Author: Alex Khassa
Date: June 20 2024
Selling an annuity is one thing. Running a business is a different skill set.
If you’re an independent advisor, you’re essentially a business owner.
There are 3 mindset shifts you need to personally make in order to grow your annuity production:
My name is Alex Khassa. I’m the CEO of Clients Blackbox. We’re the #1 Meta Ads Partner to Hybrid Retirement Planning Firms. My goal is to educate you for free. So you can grow your production. And maybe you can tell your buddies about this post, and maybe one of them qualifies for our marketing program.
MISTAKE #1: Quitting Before Completing Your Ramp Up Period
Do you hop from marketing program to another every few months? Congratulations my friend, you’ve got shiny object syndrome. And that’s what’s stopping you from growing to the next level.
The truth is, any marketing program can work, if YOU work it. You probably know advisors doing 20m and 30m a year in annuity production in all sorts of ways. Radio. Webinars. Seminars. Online leads. Anything.
What has to change about YOU is that you need to stick with it until you “figure it out”.
And while every IMO will promise you they have the magic seminar or webinar or digital lead system… They practically don’t.
Because what works for one advisor may not work for another.Â
And there will ALWAYS be an adjustment period of about 3-6 months for you to develop your own unique twist on working the program.
The secret to getting through this “adaptation period” fast enough, is volume.Â
Here's the truth...
Imagine if you were a salesperson hired at a large company. Your sales manager knows that you will have a “ramp up period”. Meaning he knows that you need to go through X amount of leads and opportunities and probably lose a few of them until you figure it out. The key here is how FAST can you go through that X number of leads or opportunities, and how quickly can you get FEEDBACK from someone who’s already had success with this before.
In this case, you are the salesperson, and the sales manager, and the owner! You just need a coach who’s done it before, and the understanding that it will take a certain amount of reps to master it.
We see that for most advisors it may take them about 30 opportunities, with proper feedback, until they develop their own system to convert them into sales.
The catch is, if you go through 30 opportunities in 30 days, you’re going to learn a LOT faster than if you go through 30 opportunities in 6 months. Because you’re going to be leveraging the power of MOMENTUM and IMMERSION. Immersion is key.
MISTAKE #2: DOING EVERYTHING YOURSELF
If you took home $200,000 last year, and you worked a 40 hour work week, you essentially make about $100/hour.
That $100/hour figure is basically the average of all the tasks you performed last year.Â
It could be 20% admin work that can be outsourced for $20/hour
It could be 30% closing qualified prospects that makes you an average of $1,500/hour
It could be 40% prospecting work which can be outsourced for $25-50/hr
… etcetera
If you’d like to make more money, you need to delegate the low paying activities, and really only spend your time in the highest producing activity which is closing qualified prospects.
**Screenshot this, make it your screensaver for the next 7 days to remind you to delegate low-paid work**
This is why you hear of advisors who make $3m a year take home because they don’t do anything but close. They delegate everything else.
That’s one of the reasons why top advisors love our program. They don’t have to spend any time prospecting or chasing bad leads. Qualified self-booked $500k+ appointments get booked on their calendar, without their intervention. They know they’ll close a certain percentage and they only focus on working with the ones that are most receptive to what they do. That’s it.
MISTAKE #3: FALLING FOR LEAD VENDOR ARBITRAGEÂ
Cheap leads cost you more than what you pay for them.
One of the largest lead vendors published a case study that said one of their clients had to literally call, chase, and follow up with 100 leads for months and months to only close 3 clients. What a dumb waste of time, right? Well because those leads are SHARED.
You have to understand that a lead vendor’s business is buying a lead for $1 and selling it to you for $3. Now that's "Smart", for them.
If you bought the lead for $3 that means it was only really worth $1.Â
But it’s much better to get leads straight from the source.Â
You’re not going to be able to do it on your own (because you’re a financial advisor, not a marketer, and finance pays better than marketing and that’s why you’re in this business in the first place).
So it makes sense to get leads from the source and pay somewhat of a premium for someone to do it for you.
Just don’t pay 3x what it cost in the first place.
For example right now if a client spends $7,500 with us (they'd be projected to onboard a $900k client) and about 67% of that $7500 goes into adspend (compared to only 33% or less with lead vendors… we put DOUBLE your money into adspend relatively) which ensures the lead quality is much higher than a lead vendor.
This also means our leads (well they’re not really leads they’re booked appointments on your calendar) are EXCLUSIVE. They are NOT SHARED.
Which means you get higher show up rates, shorter sales cycles, and you stop chasing and start closing.
Stop making these mistakes. Let's get you to $10M+ in annuity production.
Alright! This is some of what I learned after literally spending millions on ads for fiduciary firms who use annuities as bond replacements for retirement planning.
You can keep learning, or you can start increasing your personal annuity production.
Information without action is useless.Â
Let’s get busy.
Click the button and let’s get you personally to your next level in your personal production...
Alex, out.