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

In order to have a secure future, it is important that you get life insurance and coverage for your mortgage. It is customary for insurance firms to provide individual coverage plans for every type. There is a wide variety of insurance options like: life insurance, mortgage insurance, health insurance, fire insurance, vehicle insurance, and even aviation insurance. Since situations are unpredictable, a specific insurance plan must be developed in advance. Insurance plans furnish sufficient coverage that protects the client and their family members.

Homeowners worry about mortgages. Most people need to take out a mortgage to buy a home. Mortgage companies will pay big bucks for these leads, which represent homeowners looking for mortgages. Homeowners get their mortgages from banks, which publish interest rates on mortgages on a regular basis. Finding the right protection for their mortgaged house is their chief concern after mortgaging their house. Now that you’ve done that, it’s time to concentrate on finding a policy that is the right one for you.

Some insurance companies even provide insurance for mortgage protection. Decreasing term life insurance is also offered under some joint life and mortgage insurance policies. You can purchase special insurance that will stipulate that your insurer will pay off your mortgage if you die, so that your loved ones are not stuck with the bill. In order to ensure full payment on your death, you will have to pay a monthly premium throughout the policy term.

Combined life and mortgage insurance will cover you for a pre-determined period of time, and then will pay you or your family money intended to pay off your loans or mortgages after you die. The monthly premium that you have to pay will probably remain constant, decreasing only when your loan or mortgage is near its term. You are required to request a repayment mortgage, which is partly to pay the original mortgage amount and partly the interest of the mortgage.

Certain businesses will permit you to include coverage for disability. Insurance companies disfavor, and rarely offer, mortgage disability insurance. Only if you were diagnosed with a serious illness that falls under the qualifications outlined in the policy that is how this type of policy will pay out. If you have paid for mortgage disability insurance but do not die before it expires, the policy will never pay you.

There are pros and cons related to a particular characteristic of joint mortgage and life insurance. One advantage is the how reasonable the premiums are. The rate is low because this is insurance, not an investment. Hence, this is the regrettable part. Because there is no investment component, when the term is over, there is no asset left. When the term ends, the policy has zero value.

The combination of life and mortgage insurance is not offered by any company in the United States. This kind of policy is more common in Great Britain.

By: Renata Lavlor

You see the websites, you see the ads: exclusive, never before sold, prospects eager to buy, insurance and annuity Leads. Some leads cost a few dollars – others are over one-hundred a pop.

I was curious, just how good are these insurance and annuity leads? I decided to find out.

I’m not going to name specific insurance and annuity lead websites, but I will give you a summary of how it all shook out.

Insurance and Annuity Lead Website A:

Cost: Cheap

Results: Terrible. 10% of the leads my staff called got number no longer in service recordings. The rest: the people had no idea what we were talking about. They were not interested in annuities, insurance or investments, nor did they remember filling out a request for information form on the internet.

Sales: 0

Insurance and Annuity Lead Website B:

Cost: Average

Results: Terrible. Prospects didn’t recall filling out request for information on anything related to annuities, insurance or financial planning. Most just hung-up.

Sales: 0

Insurance and Annuity Leads Website C:

Cost: Expensive

Results: About twenty percent remembered filling out a request for info. However, they had been called numerous times by different agents. Most were getting sick and tired of the calls. A few had begun working with other agents. Most hung-up angrily.

Sales: 0

I spent two-thousand dollars on this experiment. I did not find one-receptive buyer. I had thrown away my money, not to mention time spent by my phoning staff to contact these “hot prospects”.

What the heck was going on? How could these websites sell such garbage?

I poked around, wrote a few e-mails to ‘industry experts’, not surprisingly, nobody got back to me. Luckily, I did end up making contact with a marketing person who had previously worked for a big lead selling outfit. She gave me the juicy details of how the majority of these lead companies operate, whether it is insurance leads, long-term care leads, annuity leads, or MLM/Work-from-Home leads. They all employ the same methods.

Method #1: You send cute E-card to your mother wishing her a happy birthday. You fill out name, e-mail and click send. Your name and e-mail are captured. If the site is a lead harvester masquerading as an e-card site, you will now be e-mailed by people looking to sell you annuities, business opportunity offers, etc.

Method #2: Leads site buys huge database, often just regional phone book listings. They sell these ‘leads’, which are nothing more than names and numbers picked from the phonebook. Some of these people may even be on the Do Not Call list, which could land you in hot water.

Method #3: Harvesting leads from search engines. Often these leads are quality, but are expensive to capture, so the leads companies will sell the leads over and over. By the time you buy the lead, it could have been sold twenty times. Sometimes you’re the first to buy and you will find some quality prospects, more often you’re not.

Method #4: Internet robots crawl web sites hunting for e-mail addresses associated with insurance and annuity content. Somebody might be inquiring about annuities on a newsgroup or forum, next thing they know they’re getting offers from annuity companies. The Annuity Lead companies don’t let you in on how they’ve harvested the leads. It’s called spam and you could get in serious trouble for contacting these people unsolicited.

My contact did say there are decent leads sites. She said to check their policy to see if they guarantee the leads. Keep in mind, just because they have a guarantee doesn’t mean you’ll get your money back if the leads fail to produce results. But often sites with some kind of guarantee are sites that harvest only quality leads and only sell them once.

If you’re still of the mind to try internet leads my advice is to try just a few. Don’t buy into a huge program that requires a minimum monthly or a large upfront purchase. Experiment a little with a cross-section of sites. Who knows, you may find one that’s legit that’ll help you make some money.

By: Bill Broich