Why Some Agents Make Money With Annuity Leads And Others Don’t

Scott Brooks, MBA, CFP®

October 13, 2026

We’ve had agents close a million-dollar case from our leads, a single sale that paid for a year and a half or two years of leads, and then quit the program after one bad phone call.

We’ve had a top producer who was closing one out of three of our leads in the Midwest. When he tried working 12 of our leads in Florida, he closed none of them. We’ve had a high school teacher, licensed for about a month, who broke even on his first 12 leads. And I’ve had two advisors in the same office, working leads from the same program, where one did great and the other struggled.

That’s the story of our whole business. Some agents make money with annuity leads, and some don’t. It’s been true since day one, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why.

This article is what I’ve learned. Some of it is about skill. A lot of it is about attitude, patience, and how seriously an agent takes the process. And some of it, honestly, is luck. If you’re thinking about buying annuity leads, from us or from anyone else, I hope it helps you figure out what it actually takes to make them pay off.

In This Article

It’s at Least Half the Agent

People sometimes ask me how much of an agent’s success comes from the lead and how much comes from the agent. My honest answer: it’s at least a 50-50 proposition. Half of it is on the lead company. At a minimum, the other half is on the agent.

That might sound like a strange thing for a lead company to say, but it’s the truth. You can give some agents a perfect lead, someone who wants to buy within a week, and they still won’t convert it.

What has changed over the years is how good a salesperson you have to be to close our leads. Back in 2011, an agent pretty much had to be working a rural area, or be a very strong salesperson, to make our program work. The leads took more skill, and the people were a little less interested.

Here’s why. Every media source pulls in different people, and some are much easier to convert than others. Sources that attract people early in the buying cycle are harder for agents to close, because those people need a lot more convincing. Someone who has been researching annuities for nine months and is ready to buy is very different from someone who doesn’t really know what an annuity is but wants to learn.

So over the years, we’ve shifted our focus to people later in the buying cycle. That has held down our lead flow, but it has improved the quality. And it has made our program work for more people.

I’d much rather have fewer leads and an easier business to run than double or triple our lead flow and have five to ten times as many problems. It’s just not worth it to me.

Still, even with better leads, the agent is a huge part of the equation. So let’s talk about agents.

What the Most Successful Clients Have in Common

When I think about the agents and advisors who have done best with us, a few things stand out.

They’re better salespeople. Financial services is hardcore sales, and anyone who’s been in the industry for a while knows it. When people went to work for the big wirehouses, the old saying was that 95% of them wouldn’t be there in five years. Getting a stranger to hand you their life savings was hard 50 years ago. It’s hard today, and it’ll be hard 50 years from now. The agents who do best with leads are better at turning opportunities into clients.

They’re personable. They’re just easier to talk to.

They’re professional and organized. They take their business, and the program, more seriously.

They don’t freak out. This might be the most important one. In any marketing program, whether it’s seminars, leads, or ads you run yourself, there are moments when your mettle gets tested. In that moment, you can freak out, or you can trust the process. The agents who do best trust the process. And they also have the skills to back it up.

I’ve seen pure relationship builders do well with our leads, people who aren’t salespeople at all. I’ve seen very aggressive salespeople do well too. But the agents who do the best are a blend of both.

I can usually tell on the first call

I’m an empath. I tend to feel other people’s emotions very easily, which has made running this business harder at times. But it’s also taught me something.

If I look at our 20 or so most successful clients over the years, they had a lot in common. One of the biggest: by the end of my first phone call with them, I came away believing they were true professionals and that they were going to succeed. Part of the reason was how easy they were to talk to. I figured if they were that easy for me to talk to, and that likable, it would carry over to the leads. And it did.

The reverse is true too. The agents who are hard for me to talk to tend to struggle more. Consumers aren’t going to put in as much effort to listen to someone as I will when I’m trying to do business with them.

These top clients also do a few things the rest don’t. They never pause their accounts. They never ask for refunds. They look at the big picture, and they don’t micromanage or pick apart every individual lead. They just operate in a different headspace.

John

One of them, I’ll call him John, has worked with us for about 10 years. There have been several years where he spent maybe $10,000 to $15,000 a year on our leads and wrote, by my best estimate, $7 million to $10 million a year in premium from them. And he wasn’t even in a heavily populated area, so we couldn’t send him as many leads as we would have in a bigger market.

What makes John different? He’s a master at building rapport fast. Within a few minutes, he makes you feel like he’s known you your whole life. He’s personable, easy to talk to, and just very likable. He’s also knowledgeable, so people trust him. That’s a powerful combination. He’s former military too, and I think he’s used that to his advantage at times.

One year, John closed every single appointment he went on with our leads except one. And the one he didn’t close, he walked away from on purpose. He believed the person had dementia, and he didn’t want the liability, which was exactly the right call. That’s an extreme example. But it shows something I see a lot: when our better clients struggle, it’s usually getting in the door. Once they’re sitting across from people, they convert a very large percentage, even if it’s not usually 100% like John that year.

I say “by my best estimate” for a reason. We’re not an FMO, so I don’t see the business our clients write. When an agent closes a $2 million case, I’m the last person they’re going to tell. Their marketing organization will know, but agents don’t always want us to know, because they don’t want it to change our relationship. But I’m pretty confident John was writing $7 million to $10 million a year from our leads alone.

“If they were that easy for me to talk to, and that likable, it would carry over to the leads. And it did.”

Same Leads, Very Different Results

Our process is the same for everybody. So why does one agent succeed and another fail?

Part of it is luck. In my first year in business, someone at a wirehouse made about a $600,000 commission on one of our leads, a wealthy person who needed a large estate planning policy. I only found out because one of his coworkers called to tell me. He never told us himself, and to this day I don’t know who it was. Some leads are like that.

Part of it is location. Calling leads in Seattle is a different experience than calling leads in Ohio. I’ve seen this play out in a way I’ll never forget.

The Midwest producer who moved to Florida

We had a client in the Midwest who was doing $15 million to $20 million a year in premium. He was very successful in our program, closing about one out of three of our leads, and he did very well selling people over the phone. He was born and raised in the Midwest. He was actually a pretty aggressive salesperson, but he had a Midwestern accent and a Midwestern approach, very different from, say, someone in northern New Jersey.

He was tired of cold Midwestern winters, like a lot of people up there, and he was thinking about buying a house in South Florida and moving to the beach. Before he uprooted his life, I suggested he work some leads down there first. I told him, “Hey, the market’s just different. The people there are not the same as the people in the Midwest.” At least not in Boca Raton, Miami, and Southeast Florida. It’s a different culture.

Of course, he thought I was nuts. I was just a lead vendor, and he was the $15 million to $20 million a year producer. But he was smart enough to take me up on it. This was more than 10 years ago, so I’m going from memory, but here’s what I remember: he spent about a month in Florida, working 12 of our leads and 12 each from two of our competitors, and he couldn’t close anybody, from any of the three companies.

His personality, his sales process, and the way he worked leads resonated with people in the Midwest. It did not resonate with people in Boca Raton. Same agent, same skills. All you changed was the location, and you got a completely different result. After he saw his results, he decided not to move. Ten years later, he’s still in the Midwest.

The agent

But the agent is still one of the biggest variables. Some agents call a lead ten times. Some call once and give up. Do they have the sales skills to convert the person when they finally reach them? Are they still following up two, four, eight, or twelve weeks after we send the lead?

In my experience, many agents don’t do any long-term follow-up at all. If someone is sending our leads a monthly newsletter for 12 months, they’re in a small minority, from everything I’ve seen and heard. A lot of agents give up after about six weeks. I think it’s nuts, but that’s what happens.

When an FMO or IMO refers agents to us, I tell them two things. First, send us your better agents, because they’re the ones most likely to succeed. Second, if you send us five people, one or two will love us, stay for years, and do well. One probably won’t work out. And one or two will land somewhere in the middle.

The Early Signs of Who Will Make It

The earliest sign is my gut feeling on that first call. Success leaves clues, and it leaves them early.

There are other signs too.

They’re already making leads work somewhere else. If an agent is buying from our competitors and making it work, they have a much better chance with us. They already know how to work leads.

They’re used to spending money on marketing. Getting comfortable spending $2,000, $3,000, or $4,000 here and there, and being okay with it mentally, is its own skill. Agents who already have that habit do much better.

My dream client is someone who already spends more than $100,000 a year on marketing and already buys leads from our competitors. When those people come into our program, they’re almost always good clients, and they stay longer. The agents who struggle are usually the ones who don’t spend much on marketing and don’t have a history of working leads successfully.

How they handle early disappointments. Obviously, closing deals right away is a good sign. But a better one is how an agent handles the delays and failures that come with any program. Established agents who do well don’t panic. If they don’t close their first three leads, it’s not a problem. The agents who are likely to struggle are much more likely to have concerns right out of the gate.

A lot of this comes down to belief. If you don’t believe a program is going to work, it won’t, because you have to hold onto that belief through the ups and downs, through the good periods and the bad ones.

Every Marketing Program Is a Roller Coaster

I firmly believe attitude is one of the most important things in this business, and not just with our program. With any marketing.

Think of it like a roller coaster. With individual leads, you go up and down. You think you’ve closed a deal, and then they back out. They free-look the contract. You think you’ve got their business, it goes away, and then they come back and you do business with them after all. And on a bigger level, you go through the same roller coaster with any lead company you work with.

It’s amazing to me that more people don’t talk about this.

The top agents know they’re on the roller coaster. So when they hit a low point, with one client or with the program in general, they’re less likely to panic. To be fair, it’s easier to stay calm when you’re writing big deals regularly. But they go through it too. You can’t do any kind of marketing in this industry without going through it.

Look at seminars. One seminar goes great. The next is a complete dud, and the agent is out $6,000 to $10,000. Nobody walks away from that blaming the post office for delivering the invitations, or saying, “Seminars don’t work.” But that same agent can join our program, get five leads, not close them, and say, “Scott’s program doesn’t work.” I’ve always found that crazy.

“Nobody walks away from one bad seminar saying seminars don’t work.”

Why some agents expect the leads to be bad

There’s a psychology term that explains a lot of this: transference. I learned about it in 2019, when I went through the Hoffman Process in California. You’ve probably met someone and disliked them right away without knowing why. Often it’s because they remind you of somebody else, someone who hurt you, or treated you badly, or just rubbed you the wrong way. You end up transferring your feelings about that old person onto the new one.

Agents do the same thing with lead companies. A lot of them have been burned before. So they bring that history into a new program, and the first time anything goes wrong, they assume the worst, even when it’s a completely normal part of the process.

I wish more people in this industry talked about it, because I think it’s one of the most underrated things agents need to master if they want to grow their production. Agents bring their bad experiences into a new relationship. They also bring their skills. Both show up in the results.

Transference works the other way, too, and this is something I want agents to hear. One thing I took away from the Hoffman Process is that about a third of people will be triggered by you even if you just walked into the room and did nothing wrong. So you can do everything right with a lead and still not get the business, for reasons that have nothing to do with you.

Some top producers are tormented by the people they don’t close, and they get no satisfaction from the ones they do. Don’t be that agent. You won’t convert everybody, and you’re not supposed to. Try not to let the ones you lose bother you too much.

Why good agents quit

The most common reason a new client stops buying leads is one bad experience. They have one bad call, or one lead that’s less than perfect, and they assume every lead will be like that.

Maybe they get a lead with $50,000 to invest, at the low end of what we send, and they bail. Maybe they talk to one jerk on the phone on a day they’re already in a bad mood. Something that might happen once every 10 or 12 leads. One event, and they say, “Forget this, I’m out.”

The biggest surprise of my 16 years in this business is how often this happens to agents who are way ahead. We’ve had agents close a million-dollar case that paid for a year and a half or two years of leads, and they still quit after one bad experience. I think they assume we’ll always be there when they want to come back.

Go Into It Like You’re Going Into Battle

The most unrealistic expectation agents bring into any lead program is that the business is going to be easy. It isn’t. No matter how good the leads are, it’s hard to get a stranger to give you their money. I keep coming back to that, because it’s the truth.

Part of the problem is that agents today are buried in marketing pitches from every direction. People ask me what running this business is like. Imagine dating someone who gets hit on a hundred times a day. That’s what it’s like. Agents are inundated, and it’s created a shiny-object problem. The grass always looks greener with the next program, so some agents hop from one marketing program to the next, hoping the next pitch will fix everything. It usually doesn’t. The number of pitches agents get today is out of control compared to 10 years ago.

Our best clients look at the bigger picture. They’re committed to the long-term success of their practice, and they aren’t chasing every shiny object. They’re also less likely to jump from one FMO or contract to the next.

You can see it in our own client base. We don’t use long-term contracts, so we’re always losing some clients and adding new ones. But we have a core group of clients who have been with us for many years, and that group has been very stable for the last few years.

What calling leads taught me

I’ve called leads in a lot of different settings over my career. I worked at Fidelity Investments. I worked at two banks. I’ve been independent. I’ve worked referrals from carriers and from clients. There’s no perfect formula.

At the banks, in the late ’90s, we called customers whose CDs were maturing to talk about their options. These were the bank’s own customers, and the bank already had their money. People still hung up on me. Some were openly rude and told me to go bug off.

At Fidelity, the calls were about as warm as it gets. We were calling people who had changed jobs and had retirement plans with us, and Fidelity had a very high level of trust with consumers. Those were the easiest calls I’ve ever made. But even then, some people were hard to reach.

I remember when 401(k) plans were being shut down, we had to reach people to tell them that if they didn’t call us back and roll their money over, they’d face a fully taxable event. Some called right back. But I was always surprised by how many people took 10 or 20 calls to reach. And remember, we already had their money, and their plan was closing.

Now think about a lead. Someone became a lead because they were interested in learning about annuities. That’s a lower priority in their life than avoiding a tax bill on their 401(k). So if those people took 10 or 20 calls, don’t be surprised when a lead does too.

That’s why, when I talk to advisors before they join our program, I’m honest with them. You need to go into this like you’re going into battle, not like you’re going on vacation to drink margaritas.

“Go into this like you’re going into battle, not like you’re going on vacation.”

Veterans, Rookies, and Seminar Producers

Does experience matter? Both veterans and newer agents can make leads work. But if I were betting money, I’d give the nod to veterans, especially the ones who work hard. Most of our clients are veterans.

Veterans are usually better salespeople. They have better product knowledge and a sales process they’ve refined over years. So they should do better, assuming they actually work the leads. But I run into veterans who are one-call guys. They want the easy leads, and they call once or twice instead of ten times. That’s where a newer agent has an advantage. They’re more likely to keep following up.

Newer agents who have a background working leads also tend to do well. Someone who used to be a mortgage broker, for example, already knows what it’s like to pay for leads and call them over and over. They don’t have the product knowledge or industry experience of a veteran, but they have that part of the process down, and it makes up for a lot.

A partnership idea for newer agents

When a brand-new agent has a lot of energy but not much money, one thing I’ve suggested is partnering with an established veteran who has the money but not the energy. I’ve seen it work a few times. The veteran brings the capital, and the newer agent brings the follow-up. They call the leads more, book more appointments, and get in more doors. They split the cases 50-50, and they both benefit.

Most of our clients have been in the industry for 10 to 50 years, so we don’t work with many brand-new agents. But I’ve seen them both succeed and fail.

The schoolteacher

Several years ago, an FMO referred an agent to us in Florida who had been a high school economics teacher. He had no sales experience at all, and he’d had his life and health license for about a month. Our program was the first thing he did in the industry.

He closed about one out of 12 leads. It was a good case, and he broke even on the program, maybe even made a little money. I don’t remember the exact return, but he didn’t lose money with us, a few weeks into the business with no sales background at all. There are just so many factors.

Seminar producers have an adjustment to make

Strong sales skills help with leads, especially the ability to build rapport and trust, because people are looking for someone they can trust with their retirement.

But seminar producers who are used to selling in person have an adjustment to make. Going from a room full of people at a local event to selling over the phone or on Zoom is a different sales cycle, and the transition takes time.

Here’s how I explain it to them. Nobody would host an hour-long seminar and try to book appointments in the first five minutes. But agents will call one of our leads and get discouraged if they haven’t booked an appointment within three minutes.

That’s one reason the overnight package helps. A seminar producer can take the materials they hand out at their events and repurpose them into a package for leads. Once they make that transition, it’s usually smooth sailing. And seminar producers are already used to spending real money on marketing, which helps them too.

Referrals are great, but they aren’t scalable. And agents who have already done well with other lead companies are much more likely to do well with us.

Does It Matter Where You Hang Your License?

Our clients fall into three groups. Some are with an independent broker-dealer. Some are registered investment advisors who also hold a separate insurance license so they can sell annuities. (The investment advisory registration is completely separate from the insurance license, which comes from the state department of insurance.) And some are insurance agents only, selling fixed annuities, index annuities, SPIAs and DIAs.

Agents with a broker-dealer have one advantage: a bigger menu. They can offer variable annuities, securities, and fee-based management. If a lead has a million dollars and doesn’t want to put all of it in an annuity, they can still help. On the other hand, broker-dealer compliance has made it harder to send materials and follow up than it was 20 years ago.

Captive agents, who can sell only one company’s products, should have the hardest time. I’d never want to be in that position. But we have one captive client on the West Coast who’s been buying from us for three or four years, and he wouldn’t still be buying if it weren’t working.

Independent agents tend to do well, because they’re focused on annuities and our leads are annuity leads. It’s a natural fit.

The firm with 300 offices that called me

Years ago, the head of a large RIA called me. They had something like 300 to 400 offices around the country, ran a lot of radio advertising, and had a big internal marketing operation. They didn’t sell annuities, and they weren’t with a broker-dealer. So I asked him, “Why would you want to buy annuity leads?” It didn’t make sense to me.

His answer was interesting. All of their advertising used general retirement planning and financial messages. And in their testing, which was substantial, those messages pulled in a lot of younger people and a lot of people without much money. Annuity messages, on the other hand, attracted people roughly 55 to 80 years old with much higher income and net worth. So even though they didn’t sell annuities, annuity leads were a way to meet people with more money.

We never ended up working together. But the call stuck with me, because it matched my own experience. It’s exactly why you’ll never see me run a Social Security or general retirement planning message. It attracts younger, less qualified people, and agents aren’t as happy with them.

In the end, I don’t think the channel matters as much as the person. The right person will succeed in any channel. The wrong person will fail in any channel.

Systems Help, but They Don’t Decide

Our top clients are more likely to have an assistant and a CRM, mostly because they have established practices and they can afford them.

But I’ve had agents work out of their basements as one-man bands, with no office, and they still crush it.

One of our favorite clients right now is in New England. He’s around 80 years old and has been in the industry for 40 years. He’s super nice and treats us great. I wish I could clone him a hundred times. He doesn’t have an assistant. He doesn’t have an office. He doesn’t really have a follow-up system either. And he does great.

I’ve had other clients with every system in the world. One advisor in San Francisco spent $3,000 with us, made $50,000, and complained that her costs were killing her. I asked her, “You spent $3,000 and made $50,000. How are we the problem?” She told me the problem was her San Francisco rent, her office staff, and the rest of her overhead.

Having every system doesn’t mean you’ll succeed. Not having them doesn’t mean you’ll fail.

One trick worth knowing

Some of my better-performing agents call leads from several phone numbers: two or three cell phones, a calling app, and a work line, all with different caller IDs.

That matters more than ever, because more and more consumers use call-screening features on their phones, and a lead who didn’t pick up from one number may pick up from another.

What the Agents Who Book More Appointments Do Differently

Our leads have a genuine interest. That’s why they went through our process. So our stronger agents are able to have real conversations with, and book appointments with, the majority of the leads they actually reach. Whether those people end up doing business is a separate question. But those first conversations are usually how agents judge our program: are the people really interested, and do they have money?

So why do some agents book so many more appointments than others? It comes back to the same things.

The agents who book more appointments dial the leads more. They work harder at following up. They’re more personable and more professional. And they stay calm when things don’t go their way.

Take a common objection, like “I already have an advisor.” Some agents hear that and assume the deal is dead. That’s silly. It’s just one example of how an agent’s reaction decides the outcome more than the objection does.

The agents who struggle usually wing it. They assume whatever worked for them somewhere else will work in our program. They don’t use a script. They don’t have a formal process for booking the appointment. And they do things that cost them leads.

One example is texting or emailing a lead right away instead of calling. I call it return-free risk. It might save a little time, but a text or email isn’t going to book the appointment, and it risks the lead blowing you off completely.

It also pays to read everything the lead provided before you call. I don’t always know what our clients do, because most of them don’t tell me. But you want to go into that first call armed with as much information as you can.

The most expensive mistake I’ve seen agents make is not taking the follow-up process seriously. They don’t get prepared. They think they can talk their way into success without doing any homework. They don’t watch our videos, and they don’t use our script. They just wing it, and they wing it right into trouble.

(We’ve written a full guide on how to work our leads: Working Our Annuity Leads.)

“They just wing it, and they wing it right into trouble.”

One Agent Who Turned It Around, and One Who Didn’t

When a client calls and walks me through numbers that are really bad, I’ll tell them to change what they’re doing. Years ago, a client had worked several dozen of our leads without getting anywhere. I told him he needed to either stop working with us or change how he followed up, because doing the same thing and expecting a different result is madness.

I’m not going to tell anyone how to run their practice. My job is to give them good information and good resources. But sometimes a client needs to hear that what they’re doing isn’t working and that they need to adjust. The good news is that the numbers speak for themselves.

The turnaround

We had a client in a large Texas city that’s full of people who have moved there from all over the country. He was smart and very educated. I believe he had a master’s degree or a PhD. But he had a strong regional accent that some people had a hard time listening to, especially transplants from California or the Northeast.

Remember what I said about how easy someone is to talk to? I told him I thought his accent was getting in the way, and that he needed to build more trust and credibility before he called. I suggested he send the overnight package first, let it tell his story, and then call to follow up. Once people knew more about him, they might be more willing to listen.

It’s the same reason the call center we used for years was on the West Coast. I wanted neutral accents. When there’s a clash of cultures on the phone, it can be a real problem.

He made that one change, sending the package before calling, and it made a huge difference. He went from barely being able to have a real conversation with our leads to sending out proposals and closing deals. By my estimate, his return went up about five times. It helped him more than I expected. I think the package impressed people enough that they gave him a fair hearing when he called.

All a lead can do is give you a chance to tell your story and present your case. That’s all it can do.

“All a lead can do is give you a chance to tell your story and present your case.”

The agent who never closed

Then there was an agent in Kentucky (a different agent from any Kentucky story you may have read on our site). Over the course of a year, we sent him 12 leads. Every one of them had more than a million dollars to invest. He met with every one of them three times. He closed none of them.

He was trying to get each of them to put most of their money into annuities. People aren’t stupid.

I asked him, “If an FMO called you and wanted you to switch your contracts, and once you switched you were stuck with them forever, would you do it?” He said, “Hell no.” I told him, “That’s what you’re asking these people to do with their money.” Nobody trusts anybody that much.

On top of that, every time he called me, he talked about the commission he was about to earn. “Scott, I’m about to make a hundred grand.” “Scott, I’m about to make $120,000.” “Scott, I’m about to make $75,000.” The leads could feel that commission breath.

If you’re meeting with qualified people three times each and they all have money to invest, it’s not the leads. It’s the sales process. I don’t know if he ever fixed it. But he struggled even though the leads were great.

You’ll Know in a Month or Two. The Long Term Is the Icing.

You don’t need years to find out whether a lead program is working. Most agents will have a good idea within the first month or two. A lot of our clients do well without ever doing much long-term follow-up.

But if you want to get the most out of a program, you need to take a longer view and keep following up. That’s the icing on the cake. So track your results from every lead source over the short term, the medium term, and the long term. Very few of our clients track the long term.

Here’s an example I’ve shared before. We had a client in Chicago who spent roughly $10,000 to $20,000 with us over two years. In those first two years, those leads produced about $250,000 in commissions. Then, in years three and four, the same clients produced about another $250,000, without him spending another dime on marketing. I know those numbers are accurate because he told me himself, and I remember it clearly. He made about half a million dollars in commissions from those leads, and he never came back to buy more.

One of the things he did in those later years was watch for product features that were really good but going away. He’d use that in his marketing to his existing clients, which gave people a deadline and a real reason to act.

So what’s a client from a lead program actually worth? It isn’t just the business they do in the first year. It’s the business they’ll do later. It’s the referrals they’ll send you. And it’s what that client is worth if you ever sell your practice. To value a lead program accurately, you have to look at all of that together. I don’t think most agents do.

Why case size matters so much

Average case size drives commissions, and it varies a lot by area. In wealthier parts of the country, case sizes are bigger, so commissions are bigger. In areas with less wealth, cases are smaller.

If an agent closes five deals from our program, it’s quite possible that one of them will be bigger than the other four combined. Wealth in this country is very concentrated, so converting the bigger cases has a huge effect on your return.

We’ve had agents close one out of 15 leads, but that one was a million-dollar case, and they made a lot of money. When agents fail in our program, it’s usually not because the leads don’t have money. I tell agents up front that most people are pleasantly surprised by how big the cases are. But at some point they also realize they may have to work more leads than they expected to make a sale. That’s probably true with every lead company in the industry.

Case size also depends on how you run your practice. Some advisors put only part of a client’s money into annuities and manage the rest on a fee basis or through an RIA. That changes the math too. The point is to track it over the long term, which most agents in this industry don’t do.

“If an agent closes five deals, one of them could be bigger than the other four combined.”

The Advice Agents Keep Ignoring

There are a few pieces of advice I give over and over. I don’t know if “ignored” is the right word, but a lot of agents don’t follow them.

Dial more. Some leads take 10 or 15 dials to reach and move forward. Too many agents stop after a few attempts.

Keep following up after the first month or two. Most agents don’t.

Use our opening script. A lot of agents skip it until they run into problems, and then they start using it after they’ve lit money on fire. I literally tell agents that if they don’t use our opening, they’re lighting $300 on fire. Neither of us wants that.

Send the overnight package. It’s another one a lot of agents skip.

All we can do is give agents the information and the ideas. It’s up to them to put them to work.

How I’d Work 20 Leads If They Were Mine

If I spent $6,000 on 20 of our leads tomorrow, I’d follow our process to a T.

I’d send the overnight package to every one of them the same day the lead came in, and then follow up with calls. That’s what I’d do personally. Some of our clients prefer to call first and talk for three to five minutes so they can customize the package to the person’s situation, and then send it and follow up. Both ways work. And if you’re not going to send a package at all, you need to call the same day, right away.

Whichever way you do it, I’d make sure the package looked professional and told them my story: my background, what makes my practice different, and why they should listen to me.

Here’s why. Success is all about leverage. An advisor could be the foremost annuity expert in the country, but if a consumer has never heard of them, that expert will still get blown off on the phone. Our leads are people who are interested in annuities. You still have to build trust and show you know what you’re doing.

I’d follow the opening script. I’d have a game plan for the questions I wanted to ask and a clear idea of how I was going to book the appointment.

And I’d have a plan for the people who weren’t ready yet. This is the missing link for a lot of agents. They hit a lead hard for the first three weeks, and then they disappear. They assume nothing’s going to happen, and they quit.

You want to close the people who are ready to do business now. But you also need a way to keep getting in front of everyone else over the months that follow, whether it’s a monthly newsletter, invitations to events, or offering them something new.

One client of ours in Florida did this really well, years ago. They’d sometimes open a smaller account at the start, just to begin the relationship, knowing they could come back later with more ideas. And they’d use other topics as a reason to stay in touch. Along with their monthly newsletter, they’d call around month two or three and say something like, “I ran across this guide on estate planning last week, and I thought of you. I’d love to send it to you and get your thoughts. Would you like to take a look?”

That kind of follow-up matters because a lead can become a much better prospect later. Someone might be retiring in four months and need to roll over a lump sum. The day you get the lead, you might be four months too early. If you call back four months later, you might be calling at exactly the right time.

So that’s what I’d do: build as professional and trustworthy a presence as possible, make the most of the short-term opportunities, and have a real system for following up over the medium and long term. That’s how you get the most out of every lead you pay for.

The Biggest Lesson: How You’re Perceived

About 10 years ago, I had a client who didn’t own a computer. He ran his entire practice off a cell phone, and this was back before cell phones were any good.

I tell that story because the people who succeed at a higher level take everything more seriously. They don’t run their practice off a phone from 12 years ago.

Another client of ours had a PhD. His contact rates were so low that I asked him to send me the overnight package he was mailing to our leads. When I’m trying to help a client whose results are bad, I act like a lead detective, looking for where in the process things are breaking down. What I found was that he was printing his package on a dot matrix printer. That was 20-year-old technology, eight years ago. It looked very unprofessional. In a business built on trust, it was the last thing you’d want to send someone.

Here’s a smaller example. Over the years, hundreds of agents have called us about our program and left a voicemail without saying their name. They don’t say how they heard about us. Often they don’t even leave a phone number. They just ramble on, as if I should know who they are. I’ve talked with something like 10,000 agents, so this has happened over and over. It’s shocking to me that anyone in sales does that. A true professional doesn’t make that mistake, even when they’re just calling a vendor.

Some of the best advice I ever got came from a mentor around 2008. He was a really nice guy, and he took a friend and me under his wing to show us how he ran seminars. He had spent $300,000 to $500,000 on seminars and had a fine-tuned system. One of the biggest things I took away from him was that at every event, he thought about how he was being perceived by the people in the room.

That’s my biggest lesson after 16 years. How are you perceived? On the phone. In your follow-up. On your website. In your package. When people meet you in person.

The agents who succeed at a higher level come across differently in every one of those places. After working with thousands of agents and advisors, it’s obvious to me.

“The agents who succeed at a higher level come across differently in every one of those places.”

Are You Likely to Make Money With Leads?

After 16 years, the agents who do well with us have a few things in common. Ask yourself honestly how many of these describe you:

  • You already do well in the industry. Agents who succeed elsewhere tend to succeed with leads.
  • You already spend money on marketing, and you’re mentally comfortable doing it.
  • You have experience working leads, or you’re genuinely willing to learn.
  • You’ll call a lead 10 or 15 times if that’s what it takes, and keep following up after the first few weeks.
  • You’ll use a proven opening and a real process instead of winging it.
  • You’re mentally tough. You can go three leads without a sale, or have one bad call, without deciding the whole program doesn’t work.
  • You care how you’re perceived, on the phone, in your package, and in person.

If most of those sound like you, you have a very good chance of making money with good annuity leads. If they don’t, that doesn’t mean you can’t. But be honest with yourself about what you’ll need to change.

So, Are Annuity Leads Worth It?

For the right agent, yes. I’ve watched it happen over and over for 16 years. Agents like John turn a modest marketing budget into millions in premium, year after year.

But leads aren’t magic. They’re an opportunity, and it’s at least a 50-50 proposition. The lead company has to deliver people who are genuinely interested and have the money to invest. The agent has to show up prepared, follow up, and earn their trust. When both sides do their part, annuity leads can be one of the best investments an agent makes.

If you’d like to talk about whether our program is a good fit for your practice, call us at (888) 288-1712 or visit TheAnnuityLeads.com. We’ll give you an honest answer, even if it’s that we’re not the right fit.

Scott Brooks, MBA, CFP®, is the founder of TheAnnuityLeads.com, which has created leads for insurance agents and financial advisors since 2010.

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