Million Dollar Fact-Finding Strategies | 7 Figure Annuity Sales Podcast | Ep. 123

Welcome to this week's podcast. I am Chad Owen. As you know, hopefully, possibly, maybe I'm somewhat important industry. At least I tell myself that. And here's Caleb. Clearly not important at all in this industry.

No place in the industry.

He's actually learned more in his time frame than I did when I first got into this. And actually, you know what, that's kind of an interesting statement. Never really thought of this. You've learned more in what, two years?

I ain't even been here for two years. Less than a year and a half.

Feels like forever. Yeah, all the grace for me. Exactly. Look at this. But, you know, within a year, he's picked up more about this industry than I did in the first four years. And I would say a lot of it has to with mentorship.

It is.

I mean, I can say I can talk to him all the time. We have offices, God help me, right by each other all the time. So both of us is like, we. All we do is hear people each other talk all day. And it's like I can't even rest at night because I hear Caleb's voice. But anyway.

No, but it's pretty cool, though, because it shows the proof of mentorship.

Absolutely.

He says a lot of the things, like if he's talking to an agent, I'm hearing him talking. It's the exact same thing I would say the way I would say it, which is pretty good.

I don't know why, but this is going to be a weird one. Just so you know, right from the beginning, because both of us are feeling off. He's feeling way more off than I.

Am, but I might have had too much coffee. Who knows?

You know, I think that is. This is supposed to have water, but it actually has energy drinks. Okay. Okay, let's get it. What are we talking about today?

Yeah, well, you know, a natural flow. After last week where we were talking about increasing average case size and closing ratio and whatnot, we're going to talk this week about fact finding. Specific. Specifically, just because we really touched on the fact finder and the importance of it last week. But we didn't go into a lot of depth when it comes to fact finding and kind of that process. And so I'm curious. This is one of those things, Chad, that you do without fail every single appointment, 100 of the time. I mean, it's.

There's no way anybody could ever say, well, you didn't ask that question. You didn't know ever. I follow a step by step. I will always get to the Actual every single question on that fact finder. Now I've met with a lot of agents and some that have been super successful and some not so much. But even the most successful agents that I meet all have different fact finders. Now mine is very simplistic. It's one sheet of one paper. So on one sided, I print the lead on one side, the fact finder on the other side. That's because I love the simplicity. Now, I may have someone say, well, you didn't get all the information. My eight page fact finder has way more questions. Okay. I am not an estate expert. I don't do wills and trusts, I'm not an accountant. So there's a lot of questions I have no business in answering. And I'm going to clarify that because there's a lot of people that try and be the jack of all trades and the masters of none. And we go back to the analogy I've used many, many times. You have doctors out there. You have a general practitioner which knows a lot about a little about a lot. But he's not or she's not a specialist. So I just went to the doctor appointment recently and I had to go to an endocrinologist that's a specialist. Well, so when I go to a normal doctor, they actually draw blood from me and I have to wait two days for them to get the results. For the A1C have type 2 diabetes, so I have to wait, wait two days for those results. I go to this doctor first time they prick my finger and I'll have your A1C results in less than five minutes. I'm like, what I said, you can get that from a little prick in the finger. And they've been drawn vials of blood from me. What is the deal? Yeah, they go, well, a lot of people won't spend the money on the machine that they can do that. The technology is available, but a general practitioner is not going to buy a specialty machine.

Right.

So my fact finder is a specialty machine that gets things, the results, the information you need a lot quicker. Yeah, an eight page fact finder can take days to decipher. My one sheet. I can tell you exactly right there. I've got the treatment available for you right there, there. And guess what? Based off of what they had, they actually prescribed me a new medication that actually says may help me lose weight. So we'll see if I start looking all trim and buff and you know, you'll know the medication worked. I'll be taking double doses.

But anyway, so because the specialist specializes, and they spent the extra money on that piece of machinery, that technology, to find the results quicker. That's how I see my fact finder. Right. I'm just taking a little drop of information. I can get everything I need to come up with the diagnosis.

Exactly.

Now, you could sit there and say, you know what? You could draw the vials of blood. You could say, hey, can you come with me for a moment? Here's our lab. And then you see 15 people in the lab and they're all doing these little vile things and trying to figure out spinning centrifuges and all that, trying to figure out what's going on with your blood. I could sit there and be so impressed by, wow, this is a big team. But, man, it's taking you multiple days to get the results. Right. Or I could go in there and they take this little drop from my finger, they put on a little slide, and then they give the answer right there. And I'm going, well, first of all, that didn't hurt. Right. You know, when they do. I could not believe. I was like, I didn't feel anything. I'm like, what did you do different? Because sometimes I hit a nerve there and I want to cut off my arm. It's a little dramatic, but. But it's. It's the blood draw sometimes can be a lot more uncomfortable. So I want to make the. The process of finding out the information painless.

Absolutely.

Now, there's a lot of pain in finding the information. So if you're in. Man, I don't even know why I'm going on this tangent, but it's actually kind of good analogy. If you go into. If you're an ER doctor and you come in and you're in a traumatic situation, you. You're going to be a lot of pain. There's a lot of clients I meet that when I meet with them, they are in pain. They're in a painful situation. They may not think they could retire. They may have had some huge hit from the market. They may have a broker that charges high fees. I have a client I met with about six months ago that they found out that all their money can only be distributed. The decisions are made every quarter, and some don't even make decisions for a year on what can be distributed. We just tried to get another distribution from one of his accounts quarterly to put into the annuity, and they've already met their limit, so he can't get any access to any of his money.

Oh, my goodness, he's good.

Old REITs. So I'm not gonna tell you if I like him or not because I'm not an advisor, but I can tell you what the client thinks of him right now. It's so frustrating because he thought he had accessibility. But this is why I find it so hypocritical when sometimes a broker will go, yeah, but you have a surrender fee. Yeah. If you're putting people in REITs, sometimes they can't even get the money. So there's no surrender fee, because the surrender fee is 100%. You can't get the money if you.

Can'T get to it. It might as well not be easy.

But yeah. So the fact finder is supposed to be painless from the process and easy to diagnose the problem. That's how I put together my whole fact finder is. Everything that I need to come up with a solution to the problem is on that one sheet of paper.

And you don't need to hit more than the things you need. And that's the reality of it. And you also, you mentioned something in that analogy about going back and seeing the lab and, you know, meeting all of the doctors and everybody that's back there, but hustling and bustling around. And really, a lot of times that can be the way that an agent approaches trying to explain an annuity. And that's true. They can go into all these nitty gritty details and all of this stuff, and it can be really easy, especially if the agent has the knowledge. It can be easy to go down that route with engineers. Am I right? Come on, don't we all love our engineers?

They're easy. They're so easy. Every engineer bases the building off of a foundation. It's true. You cannot build any sort of structure unless as a stable foundation. So how can you build a retirement when nothing's stable? If it's in stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, you can't build anything off of that. So that's. There's your freebies.

There you go.

Y' all are getting so easy.

Yeah, that's good. That's a good one. Yeah.

Well, because they're analytical, but they're analytical with a purpose.

Right.

So they really just want to know what is the foundation.

Right.

They're not trying to be jerks. That's just the way their brain thinks.

Right.

And so it's. If you can analyze how they think, which honestly, isn't that difficult. I mean, here's the thing. When people tell me annuities, when agents tell me annuities, are difficult and complicated. They have not studied because they are not difficult and they're not complicated. The most complicated thing about annuities is always knowing which company is going to be the best. That's one that takes the most time. But an annuity itself is not. An index or fixed annuity is not complicated. Variable annuities with your 70 to 500 page prospectuses, those absolutely can be brain damage. When you have page 75 contradict page 60 or excuse me, page 600. I saw a 900 page prospectus one time. What? I'm like.

That'S ridiculous.

But you don't understand my annuity. Yeah, your perspectives is a stinking phone book. But anyway, and I will say there's no hidden fees. They're there.

Yeah.

I mean, you just got to find which page they're on. Now, most variable annuities, in all fairness, they do have many prospectuses nowadays where everything's disclosed. But anyway, back to the fact, Back.

To the fact finder. Well, that's good. No, and I, and I totally agree. And it can be easy to jump into kind of over explaining and get into that. And certain types of clients can pull that out. And I actually kind of like what.

You'Re doing right now by repeating the same thing.

Well, I was, I was about to mention what I talked about last month. I mentioned something last month where we're trying to kind of revamp the mentality behind objections. And I said something, and I want to repeat it again for the podcast.

Basically just trying to get your wisdom out there one more time. Throw it out there one more time once a year. If we can do this, this, we got to get out.

Well, I don't want agents to run from objections because the reality is if you're running from objections, the client doesn't can't trust you. Correct. If they're asking questions and your assumption is, oh, that's an objection, and you try and run away from it, or you beat around the bush and you try to dodge it or whatever, they pick up on that. And there's no way that they can trust you if that's what's happening. So being the expert and being able to straightforward and in a concise way answer their questions with confidence and honesty.

If you don't address the objection, you're going to get another objection.

Absolutely.

And then they're going to wonder, why are you not answering their question?

Exactly.

Yeah.

And so objections, really at the heart of them, an objection is an opportunity for you as the agent to bring clarity. And when you Bring clarity. You simultaneously build confidence in their mind toward you. And confidence always produces sales, or rather, sales always stem from confidence. Somebody could have confidence and it still not be necessarily the right, right thing for them. But there's never been a sale that didn't stem from the client having confidence in their. In their agent or their advisor.

When I can tell you, you know, I've been married, we're coming up on 28 years, and we. I have three daughters. And I'm telling you, there's certain things I do not understand what the ladies in my life are thinking. You know, my daughters will think one thing, and I'm not supposed to. I'm supposed to interpret what they're thinking by how they look at me or the tone or whatever.

And.

And there are so many times I literally will just stop and go, okay, I don't understand any look you're giving me right now. I don't understand the tone. Can you please just tell me what you need? And clients are saying that they just want to know what we mean, explain it in a way they could understand. And I remember one time, I think my youngest daughter was 13 at the time or something, and I kind of made a real slight joke about a boy that she liked, and she started crying, and I literally turned to my wife and I go, can you please translate this? Because I don't understand what just happened. She goes, you don't ever tease a girl about a boy that she likes. I'm like, oh, okay, Well, I didn't know that. There's often times when our client is trying, we're trying to figure out what's going on in their mind, turn to the spouse and say, what are they saying? What do they mean? What do you interpret that is? Because a lot of times there's going to be one of the two spouses that wants this more than the other. And so what is it? That's their trigger? What do they need? What is their peace of mind? And that's where these fact finders come in. When I'm doing a fact finder, I'm constantly watching body language. I'm listening to the tone of their voice. I'm trying to interact. I'm truly trying to find out what is the root of their concern, not how do I get the sale. What is the root of their concern? And can I take care of that to where they don't even think about anymore. That's every fact finders revolved around that. Can I. Can I narrow it down to the exact thing they want and need.

Absolutely.

And that's.

I mean, it all comes back to it. It all comes back around to helping people right where they're at. We get to do it with what we do here in the office. You get to do it with what you do in the field. Agents get to do it with what they do in the field.

You know, it's pretty crazy because I just looked today, I opened up one of the companies that I write some business with, and I saw what I had paid for the year. I'm like, holy cow, that's a lot. But I never really sat there and go, when I'm writing the annuity, oh, how much commission am I going to make off this deal? I constantly am thinking about. I just had a client called me today and they were over the top. They're just, I'm so glad I did this. And this is four years. They want to put more money into it. Four years ago, I helped them. And remember, the markets went up a lot since then. But think about the volatility that's happened in the last four years and the craziness. And they said they don't even think about anymore. That's the win. That's the win.

Absolutely.

So good deal. I hope this helps everybody. You have a great day, and happy selling.