The Annuity Lead

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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Best Time for Annuity Seminars

Retirees generally rise early in the morning and schedule golf, tennis, shopping, doctor appointments, dentist appointments, and meetings with the accountant or attorney on weekday mornings.  Therefore, never hold a seminar on a weekday morning because you would be competing with a lot of other activities in your prospect’s schedule.  Schedule your annuity seminar either for Saturday mornings (when retirees put their weekday activities on hold) or weekday afternoons at 2:30 p.m.  By a weekday afternoon, retirees have completed their morning schedule and your only competition is Oprah.

Try and avoid scheduling evening seminars because some retirees tell me that they are reluctant to drive at night as they notice their night vision is not as good.  Additionally, single females have a safety concern, making them reluctant to venture out at night.  If you were having seminars for younger people, all of these guidelines would be different as you would seek to fit their schedule and lifestyle.

Choose the right message

Retirees are concerned with security and are afraid of making irreversible financial mistakes.  This means that they are far less concerned with performance statistics, and favor capital preservation.  (Unlike a younger attendee that wants performance as they look to future financial security).

Thus your annuity seminar title should address their concerns and their fears rather than a product.   The seminar should star you – the problem solver and trustworthy advisor, not a money manager or wholesaler.  Seniors buy trust in a person.  If they trust you, they’ll hand over the money and tell you, “If you think this is good, then let’s do it.”  While younger investors spend more time analyzing details of products and doing comparison shopping, the retired investor is far more attuned to analyzing you.

The topics you choose should focus on you as a problem solver for emotionally compelling problems relevant to seniors.   Some examples of emotionally compelling topics for the senior market include:
a. Mistakes Retirees Make With Their Finances and How to Avoid Them
b. Six Ways Retirees Can Cut Income Taxes and Save More Money

Never have the word “annuity” on your seminar invitation or it will look like a sales pitch for annuities and people will not attend.  Additionally, don’t make your seminar a sales pitch about annuities but rather the benefits of annuities.

Doing it right

Keep in mind that eyesight fails with age.  For this reason, you may wish to avoid really large rooms for your annuity seminar and choose a setup that gives all clear view of you and your screen if you use slides.   Here are a few additional rules for your presentation:

a. Make slides high contrast—dark print on a light background or vice versa.
b. Keep words on each slide to a minimum.  Avoid small text (24 point minimum in PowerPoint)
c. Drop all jargon.  Use simple, easy to understand terminology.  For example, never use the phrase “fixed annuity,” but ask “do you have the type of annuity where the principal is guaranteed but the interest rate has been falling over the last 10 years?”
d. Never speak for more than 75 minutes—people get bored
e. Have a system for closing appointments right at the annuity seminar—do not wait until the next day
Follow Up

Confirm your appointments at 8 am the next business morning.  Retirees rise early and leave the house.  It’s best if you confirm in person.  Do not delegate this to an assistant or you will lose appointments.  This is an important additional contact in building the bridge between you and your soon-to-be new client.

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If you’ve developed the opinion that annuity seminars don’t work for marketing annuities, you’re wrong.

Annuity seminars don’t work when they are done incorrectly. But make a few changes, and you can have 50 people, every time, attend to hear your presentation.

The first issue is matching your message to the market. It’s a simple idea that many annuity agents skip, assuming they know their audience. For example, let’s assume you want to market your annuity seminar to people age 60 and over. To develop a winning seminar invitation, you need to know how these 60+ investors think. You cannot assume that your 60+ market thinks like you do. If you’re 45 years old, you probably want to know about opportunities to make money grow. But people over 60 (in most cases) are not focused to make more money. They care about preserving their capital. Their biggest concern is fear of losing principal. So is it any wonder that your opportunity-oriented seminar titled, “How to Earn More with Annuities,” doesn’t get much of a response?

You could triple your attendance with the right title, such as “Six Ways To Cut Taxes and Protect Your Nest Egg.” This title appeals directly to their fear (i.e. not having enough) and will pull in the attendance from a 60+ audience. Whichever target market you choose, you really need to know their most significant emotional concern and with pre-retirees and retirees the concerns are about preservation and having enough. If you can title a seminar addressing the major concern(s) of your target audience, you have half of the battle won. If you’re not sure, then do some interviews and find out what’s really on the mind of your target prospects.

And please, don’t have the word “annuity” or “annuities” on your invitation.  Annuity prospectsdon’t want a sales pitch. If your annuity seminar looks like a sales pitch for annuities, no qualified annuity prospect will attend. Prospects want benefits.  So make sure your title conveys the benefits they will learn about: preserving capital, keeping money safe, having enough for a life time, saving taxes and having more to spend, reduced financial worry and peace of mind.

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Annuity selling has come a long way from the times when all it involved was cold calling, appointments and mailers. New concepts in annuity lead generation and follow up are turning around the fortunes of hundreds of annuity selling personnel around the world and you can also utilize the same concepts for generating annuity leads that have an extremely high rate of conversion.

Using lead generators is one of the best ideas ever to hit the annuity sales industry. And we are talking about actual lead generators that get valuable and interested leads and not the ones that force people to provide personal information and contact details at fairs and exhibitions without their being interested. The best way of getting high end leads is to first target an audience that has the inclination and the will to buy annuity (e.g. people age 60+, homeowners, household income $50,000+). And you can locate and identify these groups by providing lead generators like informational booklets and seminars.

Seminars are one of the best places for not just getting high quality annuity leads, but also for closing sales. The trick to getting great annuity leads at seminars is to market yourself as a financial advisor or consultant instead of being an annuity salesperson. By doing this you will address people’s concerns—which are not buying financial products or annuities—but rather saving on taxes, investing wisely, getting good returns and securing their future financially. When you act as a consultant and provide them with solutions (which may include buying annuities), then you help them make an informed and wise decision (all by themselves) instead of forcing your sales pitch or products on them!

Don’t have our seminar be about annuities.  Have it be about solutions–saving taxes, gaining financial security.  If your seminar is product-focused, attendees will turn off.  if it’s solution-focused, attendees will become clients.

You can get a large audience at your seminar if you offer them valuable, fresh and required information without putting them through your sales pitch. If you have already given them a hint of your breadth of knowledge through educational mailers, booklets or articles, then your chances of getting an interested audience increases even further because you will have already established yourself as an expert and people will flock to get free advice from an expert.

Please do keep in mind that a lot of such “experts” lose all their credibility in these seminars because the salesman in them starts showing through. If you feel that you also will not be able to hold the salesman in you back, then please do not waste your time and effort in conducting the seminar.

A good trick to identify people who are the best annuity sales leads is to ask your audience about the kind of investments that they have already made. People with CDs are prime prospects for selling annuities to and by providing them detailed and unbiased comparison between annuities and CDs, you might end up having a number of converts who will invest their CD money to buy annuities.

Letting your annuity leads know that annuities provide much better rates of return due to tax deferred compounding of interest and allow for withdrawals without penalties might gain you a few customers then and there. To cash in more on CD owners, make sure that you organize your seminars near the end of the financial year, since this is when CDs come up for renewal.
Get annuity leads  in your local area – prospects seeking assistance now!

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