Success Is Not Easy | 7 Figure Annuity Sales Podcast | Ep. 320

Hey, everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of seven figure annuity sales.

At what point do we upgrade it to eight figure? Like we've done seven.

Not my lifetime.

I mean, I mean, well, if you took actual sales, I guess we could. Right?

Well, you're an eight figure.

I am producer.

You write 30 to 35 million a year in annuity premium, but that equates to seven figures of comp. Yeah, there's a lot of agents out there that they're chasing that first seven figure year of production. So it's kind of like a, I guess hear it how it applies to you. Seven figures worth of commission or seven figures worth of production.

Or maybe, maybe we should send an invitation only to the eight figure annuity sales. Yeah, yeah, let's see if we. We have, we have a group of people, but I mean, most people don't realize this. In this industry, that's very, very tough. You know, we sell 10 million a.

Year plus is no joke.

There's not a lot of people out there that do that. And the reason why it seems like it's way more than what it is is because there's a lot of people out there that say they write volume that they really don't. What I mean by that is they're written businesses with sub agents as well. And so when you look at that, that's not an individual doing that. So don't get discouraged. If you're writing 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, $7 million, that's phenomenal amount of business. Now, does that make you not want to do more? No, of course, always want to do more. But don't be discouraged. I had someone literally tell me the other day they felt like a dud because I posted the numbers I did, and it felt like they hadn't accomplished, but they wrote 3 million. And I'm like, 3 million still puts you in the top 1% of all annuity agents in the United States and written business. So, I mean, you got to remember annuity agents, the term honestly is held very lightly. Do you know 78% of realtors last year did not sell one home? 78%. But if you ask them, what do you do for a living? They say, well, I'm a realtor. There's a lot of agents out there that have only written 2, 3, 4, 500,000 for the year and they call themselves annuity agents. And I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just saying don't get discouraged. When you think you see all these people writing these huge numbers Often they have downlines, you know, and so they're writing 15 million, but they have five agents under them. And I'm not saying they're not out there that do because I'm one of them. But I go to these conferences all the time where awards or whatever and I run into people all the time that they say they do something and I find out how big their team is, is not true. So, you know, don't get discouraged. I mean, that's not. We've already talked about his last two episodes about making sure you know your product, making sure you, you know, that you hear the information is correct. And this includes from what we hear in our industry because it's so easy to get discouraged and thinking I haven't arrived, I, I'm not gonna make it. And here's the key.

Man, I, I like talking a lot about things I run into during the week. And I recently been running to the agents that won't spend $2,000 on leads. Why don't have the money? Neither did I. That's how come I became $150,000 in credit card debt. But once it cracked, once it popped, where I had that two and a two and a half million dollar deal that I ended up having to split because it was an agent that we actually partnered with and they just did life insurance that they thought it was a life insurance deal, but because of the face mount, they were intimidated by it. I went out there, it wasn't a life insurance deal, they needed income. So we had this huge opportunity and once that happened, once I had that deal where I broke a million. Now to me, a million dollars is not a big deal. A million dollar sale is not a big deal. Actually, 3,5 million dollar deal is not a big deal because I, in my brain, I have trained it to treat the million dollar deal like the $100,000 deal because it's the same impact to the client. I've used this example many times. If you have $100,000 and you lose 30%, you have $70,000. If you have $10 million and you lose 30% for you, you're at $7 million. I would beg to differ that generally the person that has less money is more impacted by market volatility than the person who has way more money. They're not generally impacted the same. So in my heart, in my mind, and I just did this a few weeks ago, I had a three million dollar week. I was happy about it, but I wasn't giddy about it. You know, I was just like, okay, this is a good week. The other thing, you fight too. And people often don't understand this. When you start producing big numbers, it does not matter what you did the previous week. It's what are you doing now? You can't write on what you did. It's what you're doing. And that's actually. I saw this really good video. Josh sent it to me and it says the that the key factor to champions is not what do they do or what do they have that I don't have, it's what don't they have that I don't have. And the thing is, is a champion does not have an off button. They just don't shut off.

Is that Alex or Mosey?

I believe so, yeah. And it was so inspiring to me because there's a lot of people that give me a hard time because I can't shut my brain down. I really can't. I try unless I'm on a cruise. If I'm on a cruise or we're on some. If I'm with Leilani and we're on in some trip somewhere or even with. We take the whole family and we go, I can shut my brain down there. I can literally stop thinking about business. It's not difficult. But if I'm in my territory, my brain does not shut down. There is no off button. I woke up last night at 3 o' clock thinking about something is constant, that I wake up in the middle of night and I'm thinking of ideas how to do things, how to change things, how to make things better for people. And I often I will start texting my. Not texting myself, emailing my stuff myself, reminders. And all of a sudden, you see from 2 to 4:30am I got this string of emails that I sent of just the subject line is ideas. And then I transfer them when I wake up. But that is the thing. And I think in our industry, if you want to be successful, as long as when you're working, I'm not saying vacations, when you're on a date with your wife or you're out with your spouse, you have an off button. You need to focus directly on them. Now there is a reference though. You, you don't have an off button. You're just. Your button is going to something else. So I'm focused on work. When I'm on a date with. With my wife now my on button is for her. Like that is. There's. There's no off button that is on time with her unless. And my Wife is really good at this, where she says, time to turn things off. You know, she'll literally tell me to just veg because she sees, you know, my brain just wants to ignite into cloud of smoke at times because I have so many different compartments going at once. And gears and when you want to succeed in this business, I don't have enough leads. Figure it out. Well, how many leads do you have? I have 30. Then call again. You don't have to leave a message every time. Call again. When's the last time you went through a training platform? When's the last time you tried to better yourself? You always have something to do. And so, I mean, go play a round of golf, find a twilight golf and go out play golf. And I. I know there's people out there right now that literally, they get a lot of their business from golfing. Now, I would lose a lot of business from golfing because I spend most of my time in the trees trying to find the ball, and I'd never be able to talk to the person. Well, Caleb, don't laugh. You're way worse than that for two times in a row.

I'm laughing because I can relate.

I'm like, you've said two times now. You said you're. Gonna. You and Josh are gonna destroy Jesse and I. And the first time, I think we were 21 ahead of you. And I think this last time we were 15 or 17 ahead of you, and that was with elk hazards. We have a herd of elk out there running around, and we still kick your tail.

So age beat beauty on that one.

Oh, age always beats beauty. Beauty's frailing. Except when it's my wife. My wife always has beauty, but shameless plug. And she's not here right now. I wish I should have said that when she's walking around.

Yeah, brownie points are worth a lot more when they can actually hear what you say.

Well, conditions your heart, right? If you're constantly thinking that if you dwell on bad things, you're going to think bad things. If you dwell on good things, you're going to dwell, you're going to think good things. So if I'm constantly thinking, even my wife's not there, is how beautiful she is, how great she is, how much she loves me, how much she takes care of me when she walks into that room, what am I going to feel if I. If I sit there and I think, man, my wife stinks. She's no good. She doesn't treat me well when she walks in that room, what Am I going to think, you know, it's the same thing. It's the same thing with business, right? If I kind of constantly think, man, the annuity industry stinks. I'm not making any money. I'm not going to be able to do anything. I can't get enough leads, guess what? That's going to happen. Now, I'm not a person that says speaking into existence is a reality. Speaking with action is what creates reality.

Yeah, there's you talking about that made me think of this, this kind of contrasting idea that there is a difference between somebody who wants it to work easily and somebody who wants it to work.

Yeah, that's good.

You know, if, if, if that. And I think that there are plenty of agents out there that fall into the camp of, I want this to work, but I want it to work easily.

There's no easy. There is no easy in success that. Period. I will debate this all un. Had somebody hand a whole bunch of money to you, which that's not even easy, too, because if you think about it, you still got to maintain it. You know, we watched this show called Downton Abbey, and we watched it for all the seasons. And the funny thing is, is how they got handed all this money. And their whole job was literally to. To schmooze people, to entertain people, to do all these things, to keep the appearance of the lifestyle going. But they never had jobs themselves. They tried to have people maintain everything, and there's multiple times where they almost ran out of money because they didn't manage it. And you could think, you know, we could be handed a $5 million annuity deal and not manage the money well, and you're never going to succeed there. So that's why I always tell people, right, if you get a $500,000 sale and annuity, always make sure a portion of that money goes towards your lead system. If you're constantly trying to meet your monthly expenses and you don't learn how to learn delayed gratification and how to spend that money wisely, but also how to plant seed for the next harvest. If you eat all your seed, that's it. You have nothing to plant. So you've got to take a portion of every sale and put it into your lead bucket.

That's right. Well, and here's the deal. When you look at the earning potential that this industry has for agents, and you can quite literally go out and you can close two or three sales per month, which is less than one a week, which in most corporate sales roles is enough to get you fired because that's not enough sales. You can go close three sales a month and make double what doctors and some lawyers are making.

Oh, easily. I, I think about, I mean, you, you know, If I write 30 million a year in annuities, you got an idea of what I make per year. And I don't have a college degree. I don't now I have tons of money I've spent in college. It just was never at a school. It was, yeah, you've got, oh, I've gotten tuition, man. It was lessons in life that I've lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on. And man, that was expensive college. But it is true in our industry you can make a lifestyle very easy off just of a few sales per month. But you have to put money aside for future business, for future leads.

And my argument is that you don't get to have that kind of earning potential and it just be easy. Like what I'm saying is it's not an easy thing to go and sell annuities. It's not. And if it were, insurance companies wouldn't pay what they pay. So they're paying what they pay because the value of that premium that comes in is worth it. And the challenge to get it is real. So if you, if you're one of those agents that wants it, but wants it to be easy, that's going to be your ceiling, is as soon as it gets hard, you're not going to do what needs to be done to make it happen.

It's easy to say that you have a million dollar annuity, you make $60,000 a commission. Commission, that's what a lot of people make an entire year. But if you know what it takes for me to have that million dollar deal, in other words, the amount of studying, the amount of hours like I get home and the product changes, I'm studying that product at night. I mean, I went through a phase where I went three weeks in a row working about 70 hours a week. This was just recently. And if it wasn't for that one week where I had the break, but three weeks in a row I was working the hours. Two of those weeks I had 155,000 in sales. So one out of the two weeks at 155,000 sales, the third week I had 3 million. So I could easily get discouraged on those two weeks that I was working 70 plus hours a week and just going, I am exhausted. And I do hear people say this all the time. I used to have agents run right along with me and go Chad, I can't go at your pace. Well, then fine, go at half my pace and write 15 million. You know, I mean, don't push as hard. If I wanted to, I could work 30 hours a week. I know it. I could work 30 hours a week and I could easily write 20 million a year in annuities. But why is that? It's just like the figure skater. And I use this analogy all the time because my wife loves watching figure skating. And you get them out there and they look so graceful, they look so elegant. But how many times did they fall? If you ever watch how they train, how many times they fall, how many bruises, how many broken bones. You think of gymnasts. Same, same things, right? Downhill skiers, you know, how many times did they eat it? I mean, all those skiers have multiple knee surgeries, multiple surgeries throughout their body when they had accidents. And it, it's a lot of pain, it's a lot of scars, it's a lot of hurt. To become an expert in your industry, are you willing to bear through that to become that expert?

That's right.

It's like, I mean, look at you. I mean, you're not making it anywhere. You're not doing anything. It's like, it's because. And you're hurt. You clearly got hit in the face really hard one time. Right now.

When I fell out of the ugly tree, I hit every branch on the way down.

I'm just trying to be more like you, Chad.

Yeah, exactly. You aspire to be like me. And I, I, I, I accept that aspiration to be this bad looking. So. Yeah.

Got a great face for radio.

Exactly.

And podcasts.

You know that you don't have a voice for any of it right now. Yeah.

Still squeaking.

Yeah. If you quit your smoking, you know, you would be fine.

I did have a cigar last night. That could be part of it.

Yeah. I, man, it's been about a week since I've had a cigar. I don't. Fat, Fat bottom Betties, man.

I just, I feel bad. I feel like a bad influence. Well, now, I guess I wasn't the one that got you into cigars, but like crown apples.

C. That is true. Yeah.

Chad's never been a substance guy in his life.

Working with K. No.

Be careful when you say that's a brain. Broad statement. Never been a substance. I value substance. I've never been. I'm just a shallow person that has no substance. No, but it's, it's true. A cigar, I think. Why? Because I'll sit there And I'm literally just. I'm watching the sunset. I'm just relaxing. And that. I think that's it. I think that's.

Well, and it's almost. I've. It's almost forced relaxation. I heard somebody describe it one time of like, when they go to a cigar lounge. These business guys.

Yeah.

Their days are filled. Hours of work, you know, it's. It's all that for that 45 minutes or an hour, that's. They've bought the thing. That's all they're doing. They're sitting there enjoying the thing and making conversation with the people around them. And it's. It's disconnection from. From the normal.

Anyways, when are we gonna do our retirement realized cigar brands?

So that'd be kind of cool.

The one thing I. I do like the Crown Apple whiskey, but I will not, period, if I'm driving anywh, will not even have a sip. Like, I just. I just don't.

I've gotten to the point too where it's like, if I. If I find myself wanting it, I'll just not have it. It's almost like. Yeah, it's almost like I need to be in a position where it's like, oh, I don't care. Or not to, actually.

So the other day, I actually had a really, really rough day. And Leilani goes, hey, you want me to get you some whiskey? I said, no, I'd be drinking it for the wrong reasons. So.

I was like, I can't do that. I can do it because I love the fl. I'm not doing it to relax and I'm not doing it to numb anything. So that's good. Okay. Wow. How we got off the whiskey annuity hour with retirement. Well, you guys just do your happy hour. You don't even do that anymore.

No, we're picking it back up. Josh and I, with annuity happy hour. When we transitioned from. Well, I mean, we transitioned from in office to fully remote, and that's where we were recording. Now we've got another place to record and all that, so we'll pick it back up. But we had about a. About a three month siesta from that.

Did that hurt when you transitioned? No, no.

Oh, my gosh.

We'll leave it at that. I hope you guys have a great day. And of course, happy selling.

Sam.