The Annuity Lead

Most articles in this annuity blog concern generating annuity leads.  But what you do with those leads is critical.  Unfortunate, many agents are hit and run: they make a presentation and if they don’t get the annuity sales, they’re off to the next prospect.  But be honest, this loses a lot of potential business because if you had a way to keep many of these prospects warm, they would become buyers.

If you’re honest to yourself, you admit that less than 50% and likely less than 20% of your prospects become clients.  Of all the people you have spoken with, who you considered a potential client, most never convert to business.  And it’s mostly your fault.  If you have not dripped on them with an annuity newsletter, why should they remember you or call you when they have some money to invest?  They have hundreds of distractions in life and when the desire or need for an annuity becomes compelling, they will call the first person they remember or the first person who grabs them down at the local bank.

That first person could be you if they received your annuity newsletter in the last 30 days.
Sending an annuity newsletter has several benefits:

• It keeps reminding prospects that you are available and ready to help—they remember you because they see your name and photo (on the newsletter face page) every 30 days
• It continually shows off your knowledge, expertise and breadth of resources with articles each month that cover a different insurance topic with the design to educate and not sell the prospect
• The continual monthly dripping shows staying power—that you are a fixture in the community that can be relied upon to be there, that you are reliable
• If the articles are correctly constructed with a call to action and an offer, prospects will call you and setting appointments when the prospect calls is easy.

Here’s the report from other agents:

“The very best money I have ever spent in my business is the annuity newsletter…it never fails to generate $15-20k of commissions each mailing.”

“Then out of the blue he says to me ‘you know, I’ve been reading your annuity newsletters, and I really like them. I’m going to switch all my accounts over to you.’ About two weeks later we met. …His total accounts were almost $500,000. Now he just referred a doctor friend of his to me, and I’m seeing him next week.”

As summarized in the Norvax Insurance Agent newsletter, “A lot of your prospects aren’t ready to buy that very first time you touch them. Drip marketing keeps you in the running to make that sale.”  Capture the annuity sales that now slip through your fingers by sending your prospects and clients a monthly annuity newsletter and watch business flow in.

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Are you tired of cold-calling, hand-holding and bending over backwards for customers who treat you with nothing but suspicion?  For years, the default manifesto of the annuity industry has been to get yourself in front of as many people as possible and do whatever it takes to close the annuity sale.  However, there is a better way to prospect your leads, and in this series of three Guerilla Selling Principles articles, we’ll cover the secret strategies that many agents are using to make the customers flock to them.

For this first article, we’ll cover the importance of being recognized as an expert in the annuity industry.  In this wary economic climate, selling financial products becomes more challenging, since most people want to hunker down and hide their pennies underneath the mattress.  At the same time, they trust the people they consider to be financial experts to lead them through uncertain times.  Fortunately, it isn’t as difficult as you might think to be recognized as an expert.  You don’t have to be knighted by a college or industry organization – you just need to follow these steps:

Get Published

You don’t need to publish a novel to earn the recognition that comes with being a published author in your industry.  You don’t even need to write a word as you can find inexpensive writers at elance.com and guru.com. Instead, offer to write an article for an industry publication, such as Annuity Shopper or the Annuity Market News, or for a popular website in your field.  Not sure what to write?  Start with a success story or with unique observations that haven’t really been published in the industry.  Web and magazine editors are constantly sitting around wondering how they’re going to come up with good, unique content – if you drop it into their laps, they’ll be more than happy to help you out by publishing it.

Charge for Events

This might sound crazy – after all, how can you charge for annuity seminars and events when other people are putting them on for free AND d attendees?  Here’s the thing – just charging for an event gives people the impression that the information you’re offering is worth more than the guy down the street who’s teaching for free, even if you’re giving the same information.  Even in tough financial times, people are willing to pay for what they believe to be expert financial information.  In addition, offering paid seminars is a great way to weed out clients that can actually afford to invest – if they can’t even pay a small fee for a seminar, how much can you really expect them to put into annuities?  You can most easily charge when you run your seminar through a local adult school as people are accustomed to paying tuition at a school.  A similar idea is to rent your seminar room at a college which lends an air of legitimacy. 

Sign Up with ProfNet.com

ProfNet is resource for writers, publishers and other members of the news media to find expert sources for articles and interviews.  Professionals who sign up with this resource may find themselves invited to give expert opinions for everything from small-town newspapers to major nation-wide news stations.  Sign up for this service once you’ve completed the first two steps – you’ll be able to advertise yourself as a published author and a keynote speaker at paid seminars, which will bring you even more attention from the news media.

Clip the copies of your articles and interviews which you can then send to prospects and immediately show you are the local expert.

Once you begin to develop recognition within your industry and community, you’ll find that the amount of time you have to spend cold calling leads and prospecting for new clients drops dramatically, while your income increases.

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