About 10 or 12 years ago, one of our clients in Colorado called me, practically laughing. “Scott, you’re not going to believe this,” he said. “You sent me someone with $10 million in financial assets.”
The lead form said $100,000.
Think about what you would have done with that lead. If you’d judged it by the form, you might have treated it like a small case, or not bothered calling back after the first try. You’d have walked away from one of the biggest prospects you ever got, and you’d never have known it.
After 16 years of creating annuity leads, I’m convinced that a lot of the leads you give up on aren’t bad leads at all. They just look bad. Some leads really are bad. But a lot of the ones agents write off aren’t, and the problem usually isn’t the lead. It’s how you react to it.
When you work a lead, you’re working with partial information. A few answers on a form. A few seconds on the phone. A voicemail that didn’t get returned. That isn’t the whole story, but it’s easy to react as if it were. You see one discouraging detail, decide the lead is no good, and move on.
Here are the five signs that fool agents most often, and what’s usually going on behind them.
1. The Form Says $50,000
You open a new lead and see $50,000. Before you write it off, know that the Colorado lead wasn’t a fluke.
I can’t count how many retired doctors have responded to our ads, say a 75-year-old cardiologist who practiced for 35 years, and put down $50,000. We’ve had people living in $10 million homes put down less than $25,000. Just this week, an agent in the Carolinas told me that a lot of his leads that listed $400,000 or $500,000 turned out to have several million once he got to know them.
Why would anyone understate it? Put yourself in their shoes. You know a company doesn’t ask for your phone number out of the goodness of its heart. If you told a website you had a million dollars, you’d expect a million phone calls. So you’d give a number that felt safe. Your leads do the same thing. They don’t want to tip their hand.
It also helps to know what we ask. We ask how much someone is thinking about investing, not their total assets or their net worth. Those can be very different numbers.
Not everyone who writes $50,000 is secretly a millionaire. But you won’t know which ones are until you talk to them. Some lead companies inflate these numbers to justify charging more. We’ve never done that. We pass along what the consumer tells us. Sometimes that’s only a small piece of what they actually have.
2. The Form Says “Fixed Annuity” or “More Than Six Months”
Maybe you’ve done this. You see that a lead is interested in a fixed annuity, and you decide it’s a bad lead before you ever pick up the phone. I’ve watched a lot of agents do it. The trouble is that once you’re discouraged, it changes how you work the lead and how you sound when you finally call.
We still ask people when they plan to make a decision. Several clients have asked us to take the question off the form, because every time they see “more than six months,” they write the person off. Next.
But think about it. That person might be ready next week. Would you tell a stranger on a website that you were in a hurry? Maybe they don’t know yet. And people change their minds as they learn. Someone asking about a fixed annuity today may end up somewhere completely different once you’ve walked them through their options.
The form is where the conversation starts, not the verdict. Don’t take it as gospel.
“The form is where the conversation starts, not the verdict.”
3. They Say “I’m Just Looking”
Think about the last time you walked into a store and a salesperson asked if they could help. What did you say? Probably, “I’m just looking.”
But you walked into the store. That alone separated you from almost everyone else in your city at that moment. You were at least a little interested, or you wouldn’t have walked in.
When a lead tells you they’re just gathering information, that’s often all it means. They may be early in the process. They may not know what else to say. Or they haven’t decided yet whether they want to open up to you.
In the first few seconds of your call, the person is deciding whether to talk to you at all, and whether to do it right now. That’s why your introduction matters so much. Get it wrong, and they’ll tell you to go pound sand. Get it right, and they’re still sizing you up. “I’m just looking” is often just part of that.
When I was younger, plenty of girls told me they had a boyfriend. Some of them did. Some of them just didn’t want to talk to me. You never really know. So don’t assume the worst. Be patient, and roll with it.
4. They Won’t Call You Back
You’ve been here. Someone spends several minutes answering personal questions about their money, then won’t return your calls. It’s frustrating.
It’s natural to picture a lead as warm, and staying warm the whole way through. People don’t work that way. They swing between hot and cold. They become a lead, read an article that makes them want to wait a week, and then the market drops 4% and suddenly they’re interested again. When someone goes quiet on you, they may simply be in a cold stretch.
Sometimes it’s life. One of our clients in California called a lead about 10 times and left a string of voicemails. When he finally reached him, the man apologized. He’d been in the hospital, and the number was a landline, so he never got the messages. Sometimes the money isn’t available yet. Someone responds because something comes due next month, then figures they have a few weeks and stops answering.
And sometimes they’re putting off something they know they need to do. You’ve probably done this yourself. I know I have. It took me six to nine months to hire an estate planning attorney to set up my will and trust, because I didn’t want to think about my own mortality. I talked to a lawyer, told him I’d get back to him, and didn’t call again for four or five months.
Was I uninterested? No. I was in the process. I just wasn’t ready. Your leads are often in the same place.
Years ago, we worked with a very successful agent in Southern California. A lead completely blew him off on the first call. I expected him to be frustrated. Instead he said, “No big deal. I’ll call him in a week.”
A week later he called back. The man didn’t even remember blowing him off. He booked an appointment and closed a big case a few days later.
That brush-off meant a lot more to the agent than it did to the consumer. The next one you get probably means more to you than it does to the person who gave it.
5. They’re Talking to Other Agents
You finally get a lead on the phone, and they tell you they’re already talking to another agent. Maybe two. It’s easy to hear that and feel like you’ve lost before you’ve started.
I’d hear it the other way. Nobody hands their information to several companies for fun. They know they’ll get phone calls and have to deal with everyone who follows up. If they’re talking to several agents, I’d take that as a sign of real interest, not a reason to give up.
It also usually tells you they haven’t found the right person, or the right solution, yet. If they had, they wouldn’t still be talking to you. Often they’ve been shown one product and told it’s the answer, and something about it doesn’t sit right.
That’s your opening. Ask what they’ve been looking at. You’ll often hear the other agent’s pitch repeated almost word for word. Then ask, “Did they show you a list of the annuities on the market, or just recommend one or two?” It’s usually one or two. When people realize they’ve been shown one option out of thousands, they start to wonder whether it’s really the best one for them.
About 10 years ago, a client of ours in Louisiana asked for a refund because a lead had brushed him off. I called the lead myself. They’d been shown a single product by someone else. I asked that same question, and once they realized it was one product out of thousands, I booked the appointment for my client on that call.
The lead he wanted a refund for turned into an appointment. The other agent wasn’t a reason to give up. He was the reason the door was still open.
“The other agent wasn’t a reason to give up. He was the reason the door was still open.”
What’s Really Behind All Five
Every one of these signs has the same thing behind it. The person on the other end is nervous, and they’re confused.
A few years ago, I had a friend who was an endodontist. She did seven to 10 root canals a day. To her, it was just another appointment. To me, after four or five dentists who couldn’t get my tooth numb, a root canal is about as close to torture as it gets. Same procedure, two completely different experiences.
If you’ve been in this business 20 or 30 years, like most of our clients, a first call is routine for you. For the person you’re calling, sitting down with a stranger to talk about their retirement savings feels a lot more like my root canal.
And they’re confused. After 16 years, what surprises me most is how many people go through the annuity buying process, sometimes more than once, and come out the other end still unsure. They talk to two or three advisors and get two or three opinions. Then someone else tells them something completely different. What they want is certainty that they’re making a good decision, and they don’t find it. So a lot of them do nothing. In their minds, doing nothing is better than making a bad decision.
That’s why good leads look bad. A nervous, confused person understates their money, tells you they’re just looking, goes quiet for a week, and talks to three other agents. None of that means they’re not a buyer.
There’s a story I heard almost 30 years ago that I still think about whenever an agent tells me a lead is bad.
When I went through training at Edward Jones in 1998, our trainer had been an advisor in Georgia for about 30 years. One day she told us about her largest client. This family had more money with her than anyone else, somewhere between $5 million and $10 million, and that was a long time ago. She’d worked with them for more than 20 years. She knew their kids. She knew their dogs’ names. She knew their fears and their concerns. She was sure she had all of their money.
After she left her practice to train advisors at the home office in St. Louis, she found out that family had just as much money with Merrill Lynch in Atlanta. She’d had no idea.
She was floored. You could hear it as she told us. She had been so sure she knew everything about that family. Everything. Sitting in that class, I was shocked too.
If someone with a 20-year relationship didn’t know the whole story, what are the odds a stranger tells you everything on a lead form? Or in the first 30 seconds of a phone call?
“If someone with a 20-year relationship didn’t know the whole story, what are the odds a stranger tells you everything on a lead form?”
You’ll never have the full picture early on. The agents who struggle are the ones who fill in the gaps with assumptions, and then let those assumptions change how they work the lead.
So the next time a lead looks bad, remember that you’re working with partial information. Don’t overreact to what’s on the form or to the first thing someone says on the phone. Stay patient, keep following up, and be the one who’s still there after the other agents have given up. More often than you’d think, that’s who gets the case.
More Resources
About Our Lead Program
- Common Questions About Our Annuity Leads
- How We Scrub Our Leads
- Working Our Annuity Leads
- Testimonials From Our Clients
- Free Training Video: How Top Producers Work High-Quality Leads
- About Us
Articles
- Founder Interview: The Story Behind TheAnnuityLeads.com
- Why Some Agents Make Money With Annuity Leads and Others Don’t
- The 12 Biggest Mistakes Agents Make When Buying Annuity Leads
- Will Annuity Leads Work in My Area? Rural vs. Big City Markets
- What I’ve Learned Spending Eight Figures Advertising Annuities
- My Clients Were My Greatest Teachers
Scott Brooks, MBA, CFP®, is the founder of TheAnnuityLeads.com, which has created leads for insurance agents and financial advisors since 2010.
