It has been said over and over again by our peers, and my practical sales experience continues to shout it to me loud and clear. Follow the lead no matter what you think, don’t pre-judge the potential annuity client. For those of you who know me, I do a combination of Seminars “The Frugal Man’s Trust” and pre-set annuity appointments generated from a mail response card. In recent years I have had better luck with the pre-set annuity appointments generated by the mail response cards, and I continue to work this method of attracting annuity leads. I can’t stress the fact enough, to not pre-judge the appointments. The reason I say this is because of the experience I personally have had running these appointments.

This past week I was getting a little lazy and was looking to shorten my work schedule by trying to pre-qualify my already booked annuity appointments. Let me start off by saying I was on a hot streak with my appointments and all the meetings were great with good amounts of investable assets. We all know that when you run these appointments over a long period of time, that they run streaky. Nothing, nothing, nothing, broke no show, and then bang. It’s been going like that for me for years, let’s say almost thirty years. The system never fails, only your work habits or your faith in what you’re doing changes.

So anyway it’s Wednesday afternoon and I’m thinking about going striped bass fishing on my boat and I figure I will start calling my appointments for Thursday, rather than just showing up. (Don’t do this ever) I called the one for 9:00 A.M and I determined that they didn’t have enough money so I sent them something in the mail and supposedly saved my self some gas and some time.

I called the second one that I had for 2:00 and she had $275,00 and turned out to be a sale for next week, but the kicker for the day was that I called the third appointment and it was to be with a husband and wife, he was age 57 and she was age 65. I spoke with the lady and during my phone interview it sounded like they were dead broke and that she either had very little memory, or that she actually did not know anything about their finances. I asked to speak with her husband but he would not be available until 8 or 9:00 A.M Thursday morning. So I called Thursday at 8:00 A.M and he said that his wife had Multiple Sclerosis and that he was pretty much broke, had a large mortgage, and was worried if he could ever retire. He sounded like such a nice guy I said to myself I will get paid in other ways down the line.

I was at his home by 9:00 A.M. and met with them. She was in a wheel chair and had difficulty speaking. I asked her my pointed questions to bring her into the conversation along with her husband and it all went well. I explained several options available to them and pleasantly I was surprised that he had an IRA of $56,000 invested in a tanking mutual fund. It gets better, out of the living room comes not Chris Hansen from Date Line, but the potential clients Mother who was living with them. She said she liked what she heard and that she had $400,000 with Ameriprise and that the agent indicated that she was all set and didn’t need to do any other planning. He told her that she had enough money invested to pay for her care for about five years and that she should be fine. We immediately set a time for me to come back next week.

As I asked the mother more questions, my guess was that the Ameriprise agent was either lazy, just didn’t care or didn’t have the Medicaid planning education behind him so he made up what he thought was a good answer. To sum up the story, don’t pre-qualify, or pre-judge your appointments. You never can tell who or what’s behind the wall in the other room.

By: Peter Lepage

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Filed under: Insurance Leads

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