Processing Your Leads in a New Way | 7 Figure Annuity Sales Podcast | Ep. 115

Hello, everyone. This is Chad Owen, the annuity sales coach, owner of Retirement Realized Financial and Retirement Realized Agents Academy. Welcome to this month, this week's. Holy cow, where's everything going? This week's podcast. I'm telling you, I love doing these podcasts, especially this new format, but sometimes finding the time. And yes, I'm wearing the same shirt because we're grouping these together. It's okay. Just pretend this is now elk antlers, not deer antlers. It's the same thing. But I'm trying to make sure we have a consistent pattern and kind of that they flow a little better. Because one of the things that's hard is when you're an agent and you have trainers bouncing all over the place. Now I'm doing a podcast as a broad topic. And then of course, you know, in our academy, we dig deep in this. I mean, we have hours and hours and hours of training. We're literally. We have roadmaps. This roadmap is about fact finding. This roadmap is about phone calls. And we dig deep into this. We have individual courses. We have all my handouts that you go over that you can use during your appointments. We have our marketing organization where we're different. As you can see, we don't have a green screen behind us. I don't have my fancy little suit on. As you know me, I have a no tie policy. Someone's dead or someone's getting married.

I.

That's all.

I'm thankful for it. That means I don't have to work.

My wife does every once in a while. She asked me to dress up and I'll do that for her, but that's it. But the reality is, is we want to be as real as we can. As you know, I'm in a field just like you, an agent, just like you, run in appointments just like you. I run into the same objections, I run into the same issues, I run the same problems. You know, it's just a part of business. And this is why the. And I mean this with the utmost honor, but it's hard for someone that sits behind a desk to do training when they're not in the field, just like you. Now, I am not slamming marketers at all. There's a lot that really put their heart, their energy and their effort into it. They really want what's best for their agents. But you know what? I can't do what they do. There's some things that they do that I'm just not qualified or have the patience and endurance that they have. I mean, I know markers that consistently, the entire day they're on the phone, sitting in desk, and some of them don't take lunches. Why? Because you've got that agent that's in a crisis situation, needs an illustration right away. So, I mean, so I respect and admire the marketers, but you know what? I do this every single week. Tuesday through Thursday, I run appointments. I. I make calls on Monday. I mean, I do my own pending business. It's just. This is what I do. And so I love helping you. I know that's a long intro, but the reality is, I just want you to know I'm no different than y'. All. I mean, oh, man, I just spoke Texanese. I guess I'm no different than y' all right there. But I'm the same. I deal with the same issues. So that's why I'm here to help you.

I love it.

What do you got going?

Yeah. So I want to talk about. You'll probably have to think back to when you were first kind of starting in the industry and think back to. You weren't buying the leads that you are now. You had to work with other things. What were some things that you were able to do back then that maybe agents can implement now? It can help them when they don't have what it takes to buy new leads.

Yeah. You know what? I was just actually talking to an agent earlier, and I gave up a big. When I was in life insurance, I gave up a big percentage of my commission to get leads. And the crazy thing is, is they have the A leads. The A leads were anything newer than six months. Then you had the B leads that were six months to two years, and then you had the C leads that were two years or more. And, man, I used to scoop up those B and C leads. They didn't cost me anything, and I didn't care, man. To me, I knew I was good at what I did. I was an expert when I did. I knew that. I called. I mean, some people said they called these leads many times. I found leads that were two years old that had two notes on them. So don't tell me you called. You just went through it once, which a lot of agents still to this day do. They'll call one or two times, go, well, that leads no good. I still now call for a whole month. And if I start to run low on leads, I'll go to two months. If I run low on leads again, I'll go to three months. I mean, I don't care and now I will stop if somebody says, hey, I don't want help. Fine. That's no big deal. Move on to the next one. But as far as finding leads, it's really, you know, know. I'm also not one of those people. I'm heavily involved in church. The church is not my place to market what I do. You know, I saw someone one time wear their name tag in church. And I went up to that person. Are you confused to who you are? And, like, what do you mean? I go, why are you wearing your name tag to what you do? And they go, well, I was hoping to drum up some business. So you saw what Jesus did to the tables. Turn it into the marketplace. I'm about to overturn you, bud. Get that off. And they took it off, respectfully, so I didn't have to overturn anything. But anyway, that's not your lead source. And your friends and family are by no means a lead source if you don't know what you're doing. Don't practice someone's 20 years of retirement on your friends. Sure. There's an organization out there that will call your friends and family, ask them if you can practice on them. What, and then they get sales from that. I'm going, you don't even know what you're talking about.

There's a big difference between practicing when it's legitimate practice and practicing selling. And you're legitimately trying to get a deal. Yeah, there's a big.

Yeah, these annuities do 500% over the past two years. What? Like.

That'D be all right?

I've heard some. I've heard some crazy things. Yeah, these annuities have done 15% over the past 10 years. What annuity is that? Sign me up. No, leads are literally something that you really do have to put money into. You know, I hear agent after agent after agent call, what's the cost of your leads? They don't say, what's your investment in leads? Leads are not a cost to me. They're an investment. You know, if the only thing I get to do is talk to a client and not necessarily help them, but I get to invest in them and help them in a question they might have, then I'm willing to do that. Absolutely. But you know what? Stop calling leads a cost. They're an investment. Because just right away, you're already saying, this cost me something, instead of saying, what does it cost me to talk? Now let me use a better example. What does it cost me to talk to my wife? Nothing. I get to invest in her. I do get. Invest in you, I guess.

But you see what I'm saying though, Your language of calling a cost versus an investment, if it cost you something, it's almost like, yeah, it ripped something out of me. No, I get to invest in my business.

It's really good. That's really good. And that's. I mean, it goes back to mindset. And we talk about mindset all the time, you know, having that success mindset. And you know, you're just believing you're going to get it done, but also taking that approach to even the lead, somebody you've never talked to yet, but. But you're in vet. You've got that because you decided to invest into it. So that is important. Chad, how I've heard you say before you would basically do whatever you needed to do that was obviously within legal bounds to get things in. If things were to slow down. I mean, if your lead companies were to tomorrow disappear into thin air and you had to figure out a way to generate leads, I mean, you've got to figure out something. So I imagine there's some things you would do in that. One of the things that came to mind for me is you talk about calling B and C leads. Well, what if an agent doesn't have access to a marketing organization that's got BNC leads just kind of sitting on the side? Could they reach out to another agent?

Here's the thing. I get confused. Okay, I'm going to go open up a tire shop. What money do you have and invest nothing. How are you going to get the tires? I don't know. I don't have the money. You're not going to start a tire shop.

That's true.

You know, when you get to this business, and I don't mean this to be a slam or anything, it's a tough business to get in and be successful in. But you need to start with capital. Now, what was My Capital initially? $150,000 on the credit card. But how many times do people take out small business loans to start a business? That's what I did. I took out a small business loan and then I played the 0% interest game, moving it around for holy cow years. And then finally once I topped out of that and then I just really got good at this, had a couple of big deals and wiped everything out. But, you know, I was willing to do that. I was willing to cut way back on things to afford leads. Agents tell me they can't afford leads while they're sipping on their $8 cup of coffee. Coffee. You know, I mean, it's like I said, it sounds harsh, but it's a reality. You know, the best mentors in my life have been the ones that have been direct, not the ones that sugarcoat things, say things I want to hear. You know, what if you step on my toes, But I can feel the hug. I'm going to take that all day long, you know, And I just have to be direct with people. You cannot start companies without being willing to have either some sort of capital or the ability to borrow something. No. Business starts with nothing. I can't say no. It's incredibly rare. Sure. You know, even the people that worked out of their garage, you know, I've heard some of these stories where they're literally ramen noodles for a year and virtually no expenses. Why? Because they're pouring everything back into their business. So we just need to understand that if you want to be successful in this, there's going to be a cost. It will. I talked about cost versus investment. Now this is where I'm talking to. It will cost you something. You know, nothing is free now. I'm all for blessings, I'm all for favor. I'm all for things we get that we don't deserve. I'm all. I totally get that. But there's got to be a cost where you feel it and you feel the pain and you feel the hurt, and you're going, man, this is tough. But when that happens, the reward is so much greater. Sure.

Yeah, that's true. Because there's more of you tied up into it. You've got more at stake with it. And so when it takes off, you're really. You really. I mean, it's just. It hits your heart.

Well, I think it's funny. It's kind of like, you know, you hear people driving rental cars. Well, it's just a rental. I don't care. You know, I'll slam on the brakes. I'll accelerate. It's just a rental. No, that's someone else's livelihood.

It's true.

You know, that's someone else's livelihood. So if you treat it just like a rental, that causes my insurance rates to go up. How much? Because you end up wrecking it. Or, now I'm going to rent a car and it costs more. Why? Because you're a dodo and you thought it would be okay to do that. I mean, I even think of things like, you know, it's stewardship. It's, what do we do with what we're given. So someone in a hotel room and there's like jumping all over the beds and they're making a whole bunch of noise and I'm going, oh, it's a hotel room. No. What about the poor guy below you that's trying to sleep, that's doing a business appointment or something and he's trying to get some sleep, but you're letting your kids jump all over the bed. You know, it's like, you know, we have to think of what were our actions do that affects other people. And so we need to look at when it comes to leads, when it comes to how we help and how we treat leads, what we're willing to do to get leads. Everything we do has a consequence. You decide if it's good or bad, but everything we do in life has a consequence. So when we want leads but we don't have enough money, then we need to cut back on something. It's that simple.

Yeah.

You know, or buy, you know, I mean, I, some. My leads cost $350 a piece right Now. Sometimes I get the same client hitting all four of my lead sources. That just cost me over 1200 bucks for that one lead. But if I didn't have that, then I'd be sitting there going, okay, well then I need to buy a lot less leads or a lot lower price leads. There are some annuity leads out there. I don't know the comment, the most recent ones, but there's some that cost 20, $25 apiece. But you're sharing that with 10 or 15 other agents. So that means you need to be the one that literally as soon as they come in, you need to be the one to call. Sure. Or. Or if you're not the first one to call, you need to be the one that sounds better than everybody else and knows what you're talking about. So there's, you gotta. I mean, if you don't have money for leads, borrow if you know this is what you want to do. Because it's just like somebody take. I mean, small business loans are very common.

That's true.

I mean, sometimes it takes that. That's true.

That's good. And let's talk about working old leads in general.

I mean, what's an old lead?

Once again, I have old leads. Good. You're not selling them because you think they're old leads. I didn't look at the B and the C leads as old leads. You know, those were a lead. It was a brand new lead to me. Have I seen that person before? No. Have I met them before? So is it old lead? To me. So if you think it's an old lead, guess what? It's an old lead. You're not closing it. It's a mindset from the very beginning.

That's good.

That's good.

So your approach to old lead, DNC leads.

Yeah.

Is the same as if it was brand new.

It is brand new. I mean, what would happen if I treated my wife that way? Sorry, you're an old lead, Babe, we've been married for 20 years. Not fresh anymore. I mean, come on.

Yeah, that'd be not good. I know your wife.

That wouldn't go over well every day. I mean, this is just a message of life. Because once again, I. I'm telling you, I know we're talking about annuities, but the mind says everything. If you go through life going the same monotonous thing over and over and over again, I do the same dumb old thing every single day. You're not going to be a happy person. But if you go, man, you know what? I've never been here before. Why? I've never been here before. Why? Because I've never been this old before. Why? Because the clock is always ticking, okay? And one of these days, we're not going to wake up. Oh, it's okay. I'm fine with that. You can't threaten me with heaven. I'm good to go.

So that's a good. That's a good mindset, though, to have going into that, obviously. I mean, it's so funny how it seems like everything we talk about in some way, shape or form, loops right back to mindset. It is, but it seems like it is often the weak point in an agent's process.

I mean, I think about even what we're going through right now with the pandemic and all the political junk and all that. I mean, people go and hide in their little caves and they don't want to get out. And I'm not saying, you know, if you have health issues and you got to protect yourself and isolate, I get that, but the reality is there's still people out there walking around with smiles, without their mask. You know, it's like they're able to enjoy life no matter what's going on. So if you have a lead that's two years old or you have a lead that's brand new, has that person been helped yet? No. Do you still have an opportunity to help them? Yes. So is that fresh? Absolutely. It's all about the mindset. But, man, if you're not willing to spend money in leads if you're not willing to work old leads if you're not willing to make the sacrifices, this is going to be a really tough business for you to be into. Like I said, I was in debt seven times. Why? I mean, because when we get out of debt I'd celebrate by taking us out to dinner on a credit card. Yeah, just didn't figure out the routine. Took seven times but then figured it out now. Oh yeah, no, we are so far out of debt it's not even funny. But it's because we also, even though we have money now, we still just were very deliberate in where we spend it. So I always have a surplus budget for leads. I always make sure I have multiple lead sources and that's what I'd recommend for you. So I hope you guys have a great day and as always, happy selling.