I’ve been selling annuity leads since 2010. In that time we’ve worked with more than 3,000 insurance agents, financial advisors, FMOs and carriers. I’ve written a lot on this site about the leads themselves: how we scrub them, how to work them, what it takes to succeed with them.
This article is about something else: what my clients taught me.
Most of our clients have been good people to work with, and some have stayed with us for years. If I’m honest, it was probably always something like 80/20. About 80% of our clients were never a problem. But the other 20% were like a five-alarm fire. They pushed me to my absolute limit. In the early years, those experiences cost me my health, my sanity, and a lot of my peace. They made me not want to do this business at all. Honestly, I’ve been questioning why I do it for about 10 years.
The hardest part was that I focused so much on that 20% that I completely lost track of the 80%. They say whatever you focus on expands. If you focus on the good, you see more good. If you focus on the bad, you see more bad. My focus was on the bad. It’s easy to say, “Just change your focus.” I found that really hard to do. What finally changed things was changing who we work with. We haven’t eliminated the problem clients completely, but we have far fewer than we used to. Our core client base is strong, and most of the people who come to us now are better producers who are much less likely to cause problems.
Here’s what I didn’t understand when I started: the biggest problem usually wasn’t the client or the complaint. It was how I reacted to it. It took me years to see that, and longer to change it. That’s why I say some of my clients have been my greatest teachers. The hard experiences forced me to understand human nature, myself, and why people do the things they do.
Wayne Dyer used to say that when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. That’s been true for me, and I’ve seen it with our clients too. When an agent changes the way they look at their practice and the problems in it, those problems often change.
I’m not writing this to complain about anyone. If you’re an agent or advisor, you deal with the same things with your own clients: criticism, unrealistic expectations, people who don’t act logically. My hope is that you’ll see some of your own experience in mine, and maybe it saves you a few years.
I Thought It Was About Price. It’s About Results.
I didn’t get into this business to make a lot of money. When I started, I was selling co-registration leads for $35 each, and they were costing us $25. It’s really hard to make a lot of money doing that.
Back then, I believed agents were very price-motivated, and part of the industry is. Before I even started the lead business, I surveyed the advisors and agents from RolloverCoach.com, the training business I ran before this one. About half wanted exclusive leads at a higher price. The other half wanted shared leads that cost less. Some people just flat out want to pay less.
What took me time to realize was what the better producers actually wanted. It wasn’t a lower price. It was less work to get the results they wanted. An established advisor with a busy practice and hundreds of clients cares much more about the effort it takes to get the reward than about what a lead costs. I wasn’t looking at it from their point of view, and I priced our leads too low.
I also had to realize that the people who just want to pay the least usually aren’t the best clients. They were often the 20% who caused problems later, so I changed our program.
What I’ve learned over 16 years is that most clients care about the end zone, not how they get there or what it costs. They stay with us because they get results, and they leave when they don’t. So a lot of the changes I’ve made over the years were about one thing: getting our clients further along to where they want to be.
What Good Customer Service Means to Me
I was born in 1973, so that gives you an idea of my age. I’ve always believed good customer service comes down to four things.
Respond quickly. If you care about the people you do business with, you follow up promptly. Our clients have always appreciated that about us. Whether it’s me or someone on my team, a quick response tells them we’re working hard and we’re there to take care of them.
Treat people the way you’d want to be treated. I don’t know why, but I’ve always been made this way. I believe in fairness, and in treating people the way you’d want to be treated if you were in their shoes.
Look out for their best interest. I learned this from Jay Abraham: lead your customer in a way where you’re genuinely looking after their best interests. That’s why, whenever I talk with agents and advisors before they join our program, I’m very transparent about the problems they’re going to run into. I don’t want them thinking they’re going on a trip to Maui. I want to prepare them like a soldier going into battle, not like someone going on vacation. Getting their mind right before they start is part of the service. People aren’t stupid. They know when someone is looking out for them.
Be honest. People won’t always remember what you told them, but they’ll remember how you made them feel. A lot of this came from my dad. He was a lawyer with a small practice: him, one or two assistants, and office space shared with a couple of other attorneys. He was very honest and straightforward. When I went back through his obituary recently, one of the comments from someone at his funeral was that people always knew where they stood with him. I think I got that from him. It’s rare in business. Lots of people think they’re honest. Fewer actually act that way.
What’s changed isn’t these principles. It’s how much I believe in them. I underestimated how rare these qualities are in business today, and how much they would matter. I think they’re a big reason we’ve survived for 16 years, and why so many clients have left and come back, or sent us referrals.
Here’s an example. Several years ago, I recorded about five hours of training videos on best practices for working leads. I could easily have sold them for a few hundred dollars. I’ve never charged a penny for them. An insurance agent here in Houston watched one, used a strategy from it with his own leads, and made $50,000 on a single case. He called to tell me about it and asked what we charged. I said, “If the free training helped you make 50 grand, imagine what we could do if we actually sent you people who are interested.” He laughed, and he never joined.
I don’t regret it. What I’ve gained by giving freely has dwarfed the cost, and whatever I would have made selling those silly videos.
The Early Years: Everything Was on Me
For several years, I didn’t have anyone to handle complaints. I listened to every issue personally.
People don’t always see the stress behind producing leads. When we were buying radio and TV, we had no idea whether 20 calls or zero would come in. And because our media was national, we had to cover the entire country. Our pricing wasn’t high enough to leave 30% of our leads unsold, so we needed agents everywhere.
That’s harder than it sounds. In more than 3,000 clients, I don’t think we’ve ever worked with an agent or advisor in Alaska. We’ve had maybe five to ten in Hawaii, total. Most agents want leads close to home. But we had to maintain that national footprint just to stay in business.
When complaints came in during those years, I used to get really angry. I still get angry sometimes, because producing these leads costs us a lot of money, and I don’t think many clients see the toll it takes. But I’ve changed a lot in how I handle it, and so has the business.
People Aren’t Big Macs
When people complain about legitimate problems, I’ve never had an issue with them. If a lead works in the industry, or they’re 95 years old, that’s a fair complaint.
What’s harder is when an agent decides that if they didn’t get an at-bat, the lead was garbage, literally worth nothing. Their ability to get that at-bat depends on their own skill, on the lead, and on whether that person liked them when they called. There are a lot of variables, and many of them we can’t control.
I’ve said many times that I should have just bought a McDonald’s franchise and focused on making the same Big Mac every day. When you walk into a McDonald’s, you know what that Big Mac experience is going to be. It doesn’t change much from one store to the next.
People aren’t Big Macs. Consumers don’t always act logically. Agents don’t always act logically. Leads don’t always work. We’re in the business of connecting two groups of unpredictable people, and that’s not always easy.
“People aren’t Big Macs.”
A friend of mine who’s a financial advisor once got a FINRA complaint because a client woke up in the middle of the night and said God had told him to cancel his annuity and file a complaint. My friend is a very ethical advisor. He’s not someone who pushes boundaries to make a sale. He hadn’t done anything wrong, and I felt for him. But when you work with people, you never know what’s going to happen. That’s what makes this industry hard for agents and advisors, and it’s what makes our job hard too.
Fewer Sources, Fewer Problems
One of the best decisions I ever made was to deliberately produce fewer leads. The same 80/20 I saw in our clients showed up in our lead sources. I kept the roughly 20% of sources that I believed produced 80% of the results, and cut the rest.
Eliminating 80% of our sources was a big deal. But it also eliminated about 80% of our problems. Over the last four or five years, refund requests have been below 1% every single month. Earlier this year, for the first time ever, we went an entire month without a single refund request from any of our clients.
When you aren’t handling as many problems, they don’t stack on top of each other. And today, someone else runs that department.
The Client I Thought Was Crazy, and the Mountain I Didn’t Know About
We once got a refund request from an advisor in Washington State who was with a large independent broker-dealer. We set territories with a zip-code-to-zip-code distance calculator, and he had signed up for a 70-mile radius. He called and said, “Scott, the lead you sent me is going to take ten hours to drive to. I want a refund.”
He was a nice guy, but I told him there was no way. I figured something was wrong with the software. Ten hours? How was that possible?
What I didn’t realize was that there was a mountain in the way. The lead was 70 or 80 miles from him by zip code, but he’d have had to drive all the way around a mountain to get there. I thought he was crazy. He was right.
We refunded him. If you treat people well, they usually want to treat you well too. He was a good guy.
In 16 years, that’s the only time something like that has happened. Maybe they’ve put a tunnel through the mountain by now.
Listening to Clients Without Letting Them Run the Business
Almost every major change we’ve made came from client feedback: adding a call center early on, raising our prices, lowering the maximum age, asking more questions when someone becomes a lead, and raising the minimum investment amount. We don’t implement everything, because some suggestions aren’t practical or are too hard to do. But we listen, and we do what we can.
How do I decide what to act on? Three things.
- How often does it come up? If I keep hearing the same issue, it needs to be addressed.
- Who’s saying it? Is this someone doing well in our program, or someone who’s struggling with one foot out the door? Are the people raising it our better clients?
- My gut. I’ve always believed in listening to your gut instinct. It’s often right.
Sometimes the most useful feedback comes from someone you don’t even like. Years ago, an agent laughed at us because our prices were too low. He wasn’t a very nice person, but he was right. That was a sign I should have raised prices already. I firmly believe customers can often see things about what we do more clearly than we can.
Trust, but Verify
Not every complaint holds up.
We had a client in Florida, very confident in himself, who submitted a refund request saying the lead was garbage. We reserve the right to call the consumer when there’s a refund request, and in this case we did. The lady told us she’d spoken with him on the first call. She had asked him to send information about himself, his firm, his licenses, and the annuities she was interested in. He promised he would. He never sent anything. A week later he called back trying to book an appointment, didn’t get it, and then asked for his money back.
She had no reason to lie. She was 75 years old and still interested in annuities, because she never got the information she asked for.
I wish I could say that was the only time it happened. It wasn’t. In my experience, something like 40 to 50% of the refund requests we receive aren’t what we’d consider valid. A lot of the time, that isn’t dishonesty. It’s frustration. An agent talks to a lead who doesn’t want to buy a product right away, and they feel that should be refundable. Some requests get sent just out of frustration. I understand that, but it’s still hard when we’re the ones absorbing the cost. A friend of mine used to say, “Scott, just tell them it’s not a guaranteed-commission program.”
What it taught me is that people will push you as far as they think they can. When we were very flexible with refunds, it encouraged some agents to think, “If I got one easily, why not submit three more?” Maybe that’s just human nature. So I learned Ronald Reagan’s motto: trust, but verify.
Today, when a client is completely certain and the evidence points the other way, we call the consumer to find out what happened. Once a consumer has told someone to go pound sand, they’re not always in the mood to talk, but we try.
And this doesn’t happen with most clients. A lot of our clients only bring us legitimate issues. Our best clients know that if they might make $50,000 or $100,000 on the next deal, one silly refund request isn’t worth hurting the relationship.
I think those are some of the smartest people I’ve worked with, because they understand something intuitively that most people don’t. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. As a client of any vendor, you can win the battle and lose the war. Going to town with a vendor over one lead might get you a refund, but it’s short-sighted. Very few of our clients have ever thought about that.
And naturally, we want to help the people who help us. Our best clients have truly been our supporters.
We don’t want to lose a good client over one lead. If a lead has a legitimate problem, like someone who works in the industry, someone in their 90s, or a disconnected number, we credit it. If someone has bought 20 leads and has an issue with one, we’ll credit them too.
What we watch for is a pattern. Across the business, refund requests run under 1% a month. So when a new client asks for a refund on one of their first leads, or requests start coming in close together, that’s a warning sign, and the first thing we do is slow down their lead flow. Their actions are telling us to be careful.
I tell agents that the good thing about working with us is that we’ve been doing this for 16 years with more than 3,000 clients, and we have a lot of experience. The bad thing about working with us is that we’ve been doing this for 16 years with more than 3,000 clients. When someone does something that reminds us of a really bad experience from the past, it sets off alarm bells. If we can avoid a disaster, why wouldn’t we?
The Email Was Never the Problem
All of this used to drive me insane. Changing how I handled it is the biggest change I’ve made in myself, and it changed my life.
For years I was stuck in a pattern. I’d be fine, then I’d get an email or a call from a client that set me off, and I’d be angry for the rest of the day. Sometimes I’d throw the phone, my old landline, in pure disgust. I had a chocolate Labrador back then, and the dog always knew. Whenever I got that angry, my lab would run and hide under my bed. My self-talk afterward was terrible, and I’d stew on it for hours. Event, trigger, reaction, over and over again.
Here’s an example. We’ve had agents join our program with credit cards that had no balance on them, with the sole intention of ripping us off. That drove me bananas. And my reaction did nothing but hurt me.
Eventually I realized the emails weren’t the problem. My reaction to them was. Just like some clients overreact to a bad lead, I was overreacting to bad situations in the business. Sometimes I hid it well and sometimes I didn’t, but either way, it burned me up. The wildest part is that I didn’t even realize I was doing it. I was repeating the same negative pattern over and over without being aware of it.
“The emails weren’t the problem. My reaction to them was.”
What really helped me break it was the Hoffman Process, a week-long personal development workshop in California. One of the breakthroughs I had that week was learning to recognize patterns of behavior like that one and break them.
Once I became aware of that pattern, I could decide not to keep repeating it. I still get angry. But I’m much better at noticing what’s happening and remembering that I have a choice. There’s a line often attributed to Viktor Frankl: between stimulus and response there’s a space, and in that space is our freedom to choose how we respond. That was a big turning point for me.
Just this week, a newer client asked for a refund on one lead, even though he was happy with the rest of them. Years ago, a call like that would have ruined my day. This time we just talked it through. By the end of the call, he offered to withdraw the request. I gave him a partial credit anyway, as a sign of good faith. The situation was the same kind I’d dealt with a hundred times. The difference was me.
“The situation was the same kind I’d dealt with a hundred times. The difference was me.”
The people trying to take advantage of us didn’t care how I felt, so why let them ruin my day? One practical change helped too: we raised our prices. When our prices were lower, we attracted too many people who were struggling financially, and they were more likely to play games.
Who’s a Good Fit, and Who Isn’t
We can usually tell how good a fit someone is by how they react to their first leads. The first 30 days are a sensitive time. People can talk a big game on the phone, but things change when their card starts getting charged and they’re working leads, running proposals, meeting people and trying to close business.
The warning signs are usually obvious: blowing up our phone, being extremely anxious about a single lead, or submitting a refund request right away.
With prospective clients, I want to know what they’re doing now. What other lead companies are they using? What are they doing for marketing? Are they following up with people by phone, or mostly doing seminars? Selling by phone is different from selling in a room, and it takes an adjustment. Most of our better clients are already doing well, and we’re one piece added to what they’re already doing.
I’ll also tell people up front when their expectations aren’t realistic. If someone tells me they need to close one of their first two or three leads, they’re not a good fit. If someone tells me on the first call that our prices are outrageous, I’ll bring it up, because we’re priced in the middle. We’re not the most expensive or the least expensive. If someone thinks our price is very high, it usually means they haven’t worked with many other companies.
Expectations matter because disappointment almost always comes from expectations that didn’t match reality. That’s one reason I’m writing articles like this one. If they help someone understand what working with us is really like before they start, they’ll be better prepared, and they’ll do better.
Our biggest-spending clients are usually our best clients, too. They’re already doing well, they’re used to investing in marketing, and they don’t need every lead to pay for itself in three weeks. Someone just starting a practice who needs to close a lead to pay the bills is in a very different spot.
The Clients Who Stay, and the Ones Who Come Back
Every client has rough stretches: lower volume, or several leads in a row that don’t close. It happens to everyone. The clients who stay through those stretches believe in our service, and they believe in us. Most importantly, they believe in themselves and that they can make it happen.
In my experience, our longest-standing clients are mostly strong producers, roughly in the top 20% of the industry. They value the relationship, they’re reasonable to work with, and they look at the big picture.
About six or seven years ago, one of my longest-standing clients called me with a request. An extended family member of his wanted to join our program in his territory. He said, “Scott, I’ve been with you for many years. I’ve never really asked you for much, but I’m asking you not to let this person into the program. If you do this, I’ll be with you forever.”
So I turned the other person away. He couldn’t understand why I’d refuse his business. It was mind-boggling to him. What I told him was that we’ll do almost anything to help our good clients, including turning away other business. My client has now been with us for more than 10 years, and he’s still with us today.
We’ve never tracked it, but I estimate 400 to 600 clients have stopped working with us and later come back. The most common thing they tell us is that the grass isn’t always greener. Agents get pitched every marketing scheme known to man. Sometimes they try one, and then they come back.
Of course, not everyone comes back. Over 16 years, more than 100 long-term clients have retired. Health is one of the biggest reasons we lose people, and some clients have passed away. Others have grown to the point where referrals alone keep them busy and they don’t need leads anymore.
We’ve also had clients, and marketers at FMOs, defend our program to other agents. They’ve seen the results, and they speak up. That means a lot.
It Usually Isn’t Personal
I’ve burned bridges with clients. I’ve told people never to call us again. I don’t have much respect for people who act with bad intentions or don’t respect others.
What I try to do now is different. I remind myself that I don’t know what’s going on in that person’s life. A lot of times, when someone gets angry at us, it has nothing to do with us. They might be angry at their spouse, or at a client who just canceled a contract during the free-look period, and the lead becomes the outlet. When I started this business, I was a lot younger, and I didn’t even realize people did that.
One call I’ll never forget came from an agent who was struggling in his business and going through a hard time in his personal life. He was filled with rage. He tore into me on the phone, and I remember thinking, “I would rather dig ditches for a living than deal with people like this.” My blood pressure and heart rate went through the roof. I felt so awful I thought I might need to go to the hospital. It was like he had transferred all of his anger straight into me.
We hadn’t done anything differently for him than for the clients who were happy with our program. At the time, I had no idea what he was going through. Looking back, if you’re not in a good place in your life, how are you going to be pleasant with strangers and earn their business? The more we put forward our best selves, the better we do. An angry, bitter version of ourselves isn’t going to succeed.
It took me a long time to accept that we just weren’t going to make everyone happy, that there were a lot of things we couldn’t control, and that I had to be okay with that.
And sometimes it’s just who they are. If someone is trying to rip us off, they’re probably treating a lot of people that way. It’s not personal. Realizing that took a lot of weight off.
So I try to forgive people and not take on that energy, because holding on to it is unhealthy. I don’t need to work with everybody. And when we’ve had a bad experience with someone, we’re much more likely to have another one with that same person, so I’d rather move on.
It goes both ways. Our team makes mistakes sometimes, and our scrubbers occasionally miss something. When we get something wrong, I apologize, because I want our clients to know that’s not the standard we hold ourselves to.
Everything I’ve said here about my clients applies to agents and their own clients too. It’s the same thing. It’s human nature.
I’m Only Part of the Equation
The most useful criticism I’ve ever gotten from a client came from a longtime client in Seal Beach. He told me I cared too much.
He’s not the only one who’s said that. In 2018, I went to the Sivananda ashram in the Bahamas for a meditation class, partly because I was under so much stress. One of the yoga teachers told me the same thing: I cared too much, I was trying too hard, and I needed to relax.
What my client said was, “Scott, you can’t control what your clients do with the leads you generate for them.” Hearing that from a client mattered. For years I felt responsible for my clients’ outcomes. But I’m only part of the equation. The agents who call and work the leads are a big part of it too. I’d feel responsible for failures that weren’t entirely mine. I don’t need to fix everyone.
That doesn’t mean I stopped caring about results. I still build the program around them. But I do the best we can and let go of the rest, because it’s out of my hands.
What I’d Tell Any Agent or Advisor
The most successful clients I’ve worked with shrug things off when leads don’t go their way. Think about a .300 hitter in baseball. He fails 70% of the time, and he’s still a very good hitter. He doesn’t get bent out of shape over one at-bat.
I’ve talked before about the roller coaster agents ride, with each lead and in their relationship with us. Our top clients ride a much smaller roller coaster. They don’t get as high, and they don’t get as low.
If I could pass along two lessons, they’d be these.
Detach from the outcome. In everything I’ve done, the hungrier I am to make the sale, the more it seems to slip away. When I’m truly detached from the outcome, everything flows better. People can tell when you don’t need their business. It’s an energy you give off, and they don’t feel the pressure. Call it the power of not caring too much.
Feel connected to the people in front of you. There’s a saying that everyone is fighting a battle you can’t see. Hearing how hard some of my clients’ lives are has made me try to have more empathy, in business and outside of it. My own health hasn’t been great for many years, and it’s meant a lot to me when people showed empathy without knowing what I was going through. It’s rare.
One of the things that helped me most was a CD series by Dr. Wayne Dyer called Making the Shift, recorded at a seminar in Maui years ago. You can find the CDs for $10 or $15. He talks about moving from a life where your ego drives your decisions to a life of meaning, where you feel connected to everyone. I’ve learned so much from it. I recommend it to all our clients, and to anyone who’s middle-aged, because a lot of people, especially in our industry, have their ego wrapped up in what they do and what they’ve accomplished.
I know that from experience. The more successful my business became, the less happy I was, because I expected success to make me happy, and it didn’t. When you feel connected to the people around you, you treat them differently. And if a prospect feels connected to you at a deeper level, how much more likely are they to work with you? In my experience, it’s definitely more.
What My Clients Taught Me
If I had to sum up 16 years, I’d say my clients taught me three things.
Focus on what you bring into the world, not what you take from it. They taught me this partly because that mindset is so rare.
The problems I thought were the problem usually weren’t. My reaction to them was.
Money isn’t where I’ll find meaning. I thought I’d find meaning in helping other people make money. I didn’t. What I’ve realized is that the business can fund something meaningful. I plan to start a nonprofit that helps people living with chronic illness, and to put a large share of our profits toward it. I’ve always wanted to make a real difference in the world, and this is how I intend to do it.
If I could talk to myself in 2010, the full story would take a book, and maybe I’ll write it one day. But I’d tell him three things: listen to your clients and act on what they tell you faster, focus on the long term, and enjoy the process. At the end of the day, we’re all going somewhere where money isn’t going to matter much.
Today, my definition of success is a life of peace. It used to be about making more money. Now it’s about enjoying the different parts of my life. That’s why I’d rather have fewer but better clients, and fewer but better leads. The early years cost me a lot of my peace. My clients, the easy ones and the hard ones, taught me how to get it back.
More Resources
- How We Scrub Our Leads
- Working Our Annuity Leads
- The 12 Biggest Mistakes Agents Make When Buying Annuity Leads
- Why Some Agents Make Money With Annuity Leads and Others Don’t
- What I’ve Learned Spending Eight Figures Advertising Annuities
- Common Questions About Our Annuity Leads
Scott Brooks, MBA, CFP®, is the founder of TheAnnuityLeads.com, which has created leads for insurance agents and financial advisors since 2010.
