Strategies for Building Referral Sources to Generate Leads | 7 Figure Annuity Sales Podcast | Ep 249

All right, today we're going to talk about strategies for networking and building referral sources to generate annuity specific leads. I love this strategy for getting in front of new opportunities because, number one, it eliminates. Almost eliminates. There's always the time overhead, but it almost eliminates the overhead in getting in front of new people. At least the financial overhead.

Explain that.

Well, if you're dealing with a referral, I'm an agent and you're an agent, and probably I'm the annuity agent and you're the Medicare agent, and.

And you've got a big book of Medicare business and you don't really care to learn about annuities, and I'm an expert in annuities. So you just refer over your Medicare clients to me in exchange for a percentage of that.

Makes sense.

That's one structure. Right. So I'm not buying leads outright. I'm paying for the leads when there's a piece of business written.

So. So it just reduces the overhead. Like with CPAs, Medicare people, life insurance, property and casualty.

Exactly.

Okay.

Yeah.

Now you finally made sense.

Finally made sense.

I got it.

Well, sense is not my middle name, but my first name's Caleb. My last name's North.

This is Chad. I'll just be Chad today.

Just Chad.

Just Chad.

Not the annuity sales coach.

Nope.

Not owner of Retirement Realized Financial and Retirement Realized Agents Academy?

Nope. Heaven's Army?

Nope. Just Chad.

Just Chad.

Chad and Caleb having a good time talking about networking. It is a.

Which, by the way, I'm horrible at.

Right.

You want to hear an interesting thing? Most people don't know this, so I can go to anybody's house and I can talk to anybody.

Right.

You put me in a group. Like some of these networking things. Even. Even the words conferences. There's some people I don't know or I just don't feel like talking. I am. I become reclusive. Like, Leilani will go, where's Chad? I'm holding the baby, you know, I.

Mean, standing next to the table of hors d'. Oeuvres.

No, no, because that's where everybody comes over, you know, And I love talking with people, but my little, like, getaway zone.

Yeah.

Put a little baby in my hands and I'm just in my own little world there. So referral and networking does not come natural to me. That's probably why I don't do that great. In actual referrals.

Sure. You get them as a result of doing good business.

Correct. Yeah. So I do definitely get referrals that way. I mean, I, I have another 300,000 I'm writing tomorrow because of a referral.

Right.

You know, know. And that's a pretty normal thing. And that's why I do want to just. Let me give you a little moment of encouragement here. People get frustrated when they been doing this for one year or two years, and they're like, man, it's just not building that quick. Stick with it. Because almost 19 years later, I have people that just out of the blue, hey, my uncle told me they had an annuity with you and, you know, it works that way. And that's without even asking. Now, I do have agents that, man, they're so good at asking for referrals. They don't have that many lead sources, if any, and they continue to get referrals or they do. Like, I know one guy, he just has. He's literally the person for the town. They actually, the mayor made Safe money Day.

That's awesome.

Isn't that insane?

So cool.

And so you now get the city having a safe money day because of you. Because why every Thanksgiving, Christmas, he's giving out stuff. He has billboards everywhere. Everywhere he goes. He wears his jacket and his cap and, you know, for his company. And he is the guy.

That's awesome.

That's. That's the master referral slash networker I think I've probably ever seen in my entire life.

Sure.

Then you have Chad. I do not wear my shirts outside of the office if I'm not renting, like an appointment day. Excuse me, A non appointment day or even days I'm working where I don't have appointments or I don't have to do podcasts. I'm not wearing T shirts. Well, I am. Yeah. My heavens. Army shirts. Because those are cool. Those are really sick. I love those. But, you know, that's my style. But this guy goes everywhere. He has a little thing on his car. I. I mean, everywhere he goes. And I'm just. That's a networker to me.

Yeah.

I'm just not good at that.

Yeah, that's all right.

We're gonna. I choose to be.

It's true. It's true. But I do want your. I want your thoughts on these pieces. We're gonna cover four. Four different pieces. We're gonna talk about identifying target referral sources. We're gonna talk about building relationships with potential referral sources and talk about overcoming common challenges when dealing with referral referral sources. And then we're going to talk about measuring success and tracking results. All of which is super Important. So the first one there.

And I will say I do know some agents that make a lot of money off of partnerships. They do, yeah. I mean, it's, it is. I'm not knocking it, it's just not something I have a strength in. But man, the agents that get that down, it's incredible what they can do.

It's true. I, I know a handful of agents that already this year have written between 3 and 5 million individually on just purely referrals from other lines of business.

You know what it costs me to not be good networker and referral person.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars, 250,000 a.

Year at least in leads. So this is why it is important to get good at this. It's true, it's true.

The first thing I would encourage you to do when you're trying to identify target referral sources is look for complementary services and industries. Basically what other industries and services have the opportunity to work with the type of demographic that you're looking for. Right.

Like a daycare?

No, no, probably not, Chuck E. Cheese. Unless it's.

Well, daycare for like, okay, seniors.

You didn't just go down that road, did you? You do not go to a daycare for seniors to get annuity leads. Just so you know.

It's true. But complementary services or industries that are working with your ideal demographic and yes, it wouldn't be a daycare because they need to be in sound mind. All those, all of those important cognitive pieces there need to be intact.

But cannot sell my father in law an annuity right now.

Right.

Because tomorrow he'd ask me what it was.

Yeah, it's true.

Next day he'd ask me what it was.

It's true. Common areas that I encourage agents to look for other insurance agents. Right. But maybe that aren't selling annuities.

So you've got a casualty. Life insurance insurance, Medicare.

Medicare is a big one I think, because just they're working with hundreds of people that are all in primetime. I mean, that's. That to me, a Medicare agent that has no interest in learning or selling annuities themselves, but wants to refer clients over to you, that that's about as good as it gets.

Which is boggling to me because there is way more groundwork and what's, what's the word I'm looking for? Administrative intensive.

Oh, totally.

At this. Medicare annuities are not administrative intensive. They're just not right.

It's true, it's true. It's, it's a, the nature of the working relationship on the Annuity side, I don't like this word, but it is more of a transactional type of, of deal. It's, it's. There's less and I said I don't like the word.

The reason I say let's rewind according to your last one, let's rewind. And definitely not transactional.

The reason I say transactional though, is because you're not dealing typically with.

Residual type of opportunities there and your interaction with your clientele on an annual basis. Once you get really past the first sale, once, maybe twice a year, the year that they're like activating income or.

They'Ve got some random administrative questions. Find a different word than transitional.

Trans.

Transactional. Yes, I.

And again, I don't like the word because I think it makes it seem like it's all about a sale. But I.

It's a non negotiable.

Find a different word.

Also check out CPAs, attorneys, real estate agents, people like that. That again, they've trust attorneys.

Yeah, yeah.

They're working with the type of people that would be prime time for an annuity conversation or retirement planning conversation, but aren't licensed and maybe don't really care to learn the ins and outs of how to do it themselves.

That's what I tell people. You know, when you're in a smaller town, when you're in a town that has millions, yes, this is still very effective. It's still a great way to do things. But when you're in rural towns, like you have 30, 40, 50,000 people, it's. I would say this is a necessity. You know, if I lived in a very small town, I'd have to totally rethink the way I do my marketing.

Right.

And you know, you could also say, well, I'll just do more virtual appointments. That's true. Remember, I have no issue with virtual appointments. I probably write a couple million a year at least from virtual appointments. But if you want to do big money, it's about the relationship. You're not doing the relationship because of the big money. It's because they trust you. We talked about that last episode about the trust, right. You know, people before they release a bunch of money to you. For example, I just had a call today. I talked to someone, I said about how much do you have in IRAs? And she said, well, you know, I don't even know who you are. You know, I don't know if I want to release that. I said, ma', am, I don't care if you have 10 million or you have 50,000 this is just sheerly for illustration purpose, found out she had 1.4 million. And it's because the way I worded that that she now trusted. But you know, when you get the Trust with these CPAs, these lawyers, when they know that you're going to do the right thing with expertise, the. They'll refer people to you all day long because they know they can trust you.

That's right. That's right. Yeah. Big piece of that trust is not degrading what they have with that client already. But we're going to get into that in a minute when we talk about.

Challenges, because I've heard this too.

I also want to add that it's extremely valuable to create these types of working relationships with people that you can connect with on a deeper level than just a business arrangement. Obviously, there's value in seeing eye to eye on the business arrangement side of it. That's crucial and important. But if it's somebody that you can connect with and you've got common ground in other areas, that, that, that really helps take the working relationship to the next level for sure. As far as building relationships with these potential referral sources, there's a particular key, it's got to be mutually beneficial, and it's mutually beneficial where the equitability. Okay, so each party getting what is fair and right for them, make sure.

You'Re doing this legally.

Yes.

Yeah. Because they need to be life insurance licensed to get the commission on that.

Correct? Yeah, that's, that's, that's super important to remember. But that equitability should be based on the value that's being brought to the table and the time spent to obtain the result. Right. So if, for example, a Medicare agent is a referral source for you as an annuity agent and all they're doing is just sending you contacts, there is value there, but there is not much time spent to do that. Whereas now you have to take that with time to create a value opportunity and then apply more time to actually obtain the result. So when you're structuring that deal, you need to keep those things in mind. If for the same example, the Medicare agent was going to be calling these people, creating a warm handoff, that's more value and more time. You need to structure that deal accordingly.

Funny. Someone tell me one time, they're like, and this was fairly recent, they're like, hey, I got a deal for you. They go, I want a 50, 50 split, but I'll give you all the leads you want and I get a 50, 50 split. I'm like, wait a second. So that means I need to write 80 million in annuities just to break even so I don't have to pay $250,000 a year for my marketing. If they would have approached it, hey, I get a half of percent one, which still would have made them stupid money, you know, I mean, if you write 40 million a year in annuities and you get 10% of the commission, that's a really good deal.

Sure.

You know, but, you know, if you're doing a ton of work for them, don't sell yourself short. It's like these guys that produce or give leads, and they want 65% of your comp or 50% of your comp if they're a good producing agent. Like, we have agents where we pay for leads, and I'll go up to 70%. Now, why wouldn't you go more? Because I know how much my leads cost.

Right.

But they're doing the majority of the work. So therefore, I mean, if I minus my lead costs out of that and how much I've increased leads because I'm trying to fill them with leads. And by the way, you know, this is a side note. I usually don't do this, but if you're in the Austin area and you're good at annuities, I am looking to potentially bring someone on that I could supply leads with. We have one of our really good agents that's moving to another city, and I'm looking possibly maybe kind of to look at this now. I'm overemphasizing that. Because we have a very specific culture, and excellence is very important. Our relationships are very important. So. And we talk about this, you know, relationships are everything. And if you're going to get into this business, we need to be able to work well together. But. Okay, I think that pitch for the potential possibility of maybe you used a.

Word there that I think is key, and it's relationship, and it's one that I use at the beginning of this particular portion of it. And it's building relationships with referral sources because that's ultimately what it ought to be. I think it's different than some kind of.

Contractual arrangement. Not that there shouldn't be a contractual arrangement as well.

That's actually a very good point. It's wise to have that you want some sort of in writing, because the worst time to find something doesn't work out the way you thought it did is when you actually are in the middle of whatever the payment or you need or you find out this is the time to access it and it doesn't work the way you thought.

Right.

That's a bad thing.

Yeah. Well, that's actually a great segue into some challenges, common challenges that I've seen. Frustrations one way or the other. Okay. So either the referrer or the referraleer is frustrated about too few referrals. Right. So if you're the one getting the referrals and they're just not getting them over to you, as many as you need, that can create a frustration. And now you're having conversations.

I have a partnership with the trust attorney where I could refer him probably once or twice a week and he hasn't referred one person to me. And so that, that lasted very short. He's getting four grand per trust deal and not one person he's referred to me.

That goes back to the mutual benefit. There wasn't mutual benefit in the way that played out in the concept. There was, but in the practice.

Don't want to help my client. Is that I don't know if somebody's not saying they're telling you they're going to refer someone, but they don't, that becomes a trust issue.

Sure.

So.

And it's like, do I want to send my clients to this guy who isn't quite honoring what he told me he would do?

Trust issue with the person who does trust.

Interesting. Yeah, that's an irony of irony.

Irony of irony.

Another one is missed deals. Right. So they send referrals over to you and your closing rate is just on the floor. That's going to frustrate them.

Oh, for sure.

Because they're sending you value and there's nothing coming back to them. Especially if the way that you all have it arranged is as a percentage of comp. Yeah, that's. That's a tough situation. And then the last one, and this one would be.

To me, the biggest, the biggest issue of them all is potentially losing the client for both of you. And this is going to be the biggest hiccup that you have in working with other agents. Lines of business that are primarily residual based is that their primary revenue stream is on the basis of those residuals and continuing to nurture that relationship. So if they then send those people over to you and you screw something up and now this person leaves both, that's going to create a bigger problem.

And a lot of times, if you operate in ethics, integrity with excellence, you're going to avoid the vast majority of those issues.

It's true. And I think setting clear Expectations on the front end discussing each part of the process and who's responsible for what. Just having good, clean, clear communication with shared meaning. Have a relationship that's backed contractually. Set it up clean and kosher and good. You'll be okay. Yeah.

Yeah. Was that it?

Success in tracking results. This is one thing I want to hit real briefly because we pretty much.

There do need to.

Yeah, you want to be able to back up the results you've obtained numerically. Right. So actually, having empirical data, that is just. It's logic. It's not emotional. It's not.

Well, we have someone who refers agents to us all the time and we make sure we track.

We do.

This is how many we got. This is who we call. This is how many we've closed. This is why we didn't close someone if it's a case. And because, you know, you know, we. We own our own fmo. I mean, Retirement Realized financial is very up and coming and we're doing phenomenal at building this thing and. But we will not work with everybody. It's gotta be the right alignment. So if they send someone our way, we'll say, this is why we didn't accept the partnership.

Right.

So, you know, if you have a client and often. We'll see. You know, I remember one time somebody referred an agent to me and I'm like, yeah. We chose not to do that. And their response was, yeah, you know what? We had weird feelings about them too. I'm like, why'd you send them my way then?

Yeah, Rascal, for sure. They're probably messing with me.

Some KPIs to key performance indicators to keep track and measure of the referrals you receive per month. The contact rate. Right. So you receive 10 referrals this month. How many have you contacted? How many times have you tried to reach out? Right. They want to see, you're trying to. So if you call them one time and that's it, and you're like, oh, yeah, these referrals are terrible. It's like, well, you need to work a little harder on these. So contact rate, appointment rate. Okay, so the percentage of people that you book an appointment with, you get 10, you set an appointment with six. Great. 60% appointment rate, your sit rate, the percentage of people that you book appointments with that actually show up. So you booked six, but only three showed. That's a 50% sit rate, your close rate. So the people that you meet with that actually end up having a deal done, you meet with three, you close one, you got a 33% close rate. And then lastly your average case size. So what I mean if you take all the total written premium divided by the number of. Of referrals you got. What's, what's that average look like?

I'd like to add another thing. When you do close a deal and you do get paid and you're past the free look period, which I'm telling you, you need to be that if you're going to be sharing commissions, make sure you pay them on time.

Right? Another yes. So and here's a. Here's a logical way. Okay. So you can receive all the commission yourself. Make sure they're licensed, they're correctly set up legally. Right. To be able to receive a commission as a result of the sale of a product. Because that's what it is. Even if you're paying them out. That's what that is. Or go ahead. If they're not licensed, have them get licensed. Have them get appointed. Have them work with your imo. I have agents right now that they literally work with two or three other agents that are contracted with us. These other agents don't write business but they're contracted with us for the sake of doing applications.

And then way if there's a chargeback, they get hit too.

Exactly. It comes straight from the carrier. You don't ever have to mess with it. It's way cleaner. It's easy to do well as.

That was good.

Yeah.

Boy. This is our fourth, third or fourth week in a row. We've wan a little long.

We were going. Yeah.

We just love you guys that much. So. Okay. Hope this helps you guys. You have a great day and happy selling.

It.