The Annuity Lead

Take a second to think about today’s advertising landscape.  Annuity prospects are exposed to dozens of conflicting sales messages every day – to have success with annuity selling, you’ve got to find a way to cut through the clutter.  In this second installment of the guerilla annuity selling principles series, we’ll take a look at one easy way to get your message across: marketing with information.

Today, corporations and sales executives spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads that are designed to be humorous and memorable.  However, while these messages may provide a brief burst in market recognition, they don’t always measure up in terms of sales conversions.  Do you remember the sock puppet dog that was the mascot of dot-com bust Pets.com?  Even though people around the world could correctly identify which company the puppet represented, it didn’t result in more dollars coming in to the company.

What people really crave is information – not catchy jingles or memorable mascots.  If you give them good information in your sales message, you’ll have them knocking down your door with more business than you can handle.  But what qualifies as good information?  In general, it should be both concise and specific, demonstrating your annuity’s benefits without being bogged down by obvious sales messages.  The specific type of information you should provide depends on which marketing method you’re using.

• Direct Mail

With annuity direct mail, you have a limited amount of time to capture a prospect’s attention, so your information needs to be short, sweet and to the point.  Come up with three to four single sentences that describe your annuity’s strongest benefits.  For example, consider something like “Earn a guaranteed return of 4.5% on your investment, while the stock market tanks.”  If you want success with annuity marketing and annuity sales, you must immediately answer the prospect’s question “what’s in it for me.” 

• Seminars

When you’re hosting an annuity seminar, keep in mind that people have shown up for the information you’ll provide – not to hear an hour-long sales presentation.  Speak openly and honestly about the benefits of annuities, not annuities.  In other words, your presentation must be about safety, tax savings, savings on social security tax, lifetime income.  Sell the benefits, not the product. Be that guy that tells it like it is, and be refreshing with your honesty and candor.  Even if you turn off some prospects because annuities aren’t the best fit for them, you’ll impress other attendees with your honesty and likely convert more of them into customers than you would rattling off standard sales copy.

The truth is that people can smell an advertising pitch from a mile away, and are more likely than ever to simply ignore it.  Don’t believe me?  Studies have shown that Internet users don’t even notice banner ads anymore because they’vebecome so attuned to subconsciously detecting and disregarding advertisements.  In this advertising-happy climate, the one thing people long for more than anything is good, solid information.  If you’re the one that fills this need, you’ll find yourself overrun with new customers and clients, ready to give you their money.

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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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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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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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