I’ve been asked this question more than 100 times in the last 16 years.
It usually comes from a skeptic, and I understand why. If our leads are as good as we say they are, why would I sell them to you instead of keeping them and collecting the commissions myself?
Here’s something that might surprise you: I do sell annuities. Since 2021, my small agency has written about $48 million in annuity premium. And I still run a completely separate business that sells leads to agents and advisors across the country.
Selling annuities and creating annuity leads are two very different businesses. Here’s why I’ve chosen to do it this way, how our leads are actually distributed, and how to judge any lead company, including us.
Yes, I Sell Annuities Myself
During the pandemic, I set up a website and got personally licensed, and I’m now licensed in most states. The agency is just me. It has no staff, and I haven’t built out the infrastructure to scale it. The lead business and my health have been my priorities. I’ve done one Zoom call in all that time. Everything else has been over the phone.
The agency sells only contractually guaranteed annuities: multi-year guaranteed annuities (MYGAs), SPIAs and DIAs. It doesn’t offer index or variable annuities.
That’s a deliberate choice. Guaranteed products fit the way I work. They’re much easier to explain to someone far away over the phone, and I think index products need more face-to-face contact. That’s one more reason consumers who want an index annuity go to agents who sell them.
The two businesses are completely separate. They have different websites, and all of our staff works on the lead side. And the agency never gets leads from the lead business. Ever.
In fact, it works the other way. When consumers contact our agency wanting an index annuity, we send them to our lead clients, because that’s not something we sell. Those have turned out to be some of our best leads, because those people have usually gone through a lot of our material before they ever reach out.
“The agency never gets leads from the lead business. Ever.”
Running the agency has made our lead business better, too. I hadn’t done personal production in years. Dealing with the same problems agents face has improved our marketing, and it’s given me more empathy for people in the industry. When you talk with consumers every week, you learn where they are mentally and what they worry about with annuities. When you process the transactions yourself, you see the whole buying cycle, which is different from reading about it.
There’s real friction between agents and FMO marketers. Agents often feel that marketers aren’t fighting the same fight they are. The marketer is in an office, and the agent is at home trying to make things happen. Running the agency has helped me identify with agents, and it’s given me ideas that have improved our lead program.
Do We Keep the Best Leads?
No, we don’t. And it wouldn’t make sense if we did.
Here’s how a lead moves through our system. A consumer responds to one of our annuity ads. Our team reviews and processes the lead by hand. Then our software delivers it by round robin, rotating among the agents who cover that area. Nobody hand-picks which agent gets the good ones, and our agency isn’t in the rotation.
If we have a lead we can’t place and the data looks good, my assistant emails our clients to see who wants to pick it up. It still goes to a client.
There’s one thing you should know, though. If there’s a problem with an agent’s history, such as billing or credit card issues, refunds or causing trouble, it does affect their lead flow.
Think about it from my side, too. If money were my focus, I’d be selling index annuities to the $1 million leads that come in. Instead, my agency mostly sells MYGAs. Why would I sell someone a two- or three-year MYGA when an index annuity can pay four or five times the commission?
And if our clients don’t get results, they stop buying. Skimming the best leads would hurt the business that pays our bills to feed one I’ve never focused on. Doing the right thing matters more to me than cutting corners and having to live with it.
“Doing the right thing matters more to me than cutting corners and having to live with it.”
Every agent has to trust somebody. Your FMO sees every case you submit. Your technology vendors handle your clients’ information. You can’t personally oversee all of them, which is why their reputation and history matter. The same goes for any lead company you work with.
Why I Don’t Want to Work Every Lead
Here’s the part skeptics don’t expect. We could easily work the leads ourselves.
You can get licensed easily. I have the capital. Money isn’t what stops me. I simply don’t want to build a big sales operation to work every lead, and I never have.
To work every lead we create, I’d need an office with something like 10 employees, and we’d be selling annuities nationally. A few firms have built agencies around a national call center strategy. That has never been the business I wanted.
I don’t like managing people. I once heard the marketing consultant Dan Kennedy talk about how much he hated managing people, and it really resonated with me. I don’t want to deal with employee complaints. I have enough of that with our existing team.
What energizes me is creativity: finding new ways to do things and coming up with new ideas. That’s what motivates me to do difficult things. Managing a sales floor isn’t on that list.
I prefer a simpler life. I work from home. Our team works from home. We have very low overhead and no fancy office. When I do something, I have to feel compelled to do it, and I have to do it my way, not the traditional way.
“Money isn’t what stops me. I just don’t want to build a big sales operation, and I never have.”
There are practical reasons, too. I’m not with a broker-dealer. Our leads want a blend of products, and many of them want index annuities, variable annuities or RILAs. My agency isn’t set up to offer any of those. Our leads also come in from all 50 states, and many consumers would rather work with someone local. Put all of that together, and selling leads to agents across the country makes far more sense than trying to close them myself.
How I Ended Up Selling Leads
The lead business didn’t start the way most skeptics imagine.
From 2007 through 2009, I sold a training course that helped financial advisors grow their 401(k) rollover business. It was an audio CD home-study program, seven to 10 hours of content. Our email list grew to 7,000 or 8,000 people, and at least 1,000 to 2,000 of them bought the course.
In the middle of 2009, I surveyed them and asked how I could help. Their number one answer was to help them get in front of more people. They wanted more leads, more appointments and more sales.
So in 2010, I started a lead business. When I first emailed my list about it, 300 to 500 financial advisors and agents responded, and hundreds of them wanted to join right away. Without that, I don’t think I would have gone down this road. The business didn’t start because I wanted to sell leads to make money. It started because our clients asked for it.
The early days were a disaster, and I paid a lot of tuition. We partnered with Monster.com and CareerBuilder and sold co-registration leads for $35 each. We were paying about $25 for them. About 300 agents and advisors signed up. Those leads came with names and phone numbers, but because of the process they went through, many of the people didn’t even remember responding. That taught me something I’ve never forgotten: both the message and the process behind a lead have to be designed for quality.
Within a year or so, we moved into annuity leads at $79, unscrubbed. As our scrubbing tightened over the years, the price rose with it, to $125, $150, $200, $250 and now $300. Inflation in our key costs drove part of that, too. From 2011 to 2019, the cost of advertising on Fox Business went up seven to 10 times. Our tech stack has gone up sharply as well, because some of our most important tools have very few competitors. You can read more about those early disasters in our founder interview.
Why I’ve Kept Doing It
The main reason I’ve stayed in the lead business for 16 years is referrals, from clients and from the groups we’ve partnered with. Every year, we have to bring on more than 100 new clients just to replace agents who retire, get sick, pass away or stop needing leads. As more people got to know us, more referrals came in. We’ve also had some large clients, including an insurance carrier a few years ago, and that made staying in business even more appealing.
There’s a personal reason, too. I’ve dealt with serious health issues since 2015, and I haven’t been anywhere near full capacity for a very long time. A lot of my time and energy has gone into getting better, not into doubling my business. I’m grateful the lead business kept going through all of it.
Those health issues actually sped up many of the improvements to our program. I didn’t want to keep recruiting at a high pace, so we focused on keeping the clients we had. I applied the 80-20 rule and cut a lot of our media sources.
Where I Add the Most Value
This industry is full of people who can do retail business. It isn’t full of people who combine product knowledge with copywriting, marketing, media buying and lead generation experience.
I’ve always asked where I can add the most value to this industry, and what’s unique about me. My background is different because I’ve done a lot of different things, and I’ve spent eight figures of my own money on advertising annuities. I decided the lead business was the best way to add value with the skills and experience I have.
It’s also taught me things I never would have learned by closing cases myself. We’ve worked with more than 3,000 agents and advisors. That gives me a first-hand view of the people who go into battle and either succeed or fail. Success leaves clues. So does failure. My job is to find both and connect them.
The biggest lesson? Most agents underestimate the mental side of this business: how they handle setbacks, how they handle spending money, and how they ride the roller coaster that comes with working leads. You can read more about that in why agents leave lead programs. A lot of the time, an agent’s biggest enemy is themselves.
“If It Sounds Too Good to Be True…”
If something looks too good to be true, there’s a good chance it is. Trust your gut.
Here’s what usually happens when agents join our program. They overestimate their close rate. But they underestimate their case size, how much they’ll make when deals come through, and the lifetime value of the clients they get.
This business was hard 30 years ago. It’s hard today. It’ll still be hard 30 years from now. You’re asking a stranger to trust you with their life savings, or a big part of the money they spent decades building. That has never been easy. And today, prospects have more access to information than they’ve ever had. This isn’t 1990 anymore.
“You’re asking a stranger to trust you with their life savings. That has never been easy.”
Why So Many Agents Struggle With Leads
A wholesaler once told me he’d watched lots of agents buy annuity leads with very little success. There’s some truth to that, and sometimes the problem really is the leads. I see five reasons.
- What counts as an “annuity lead.” Some companies call a list of names and phone numbers an annuity lead. Others use people who responded to a Social Security event or a retirement income offer. If someone didn’t respond to an annuity message, it isn’t an annuity lead, and many of those were never scrubbed.
- There’s almost no training on working leads. The industry trains agents on products and selling, but very little quality training exists on working leads from different sources.
- The 80-20 rule. Some FMOs have told me 10% of their agents produce well over half their business. Ask the wrong agents whether leads work, and you’ll hear that they don’t.
- The mental side. It’s underappreciated, and it decides more outcomes than most people think.
- Seminar habits. Plenty of agents spent five or 10 years doing seminars, then worked leads the same way. A lead starts with a phone call, maybe a video call, then follow-up. A seminar starts face to face. Agents who don’t adjust their process struggle.
Here’s the thing. Seminars don’t work for a lot of people, but nobody says seminars don’t work. A good lead program is the same. It works for some agents and not for others.
How to Check Out Any Lead Company
Look at a lead company the way a consumer looks at you. Are they credible? Competent? A reliable source of information? Someone you’d trust?
Read everything they’ve published: their articles, their interviews and their website. If it resonates and you trust them, partner with them. If you don’t, don’t.
Then watch for three red flags:
- Hype. Are they telling you exactly what you want to hear? I always laugh at companies promising to fill your calendar with people who have $1 million and want to buy an annuity tomorrow. If it were that easy, someone would buy those companies in two minutes. I’ve intentionally avoided hyping our program, because the bigger your expectations going in, the more likely you’ll be disappointed.
- Huge promises. Nobody should expect $1 million in commissions from five leads.
- Long-term commitments. We’ve never had a long-term contract. We bill weekly, in arrears, so we’ll send you several leads before you’re charged. Several companies charge your card before every lead. I think we’re one of the only companies that bills this way.
“When they lock you in, they’re locking in their profit.”
The more commitment a company wants from you at the start, the less confidence it probably has in its program. If it were everything they promised, why would they need to lock you in?
It also helps to understand what a real annuity lead costs to make. Think about seminars. Even when agents offer a free steak dinner at a very nice restaurant, most of the invitations never use the word “annuity.” And response rates are shockingly low, especially if you take away the steak. “Annuity” is one of the most polarizing words out there. Like politics, it splits consumers in half: they’re either for it or against it. Our ads have to get people to respond to an annuity message, without a free dinner.
We have staff, a tech stack and legal costs, and media is by far our biggest expense. It gets more competitive and more costly every year. I break down those costs in why a cheap annuity lead can cost more than a scrubbed one.
So Why Don’t I Just Keep All the Leads?
Because I don’t want to.
I could build a big sales operation. I could sell index annuities and earn a lot more per case. But that’s not the business I want to run. I’d rather use what I’m good at, creating the advertising and finding the prospects, and let agents who want to work those leads do what they do best.
If we stopped tomorrow, our clients would lose a source of business they’ve already proven works for them: leads from people who responded to an annuity message and were checked by a real person before they arrived, with no long-term contracts and honest expectations up front. That’s hard to replace.
If you’re still skeptical, good. Do your homework first. Read our articles. Go through our website. Watch our videos on working leads. Listen to our client testimonials. Then, if what you’ve read makes sense, give us a call.
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 Agents Leave Our Lead Program, and Why So Many Come Back: why agents quit lead programs, why so many return, and what to ask before you stop.
- Why a Cheap Annuity Lead Can Cost More Than a Scrubbed One: the math on cost per sale, and how to judge any lead program.
- How AI Is Changing Annuity Leads, and What Agents Should Do About It: what AI-informed prospects, bots and AI search mean for your practice.
- 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.
