Let's Chat Leads

Speaker A: What's up?

Speaker B: And welcome to the Unquit podcast. And whether you're on the verge of quitting life insurance sales or you want the best tips and tricks to win in the industry, you're in the right place.

Speaker A: I'm your host, Jim Larson, and sure,

Speaker B: I might own one of the largest and fastest growing brokerage life insurance agencies in the entire country.

Speaker A: And yeah, I might have built that

Speaker B: agency in just three years, but I also started years ago and quit. I quit on myself and my goals and came back two years later, humbled, um, and ready to win. So whether you need to be talked off the ledge or you want advanced leadership content, you're going to find that here. This will be the number one sales and leadership podcast for life insurance agents. Welcome to the Unquit podcast.

Speaker A: All right, share my screen. And we're gonna have some fun today. Let's go with, uh. All right, we're gonna talk about leads. Gonna have this conversation about leads. Some of y' all need to hear this conversation about leads. So this is what we're gonna do. Let me pull up the chat so I can see y' all yelling at me. All right? There's nothing worse for a salesperson than to have nobody to talk to. All right, we know this is sales, people. Jim Rohn says to succeed at sales, you have to talk to lots of people. Good thing there are lots of people. All right, good. We're at a good. We're at a good spot so far. Business is going to come from four places. And this is going to be in every industry. This is all of business. I want you guys to understand this. For our businesses, the business comes from four places. One of them is your warm market. I want you to think friends and family. Again, this is any industry. You could open a law office. There are four places business business comes from. You can open a roofing siding company. There are four places businesses come, business comes from. You can have a life insurance agency. Your business will come from four places. So war market, friends and family. The pros of working friends and family is that they are free to work with. And there's a built in rapport. The cons are it's limited in scope. It crosses a personal, professional line. Sarah, can you jump on mute hammer for me? Um, it's limited in scope. It crosses a personal, professional line. For some people. Just don't. Don't want to cross that line. Um, and you need to gauge interest. Just because they're your friends and family does not mean they're in the market. For life insurance. So there's a couple. There's pros and cons with every lead source. The second one, sphere of influence, I want you thinking acquaintances, co workers, schoolmates, people you know around the community. Again, the pros, they're free to work with. There's some level of rapport there. The cons are they're limited in scope. It does still cross that personal, professional line. And again, you need to gauge the interest because just because you're connected with them doesn't mean that they've expressed any interest in life insurance sale, uh, or like buying life insurance. Uh, okay, third place, paid advertising. Think of, uh, paid leads or your own lead generation. You're going to put out money to get in front of people. Now, the pros to these are that they are infinitely scalable and that they've indicated a level of interest. They put their hand up asking for this. The cons are it costs money and there's no baseline rapport. Understanding the pros and cons are important. The fourth place, last one is cold market. Think zero connection. You are dialing white pages or door knocking. The pros are infinitely scalable, free to work. The cons are there is no rapport, no indicated interest, and an exhausting level of time commitment. These are the pros and cons of, uh, where business comes from, period. Now let's talk about the war market and sphere of influence. I'm going to use these two to leverage the rapport while I'm new, to build confidence and fund the learning curve. The limited availability nature means it's not going to be the foundation of your business. No matter how many people you know are connected to, you will run out of people. Okay, that's going to happen. But understand, until it happens, you can leverage the rapport you have, which builds your confidence, which builds working with people that know you're new and will extend grace while you're figuring this out. Cold market, if you have time but no money and no warm market and no sphere of influence, great. This is your only option. I interviewed one guy, old guy, been in the business a long time, was looking to come over here and he was like, I just want to tell you up front. He's like, I'm not the type of guy that pays for leads and I don't talk to my friends and family. Like, no worries, dude. Where do you think your business is going to come from? You tell me. Where do you think it's going to come from? I don't care that you refuse to talk to friends and Family. I, uh, don't care that you refuse to buy leads. I don't care. Where do you think it's going to come from? The only option in my mind, you're left with cold market hustle. Hope you like knocking on doors and calling white pages, but if that's your game, man, rock out with it. Burnout's going to be high playing that game. I didn't hire him, by the way. I didn't hire him. So with leads, you're going to get what you pay for converting, uh, leads. Conversion is about quality and skill sets, so I'm going to talk about both of these. The more a lead costs generally, the higher the quality. Here's what I mean by quality, though, and I need you to understand this. Quality is about the level of indicated interest, the level of verified contact info, the exclusivity period, and the recency of the request. The that is what you're paying for. Okay? Cheap leads have a low level of indicated interest, a low level of verified contact info, a low level of exclusivity, and a long time since they made the request. Again, this is what you're paying for. If you're like, I don't have money. I want to get cheap leads. What's the cheapest leads I can get? There are cheap leads. Understand what you're getting. You're getting for cheap leads. Low level of indicated interest, low level of verified contact info, low level of exclusivity, and long time since the request. That's what your cheap leads are getting. You just understand that. That doesn't mean there isn't meat on the bone. It doesn't mean you can't convert them. I just need you to know what your money is getting you. One agent left me for a place that offered free leads. I don't want to pay for leads. They say to themselves and out loud to me, they're like, you found a place that has free leads. I said, rock out. What do you think they got there? What do you think they got? Think about it yourself. Leads cost money to generate. Someone is paying that advertising. Do you think any company in the world, any company is going to invest money in advertising, get a return, get these leads that they paid for and give them to an agent for free that has no proven track record of being able to convert those leads. What company in the entire world is making that bet? The answer is none. They got a list of 300 names that they could call that an indicated interest in something completely not life insurance at all. And on a bait and switch. That's what they, the numbers they got to call. That's what they got for free. You get what you pay for. I want you to think of yourself as a detective on a crime scene. And leads are like clues. The detective shows up at the crime scene, they're trying to piece together what happened here. And they're looking at all the details, and they're trying to piece the details together like, this is a lead. I need to chase this down. And so they take the lead, they figure out the next step. They go to the house of the person, and that person from inside the house says, I don't know nothing. And then the detective goes, yeah, you're right. I'm so sorry to bother you, and walks away. Do you think that detective is going to solve any crimes? No. No, not if everyone they go to says, I, um, don't know nothing, and then they walk away. They've got to press into it. They've got to ask more questions. They've got to get curious. Not every lead solves the crime. But if they turn away at, uh, every, uh, every bit of resistance, they're never going to solve any crime. We are lead detectives. It is our job to chase down that interest. Just because they requested a call does not mean that they recognize your number, your name, or your voice. Our job is to connect the dots between their request and our call. The higher the quality of the lead. Remember what I talked about in quality and those elements? The higher the quality, the easier our job is. The higher the quality, the easier our job is. But we still have a job. And quality leads don't make up for being bad at the job. On the other hand, being good at the job can make up for low quality leads. So in both cases, the better you are at, uh, converting, the better you're going to be, no matter the lead you get. One mistake is thinking that good leads make up for poor skill set. That is a mistake. And mistakes on, uh, good leads are expensive mistakes. Another mistake is expecting average or better returns when your skill set is below average. Hear that one? Another mistake is expecting average or better returns when your skill set is below average. The average agent earns, uh, a 4x return on their lead spend. So if they spend $500 on leads, they should put 2,500 in their bank account, refund the output, and net a 4x return. This is what an average agent should do on lead spend. Now, if you're new and you're not average yet, your conversion ratios are going to be less than Average. So you spend a hundred dollars investment on leads because you're new, you're scared. You don't want to invest a lot of money on these leads. You don't know that they're going to be good. So you put a hundred dollars on leads. What can you expect as a return? Tell me in the comments what you can expect as a return on $100 lead spend. Luis 0. Katie 0. Page 0450. Allen Here you go. The answer is zero. Not one single dollar can you expect. Here's why. The average policy is going to sell for a thousand APV with 80% commission and 75% advance that $600 in commission. If you spend $100 and you get a 4x return, $600 in commission is more than the $500 for extra turn on 100. 400 plus the investment. 500, 600 in commission is more than the $500 an average agent would be expected to return. So even one single sale is better than the average conversion rate of an average agent. And you're new, you're not average yet. So when new agents come in and they say, I'm going to spend $100 on leads, even an average age, limited scope, can't expect a single return at all. And yet a new agent is like, I need to turn this into $2,000 or my husband says I have to quit. Well, then your husband's an idiot and you might as well quit now. I don't know what to tell you. Like I don't know what to tell you. The math doesn't math. At some point it's math. When you've got a $10,000 per month income goal, you've got to have the lead spend to justify it. See, the tension lies here. If you knew the leads would convert, you wouldn't be afraid to invest the money. If you knew for a fact they were, they would convert. You'd spend as much money as you could as you had time to work them. But investing the money is the only way to develop the skill set to get the leads to work. So what do you do in that tension? You commit to the investment and then you go to work to make that the right decision. You don't stress over whether it's the right decision. You go make it the right decision. You put in the dials, you honor that investment. You go to work, you make it the right decision. See, I would figure out what I could sell in order to get the money I needed to afford leads. Some people host yard sales for me. When I was brand new, I sold life insurance to my war market and sphere of influence. That is 100% how I funded my lead. My, my uh, learning curve. My first six months here. Maybe I broke even on leads. Maybe I would have been sunken out of business if I relied only on leads. I needed my war marketed sphere of influence. Buying leads isn't going to guarantee business, especially with a low output of activity and a poor skill set. But not buying leads is going to guarantee that you'll go out of business every time. The agent who's not getting leads is not going to be here long. Getting good at this guarantees that you can write your check and achieve whatever goals you have. Massive action and constant correction on leads will guarantee that you will get good at this. So how do you get good at this? You practice period. A hundred dials a day minimum is just going to work less than 100 dials. You didn't even go to work that day. You did a, you did a part time day. You ducked out early. And if you think of it in those terms as a hundred dials is the minimum, I want you to think about how many times you have failed to live up to the minimum. And if you worked any other job in the world and you ducked out as early as you duck out here and you don't show up as often as you don't show up here, would your boss keep you? No, absolutely not. How many half days are you going to take before your boss is like, dude, for real? And if we're honest, $100, about three hours of work. It's not even a real part time. Like you got to show up 100 dial days minimum. And if you start, if you start ducking out less than that, you're ducking out on your boss. How do you get good at working leads? Get on the top Producer call, Tuesdays, 1pm Eastern in the Macro. Every single week, listen to top and elite producers. Live dial in the macro. Volunteer yourself to live dial in the macro or whatever virtual workroom you use for feedback. Ensure new leads come in every week and add to your database of unresolved leads. You want to never get good at leads. You want to never figure this out. I'll show you how to never figure this out. Until you quit, think and worry about dialing without actually doing it. That'll put you out of business. Do less than 300 dials a week, so you never build endurance and never gain momentum. Um, all you do is recycle the same low output week, week after week. Using hope as a strategy. Just thinking this week something might land, but you have no evidence to believe it will, and you're changing nothing. I watch a lot of people do that. 200 dial weeks, week in, week out. Not promoting, not making sales, not. Not being profitable profitable, not hitting their goals, and yet not changing anything. Uh, I don't know why. Dial by yourself and don't log into a virtual office. Just sit in your office by yourself. Dial alone. Get beat up on the phones. That'll guarantee that you never get good at this. Never watch good producers dial and certainly don't implement what they do. That'll make sure you don't get good. Refuse to buy more leads until you convert some of the ones you already have. That'll guarantee that you don't get good. Assume it's just a numbers or quality game and refuse to take ownership of your skill set. Some people like it's a numbers game. The numbers owe me. No, they don't. You might just be bad at this. That might just be a real thing. You might just be so bad that no matter how many times you swing that bat, you ain't gonna make contact with that ball. That potential exists. You gotta take ownership of your skill set. You got to practice this. Everything you need to build a business is in your corner. You have a state license. You have a product portfolio. You have access to leads. You have no excuses. Everything you need that any life insurance agent has ever had, you have. The state gave you a license. Symmetry gave you a product portfolio. What else are you waiting for? What you do with those things will determine what you get from those things. Every one of us has access to leads, a state license, and a product portfolio. What you do with those things will determine what you get from those things. Your goals are worth getting good at this.

Speaker B: And you can.

Speaker A: The only question is whether or not you will. That's what I got for you today. I packed a lot in 16 minutes.

Speaker B: Hey, thanks so much for tuning in. Every single week we are going to be delivering real, raw, impactful content. So you can not only grow a business, but grow yourself. The best way to connect with me is on Instagram. Eat Jim Larson. Just spell my last name right. That is L, A, R, S, E, N. I cannot wait for for some upcoming announcements. And thank you for your support and your help in making this the number one sales and leadership podcast for life insurance agents.