Why Top Agents Leverage Technology | 7 Figure Annuity Sales Podcast | Ep. 328

Hello, everyone. This is Chad Owen with a seven figure annuity sales podcast. I am with my sidekick, the cowboy case designer.

New nickname. Well, we kind of have to stick with that one because it's going to be your Persona now.

Yeah.

Even though I don't think you can fit ahead a hat on that cap right now because it's like sticking must be shellacked up there. But I'm definitely going to talk about what I'm doing to track my clients. That's really important. I want to start to utilize that even more. And then, of course, how my week went. And then I'd like to talk about the cowboy case designer because I think there's. There's definitely some importance to that. I'll go into a little bit more at the end, but, man, you've made some videos that have just really honestly blown me away. I'm blown away. And so I know you're like, I don't know how to. I don't know how to accept this. He's like complimenting me. What's going on?

Yeah. Somehow I'm more comfortable with the digs than the compliments.

It is. Well, I have seen studies. I mean, it's proven guys that tease each other are better friends. I've seen that so many times. It's. Well, because you feel comfortable. Right. I mean, you got to be careful, though, because some digs come with a little bit of underlying truth. So you gotta be careful. But I've been digging in real heavy into Go High Level. As you know, we've customized that specifically for annuity agents and retirement planning agents. And I was, I was very, very intimidated by it at first and still kind of am because I think I probably have. I was talking to Jesse. I probably have probably a third grade level understanding of what Go Go High Level truly can do because I think there's so many opportunities when you utilize your current client base. Oh, yeah, I have over 7,400 emails. And yeah, it's. Now, obviously that's not how many clients I have, but I have hundreds of clients, maybe, maybe even a thousand clients. I. I haven't really put that together, but Go High Level will actually help me know that. Yeah, because you'll go in there and you tag it as a client. You go in there, you tag it as a first appointment, second appointment. All your information will be in there. And what I like about this is because when I would travel before, it would be really hard to know, unless it's just off memory, what my client needs or what they did I could obviously call the insurance company and find out the information. But now and go high level, I can go in there and see all the notes. So I'm having someone go in and take in every application and believe it or not, can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm actually going to shred the lead or shred the application and all the information once I'm done. Seven boxes, legal size boxes full of applications. Oh yeah. And there's a couple reasons why we need to get to the digital agency. We need to get to the digital. Everything's available because this, and no matter where I am, I can pull it right up on my phone and I can see the exact information about that client. The other thing I like about this too is I'll have all those emails, which I already do, but I get calls periodically and I can just go in there and I can type in a couple little notes and you know, I had a conversation with so and so actually I'm buying a digital recorder as well and it actually meets with AI it actually I can do it Bluetooth and it will attach to my phone, it will record everything on that and then I can take those notes and drop it directly into that client's device information with a summary of what we talked about. So I. If you're an old timer listening to this, which I'm not really an old timer, but I'm definitely upper middle age timer, you know, because if you think about Caleb, you're just dying to tease.

It's true. Hey, hey, you know your idea of Bluetooth is one cow talking to another cow through telepathy or something. You know, this just how that's Bluetooth to you. How do you even work out? Oh, you want to get in this brain, man, you do not want to get this brain. Funny, but I think it's so important. I mean, what do you find with some of the agents you're talking to? It's just, I mean, are they resistant to it? The tech, yeah, the tech side of things.

Everybody that I'm talking with is embracing of the tech. You know, from the standpoint of they recognize that it can create efficiency. And by creating efficiency, one of two things happens. Either you end up spending more time writing more business or you write the same amount of business in less time. So you have more freedom, more flexibility, but either way it's a win. So when you look at, you know, software tools like the agency marketing suite that we've created and it can, you can literally manage your entire book of Business. Out of that, you can manage your pending business, Chad. Maybe I'll hop on some time and show you how you can actually set deal stages so that when you have a lead, you can say, oh, this lead is in the second appointment. Oh, this leads in the third appointment. This lead is just brand new come through. This lead's already been sold. Now we're pending issuing application at the carrier. And if you put in the right information, it'll tell you exactly. You look at one thing, you can see, oh, I have $2.5 million pending right now. So there's ways you can build that tool out to just maximize efficiency. And that's really what it comes down to. Right. And it's a forming tool, and it helps you manage what you have. Sorry, what were you going to say?

It goes back to my saying, seconds count, pennies count. You know, I mean, you want to be sure you're being efficient. And I've been. I'm. I'm definitely in a flow into. The next thing we're going to talk about is I've had multiple clients lately. Literally. Tell me. I just had a $2.7 million sale last week. This week I did about 315,000. Next week is looking to be a doozy. I mean, as long as everything works out the way it is. And I've been hearing clients a lot lately say I went with you because the way you understood and explained to me how annuities work and so the go high level ties in. Nice to that. Because if I have information at my fingertips, I can service my clients better, more efficiently without having to scramble trying to find out where things are.

Oh, yeah.

And that's it. I don't know if I'm looking at gaining more time or losing more time or writing more business. I. I don't know if that's really my. My primary focal point. As far as it goes, I think it's being able to service my clients more efficiently because that's the number one thing I hear people say. We've met with three or four or five different agents, we've been to seminars, and people just don't know the product like you know it. They don't know how to. I didn't understand how the annuity worked till you explained it to me. Yep. So efficiency is so important. I don't want it to be a waste of time. Yeah.

I'm just ideating a few ideas here, Chad. But where my brain goes to is your process. Right. And you train your clients to, hey, when you get Your policy statement for the year, reach out to me and we'll look at if we need to reallocate what your, what your, your index strategies. Right. Or you know, if we need to activate income or whatever that looks like you're training your clients to reach out to you. I know there's a way that we can build out an automation in the system that you plug every client into and you put in their policy date and then it sends you a notice via email or text or however you want to receive it one month before their anniversary date, or two weeks or however you want that. The other cool thing about it is you can set it up to where it sends you. When a policy is now out of surrender, now it's a little bit less applicable to you because you sell so many income riders. It's like, okay, so we get 10 years down the road and you're just getting your income, but there's not really a replacement opportunity. But for agents that sell a bunch of mygas or just straight indexed annuities, number one, do better fact finding because you'll find more income cases than you think you have. But then number two on those where you know, okay, in three years, five, 10, whatever it is, we're going to probably need to replace this policy. You can build that in to where it sends you a reminder about it.

So your ability to continue jump on that with you. I'll definitely jump on the call with you and do that because that's really important. Yeah. You know, it's funny you say that though. I had an FMO from years ago, years and years ago that reached out to me, says, hey, you got some policies with us. And we see there's a replacement opportunity on these. And I go and I look at these policies and they all have income riders on them and the income values are super high. And I'm like, that's slimy. I mean, when you sit there and you're going, I got a replacement opportunity. And you know that if you replaced it, they would lose that income value. Which how I plan is income first. You know, that's, I would say easily 90% of my clients are income driven first. And I can debate anybody, anybody all day long that, because if you do a really good fact finder, vast majority of the time the income is the biggest potential issue. So I'm not going to go into that. But it's important to understand that, you know, using the go high level is very important for servicing. But then also I, I had, you know, this, Caleb, this has not Been a phenomenal year for me. You know, I'm probably still about 4 million behind last year, but.

It'S definitely looking like I could catch up pretty darn quick. And then the other thing I look at this year is the last five weeks of 2020. Excuse me, last five months of 2024 were not huge months. They were not even what I consider average. So I have a huge opportunity to catch up. But I've been bombarded with building a house, with trying to sell commercial property, with trying to get Realtors and bankers to do the things I need them to do. Oh, yeah, it's been great. I mean, little things. Oh, it has. I mean, this has been by far the busiest year I've had. And it's funny because when Josh said, hey, I need, I think you should step down and you could become the. Just stay the CEO and I'll become the president, which. Caleb, that won't work. Don't try that on me. But it made sense. So I went from literally 75 hours a week down to probably 40 to 42. Now I'm way back up. I'm, I'm probably even working more than I did before. But when the house is built, when the properties are sold, things like that, I'll really be able to utilize my free time more because I put everything into the go high level and I'll be able to focus more on nurturing clients instead of just when they call me. Try and figuring things out. Yeah. So I would heavily encourage. If you're not part of our organization, we have a phenomenal. I, I'm not supposed to call it a customer relations manager because it's way beyond that. It is, you know, it's. I mean, somebody told me, I said, I said, we have a CRM and said, Josh goes, if you're calling this a CRM, you don't even have a clue what this can do. I'm like, you're right, I don't.

There's a reason we call it the agency marketing suite. Like it is a full blown marketing tool. Like agents are generating leads using the tool.

Yeah.

So it's, it's, it's extremely impactful. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Shameless. Plug to the agency marketing suite. But yeah.

Well, it's not. Well, the thing, as you know, I want to bring value, but I also want you to realize we have tools that are designed specifically to help people cross reference, cross sell to their current database in areas that you can greatly help them. I'm not saying try and sell something to someone who they don't need correct. But man, you got to see. I think we'll talk about the other thing a little bit later because we only need a couple minutes for it. But one of the greatest errors I believe I see with agents is they only look at now. They don't look at the future. They don't capture emails, they don't capture phone numbers. They don't capture anything that would plan for a future business. And I think probably last year I think I wrote 30 million and I would probably say 8 million or 9 million of that would be previous clients reaching back out to me. And it's because they know, number one, you can get in touch with me. I say this all the time. If I'm not a date with my wife, out with my family, in appointment, at church or sleeping, I will answer that phone. And if I am doing one of those things as soon as I am free, then I will call you. One of the worst voicemails you can ever leave is, hey, this is Chad Owens. Sorry you missed a call. I missed your call. But I'll leave your name and number and I'll get back to you at my convenience or when, when it's possible. I say I'll get back to you as soon as I can. And it's a, it's letting them know that they have a priority in my life. And they do, because without them, I wouldn't have what I have.

It's true.

You know, they definitely helped. We've worked. It's a symbiotic relationship. Right. Their need meets my need. In other words, as I'm able to help them, they help me totally. And that's. Boy, there's something about that. I need to dig into that a little bit more. But, you know, that's, that's a very. Like a client I was talking to yesterday. I mean, it looks like it's going to be 1.3, 1.4 million and it will probably happen next week. His wife wants to go with a 1.4 million. He's trying to lean in towards about a million. But I think she's going to win just to. She wants guaranteed income coming in when she pays bills and that's so important to her. And he appears to be a really good husband and is probably what's going to happen. But what I'm saying though is when we. She said.

Something along the lines of your product knowledge and what I can do or how I can not worry about anything helps us have a peace of mind. And she's. They're Asking about how the insurance company makes its money and they asked how I got paid. And I actually say this, I say I get paid very similar to a realtor, because that's it. I get paid very similar to a realtor. And she goes, oh, it's kind of like, you know, it's a win win for everybody. And I was like, yes, it is. That's a very true. Because the insurance company has do well, the client has to do well and the agent has to do well. So, you know, this all ties together. I didn't, didn't plan on talking about the agency marketing suite this much, but you know, like when you have a guy who's resistant, I mean, I just talked an agent yesterday. I've known this guy for 15 years and he still does paper apps. Now he says, I, I just have to spend all this time doing paper apps. And I go, bro, you have to pick up.

Online applications. And he's like, yeah, but you, you did it. I said, I said, for the past two or three years at least, I've been focusing heavy on online applications because it doesn't, it, you know, the chances of making mistakes are a lot less, which creates less time having to fix mistakes you made. And it just is way more efficient. But the point to that is, is as we adapt this technology, it's going to help us service our clients. Totally. I heard something before, it talks about, you know, this was referring to AI, but they said AI is not going to replace your job, but people using AI will replace your job. And I think about that with technology. Technology isn't going to replace my job, but people using technology will because they're going to be able to service way better than anybody out there and be more efficient.

Well, I think about it like this. If you can, if you're not using some kind of client management system to handle the vast majority of your interactions with clients and that whole client profile and basically just again, it's just managing that, that relationship. You're operating reactively. Right. And I think you would probably say, yeah, that's kind of how you, you've done. What you've done is client needs something, they call you react. Client gets their annual statement, they call you react. Well, if you can write 30 million a year reactively, what does it look like to operate with those people proactively?

Absolutely.

It's, I think it unlocks the opportunity for, yes, more efficiency, but more production as well. And so I'm excited to see, you know, the full impact that it has. But that's Kind of the way that I would encourage agents to think about it is it does bring efficiency, but it also brings proaction. Like your, your ability to now get ahead of your clients is far great, far more increased, far greater than it is without a tool like that.

A very challenging situation is when I talk to a previous client and I find out they bought another annuity from another agent after they met with me. And that's because I don't think it's intentional, but they may just forgot, you know, and that's the. Oh, someone else I saw another ad, I reached out. So I believe this will help that decrease a lot.

Absolutely.

And then of course, the last thing I want to talk about is a cowboy case designer. I. You have a LinkedIn and a Facebook do that, right?

I do, yeah.

Cowboy case designer. And we can't go into a lot of details, but this last video you posted, once again, cowboy case designer, you. You go on LinkedIn, you go on Facebook and watch this video. Very impressive. Not the one with the cows. That one's kind of boring, but no, I've teased it. It was good too. It was really good too. But the one where you're talking about what gets you to retirement won't get you through retirement. And just watch it. You know, we're not going to talk about it because Caleb would talk about it. For another, I'd give you the full.

15 minute video on this podcast.

You would, but you don't want to miss that. So thank you. The recap, obviously we want to talk about setting up go high level. That was really important thing. It customized to us and then business is starting to pick up for me, which is awesome because summer technically is usually a slower time, but not for me. And then of course, cowboy case designer, you definitely want to hook up with that. Not hook up with the cowboy case designer, just look up his page as he is a taken man. So we're hoping more taken sooner rather than later. But you know, sometimes people just wait and wait and wait to put the ring on it. You know, we'll see. I hope you guys have a great day and of course, happy selling.

Ra.