screen. Actually, no, with the, with your big old head, you're probably like three or four feet back from the screen.

Yeah, well, I got the, you know, the north, the north head.

The north head. Okay.

It's a paternal, paternally passed genetic issue.

I'm not saying anything about your dad and definitely not your grandpa, so I know better than that. Okay, so let's get started.

Well, we're talking about lead generation strategies for the new year. We talked a little bit about it as at the last episode of last year. We're talking about getting your, your strategies ironed out, getting your relationships with your lead vendors, your lead companies, your marketing systems. Have those in place and have those ready to go for the new year. My assumption is that most of you probably don't have nearly as many leads as you could or want or desire, as is for most agents. So I've got a few ideas and there really are some tried and true methods that we'll talk about today. But before I even jump into that, I want to just say you can generate leads and however creatively you can think. Right. I mean, if you think about marketing, you think about lead generation, there's inherent elements and advantages given to those that are creative thinkers. So if you can just think creatively, there are plethoras of other ways you can get in front of prospects, clients, opportunities, some of which maybe have never been done before, but could be your best systems.

Yeah, I mean, with the reality of AI coming out right now, there's going to be some things coming to fruition that haven't been done before. And that's just a fact. I mean, I'm watching people create algorithms to get leads at a fraction of the cost that could be game changing for our industry. And we'll see how it pans out. You know, I've heard this for many, many years, but you know, we, we generally have about five of the big Internet lead companies and of course we have Retirement Realize Radio, which is always a killer. I mean half my volume last year was based off of Retirement Realized Radio. And the one thing I'll find with that though is you can't even really quantitate the value of the radio because I use that with every other lead. So if I say this is Chad with XYZ company and host of Retirement Realize Radio. Oh, you're a radio host. You know, it immediately builds rapport. So I mean I tell people all that. I tell people all the time. Even if you can only afford a very minimal station, it's still good to be on the radio. So if you're interested in that now, balancing statement, little pitch for us, you would have to have all your contracts with Retirement Realized financial because we are not going to shut down a territory for radio unless somebody is running their contracts through us. But you don't have to spend a ton of money. You can have your life insurance leads, your Medicare leads, you can have all those and just get a very inexpensive station. Let's say $300 week and then you pay $700 a month. So let's see, that's 300 times five for a five weeks. So it's 1500 plus 700. So that's $2200 right there to become a radio host. And that includes the producing as well. So just a thought.

Yeah, yeah, that's great. And that's actually one of the three kind of tried and true time tested methods that I've actually got noted here. It's like we talk a lot about Internet leads, we talk about seminars, webinars, and we talk about radio because historically when you look in the industry and you see somebody writing good, good production, we're talking eight figures a year, double digit millions. Right. They're generally going to be doing either seminars or radio supplemented with Internet leads. That's, that's kind of the recipe from a marketing perspective.

It is.

So we're actually.

Without fail. Yeah, without fail. All the big producers I've ever met that do over 15, 20 million a year, they are doing. Oh well, there is another one. I see SNE sneaking up. It's still a seminar, but it's more like an infinite webinar. So I see that kind of sneaking up a little bit too more into the picture.

Right, right. As, as the digital age kind of continues to advance and people become more comfortable with virtual meetings and that kind of thing. I think you're going to see some of those webinars take some precedence over the actual face to face seminar and in some coming generations.

But my goal, I haven't, I haven't even told you this. My goal this year is to have a third of my business virtual.

That's my goal.

Impressive for a guy that historically is to steer clear of virtual everything face to face.

Oh, but you know what, driving, I mean, driving 40,000 miles a year, dealing with the traffic, dealing with the time, I mean even if I had.

I mean, if I am slammed, I'll do four driving appointments in a day. If I'm going virtual, I could easily have five to five to seven virtual appointments a day. So yeah, I mean if you took a 12 hour day, let's see, if we did 12, 12 divided by seven. So that's basically. Yeah, that would be more than an hour and a half block for each one. So yeah, I could do seven appointments in one day without an issue virtually, versus, I mean the most I've ever done in one day face to face was five. And that was a, I think my last appointment was at like 8 o'. Clock. So yeah. Another thing you find is virtual too is if you're doing national. I mean you can, in your, let's say you're in mountain time zone, you could start your day at 7 o' clock and it's 9am in the east coast. So there's ways you can do this.

Yeah. And it also allows you to expand your, your territories from a lead generation perspective. A lot of the digital lead generation strategies running social media ads, search engine ads, anything like that, a lot of times to keep the costs low, it helps to expand that territory for sure. Rather than, you know, if you're, if you're trying to, to do a Facebook or some kind of social media type of advertisement for something, generate leads for a webinar or something to that effect. You can isolate however small you want to, but your cost per lead tends to go way up. If you could do the whole state, the whole country, now that starts to become a lot more cost effective. Chad, you're funny to me because you're, you tend to be a late adopter on certain things and then other things. It's like you're like plowing forward. You're like taking the charge. Like I think about how long it took us to get you onto E apps from your paper apps. You know how long it's.

Well, I Think about you on the virtual train. You were there when I used to do all my appointments on the little like teacher scheduler thing. Oh yeah, the handwritten. I didn't even have. I didn't even have a Google Calendar. And then once I got you to Google Calendar, well, once I got to about the fifth company you guys are going, yeah, we need to know what your schedule is. And I totally get that. I am, I am. There is just funny because technology standpoint, I'm very quick to adapt from an efficiency standpoint, but I want to make sure there's not a bunch of glitches in the E apps. You know, I want to make sure the Google Calendar. I'm not sure why that took so long. It just, I was very, I think because you remember back in that time I would pull out my calendar and I would flip to that back a couple weeks intentionally and they would see how busy I was. And then when I got to the page where they're available, like, oh my gosh, this guy's calendar slammed. You know, I need to take that spot now. That doesn't, wouldn't work if you had one appointment that weekend. Well, try and squeeze in here. So that's why it was so long to adopt that. But now, I mean, even on the Google Calendar, I mean I pull it up on my phone so they don't even necessarily see that. So yeah, I mean it is important to be ahead of time. But the leads, the leads are something there's. You have to be ahead at the time. You have to be innovative in that because you nailed it. Caleb, I don't think there's ever a point of too much leads. I really don't. I mean there's. To me, there's the low hanging fruit and I'm all for that because I've said this before, I'm not begging people to protect their own money. If they want my help, I'm more than happy to, more than happy to do 100% into it. But if they don't or they're kind of wishy washy, they've got to feel the pain to want to do something. And very few people, I mean, we try and sell our way out of things and the reality is you're not trying to sell. And if the person doesn't understand the importance of safety and security, they don't understand the importance of not outliving their income. Then you educate them and they still have to make their decision. But don't get emotionally attached to that. So that's why Having a lot of leads is important.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. So on that subject, we're working on some Internet lead generation programs right now in house with retirement realized. And we're working on a seminar program right now in house with retirement realized. And Chad already mentioned the retirement realized radio is ready to rock. So you guys reach out to us over this, I mean reach out to us now, but certainly over Q1 and see what we can do to try and help you out in the lead generation department. There are some alternatives that I'd love to talk about too, that these are just pretty low barrier to entry and kind of, I would say creative. Like a lot of agents don't do it. But there are things that I think can be done that can have some pretty good impact. Number one, a referral network. This is, I talk about this in the retirement realized agents academy actually. But it's one of those things. I think everybody should have some kind of referral system going on. Like if you can create a relationship with somebody else that's doing a complimentary service, if you can focus on the annuity side and you can develop relationship with a Medicare agent, they're going to send you Medicare people that they help and you're going to be able to help them with retirement and annuities. And then you get some people, you know, coming through your marketing systems and you send them over to that person to help them with Medicare. It's very mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationship. Build those types of things, right? Make those connections, network that email marketing, one of those things that should be in place for everybody. Chad, this is something you're huge on and we've actually developed a program based on your book Stress and Rocking Chairs and it really does a good job of acting as a net. The way I like to describe the email marketing is if you're going to spend the money to obtain the contact, you're buying the lead, you're doing the marketing system, whatever the case is, you've got money into that. What does it cost you really to try and nurture that and to try not to lose that over time? And that's what the email marketing does. Keeps you in front of them and helps kind of bring back those opportunities to work with them.

Correct? Correct.

Any thoughts on the email marketing, Chad?

No. It's a must. It's an absolute must. Any, any lead, any client, any you get, always get the person's email and now phone number because a lot of times people, the texting is far superior to the email. The Open rate on a text is far greater than an email. So you want to be capturing all that. And once again, these are things we've all done for you. I mean, the CRM we're having out now, all. I mean, we have so many things on. I will tell you, doing this for 20 years, I am, I can honestly say, what we are doing in retirement realized financial is far superior to pretty much any other marketing organization out there for a couple reasons. Number one, anything we build, whether it's a CRM, whether it's a lead system, is based off of real life in the field experience. Where I'm in the field, I still run appointments every single week just like everybody else. I meet with clients face to face. I meet with them virtually. I know what they want, I know what they need, I know what, what they're looking for. So everything we're building is not from someone in a cubicle or a office that's trying to say, well, this is what I think my agents are saying. Well, the reality is I know what they're feeling and what they're saying. So we're. Everything we're building for the success of an agent is based off of real life experience.

That's right. That's right. I love it. And things that you've had success with. I mean, for example, our entire stress and rocking chairs email marketing drip system that we've built came about as a result of us seeing the impact of the book Stress and rocking Chairs. In other words, I had so many agent testimonials of people that said, hey, Caleb, I left this book with a client that I met with. They reached back out to me after they read that book asking, how do I move forward with the concepts in this thing that happened like half a dozen times. Okay, well, you start getting enough of those testimonials and you're thinking, okay, if that's the impact of this content, how do we get that content in front of people that maybe never even met with the agent?

Well, now I have stress and rocking chairs, two common killers of seniors. I have stress and rocking chairs off the rocker, which is a complete travel guide for retirees. I have stress and rocking chairs, Home suite retirement, which is a complete guide for different housing retirement housing options. I have stress and rocking chairs, life and death insurance. And then I have another one. I can't draw a blank on it, but this is going to be a series of about eight to 10 books. And the purpose of this is we want to help retirees in all areas. We want to be the go to place for retirees for anything they need. So this is where the drip system can really come into play because you know, we might have an article about, you know, living abroad and someone like, you know, I always thought about that they reach out to us. You know, I've always wanted to do that. How do I do that? Well, do you have any eyes or 401ks? Well, yes, I do. Well, here's what we can do with that. To secure a safe type of income while you're living abroad. So these are all different ways we're going to try and create lead systems off these books.

I love that, I love that. One of the other alternative methods of some lead generation that I was thinking about is just branded materials, having, you know, clothing. Chad, isn't there a guy that you know of some. He's in some small town somewhere and he's kind of known locally.

He is, he is the retirement guy. Any, I mean he has billboards everywhere, he wears a jacket everywhere. I mean he is the person. So I, it, it's basically, and I've seen this throughout the years, people can't tell me why I don't live in a big city. So I can't make it anymore. One of our partners lives up in northern Michigan in a very small area and he's very successful. So small areas with the ability have the reach we do in the Internet and the capability of sending out broadcasts that way, living in a small town is no excuse anymore.

That's right. That's right. One idea that just came to mind is, and I've actually seen this concept before where you, you get custom branded like golf balls. But this kind of taking it another step like further is having printed on a golf ball, you know, round a golf on me with your company name, logo, whatever, and your phone number. And it's just like you're out there playing golf, you know, you.

Yeah, but here's the thing though. What's the rule on the $25?

Well, it's not a, it's not a rebate though. This would be, this would be basically you're out playing golf. Somebody finds your golf ball, says hey, round of golf on me. Your logo, your, you know, your company name and your phone number, they call you, hey, found your golf ball. You still good for a round of golf. And now you've got basically a four hour fact finder with this.

It could be like considered as it could be marketing. It could fall under marketing. Yeah, yeah. Because that was the concept that might work. That's an interesting concept. Why the heck haven't you told me this before now? The, the. Well, I just thought the problem though is when the people that find my ball are way out in the woods and you know.

If you find my ball, that means you, you are not good either. So actually that'd be kind of good too. Right? Because you know that the person you're playing with isn't that great. And then you don't feel like an idiot when they hit every ball like the, like the tv. Yeah. That's interesting. I like that. Yes. I think we'll keep you around for a little while.

Use some. Yeah. Get you some, some Titleist Pro V1s or something like that. And hopefully they're playing with them too. They save your number and then they start hitting it around, you know, who knows? But. And get involved locally. I think this is one thing that a lot of agents don't do. But there's so many different programs and things, groups locally that you can get a part of, be a part of. That doesn't cost you anything but time. And I can tell you, for somebody that's writing, you know, 30 something million a year, Chad like you, that's probably not something that's super advantageous to you in your business because of how much you're doing and how much time you're already spending. But for somebody that's getting started, somebody that maybe isn't writing as much, they're not having as many appointments, you've got time, but you maybe don't have the capital. So figure out those ways that you can get involved and generate some opportunities locally that have very low overhead, like a referral network. But maybe they just require a little bit of extra time. That can be your expense on the front end as you're trying to get things ramped up. So at the end of the day, have several streams of flow this year. Don't try and. Don't try and run 20, 24 on. On one wheat system. Have, have several, three, four, five at least and make it awesome.

Well, I hope everybody has a great week and of course, as always, happy selling.

Sam.