A few years ago, an agent who sold Medicare and final expense joined our program. He’d been life and health licensed for about a year and a half, but he’d only been selling annuities for 30 to 60 days. He was making about $60,000 or $70,000 a year.
In his first six weeks with our leads, he made more than $100,000 in commissions. That’s a year and a half of income in six weeks, with almost no experience selling annuities.
Then he stopped. He didn’t need leads for a while, and he didn’t want to work for a while either.
In that case, the program worked too well. It’s one of the stranger things I’ve learned in 16 years of selling annuity leads: agents leave for all kinds of reasons, and a lot of them have nothing to do with the leads.
We’ve worked with more than 3,000 clients since 2010. Some stayed for years. Some left after a handful of leads. And somewhere between 400 and 600 have left and come back.
Sometimes leaving is the right decision. Your business changes, your budget changes, or the results don’t justify continuing. But sometimes agents shut off a profitable source of business over one frustrating experience. Those are very different situations. Here’s what I’ve learned from watching both, and what I’d want you to know before you quit any lead program.
The Real Reasons Agents Leave
These are the most common reasons I see, roughly in order.
They run out of money. Some agents have established practices and are doing well financially. Others join and simply can’t afford to keep going. We’ve heard this many times.
One bad lead. This is one of the most common, and the most surprising. An agent can make $50,000 on a $4,000 spend, get one bad experience with a lead, blow it out of proportion and quit. They turn off something that’s working.
I think that’s the number one mistake agents and advisors make in their practice. They stop doing what’s working to chase something that might or might not work better.
One of our agents spent about $13,000 with us last year and made about $170,000 in commissions. That’s $157,000 more than he spent on leads, and his account was off for most of the year. Imagine what he’d have made if he’d raised his monthly cap and left it on.
They lose hope. Working leads is a roller coaster. Every lead has its own ups and downs as you follow up. But your relationship with a lead program rides a roller coaster too, depending on what’s happening in your practice, where you are mentally, even your health. When you’re at the bottom of that second ride, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture.
They make too much money too fast. This happens over and over. Someone makes $100,000 or $200,000 in a couple of months and decides to call me back in a year. It’s more common with agents who work from home with no overhead. Agents with staff and an office tend to be more stable, because the bills don’t stop.
They’re bombarded with other offers. Agents are like a very pretty girl. Everyone’s hitting on her, and she has a lot of options. Every week, agents are pitched by FMOs, new FMOs, marketing firms, advertising agencies and lead generation companies, all promising their dreams will come true for $5,000. Most of the pitches look polished. Very few come with any proof.
Just yesterday, I looked at a company selling leads to insurance agents. The landing page told agents exactly what they wanted to hear. But the same company did lead generation for a lot of other industries. The page had maybe 700 words on it, there was no sign they’d been doing this long, and there was no proof of results. Agents see pages like that on Facebook all day, and it’s easy to believe the grass is greener.
And some reasons are just life. Successful agents retire, and most of our clients are older than I am. Some get sick or have a heart attack and pull back. Some have an established practice with a busy stretch and simply don’t need leads for a while. That’s why we’re always bringing on new clients.
The Lottery Ticket Mentality
The agents who frustrate me most are the ones who make 30 or 50 times their money and quit anyway.
What they usually have in common is a very high close rate. They’re so used to winning that they can’t handle hearing no. They fixate on the one person who didn’t buy instead of the three who did. Honestly, that’s one of the most frustrating parts of this business.
A lot of them have what I call a lottery ticket mentality. They hit one big win and stop playing. They don’t run their business like they’re serious about it. If someone can do that well with a few leads, they have the skills to do much better. What usually stops them is the way they react.
Back in 2005, I was at the Grand Casino in Monaco. I put about $5 in a slot machine and won about $100, which was worth a lot more then than it is today. I took the money, walked out and had a nice dinner, because I knew the slot machine wasn’t repeatable.
Walking away from a slot machine makes sense. Walking away from something you’ve done over and over doesn’t. These agents haven’t closed one deal. They’ve closed many.
“Walking away from a slot machine makes sense. Walking away from something you’ve done over and over doesn’t.”
The First 90 Days
Most of our turnover happens in the first 30 to 90 days. Once someone has been with us four to six months, they’re usually solid for years.
Some agents come in wanting to dip a toe in the water. They’ll try five or 10 leads, without a system for working them, and see what happens. The idea of leads sounds great. Then they find out it takes work. People don’t answer on the first dial. Sometimes you have to call several times, or meet with someone more than once. That’s why the commissions are so big. Nobody hands you a $1 million case for doing nothing.
Agents who are used to referrals, or who are coming from seminars, often have to adjust how they sell. That takes some getting used to.
In the late ’90s, when I worked for a bank broker-dealer, a friend and I knew a seminar producer named Dave. He gave us one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard: if you’re not committed to doing six seminars, don’t do one. Do six or do zero.
Even after hundreds of events, Dave still had seminars that bombed and some that lost money. One event couldn’t tell him anything.
“If you’re not committed to doing six seminars, don’t do one. Do six or do zero.”
Think about that the next time you’re three or four leads in. A seminar producer might spend $5,000 and fill a room. Some agents quit our program before they’ve worked enough leads to fill a single room.
Don’t Quit at the Bottom of the Roller Coaster
If you’re thinking about quitting, here’s what I’d tell you. Don’t make an emotional decision. Don’t let one experience decide it for you. That’s easier said than done when you’re spending money and dealing with unpredictable people, but make it a logical decision.
And remember that this business is cyclical. Even our best clients go through stretches where three, four or five leads in a row don’t convert.
We worked with an agent in Los Angeles who went six to eight weeks without closing a single lead. I told him, “You’ve been with us a long time, and you’ve always done well. You’re in a rough patch. You have to believe in yourself, and you have to believe in the leads.”
Within 30 days, he wrote three seven-figure cases back to back to back. When he called me two months later, he’d written about $4.7 million in index annuity premium. Eight weeks earlier, he hadn’t written anything.
You don’t want to get off the roller coaster at the low point. In my experience, the high point has come for the agents who kept going. And notice what the big producers you respect do: they never shut down their marketing. Ever.
Leaving Can Make It Worse
One thing I wish every agent understood before quitting any lead program: switching vendors doesn’t fix a sales or follow-up problem.
People underestimate how much worse things can get. Other companies promise the moon and the stars, often with misleading claims. But if you have a track record with something that works, leaving it can put you in a worse spot than you’re in now.
Our best clients don’t hop from vendor to vendor. They usually buy from several companies at once and never shut any of them off unless there’s a real emergency. Agents who aren’t doing as much business tend to pick one company, leave after a few months, then try a second, a third and a fourth.
If five legitimate programs don’t work for you, are all five vendors trash? Or does something need to change on your end?
“If five legitimate programs don’t work for you, are all five vendors trash?”
Some Agents Leave for Good Reasons
Not everyone who leaves is making a mistake.
We worked with an advisor in Ohio for six or seven years. He never complained, and he was great to work with. While he was with us, he used annuity business to pay for his marketing while he built a fee-based practice. Once that book passed $70 million, he didn’t need leads anymore. The program had done exactly what he wanted it to do.
Another longtime client, in Utah, went fee-only. He dropped his life and health license, set up an RIA and stopped selling annuities. That made complete sense.
He was also the only client out of 3,000 who ever did this: when we raised our prices once, he called and said, “Hey Scott, I noticed you raised the price. There’s probably a reason. Please raise it on us too.” He knew I didn’t want to do it, and he was thinking about our business, not just his. I still respect him for it.
Why So Many Come Back
Agents have come back after three months, a year, five years and, in at least one case, 10 years.
When agents come back, I hear this a lot: “When I was with you before, I was brand new. I didn’t know what I didn’t know.” Those agents come back with more experience, and they’re ready.
Here’s something worth knowing if you’ve left a program before: returning clients tend to repeat their first pattern. Agents who were only with us a short time the first time often leave quickly again. Agents who stayed a long time usually stay a long time when they come back. I’m not saying that to blame anyone. It’s a pattern I’ve seen over and over, and it’s worth being aware of so you can break it.
Most come back because they want leads coming in again, or because something went wrong with another vendor. Their lead flow slowed down, the price went up, the quality dropped, or the company wanted their contracts. You can read about that last one in why agents should think twice before joining an FMO lead program.
What they tell me when they come back is usually the same. The other programs were full of big promises they didn’t like the reality of. Often they didn’t like what had been promised to consumers. Hype in the ad turns into problems on the phone. Some programs didn’t even advertise annuities, and agents learned how different those prospects are from people who actually responded to an annuity message.
Agents who’ve tried a lot of other companies have a better perspective. They’ve surveyed the market, and they know the grass isn’t always greener. To be fair, they’re also the ones most likely to be pulled away by the next shiny object a month later.
We’ve also learned from the people who left. For several years, my assistant has emailed everyone who stopped to ask why. That feedback is part of why we lowered our maximum age from 85 to 83 and raised our investment minimums. We noticed that agents were far more likely to quit after a weaker lead. An agent who gets a lead with $700,000 to invest rarely quits, unless the person is rude to them.
Who Lasts
The agents who stay for years tend to have three things in order:
- Mindset: how they think about spending money, their practice and their future.
- Expectations: whether what they expect matches reality.
- Preparation: a plan for working the leads, and the sales skills and product knowledge to back it up.
That last one matters more than people think. We send new agents the same serious annuity shoppers we send everyone else. They need to answer basic questions well and come across as experienced. Nobody wants to trust their finances to someone who’s learning on the job.
When I look at our longest-running clients, they have four things in common:
- They’re patient.
- They don’t overreact to individual situations.
- They keep faith in themselves, and in us, through the ups and downs.
- They’re strong producers in general.
Before You Quit, Ask Yourself
If you’re thinking about stopping any lead program, ours included, run through these first:
- Have I worked enough leads, for long enough, to judge the results?
- Have I followed up consistently on every lead?
- What have I earned after my lead costs, and what business is still pending?
- Has the lead quality actually changed, or am I reacting to a rough stretch?
- Does continuing fit my budget and my business goals?
When I’ll Tell You to Stop
I normally don’t try to talk anyone out of leaving.
If you’ve done well and you’re just mentally down, I’ll encourage you to look at the bigger picture. But if you’ve worked a fair number of leads and it isn’t working, more leads won’t fix it. Unless something changes in how you follow up, you’ll keep getting the results you’ve been getting. Tony Robbins likes to repeat the old line that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. With leads, it’s working them the same way over and over and expecting a different result.
So I’ll suggest you look at your process, go through our content, send the overnight package, change your follow-up script and dial more. If you’re not willing to make changes, then stopping is probably the right call.
“If 30 or 40 leads go nowhere, the solution isn’t another 30 leads.”
Once in a while, we end a relationship ourselves, usually one or two of the roughly 100 new clients we bring on each year.
Ultimately, people do what they want to do. My hope is that if you ever think about leaving a lead program that’s working for you, you’ll stop and ask yourself whether it’s a logical decision or an emotional one.
More Resources
About Our Lead Program
- Common Questions About Our Annuity Leads: pricing, territories, billing, refunds and how the program works.
- How We Scrub Our Leads: what our team checks before a lead ever reaches you, and why more than half never do.
- Working Our Annuity Leads: the opening script, the overnight package and the follow-up process our best clients use.
- Testimonials From Our Clients: audio testimonials from agents and advisors who use our leads.
- Free Training Video: how top producers work high-quality annuity leads.
- About Us: who we are and how we’ve run the business since 2010.
Articles
- Why Insurance Agents Should Think Twice Before Joining an FMO Lead Program: what to ask before you switch contracts for a lead or appointment program.
- How We Work With FMOs and IMOs, and Why We’re Different: how our partnerships with FMOs and IMOs work, and why we’ve stayed independent.
- Why Good Annuity Leads Look Bad: the five signs that fool agents into giving up on good prospects too soon.
- Why Some Agents Make Money With Annuity Leads and Others Don’t: what our most successful clients do differently.
- The 12 Biggest Mistakes Agents Make When Buying Annuity Leads: what to avoid before you spend a dollar.
- Will Annuity Leads Work in My Area? Rural vs. Big City Markets: how your market changes lead flow, case size and close rates.
- What I’ve Learned Spending Eight Figures Advertising Annuities: 16 years of lessons from the advertising side.
- Founder Interview: The Story Behind TheAnnuityLeads.com: how the company started and why it works the way it does.
- My Clients Were My Greatest Teachers: what 3,000 financial professionals taught me about business, people and myself.
Scott Brooks, MBA, CFP®, is the founder of TheAnnuityLeads.com, which has created leads for insurance agents and financial advisors since 2010.
