The Summertime Slump and How to Navigate It | 7 Figure Annuity Sales Podcast | Ep. 207

On this week's episode, we're going to talk about how to get through the summertime blues.

Hey everyone. Welcome to this week's episode. I am Chad Owen, the annuity sales coach, owner of Retirement Realized Financial, where we can help you become a mini Chad. No, you don't want to become a mini Chad. And then of course, Retirement Realized Agents Academy, where we do straight training, where you don't have to be a part of our organization for that. But you know what, we want to be really one of those organizations that, you know what? If you want to be a part of our team, great. If you just want to do the training and still keep your contracts wherever you are, that's fine. I personally do not know of any other organization, any other IMO that offers that.

I have never seen it either.

I haven't.

Much less from somebody that's actually in the field doing it.

Well, yeah, that's true. I was in the field 75 years ago. That's not mocking, but it is making fun. So anyway. Well, my mentor actually was in the business. I mean, he's been in it for 40 plus years. He's retired now, but he still talks with clients and he still sells a little one here and there. But you know, it's. He told me back in the day, I mean, of course we didn't have indexed annuities. We had odd variable annuities. We had fixed annuities, we had immediate annuities. But they had this book that they had to go through. I mean, we, they didn't have the computers with the software and stuff on it. So I'm very grateful for the pioneers we've had ahead of us. And so.

Yeah, that's good.

Definitely not mocking.

Yeah, well, we are in a season of summertime blues.

I'm not.

Well, that's fair. It's weird though, because this year it seemed to me, even in my conversations with agents, it seemed to me like the summertime slump has kind of hit a little bit later than normal. I mean, we're.

That is very true. Yeah, very true.

I mean, we're here halfway through the summer at this point. Over halfway through the summer, really. And it's, it's kind of just recently been something that we. And I don't know if that's product of the mark, obviously.

Market conditions, restrictions going down, market conditions, you know, being very challenging in the beginning of the summer. And now they're, they've kind of wobbled the past month and the first part of the summer in May and stuff. They were Just getting hammered.

Right.

So, you know, when it wobbles and then you got people that flat, just flat out, they're gone, they're on vacation. So, I mean, there's not much I can do about that. When I can't. I can't go, hey, I just got a vacation. Why are you going on vacation? You know, it's.

Yeah.

And I'm honestly, you know, just purposely making a point that this summer I'm definitely taking off more time than I did last summer. Yeah, I think I took off. What? I took off three weeks almost didn't. The trip I just came back from a little bit ago, that was. That was 16 days. And then I have a trip for four full weeks coming up in August. And so that means literally half the summer I'm going to be gone.

Yeah.

And. But that being said, I think for June, I still wrote 2.9 million.

You did.

And then July, which was only last week. Yeah. I have 345,000 on right now. And I think I'll have a pretty good week this week. It's weird though, because I had really good appointment setting. But some of them are a week out.

Right.

And it's. Once again, some people are on vacation and things like that. And they said, hey, we're out of town this week, so can you meet with me the following week? But, you know, the reality comes into a still mindset. We are still in the greatest business you can ever be in in anything. I mean, if you look at any, any top income producers, it's almost always the financial people. And it's the thing I love about what I get to do is my top income is based off of protecting people's money. Not, not, not rolling the dice and gambling. You know, I get to truly help people. So I don't have any summertime blues.

Yeah.

It does get frustrating though, to make calls on. You're like, oh man, I just went through a whole stack.

Right. Well, then that was. I put down a few things that I felt like tend to kind of come up during the summertime blues. As we say, number one, lead flow can reduce a little bit. Although what you see I think more of is not. Not as much a reduction in lead flow as much as you have just a reduction in appointment rate. Like you're talking about where you've got leads in front of you, but. But nobody's answering the phone. And I don't know if that's a mentality and clients prospects of they feel like they've taken one step closer to something they need to accomplish at some point, but they're not going to actually do anything until after, you know, the grandkids leave or after the vacation or after the summer's over, whatever it is. But you do have reduced answer rate on calls and then ultimately with that, obviously a reduced appointment rate.

One is because you know, this week I may, may only have a four day workweek right now. Granted my four days, our w. There's still going to be like today will easily be a 13, 14 hour day easily. But you know, it's, it's one of those things you look at and that is the luxury of what we do in the summer is you can say, you know what, I'm going to run appointments and calls four days this week and then take a Friday, Saturday, Sunday off. You can do that.

Right.

Because it's important because we know once September, October, November, get in, it's crunch time again.

Well now I had a question on that. So we talk about how the last quarter of the year, the wintertime tends to be, at least historically it has been your best quarter of the year for almost every year.

But what's weird about it is you actually end up generally meeting with fewer people. But the people you do meet with generally are more serious about doing business. Do you find the same mentality in the summertime where if you can get people to meet, they tend to be more serious than others that don't. I mean obviously more serious than those that aren't meeting.

But I don't know because a lot of the times people with higher net worths are on vacation.

Okay, so maybe, maybe it's not necessarily tight like in the, in the fourth quarter you write more business on fewer people because you've got like your average case size in the fourth quarter for some reason is much larger.

Yeah, but it'd be interesting to do. I don't want you doing this.

Right.

Because it would take a lot of time. But it could be a perception. Yeah, I mean because my case size is still really high right now. What's my average case size?

Over 440 or 4.

You thought it was going to drop?

No, I thought your appointment rate would drop and it did.

Well, what's my appointment rate at here.

Of the people like that you talk to actually. I'm sorry? No, of all leads, not of people you talk to, but of all leads that come through your, your hair, over 40%. It was over 70 at the start of the year.

Maybe you're right in this area, but.

Flip side of that, your close rate, your application percent is over 80.

So. Wow.

That's. That's the, I guess the efficiency that, that we're seeing in your production this year is there. There have seemed to be more leads, but I will say to the way that you're handling leads and working with other individuals, it is different this year than.

I may get a lot of leads, but I get a lot more people now that are calling out of desperation because they don' money versus the ones that want to protect the money they have.

Interesting.

So I definitely get a lot more of the scrubbed Internet leads at 50,000 and that's all they have. Which, you know, I'm not moving anything in that case.

Right.

You know, that's emergency funds and savings. And I know there's plenty of people, and I'm not saying do or do not, but there's plenty of agents that will write a 15 or $20,000 annuity. Sure. I mean, I actually just saw someone advertising you can get into these in as little as $5,000. That's true. I just won't do that. You know, I'm not going to lock up someone's emergency funds and savings. If they have 10 grand and we use 5 grand, that's still suitable. But people can blow through 5 grand with one bad car repair.

Oh, yeah.

You know, especially if you own a Chevy. Well, not really. It's just because of labor, because the parts aren't worth anything on that anyway. So there it is. You could just, you could do the bubble gum machine with 25 cents for the parts, but it's the labor.

Yeah, yeah. So.

So this year, which is funny, I'm.

Just trying to move past it at this point. Um, but you are, you're, you're, you're closing over, you know, 80% of the people that you meet with, which is quite honestly pretty staggering. But I think that that actually goes to show a strength on the front end of your process. If you see a very. And 40. 40% is not a bad appointment rate. That's, that's not bad. It's, I mean, four out of 10 by the time you factor out lead rot. Because you don't call like you get a lead on Tuesday, you're not going to call them t following Monday anyway. So that's almost a week of time. So we factor in lead route. You factor in people that just don't answer the phone. Realistically, 4 out of 10, 40% appointment rate is actually still really good. But what I like about it is when you look at the fact that you've had over an 80% close rate this year. So the number of people that you're meeting with are converting to deals, but you're bringing fewer in on the front end. That means that your call process is improving. To me, it means that you're like the way that you're getting information over the phone and you're weeding out certain things that probably are not maybe a good fit for an annuity.

That is true. Because, you know, I've gotten to the point in my career where I'm not going to beg someone to protect their own money.

Right.

If someone doesn't want help, I'm not going to force it. And I've always been in that way, shape or form. But at this point right now, when I have so many people that want to meet right now, that need to meet right now, why would I waste time trying to convince someone to protect their own money? It's not my money.

Right.

Or if they want to give me a hard time, you know, which they all do. I mean, there's, there's, you know, we're all going to have issues with some client at some time or another. It's just I want people that are long term relationships. And you say, well, how's that possible? You do an income rider a lot of the time. What do you plan on continuing long term relationships? Relationship. My relationship is not based off of making money on them in the future.

Right.

My relationship based off of they can trust me.

Right.

And. And I'll always be there to help them.

Yeah. So that's good. Well, I put together eight different things that I felt like would help agents navigate it. Yes. Eight.

Things.

We got a few minutes. We'll hit these last few. Number one, just go into summers in general, knowing there's a summer slump. Okay.

I'm always going to complain about how slow it is. And I'm gonna call my marketing people. I'm gonna go, what the heck is going on with the leads? Why are we. All right. And they're gonna go, we have to do this. We actually have in our calendar. Chad's going to call to complain. Okay. There you go.

Yeah. The people that do meet with you and will meet with you.

Oh, by the way, though.

Yeah.

I do want to say something. Even though summertime starts to slow down, I picked up another lead system.

Yeah, you did.

So even though I know I'm generally the chances of getting as many appointments, I just picked up more. And so it's an existing lead source I already have. So I just said, hey, I need some more time on this. And they're doing it so well. There you go.

I like it. I mean, if you're still meeting with people, which encourage you to keep working the leads that you've got, keep working the leads that come through. Treat them just like you would anybody. I mean, don't go into it with the mentality that, oh, they don't want to meet it. I'm like, treat them like a. Assume they actually want to do business with you because they'll pick it up in your voice if you're assuming they don't. And that won't lead to anything good. Understand urgency and why it's needed with current market conditions, especially, I mean, right now here in 2022, July of 2022, we're, I guess August of 2022 now by the time this podcast goes out. But I mean, market conditions are. It's prime time, and it's been prime.

Time 100% all year, and it will be prime time for the next year or two.

Don't cut corners or devalue your services by becoming an order taker simply for the sake of trying to close a deal. That's one of the things I come across pretty frequently is as production slows down for agents, the felt pressure of needing to write business goes up. And when that pressure goes up, it, I think is easier for agents to buy into this like, cut corner mentality and just kind of appease the client and do whatever the client's saying. Rarely does that benefit. Yeah.

Focus heavily on asking the right questions. And we, we met this morning and one of the things I picked up on the way that you do that is you make definitive statements and then the questions you ask are just confirmation statements.

Sure.

Wouldn't you agree with that, Chad? Yeah, right, sure.

Yeah, I'll agree with that.

I basically just gave an example. Oh, gosh, my face.

You guys gotta watch the YouTube smash.

My face on the microphone, he said.

There stationary and he bangs his head into. Or his face into the M. Rookie Pinky.

I guess not Pinky.

Absolutely. Pinky.

In the brain, always find what the purpose of the money is, what the problem the client's facing is, and then the best solution to it. And educate them. Obviously treat the annuity as the means to the end, not the end itself. If you have the budget to increase lead flow, hey, do it. I mean, Chad's an example of that. And then perhaps even consider using the time as an opportunity for you to capture some R R for you to get some rest. If you can. And if it's needed.

Yeah, well, we all can. I mean, even when we had no money, it means we're going to the park. It means we're making our own sandwiches and then we go to the park. I mean, this, you know, doesn't have to be lavish. Yeah. It isn't until probably the last.

12 years where we've really been able to go after things, you know, enjoy going out and doing things that we normally couldn't aff before. But we don't take that for granted. I mean, it's. It's honestly something we value highly. And that's, you know, that's my wife and I saying that's a. Kids things. You know, our kids got to live a very fulfilled life from the standpoint of seeing the world, doing third world missions, you know, tons of travel, seeing different cultures, and, you know, once again, I think some of the best times that we've ever had is when we went on third world missions trips.

Right.

You know, that's kids, never forget that kind of stuff. You know, never take for granted what you have and where we live.

Yeah.

So. Yeah, that's true. Okay, well, I think that's it. I appreciate your time. Don't let the summertime blues get you. You have a great day and happy selling.