The Annuity Lead

I get a dozen emails a week offering me “free leads.” Most of these advertisements are bait to get agents to sign on with a particular insurance wholesaler as they attempt to add value by providing agents tools that will help make sales. But let’s take a closer look at what the industry calls a “annuity lead” as this word is used inconsistently. The agent needs to know what’s being offered.

Cold lead—this is worthless—it’s a name form a mailing list broker. The person may meet certain criteria—e.g., age, income or household value. Above that, it’s just a name, like a name from a phone book. When I was a young financial advisor, the mutual fund wholesalers brought me 1000 “leads” like this. When they left the office, I threw these in the trash. Right—I’m going to waste my time cold calling strangers.

Warm annuity lead—the person has requested information by completing a card, an Internet form or expressed interest with no coaxing. Your best prospects will always be the ones that take action on their own, with no one convincing, no coaxing, no call from a telemarketer. This annuity lead has value as the prospect has made a request and expressed interest.

Telemarketed lead. This is supposedly a warm lead with interest in meeting—they tell you that the prospect is waiting for your call. I doubt it. Poor people have time and inclination to talk to telemarketers and sales people on the phone. Rich people, the people you want to talk to, put their name on the “do not call list,” hang up on telemarketers and run away from sales people. Telemarketed prospects did not take action on their own. Someone called and pitched them and convinced them to take the next step. By the time you contact this prospect, the “convincing” has worn off and you basically have a cold annuity lead. These are weak leads as opposed quality prospects who see an advertisement, a piece of direct mail or other offer and act on their own. ,

Set appointment—this can be a very valuable annuity lead but ask how the appointment was made. Did the prospect first call from an ad or direct mail offer and then a telemarketer set an appointment? That’s good because this prospect took the initiative. Or, did the lead company call this person cold and talk them into an appointment? This is like the “tin man” lead—the firm that calls people at random stating that a representative will be in their neighborhood installing aluminum siding on a neighbor’s home and could stop by and show them how they too can increase their home’s value. This type of annuity lead is weak and usually is not at home 30% of the time when you arrive for the appointment.

When you consider an annuity lead of any type, ask the critical questions:

How is this person qualified for my product or service—what criteria do they meet?
Were they cold called and convinced to be a “lead?”
Or did they act on their own, essentially raising their own hand to say “I’m interested!”

It’s this third type of lead that you desire. At minimum, 10% of these people will become clients. This allows you to quantify the value of your annuity lead as follows:

If you earn $2500 from a new client and are content with paying 10% to get that client ($250), then you would be willing to pay $25 per lead for 10 annuity leads that resulted in at least one new client.

To maximize the value of your annuity leads, make sure you have the sales skills. Sales skills do not come through experience—they come through training. So before you spend significant time and resources to buy annuity leads and make presentations, gain the ability to close prospects. Get professional sales training from schools like Dale Carnegie, Sandler Institute or Huthwaite. If you don’t, you’ll waste your career earning a mediocre living and working harder than necessary.

More here on annuity leads.

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The generation of leads in the search to sell annuities is a vital tool in the overall sales technique, as the more leads that are generated and the higher the quality, the more possibilities of closing that lead and creating a sale.

The problem for many annuity agents is that they look too deeply at the apparent ‘miracle sales techniques’ and ‘guaranteed leads’ that are often offered on Internet advertisements, and find in time that these are not what they seem; there is no miracle answer to generating annuity leads, just the overall ability of the individual selling the annuities to do the job.

Think of the business of selling annuities as hitting many singles.  Don’t worry about the home runs.  If you are always at bat, you will get your share of home runs.  The key is to always be at bat, contact annuity prospects every day.

There are a number of proven and popular methods of helping to generate leads that are used by sellers in the market, and these take into account the individuality of each separate potential client – let’s take a look at a few of the more successful aids to annuity lead generation.

Looking for annuity lead generation providers

The Internet is a booming business tool, and even in the field of generating annuity leads there are a number of organizations in the net that specialise in this area. Be aware that most form that generate leads are field marketing organizations (FMO) that require you to write your annuity business with them.  They offer you free leads.  But is the lead free?  If you sell a $100,000 annuity and the FMO that gave you free leads also paid you 1% less in commission than you could have received from another FMO, you may be paying plenty of their annuity leads.  Then there are lead providers that don’t distribute any product.  They are simply experts at generating leads for sale.

Try web search, and look in particular at telemarketing outfits that offer a dedicated lead generation service. These people are professionals and know what they are doing – they don’t offer a miracle but a tried and tested method of attracting leads, of reaching the potential client that you need to find. Using easy to use message retrieving systems, these companies have a proven record in the field – read the testimonials, and look for names that are well known in the market.

For example, one firm uses an auto dialer to all consumers and play a message.  If the consumer had interest in the message, the consumer presses ‘1″ and is connected to your phone. While at first this may seem like a dream come true, consider that calls are only placed to people that have not placed themselves on the “do not call” list.  These may be lower quality investors with less money. So make sure you understand the nature of how the leads are generated and how that impacts the quality of the annuity lead.

Consider a direct mail campaign

Direct mail has come a long way from the ‘junk mail’ days of old, and with today’s sophisticated direct mail techniques it is worth considering a direct mail campaign to help generate annuity leads.

Direct mail works by making sure the mail shot goes to potentially interested parties, and not just to addresses at random, and thus enhances the success rate of any campaign. For example, if you mail an offer to people age 60+, that own homes with a household income over $50,000, you are targeting the sweet spot of fixed annuity buyers.With companies out there that focus on direct mail, you can find a supplier who will take on an entire project, designing and writing the mail shot and sending it out to a select list of clients of whom some are almost certain to respond. Each response is a lead, and each lead a potential sale.

If you don’t want to go the full route as above, you can by lists of potential clients from companies that generate and supply such things, and devise and operate your own direct mail campaign. In general, the professionals are adept at the technique, and can provide a cost effective and potentially lucrative annuity lead generation service.

These are just a couple of the many options for marketing yourself, and for generating leads a result. There are no hard and fast rules here, no right or wrong, and trial and error, along with a well planned campaign on the lines of the above, can prove a very good method of generating annuity leads.

Post provided by Javelin Marketing

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Selling of annuity products is done either by the direct representatives of insurance companies or by agents who sell annuities on behalf of the insurance companies. Generating leads is the most important aspect of annuities. So let us now find how annuity lead generation is done. There are various ways of how it is done.

Annuity lead generation is done by cross selling and up-selling annuity products to existing clients. If an insurance company has a client of life insurance products, an agent would definitely call up the customer for selling an annuity product. Now, the lead generation or prospecting of a customer is done after considering many different factors. These may be the age of the person, sex and other factors such as investment appetite. Once the customers are segmented various products which are created for specific groups are pitched to them. Once a customer shows interest in any product, sales agent visit the customer and explains the various features of the product.

Another method of lead generation is making calls from a random database. These databases are created from various resources such as telephone directories and yellow pages. However many insurance companies prefer not to use this method because customers may sue companies if they make unsolicited sales calls to customers. In many telecom company’s database’s customers who do not want to be called have registered their names in the “do not call” registry. Calling up these customers can be legally challenged. There are many other innovative methods that are used by insurance companies to generate leads.

When we receive our credit card statements many a times we see flyers which advertise annuity products. This is one of the potent methods of advertising which can create the pull for an annuity product. Customers who are interested in a particular product call up the company’s toll-free number or drops an e-mail which is responded by a customer service executive of the company. These leads are stored in a database and followed up by the sales agents. Other ways of generating leads is by conducting events.  During such events, there are many prospects who show interest in a product and these leads are captured by the company. After the event ends, the sales agents start calling up the customers with sales calls.

No one technique of lead generation can be perfect. An insurance company will adopt a multi pronged strategy in their marketing and sales effort. A multi pronged strategy will help the company to get better results. It needs to be understood that not all leads can be converted to actual sales. Therefore insurance companies stress on maximizing the lead generation process which will help them to get a broader clientele.
Competition in the annuity market is driving companies to adopt newer strategies which will help to increase their revenues.  And agents are getting more aggressive resulting in the SEC wanting to take over control of regulating EIA sales.  But a sound annuity lead generation effort eliminates the need to be overly aggressive or bend ethics to make sales.

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Annuity lead generation is not an easy task. Most people selling annuities resort to buying leads, but if you have been there and done that, then you would have realized by now that buying cheap annuity leads will never make you rich. Annuity lead generation has become tough because of the huge competition that exists in the market. Every prospect that you might reach out to would already have been bombarded by others selling the same things, as a result of which, you will simply not be entertained. However, by wisely using lead generators, you can get valuable leads that result into high end annuity sales.

The first and foremost thing to consider is the target audience that you are reaching out to. Most firms collecting annuity leads simply collect a database of people in a certain age group. But this is simply no criteria for selection of people who might need or buy annuities. At the outset only, decide who your target audience is, what is their age bracket, monthly household income and socio-economic profile. This would help you create a message that is tailored for your audience, making them more likely to sit up and take notice.

Once you have narrowed down your target market, you will need to decide what path to follow. While conventional annuity sellers collect demographics and make cold calls, savvy annuity selling professionals nowadays use lead generators to get access to a database of leads that have high chances of converting into sales.

Lead generators are generally products or services that you advertise, in place of the annuities that you are selling. Once the prospect takes up the offer of the lead generator, you gather all his contact information and quickly become the owner of a list that has an extremely high percentage of conversions.

A major advantage of using lead generators is that most people have become bored with annuity selling ads. As a result, they simply ignore them, but this is not the case with lead generators. Instead of advertising your product, which is annuity, you advertise the lead generator, which could be an informational manual or booklet about annuities, a free consultation with a retirement income expert or a retirement income calculator that calculates retirement income with and without different financial products attached. Most people would jump at the chance of getting valuable financial help and advice for free. But, you will also be saved from generating leads that are not interested in buying or using financial products.

To generate relevant annuity sales leads, you can start by making people aware of your free “lead generator” through emails. Build a directory of people who show interest in your product and mail it to them as soon as possible. Make sure that your product is unique, helpful, professional, good looking and offers value to the customer. Most importantly, it should not be a sales pitch at all.

After your product has been delivered to your prospect, you can give them a call and ask them if they are interested in buying annuities. Even better, make them feel that your aim is not to sell anything, but rather to help them with their financial planning. Your leads will definitely feel more inclined to buy if they realize the need for buying annuities instead of having the need thrust down their throat through incessant sales pitching.

Annuity lead generation in your local area – prospects seeking assistance now!

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Annuity selling is not an easy job, but with a sound marketing plan in place you can earn much more than you ever thought possible. Like all other jobs, selling annuities requires not just hard work, but being innovative, talent and an effort at out of the box thinking. Having a sound marketing plan in place is the first thing that you need to do if you want to distinguish yourself from the run of the mill annuity salesperson.

One very important thing to remember here is that no marketing plan should feature only a single marketing strategy. There are a number of annuity selling agents who either resort to cold calling or direct mailing to follow up with their leads. But having a single strategy greatly increases your risks of failure whereas a multi pronged strategy not only manages to reach out to your prospects at different levels, but also increases your chances of getting higher sales. So what are the marketing methods that are most effective for selling annuity? Some of the best methods for approaching your annuity leads that will yield good results are:

1. Advertising: I know you will be shocked that I said advertising! After all, that is what you do all the time and you already know what the results are. However, we are not talking about advertising what your company is providing, or the run of the mill annuity ad. Like in all things, you will have to distinguish your ads from others advertising similar products. For this, you will not only need to rework and redesign your ads, you will also have to post them at the right time. The main focus of your ad should not be just what the company is offering, but rather the benefits that buyers of that particular annuity will get. On the other hand, most people shift their investments or plan them around the beginning or end of the financial year, so advertising around this time would be more fruitful as compared to advertising during the holidays when people focus more on vacations and shopping.

2. Seminars: Seminars are one of the best ways of cashing upon and creating high quality annuity leads. Offering a free seminar in localities where your target customer resides can get you an extremely high rate of sales compared to other marketing methods.  This is because only people who have a serious interest in financial planning will attend a seminar that is focused on personal financial management, retirement planning and buying financial instruments. Covering a number of topics at your seminars, instead of just focusing on equities, will help you get a larger audience. You can tie up with other agents dealing with other products to host a full fledged informational seminar for seniors. Just make sure that you provide valuable information instead of delivering your sales presentations during your seminar. This would establish you as an expert and you will notice people coming to you to buy annuities instead of the other way round.

3. Direct Mailing: Direct mailing can be an extremely powerful marketing tool provided you know how to make your mail stand out and grab your prospects’ attention. To know more about how to do this, check out our post on creating powerful direct mailing messages.

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Selling annuities can be quite profitable, provided you know whom to sell to and how to sell. Most people view the annuity selling business as a gamble because getting annuity leads that work is actually one. When you buy annuity leads for money, you can get amazing leads that lead to a high percentage of sales. On the other hand, you might end up buying annuity sales leads that have a conversion rate of one per cent or less. By managing to get quality annuity leads, you can end up earning excellent commissions. So how do you go about generating annuity leads that convert into customers? Our step by step guide here will help you get good annuity sales leads easily.

Know Your Target Market: If you are already into the annuity selling business, then you might have a good idea about the demographics of people who are buying annuities. Seniors form a major portion of the people who invest in annuities, but simply buying a list of names and addresses of people over 60 does not qualify as a lead list. Define your prospects in terms of age, monthly household income, geographical location, occupational profile, and ownership of financial products etcetera if you want to generate quality sales leads.

Choose Your Medium Wisely: Once you have identified your prospects, the next step is to find a place or a medium through which you can reach out to them. Do you think all your prospects surf the internet for products and advice? Or are they living in small communities where everybody swears by the local rag? Do all of them live in certain particular areas where you might hold educational seminars for collecting leads? Advertise through the medium that you think your prospects are most likely to use. You can also try a combination of mediums based on your marketing strategy and budget

Create A Powerful Message: The common man is bombarded with hundreds of advertising and marketing messages everyday. If you want your adverts to catch your target audience’s attention, you will have to think of something that is different and customized. Offering something of value to your customers or a lead generator can come in handy for collecting quality leads. When you use a lead generator, you offer your prospects something like a free financial counseling session or a free booklet on managing funds (e.g. How To Buy The Best Possible Annuity, How To Manage Your Funds Post Retirement etcetera) based on the demographics of your target audience.

This would establish you as an expert and people would come to you to buy annuities instead of you running after them to sell. But you will have to make sure that your lead generator offers valuable information instead of being an ad for your product. On the other hand, you can also directly advertise your annuity product as long as the message you choose is powerful and compelling.
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This post contributed by Javelin Marketing

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Selling annuities is tricky business. As a result, you see that while some people selling annuities somehow eke out a middle class existence, others who have mastered the tricks of the trade roam around in high end cars and live in plush villas. You might find many high end annuity salespeople turning away sales and annuity leads for some reason or the other and thought that in their position, they can afford to. Right?

Wrong! Because the main reason why some annuity sales people are successful while others are not is because they have learnt the art of turning away prospects. Your success as someone selling annuities largely depends upon your ability to judge prospects and disqualify imperfect annuity leads instantly. Most people who succeed in this business do so because they do not waste their time convincing non- buyers to buy their products but rather spend it productively only on chasing leads that they know will turn into conversions.

As someone with even a little amount of experience in annuity selling, you would also have gained the experience to judge whether a prospect is inclined to buy or not within the first five minutes of interaction. However, most salespeople continue wasting their times with such leads because they are desperate to make a sale. But since no customer is an idiot, most of them can see through your desperation and leave you without a sale and all alone with your desperation once again.

On the other hand, people who have made a success out of selling annuities do not waste time on every annuity sales lead. Instead they will begin by disqualifying leads based on demographics, telephone conversations and initial contact. So if you give both a newbie and a pro 20 leads to begin with, the rookie will waste the whole week selling to every lead and make 2 sales while the expert will disqualify annuity leads based on initial interaction, meet with 8 and make 5 sales in two days. This would leave him with more leads to follow and give him time to work on improving his marketing strategy and promotion.

Another major advantage that you can get by disqualifying annuity leads is that you can establish yourself as a specialist. Everyone wants to deal with a specialist, and if you manage to create a niche for yourself in this market, you will never be short of sales. Just make sure that the niche is not too narrow! For example, you can market yourself as a specialist dealing only with seniors above 50 years of age and sell products targeted only to the senior market. You might have to turn away a few good leads that do not fall under this category, but you will soon find people seeking you out because your clients might recommend you as the specialist to go to for the senior annuity buyer.

Other situations in which you will save a lot of time, effort and energy that can be put to good use prospecting elsewhere are when you get an initial impression that your client cannot afford the products you are selling, that they are not suited for him or her or when your annuity leads do not look interested enough. 99.9% chances say that they will not buy. Don’t waste your time on such leads and you will gain credibility and respect. Once people get the impression that you are not a desperate salesman, they will feel more inclined to buy. This definitely sounds convoluted, but human psychology generally is!

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Selling annuities is tricky business. As a result, you see that while some people selling annuities somehow eke out a middle class existence, others who have mastered the tricks of the trade roam around in high end cars and live in plush villas. You might find many high end annuity salespeople turning away sales and annuity leads for some reason or the other and thought that in their position, they can afford to. Right?

Wrong! Because the main reason why some annuity sales people are successful while others are not is because they have learnt the art of turning away prospects. Your success as someone selling annuities largely depends upon your ability to judge prospects and disqualify imperfect annuity leads instantly. Most people who succeed in this business do so because they do not waste their time convincing non- buyers to buy their products but rather spend it productively only on chasing leads that they know will turn into conversions.

As someone with even a little amount of experience in annuity selling, you would also have gained the experience to judge whether a prospect is inclined to buy or not within the first five minutes of interaction. However, most salespeople continue wasting their times with such leads because they are desperate to make a sale. But since no customer is an idiot, most of them can see through your desperation and leave you without a sale and all alone with your desperation once again.

On the other hand, people who have made a success out of selling annuities do not waste time on every annuity sales lead. Instead they will begin by disqualifying leads based on demographics, telephone conversations and initial contact. So if you give both a newbie and a pro 20 leads to begin with, the rookie will waste the whole week selling to every lead and make 2 sales while the expert will disqualify annuity leads based on initial interaction, meet with 8 and make 5 sales in two days. This would leave him with more leads to follow and give him time to work on improving his marketing strategy and promotion.

Another major advantage that you can get by disqualifying annuity leads is that you can establish yourself as a specialist. Everyone wants to deal with a specialist, and if you manage to create a niche for yourself in this market, you will never be short of sales. Just make sure that the niche is not too narrow! For example, you can market yourself as a specialist dealing only with seniors above 50 years of age and sell products targeted only to the senior market. You might have to turn away a few good leads that do not fall under this category, but you will soon find people seeking you out because your clients might recommend you as the specialist to go to for the senior annuity buyer.

Other situations in which you will save a lot of time, effort and energy that can be put to good use prospecting elsewhere are when you get an initial impression that your client cannot afford the products you are selling, that they are not suited for him or her or when your annuity leads do not look interested enough. 99.9% chances say that they will not buy. Don’t waste your time on such leads and you will gain credibility and respect. Once people get the impression that you are not a desperate salesman, they will feel more inclined to buy. This definitely sounds convoluted, but human psychology generally is!

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This post provided by Javelin Marketing

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Poor Advertising.
Most agents selling annuities or other financial products would agree that ads selling annuities generally look the same and are all equally boring and non- attention grabbing. If you go on using the same advertising message that has already done the round for the last ten years in different avatars, then you should not expect to get any good leads from this kind of advertising. On the other hand, by simply changing your ads with the use of attention grabbing headlines and outlining the benefits of your products, you can raise the number of annuity leads generated per campaign exponentially.

Poor Marketing
Now you would go ahead and say that your cold calling staff is well trained and that they get you satisfactory annuity leads. But do you want to spend the rest of your life with a business whose performance is just that—satisfactory? An extremely large number of annuity sellers rely on only one kind of marketing instrument—direct mailers, emails, cold calling, seminars, endorsements or referrals. But do you know of any successful company that markets through only one single medium? Frankly speaking, I don’t. A good multi pronged marketing plan is necessary for you if you want to survive in the competitive business of annuity sales.

A Loser’s Attitude
To tell you the truth, most losers do not realize two facts—one, that they are losers and second, that they are the only people responsible for their failures.  The annuity selling business will always go through good and bad phases, but the person who can face problems head on and handle them will be the one who will succeed. This is not rocket science, but still we find a large majority of people selling annuities questioning God, circumstances, destiny and what not in order to find out the solution to their problems. There is only one solution to your problems, face them, address them and change for the better.

Be Everything To Everyone.
A large number of annuities today are focused on the senior group aged above 50. However, if you get an annuity lead who is aged 40, won’t you try to sell a similar product to that person? The inner salesman in you would never let that opportunity go, but unfortunately, most such sales either do not take place or result in customers who suffer from major cases of post purchase dissonance. Identifying a niche and becoming a specialist is important for survival in a world that is all for customization.

Not Following The Right Annuity Leads
To follow the right annuity leads, you will first need to find the right annuity leads, and you will never find them selling for a dollar each. Getting the right kind of annuity leads involves the use of different kinds of lead generators like seminars, booklets and informational websites where people genuinely interested in buying annuities volunteer their contact details themselves. If you cannot find such annuity leads yourself, buy them because even if they cost more, they will eventually give you an ROI that will be much greater than what you will get with cheaper but non-focused annuity leads.

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As an annuity agent, the most crucial thing in your business is getting relevant annuity leads. A large number of people resort to buying annuity sales leads, but in many cases, even these leads might turn out to be useless. While there are a number of companies that do sell annuity leads, many of them just sell you a list of phone numbers and addresses of people who might not fall into your target consumer bracket at all. At the same time, there are others that collect targeted annuity leads that have higher chances of turning into conversions, but these leads can be quite costly.

As a newbie who is just starting out or even an old timer who is just plain fed up of paying for annuity leads that cost too much and deliver too little, you might be forced to think how good it would be if you could somehow get free annuity leads. In fact, with a little time and effort, you actually can. Some ways by which you can create your own database of annuity leads are:

Set Up An Information Website: By setting up an information website regarding annuity products, you can easily and quickly get a list of high end, high conversions leads. You can set up a website for free and include information on everything to do with annuities, ranging from selling structured settlement annuities to the annuity formula and annuity rates, and inform readers about how they can get the best annuity rates etcetera. Instead of making free registration compulsory, ask people to register and provide contact information if they need any further “free” guidance or counseling regarding annuities.  You can be sure that anyone who shows this amount of interest in getting annuity related guidance is a lead that is very very promising. If you get leads outside your geographic area, you can also trade them with other agents in those areas.

Advertise In Local Newspapers: While this will not really cost you nothing, posting little flyers in local newspapers will cost you “next to nothing”, especially when compared to the huge amount that even a single high conversion lead will cost you. Instead of advertising an annuity program or selling annuities through your ad, try to sell a “free consultation with a financial expert” and when you do get an appointment, please try to behave like a financial consultant and not a salesman. Build trust in the people you meet, give them genuine information, and they will actually ask you to sell them your annuity programs. However, most people selling annuities fail at this stage because the pressure to sell gets to them. If it would not, they would all make much better and much wiser sellers.

Provide A Free Booklet: Once again, creating and printing a booklet that you can give away for free will cost you something, but even this cost would be phenomenally lesser than what you would otherwise pay for an interested “lead”. You can even buy a number of such annuity booklets online for a small price. Send them to people who voluntarily express an inclination to receive guidance about annuity products. You can gather these annuity sales leads by making people sign up to get a free information booklet on a website or in exhibitions, camps and seminars.

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