What makes a good IMO? | 7 Figure Annuity Sales Podcast | Ep. 234

On this week's episode, we're going to talk about how to pick a good marketing organization.

Hello, everyone. I'm Chad Owen, the annuity sales coach. And if you look in our little link down below, you can tell who. Who we are, what we do, why we do it, and how to get in touch with us. And I'm not going to say what I own. I'm in real life financial, and I'm not going to say that at all, so.

Because today we're talking about finding a good marketing organization.

I heard retirement realize financial is really good.

It is. But I'm. I'm going to. I'm going to take off the FMO marketer hat today.

Why are you wearing a hat today?

I just didn't fix my hair today.

Oh, my gosh. That's not.

I'm going to take off my.

Have you ever done a podcast?

I've never done a podcast with a hat on. And I told. I told Josh, I said, josh, I need to fix my hair. He goes, here, you go. He gave me some stuff. He goes, why do you need to fix it? I said, well, I'm wearing a hat. He goes, why don't you just wear the hat? I said, oh, okay.

Well, in that case, why don't you wear a hat with a veil so we don't have to see anything.

Yeah, you're not that lucky.

Okay.

But I'm gonna take off the FMO marketer hat today. As much as I love retirement realized financial and everything we do, I'm going to talk about these really good things about retirement relationship. Yeah, I know you have. And I want you to talk about these concepts as an agent.

Let's do it.

Okay. Okay.

So I have to call myself away. Okay. Agent Hat.

Yes.

Okay. It's on now.

We do have a freemium that you can go to. Rragentsacademy.com It's a PDF document, and there's literally five reasons to never divorce your IMO. Okay. And if you're curious, go check out that document. You can download the PDF and use it. Definitely recommend it.

Is that assuming you're marrying your imo.

That'S just what we call it.

I don't like that. Let it be on record.

You don't like that idea of divorcing your imo?

Nope.

Okay.

It's not a divorce. It's not a partnership. It's whatever's best for both.

Yeah.

In marriage, once you're married, that's it. It's lock, key, everything. Well, that sounded really bad. I Hope my wife's not listening to that.

Couldn't call her a ball. And Jane more clearly.

You know what's funny? This is total side note, but when, when we got married, my wife actually gave me a gold chain. Right. Or my wedding gift. And then my dad tells me, goes, well, you got the chain, all you need is the ball. And you're marrying her today. I was like, that's. Wonder why you were divorced three times.

Yeah.

Married three times.

He's dead, so it's not going to offend him.

Does she hear that?

No.

Probably. Okay.

Yeah, I know.

That was said.

Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Well, first thing that I do want to say about looking at marketing organizations is that you should be drawn to more about that organization than just what you perceive you're going to receive from them. Okay.

Absolutely.

It's character. Okay. It's. What's the. What's the organization like? How do they do business? What are the qualities here? Not just the things that they give you.

No, the things that they say, they're going.

Well, that's true.

Because remember, this is the thing that I find so fascinating. People that are in the insurance industry are quote, unquote, salespeople. And I do put that in quotes because I hate being called a salesperson.

Right.

I'm a person who finds a problem, finds a solution. I'm not a salesperson. Salesperson generally will not walk away from a deal. I walk away from deals all the time. If it's not good for them, it doesn't make sense. It's easy for me to walk away. But that being said, their salespeople or, you know, most marketing organizations, they're salespeople. They're called recruiters. They're called recruiters for a reason. Now they have a whole bunch of family, fancy kind of names. And what is yours? Like?

I'm a. The VP of agent development.

No, before that. What would it. What were you called before that?

Agent development specialist.

Oh. So we always had good titles. It doesn't matter.

Well, we chose those titles specifically because rather than like, you've got marketing organizations out there that emphasize recruiting model.

They.

That's like their whole focus is recruit as many agents as we can and.

Then no matter what, accept everybody.

Right. And then get our agents to recruit more agents and they build these big downlines and multi levels and all this stuff. And we're like, you know what? If that's one model or one way of doing it, we're going to actually approach it a different way and we're going to Focus on developing the agents that we work with. So then that's where the titles came from.

That's good. I do like that. So pretty sad that I own the company and didn't remember what your exact title is. That's okay, but it really is not something that you need to worry about because you guys got taken care of.

We do it.

We were actually as just at a business conference. It was actually a legacy mastermind. And one of the things I was able to brag on my team about is there's a lot of the day to day operations that I just don't stick my head into because I don't need to. I know that no matter what, my team is going to take care of care of it. They're going to do a great job, they're going to do it with excellence and I just don't have to worry about it. And that is very rare. Most of the time you have to be more hands on. And as you guys know, I'm running appointments every single week, Tuesday through Thursday. I'm making calls. I have all these other responsibilities and it's just nice to know that I never have to worry about any of my agents not being taken taken care of.

That's good.

I do appreciate that.

Yeah, absolutely. So consider more than their comp rates. Consider more than the programs they have, their incentive.

Never consider comp rates. I am happy with street as a 40 million, well, not quite 40 minutes. I can't claim that yet. As a $38 million producer, that was what I did. In 2022, I could get pretty much any contract I wanted anywhere. And compre is always the lowest on anything. And leads is down there as well because leads are always put out. We got leads, leads, these leads and then you get the leads, you go, man, these are junk. Do you know anybody who runs those? Well, yeah, we have agents that run them all the time. Yeah, but do you have anybody here that owns the company that's, you know, actively running these appointments? No. Well, I do. I. Every lead system we have, I run appointments on.

Yeah, no, I agree. So vet out the character and the values of the organization you're looking at, not just what their programs are, what their comp is, all that kind of stuff. And that actually brings up a second point is you should actually want to work with an organization that vets you out as much as they as you vet them out. That's one of the things that I try and really emphasize when I'm talking with agents about working with retirement, realized financial is I'm making a level of commitment to every agent that I recruit and bring on. And I use that term loosely because oftentimes it's agents reaching out to me, asking, hey, how can I work with you guys? And that's great, but I've got to make sure that I'm not devaluing the commitment that I've already made to hundreds of agents prior for the sake of bringing in somebody new. So I do vet, and it's a back and forth vetting, and they're vetting me. And as a, as a rep for the imo, I appreciate agents who allow that process to take place.

Well, and that's important. You know, it's really weird that you expect something just blindly take everybody and we won't do that. I mean, this industry is tough and we have some very, very challenging agents that their finances are an absolute mess, but they want to help other people with their finances or their retirement. And that just. It doesn't work that way. If you have bankruptcies or poor credit score or delinquencies or behind on tax payments, those are things that you cannot get approved by insurance companies, nor would we want that initially. Remember, you're talking to a guy who was $150,000 in credit card debt when I got into this business, because it took me two to three years to figure it out. And I kept having to, you know, put more in and put more in and buy more leads and figure out new lead systems and all these things. So $150,000 credit card debt, but I didn't miss one payment. And that means we didn't get a travel like we do now. That means my wife went three years one time without taking any plane flights. Now, this was earlier on in our marriage, but, you know, when you look at that scenario, you've just got to be good with your money to make sure you can get past. I mean, I don't know if we're going into this, but there's a guy, one time, I just spoke to him, this was just a couple weeks ago, and he said, you know, I don't care about anything other than you get me leads, I'll sell whatever product you tell me, I'll even sell a crappy product. And I said, whoa. I said, you. I stopped him right there. I said, there is no way anything you can say from here on out is going to let me or convince me to hire you or to be a part of our team. No way. Because you just admitted you would put your own needs and our needs before your clients. And that was it. That was the end of the conversation. He's like, but, but. I said, no, there's no buts here. That's it. Because our primary focus is what's best for the client first and not what's also a crappy product for leads. What the heck are you saying? Yeah, because I bet you there's tons of people out there that would.

Right?

Not just.

Well, that's actually my fourth point here and I've got, I've got a note that I want to hit before I get into it. But the fourth point was that a good marketing organization will actually value what's best for your clients more than they, what their override is and more than they value what the agent comp is and what's good for. For the IMO and the agent. Like they'll value the client getting what is in their best interest above the other two entities at play.

And unfortunately in life insurance there's groups of, there's organizations out there that will do the MLM type deal. Now, I don't have a problem with mlm. It's all multi level marketing. Everything any company anywhere has a president, vice president. They have executives, they have, you know, your managers, your employees. That's all multilevel. But my point is when you get the marketing organization out there that just literally gets people going and you're saying something. What did you just say about the, what was that thing you just said.

About the like the value of that they place on the client?

Yeah. And so they'll, they'll put the value. And this is actually why end up going to business on my own is because the company I had with the mortgage protection, they only pushed two or three products and two of the products were with the same company. And I said, hey, what about these other products over here with this company? Company whatever. And it's actually a better rate. Oh, we don't do that. It's a better rate. It's right in the. No, we just put everything through these companies. Now at the time I didn't understand why. I didn't understand about product funneling. I didn't understand about trying to push all your money through one company so you get the higher comps and trips and incentives. But I knew enough to go, well I'm sorry, I'm not selling that product, I'm going to use the other one. And they wouldn't let me. So I said, well fine, well I'm just going to go start my own company. And that's what happened. So you've got to be careful when you go to a client, you say, hey, we have the best product for each situation based off of the factors that we state for us is financial security, best benefits, best customer service, highest pay to pay out our potential growth, realistic potential growth, not illustrated potential growth, because you got to watch the indices and the current rates we're at right now. But point being is they wanted a product push and I'm not interested in that. So they're definitely putting their own needs before the clients. Right.

And even ahead of their agents at that point.

100%.

Like the way that I try and explain the way that I view business, I view it client first, agent second, IMO third. And it's like if you take care of people in that order, you won't have to worry about business being coming in. You won't have to worry about agents sticking around. You won't have to worry about any of that junk that IMOs have to deal with when they go IMO first agent second, client last.

And that. And when you look at that, when you have a good marketing organization now, of course we want them to do well too.

Of course.

Like I want my upline to do very well because, you know, they've poured a lot of time, energy and effort into me as well. So I want that. But when they start to put, oh, we only do these products with this company, and you can tell that because it is so bad from experience when you go to a client, go, hey, this is the best rate that's out there, and go, really? Because I just found this and it beats your, your product. Now, back then, people searching the Internet for life insurance rates was not as easy. Nowadays you can just find websites everywhere that tell you what the best life insurance rate is. So they're forced to be more competitive.

Right.

But annuities are like that now. It's still hard to find the best annuity rate because of is very situational. They, they don't want to have all these circumstances, all these different rates, and the client pick which product. Because the reality is that's why we're involved is to help with the diagnosis.

Yeah.

But you know, we just got to make sure that it's client first, number one.

Yeah. I think your desire there that you're upline does well, ties into my third point that I actually had before what we were just talking about. But the idea is that a good marketing organization is going to have programs that ties their bottom line to your success as an agent. Right. So it's like a good marketing organization is not trying to just capture whatever business an agent is already writing, but a lot try to do that. Right. They'll just try. Like if you're writing a million a year, great. IMO's will be glad to have your million a year and let that be that. But a good marketing organization will want to help scale you from a million to 2 to 3 to 10. Right. And that, that growth process. So they create programs that tie their bottom line to your success as an agent. That's a good organization. And so when you have the desire that your upline does well and you simultaneously have the confidence that when they do well, that's going back into programs that are designed to help you do better. It's a win win for everybody. Most cases the agent wins twice there.

Which is why we've spent, I don't know, a couple few hundred thousand dollars on the training website. We have, I mean we, we do that. We don't make like I guarantee you, I mean, I won't guarantee, I would say it's very highly likely and I'm a numbers person that we have put more into the website than what we've gotten from actual subscriptions. And the reason why, now granted, you know, three, four, five, six, seven years of the way we've been hitting it, that will reverse itself. But the number one thing I'm looking at is my number one purpose for the training. And I assure you I've made way more with my individual annuity sales hands down in one year more than I 10 times what I pulled in off of the academy. Well, I can actually say way more than that because I've only taken one draw ever from that academy. So yeah, I guess, I guess I could say definitely. But it's because I want our industry to be better. I want us to continue as an industry to be good. And the only way to do that is to help everybody with training.

Yeah, well, and that was actually one of the notes I made. I said their programs are designed to operate by respective experts or sorry, designed and operated by respective experts in that area, not posers. And I put ie sales training because what you have a lot of times, and they mean well. But that's why we created the academy is because marketing organizations tend to not do annuity sales training. Well, because it's somebody that's in a cubicle all day, not actually meeting with clients.

Right.

Well realistically, you create the fmo, you create the Academy. It doesn't make sense for you to stop running personal production Just to train agents. And then if you were to stop running personal production, eventually your training becomes obsolete because you're not in the field growing and learning too.

I learned so much just by actually being in the field every single week. By what my clients are saying and how they're feeling and the concerns they have and the dodo stupid stuff that some people do to try and hold on to someone's money. Right. The lies they'll say. The phone calls I have with the client, the broker and myself, I mean, that knowledge is invaluable because I can pass that on to agents.

Yep. So we've literally spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop a training program that's based on a proven sales process that you have, but chosen to spend the money to put it in a format that doesn't require you to have to constantly be doing training with agents so you can actually stay in the field and do it.

Yeah. The inner circles where I. But you pay. You pay for that.

Totally.

It's what, 1297 per month? And that's the one that, you know, you're getting me individually teaching. But even with that 10 agents, I'm still making way more than what I'm way more on my personal business. I just do that because I want to help. Yeah. I mean, I heard someone say and someone we partner with, and it was just so wise, so profound, but really hard hitting. They said. He said, if you expect me to do this for free, then you don't value my time or value me as a person. And I was like, wow. I mean, it just really hit me hard there because the blood, the sweat, the tears. Anybody that's been in our business for a long time knows legit. There's. It can be incredibly tough and incredibly lonely. And yeah, if you just expect me to do everything for free and take up my time and then I don't get to do things that I'm good at, which is my actual running appointments to get the information to be able to help you. It's just like what you said. I don't want to ever become obsolete. I don't want someone to go, oh, you were in the field. That was three years ago. I mean, I can't tell you how many agents try and call me. You know what? Yeah, I used to do this 10 years ago. I know all about annuities.

Right.

Do you know this? No. Yeah, that just happened in the past two years. Do you know this? No, that happened seven years ago. No, you don't know all about annualties. It's a constant changing platform.

It is.

They don't know about 151A. They don't know about the DOL rule. They don't know about the best interest. They don't know any of those. They don't know how the products have changed and adapted and modified to current market conditions. So that's what I get to help with?

Absolutely. So go to rragentsacademy.com go to free resources and download that 5 reasons to never divorce your imo I I know Chad doesn't like that word, but I.

Don'T like that word.

And then remember, you should be drawn to more about that organization from their character and their values than just the programs they have. You should want them to vet you to make sure that you're actually a good fit with them and not just accepting anybody and everybody, because eventually that's going to come back to hurt you when your processing times are on the floor.

Yeah.

They should have programs that tie their bottom line to your success and be continually developing those to help you grow. And then obviously they should be putting your clients ahead of everything else. Yes. Including you and certainly them.

So awesome.

Yeah.

Okay. Well, I hope this helps you guys. You have a great day and happy selling.

Sam.