How We Scrub Our Leads

We spend a lot of time looking for reasons not to sell you a lead.

We’ve been selling annuity leads since 2010. The biggest change in that time is how much work now happens after a consumer responds to one of our ads and before we’re willing to sell that response to a client.

Depending on the campaign, around 60% of the responses we generate never reach our regular clients. Some campaigns run higher and some lower. We paid to generate every one of those responses. So why do it?

Because I try to look at every lead from the other side of the transaction.

If I were the agent paying $300 for this lead, would I be happy or unhappy to receive it?

Everything on this page is how we try to answer that question before the lead ever reaches you.

Scott Brooks, MBA, CFP®

President, TheAnnuityLeads.com

What happens between the ad and your inbox

Every lead company can tell you how it generates leads. Fewer will walk you through what happens next. Here is the path a response takes with us, and it can be stopped at any step.

1. The adSomeone responds to advertising about annuities.
2. The questionsThey read our information and answer 12 to 20 questions.
3. The scrubA person checks what they told us.
4. The decisionWe approve the lead or hold it back.
5. DeliveryAn approved lead goes to one agent or advisor. Only one.

It starts with the ad

Most people comparing lead companies start with the form or the phone call. I’d start earlier. The advertising decides who responds, so it decides what kind of lead is possible.

Most of our leads today are generated online, and every one of them comes from advertising about annuities, shown to people who are already researching annuities or reading about retirement. I’ve been in the financial industry since 1998, and I’m now in the age range we advertise to. I see a lot of annuity ads and think: I wouldn’t respond to that. Some of them promise 14% returns. To me, the companies behind them don’t look credible. They look like hypesters.

An ad built on hype, or on a rate of return that sounds too good to be true, will get clicks. It is much less likely to attract the kind of person an experienced financial professional wants as a client. So our ads don’t promise rates of return, and they’re written to earn the trust of people who have money and have invested before. That costs us response. It’s also where lead quality begins.

A click isn’t a lead

After someone clicks, they still have work to do. From what we see, consumers easily spend three to five minutes reading our information, because there is a lot of it to go through. Then they spend another four or five minutes, on average, answering our questions. Some spend ten minutes on the questions alone. Depending on the campaign and their answers, that’s roughly 12 to 20 questions. Add it up and most people have spent close to ten minutes with us before they ever become a lead.

Here is something that surprises people. Consumers spend more time going through our online process than they do on the phone with our call center. Historically, when a live person asks the same questions, the call runs about 30% shorter. Online, people take their time, and overall I think that has been a good thing.

We’ve tested much longer forms over the years, including one with roughly 70 questions. The versions with 15 to 20 performed better. What I learned is that every question comes at a cost, and you have to decide whether the information is worth the people you lose getting it. More questions give us more information, and every one of them also causes some people to leave. You don’t get to choose who leaves. The person who gets tired of your form might have $50,000 to invest. He might have $1 million. The one thing I don’t want to do is run off the people with the most money.

So we aren’t trying to have the longest form in the industry. We want enough of the right questions to understand the opportunity, without making the process such a chore that good prospects quit.

What we ask

• How much they are considering investing
• Where that money is held today
• Whether they want growth or retirement income, and when they may need the income
• The time horizon they’re comfortable with, and how much access to the money they want
• When they expect to make a decision
• Whether they already own an annuity
• Their age
• The best time for an annuity specialist to reach them
• Any specific question they want an advisor to answer

About 40–45% of our leads already own an annuity. These are people who have bought one before and are deciding what to do with more money, or with a contract they already have.

We also collect the contact information we use to verify and reach them. More than 90% of our leads include a mailing address. A small share of those are P.O. boxes, usually from people in rural areas or people who simply prefer to get their mail that way, and a few leads have no mailing address. Most leads include an email address, though not all. Asking for an address costs us response, and I think it’s worth it for two reasons. You can mail the prospect a package before you call. And our scrubbing team can check whether the name at that address matches the person who filled out the form. I’d rather tell you that now than pretend every lead looks the same.

What that looks like on a real lead

Here is a lead we generated recently, with the identifying details removed, next to the kind of lead many agents are used to receiving.

Does all of that guarantee she buys an annuity? Of course not. A lead is an opportunity. It isn’t a guaranteed appointment or sale. But the advisor who calls her knows who she is, what she’s trying to do and what she wants to ask.

And at this point, we still haven’t decided whether we’re willing to sell the lead.

Then a person goes to work on it

Every lead is reviewed by a person before it’s sold. We have three full-time employees who do nothing but scrub leads, and they spend 20 to 30 minutes on each one. Two of them have been doing this for us for more than ten years. They scrub leads seven days a week.

Frankly, they’re better at it than I am. I don’t scrub leads every day. They do. After you’ve looked at thousands of responses, you start to notice things that aren’t obvious from a single form: an email address that doesn’t look right, an age that doesn’t match, a phone number that doesn’t fit the person, several questionable leads with something in common. A business email domain can tell you what kind of company someone works for, which is something the form never asked.

They take what the consumer told us and check it against the databases and tools we subscribe to. Our full process has 17 steps. Some apply to every lead, and some depend on whether the lead came in online or by phone. These are the main ones, and all of them come down to one question: does everything about this person make sense together?

What the searches turn up

Our team searches the email address and the phone number. Part of that is looking for bad information, fake information and simple typos we can fix. Part of it is finding out who the person is.

If the search shows the prospect is a doctor, a lawyer or a business owner, that goes into your lead notes. If you know you’re calling a physician, you call him Dr. Johnson. You don’t call him John. It’s a small thing, and it starts the call the way everyone else in his life starts it. Anything you know about a person before you dial helps you handle the call differently.

Phone numbers nobody answers

We check whether the phone is registered to the person, and we also check what kind of phone it is. Some numbers belong to internet calling services and apps where nobody ever picks up and there’s no real voicemail. Those leads are scrubbed out. You can’t work a lead you can’t reach.

People who take ten years off their age

We compare the year of birth on the form with the year of birth in public records. What we’ve found is that some people over 85, and especially people in their 90s, put down a lower age. Someone who is 92 enters 82. I don’t know whether that’s on purpose or a slip of the finger, but it happens a fair amount, and it’s one more reason a response doesn’t become a lead.

Agents, advisors and their spouses

A surprising number of people who work in the industry become leads. We ask every prospect whether they work as an insurance agent or financial advisor. The ones who do lie about it roughly half the time, and some submit a spouse’s name instead of their own. So we run both names through the state insurance department, FINRA BrokerCheck and the SEC’s adviser records. We read the email address too. If it has something like “tax advisor” in it, or it’s a business address, we find out who owns the domain and what kind of business it is.

We learned this one from experience. When an agent gets through, one of two things happens when you call. They tell you they never requested anything, or they’re rude to you. Either way you’re out $300 and your time.

Bots have made this more important

Bots can fill out forms too. Our team calls them prank leads. I think most of them are bot traffic. Some look legitimate at first and very different once our team digs in. The fake email addresses tend to be put together the same way, so our scrubbers look at the leads we’ve declined and ask what they have in common. When we find a pattern, we look for it everywhere else. And if one advertising source starts sending an unusual amount of questionable traffic, we cut it back or shut it off. The leads we reject teach us almost as much as the leads we accept.

Leads that call in

Most of our leads come in online today, but some prospects pick up the phone. Those callers go through our call center, which answers as Annuity Resources, asks 11 qualifying questions and tells the caller that an annuity specialist will contact them.

Then one of our scrubbers listens to the entire call again. That takes 25 to 30 minutes per lead. They confirm every question was asked and answered, improve the notes you’ll receive, and run the same industry searches we run on online leads. The person reviewing the call is not the person who took it, which is the point. Historically only about 35–50% of inbound calls have become leads.

A second and third set of eyes

People make mistakes. Our employees do, and I do. Years ago I read about how the big international jets are built with double and triple redundancy, so every critical system has a backup. That stuck with me, and it has been a guiding principle for how I set this up.

Typically three people see a lead before it reaches you: two of our scrubbers, and then the person who routes the lead, who does a final check for errors. When our call center takes a call, someone else audits it. Scrubbers leave internal notes on anything that concerned them, and when they’re unsure they have dozens of sites and resources to go dig further. If one person misses something, we’d like another chance to catch it before you do.

How long it takes

Leads that come in during business hours are normally turned around within a few hours. Leads that arrive at night or on a Sunday take longer. Our team is fully staffed on weekdays, works weekend shifts and is on the job every day of the year except Christmas Day. The lead in the example above came in online and was delivered to one of our clients in Florida a few hours later.

Real isn’t the same as qualified

Someone can be exactly who they say they are and still not become one of our leads. Verifying a lead and qualifying it are two different jobs.

Standard	Our guideline at $300 a lead
Amount	At least $50,000 they are considering investing, in almost all cases. We ask what they’re considering investing, not their net worth. Someone with $1 million may only be deciding what to do with a $100,000 CD coming due. The figure is what the consumer tells us. It isn’t a verification of their assets.
Age	Our normal upper limit is 83. Ages 84 and 85 are a judgment call that depends mostly on the amount, and only a small percentage get through. An 85-year-old considering $50,000 would normally be rejected. An 85-year-old with $750,000 to invest is a different opportunity. Above 85, we don’t send the lead to our regular clients, and over 90 nobody wants the call. Prospects who are too young are rejected as well.
Occupation	No insurance agents, registered reps or investment advisers, whether it’s the consumer or the spouse.
Contact	A working phone number that fits the person who submitted it.

Rules matter. So does judgment. When a prospect falls just outside a guideline, our team looks at the whole picture and goes back to the same question: would the agent paying for this lead be happy to get it?

Not every lead we reject is a bad lead

If around 60% of the responses from a campaign never reach you, that does not mean 60% were fraudulent. By the time you take out the people who are too old, too young, short on money or in the business, a lot of responses are gone. A response is held back because:

• The amount they’re considering is under our minimum
• They fall outside our age guidelines
• They, or their spouse, work in the financial industry
• We can’t verify the information they gave us
• The submission looks automated or questionable
• They’re probably real, but something doesn’t add up and we aren’t confident enough in the opportunity

That last group comes up every week. Many of them are real people with real money. Our scrubbers’ notes tell us how likely a lead is to be a problem, and when the answer is “we’re not sure,” our regular clients don’t see it. Our standard isn’t whether we can sell a lead. It’s whether we’re comfortable charging one of our regular clients $300 for it.

Our clients helped build this process

We didn’t start out doing all of this. Almost every rule we have traces back to something that went wrong for a client.

• 2011Consumers responded to an offer for an hour-long audio CD. We scrubbed for two things: a disconnected phone number and people who worked in the industry. If the phone worked, the lead went through, no matter how much money the person had.
• 2014We dropped the CD because it was too hard to get through compliance. Clients at broker-dealers couldn’t send it without FINRA approval. We moved to the proposal-based offer we use today, which also worked better for our agents, and we added a minimum investment amount of about $25,000.
• Around 2019We raised our price to $250 and, around the same time, raised the minimum to $50,000 and lowered the maximum age to 83.
• TodayDatabase research, bot detection and typically three people looking at every lead.

A client would receive a lead who turned out to be in the insurance business, and we’d ask how to catch that next time. Someone wouldn’t have enough money to make the opportunity worthwhile, so we added a minimum. We had problems with very old prospects, so we tightened the age guidelines. We ran into phone numbers that didn’t work, so we added phone checks.

It was also a different market. In the early days I could run a commercial on one of the TV networks and get 70 calls for almost nothing. Today annuities are one of the most competitive and saturated advertising markets in the country. Leads cost far more to generate, the price our clients pay has gone up with that cost, and the more a lead costs you, the more selective we have to be about what we send.

Each time, we asked the same three things. What went wrong? Could we have caught it first? What do we change so our client doesn’t deal with it again?

I wish I’d done more of this from the beginning. But like most things in business, you don’t know what you don’t know.

What the consumer is told

A lead is only as good as the consumer’s memory of why you’re calling. So this is what every prospect requests and what they’re told to expect.

Our offer is a free annuity comparison report. We tell consumers that we’ve researched thousands of annuities and summarized the very best ones on the market: the annuities with the best rates, the best potential returns or, if income is what they’re looking for, the most retirement income. The report is customized for their state, their risk tolerance and their situation. Before they submit, they’re told that one annuity specialist will follow up within one business day to customize it for them. That specialist is you.

The offer was designed around Annuity Rate Watch. We’ve had a corporate account with them since 2012, and our clients can use it to produce reports on the best annuities in the market, customized for the prospect’s state, investment amount and source of funds, and send them to their leads. The consumer asked for a comparison report, and you’re able to deliver one. Every firm’s rules are different, so confirm with your own broker-dealer or compliance department before you send any material.

The consent disclosure sits directly above the submit button, in type the same size as the rest of the page. We hired a law firm that specializes in the TCPA to review our lead-generation process, and we implemented its recommendations. You remain responsible for your own compliance when you contact a lead.

Why your opening matters

Every client gets a recommended opening for the first 15 to 20 seconds of the call. I’m not trying to tell an experienced advisor how to run a conversation. The opening has one job, which is to connect the dots, and the order matters. Start with our brand, because Annuity Resources is the name the consumer knows. Then summarize what we promised them. Then tell them who you are. Your own firm name comes last.

If someone goes through one experience with us and then gets a call that sounds unrelated to it, that’s when you hear “I didn’t request anything.” Or “I already took care of it.” People don’t remember every detail of something they did online a day ago, so the first few seconds need to match what they do remember.

What we learn after the lead is delivered

We’re not an FMO, so we don’t see every appointment, application or commission that comes from our leads. Sometimes clients tell us what happened. Sometimes they don’t.

What we can track closely is problems. Every refund request is traced back to the campaign that produced the lead: which advertising generated it, how many questions that consumer answered, and what our team found during scrubbing. If one source starts producing more problems than we’re used to, it changes where we advertise.

That makes the whole thing a loop. The advertising produces a response, the response goes through qualification, a person reviews it, we approve or reject it, and what we learn goes back into the advertising. One incident doesn’t tell us much. A pattern does.

Cost per lead matters. We’re a business. But a campaign can produce plenty of inexpensive responses and still be a bad campaign. The economics are simple: if our clients don’t succeed, they don’t stay, and if they don’t stay, we’re eventually out of business.

I was surprised by that month myself. It doesn’t mean every lead became an appointment, and it certainly doesn’t mean every lead became a sale. We will send a lead with a problem again. Refund requests are simply one honest way to measure how often clients report a problem with what we send them.

I think the number is low for two reasons. We do the work up front and take out a lot of the problem leads. And clients who are doing well with the program don’t tend to argue over one lead.

Sometimes we call the consumer ourselves

A refund request doesn’t always mean the lead was bad. Sometimes we missed something, and we want to know that. Other times we call the consumer and hear a different story: “No, I talked to him. I told him to call me back in three months because I’m not retiring yet.”

That’s very different from “I’ve never heard of you.” We aren’t trying to win an argument over a refund. If our advertising caused the problem, we fix the advertising. If our qualification caused it, we fix the qualification. You can’t fix the right problem until you know what went wrong.

Five questions I’d ask any lead company

You’ll see leads advertised as exclusive, pre-qualified, scrubbed and phone verified. There’s nothing wrong with any of those words. But “phone verified” doesn’t tell me enough. Verified by whom? Checking what? Two companies can use all four words and run completely different processes, starting with completely different advertising. If I were buying annuity leads today, these are the questions I’d ask before giving anyone a credit card. Ask us too.

• What does your advertising promise the consumer?Is the ad about annuities? Does it lean on a rate of return? The lead company makes your first impression before you do.
• What does a consumer have to do to become a lead?How much do they read, how many questions do they answer, and what are they told will happen next?
• What do you check, and does a person check it?“Verified” can mean a 20-minute review or an automated ping of a phone number.
• What percentage of responses do you throw away?A company that sells everything it generates has made you its scrubbing department.
• What happens when there’s a problem?Who owns the company, who answers the phone, and how are refunds handled?

People decide very quickly whether a company can be trusted. They land on a web page and make that call in seconds. Your prospects do it to the lead company’s advertising, and you should do it to the lead company. Visit every company you’re considering and read everything on their site. Then go with your gut on which ones look credible.

An agent told me recently that he had contacted three or four lead companies and we were the only one that followed up. I’d answered his email over the weekend and called to see if he had questions. That’s a small thing. But if I were trusting a company to represent me to prospective clients, I’d pay attention to the small things.

After doing this since 2010, I think it comes down to one question.

Do I trust this company to make the first impression on a prospective client before I ever get the chance to speak with them?

We’re not perfect. We’ve made mistakes, and our process is better today because of some of them. We have made it considerably harder for a response to become one of our leads, and that costs us money. I’d rather send our clients fewer leads and be comfortable putting our name on every one. Our name is on the line too.

Leads are opportunities and are not guaranteed appointments, applications or sales. Individual results vary.