Dale Foster, Annuity Appointment Case Study
Introduction
Dale is three years licensed and writes fixed indexed annuities in Ohio. He came into the business after eleven years in operations management, and he built his book the way most producers build one, off referrals and his own network.
That worked until it didn't. Referrals arrive on their own schedule, so he had good months and empty months with no way to predict which was coming. When he called us he had a case in underwriting worth about $35,000 in commission, sitting behind a client's medical exam that kept getting rescheduled. His income was real and completely outside his control.
He had already tried to fix it by buying leads. Three vendors, fourteen months, $19,500. The first sold him what they called pre qualified retirement leads, and six weeks of work produced one real conversation. The second took $8,500 and handed him phone numbers that never got past voicemail. The third sent a lead with a qualification call logged at 3:30 in the morning, and when Dale finally reached the man he said he had clicked on something about Social Security and had never heard of an annuity.
Dale's Situation
Dale has tried to buy his way to more appointments, it has never worked, and he has the cancelled invoices to prove it. Of the last two dozen producers we spoke with, nineteen brought up money lost to a lead vendor before we asked about it. The numbers they name run from $1,000 to $20,000.
What that does to a producer is not mainly financial. It makes him stop trusting the category. By the time Dale called us he had decided that everyone selling leads was running the same play, and he was mostly right. He was still taking the call because working referrals alone had capped him and he knew it.
Here is what he was actually after:
- A predictable number of appointments every month, instead of whatever referrals happened to produce
- To stop paying for names and phone numbers, and start paying only when somebody sits down with him
- Enough volume in the pipeline that one delayed case, like the $35,000 sitting behind a medical exam, could not stall his whole month
- Somebody else owning the part between the booking and the meeting, because that was the part every vendor had walked away from
- Proof in the first thirty days, not promises about month six
That third one is the goal most producers never say out loud. There is a belief in this business that a bad month is a closing problem. It almost never is. A bad month is an empty calendar that was set sixty days earlier.
Overall Results
The first thing we changed was who gets to reach his calendar. Every prospect now confirms a working mobile number by code before they can book. It sounds small. Prospects who confirm a real number turn up far more often than the ones who never do, and that one step is most of the difference between a full day and a wasted one.
Over 90 days he took 32 appointments that showed, against 56 booked, at a blended cost of $656 per appointment that sat down with him.
| Month | Ad spend | Booked | Showed | Cost per show | Closes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Month 1 | $4,000 | 14 | 8 | $500 | 0 |
| Month 2 | $6,000 | 21 | 12 | $708 | 1 |
| Month 3 | $6,000 | 21 | 12 | $708 | 4 |
| Total | $16,000 | 56 | 32 | $656 | 5 |
Five of those became signed applications averaging $238,000, so $1.19M in premium and roughly $71,400 in commission at his 6% rate, against $21,000 in total cost.
Process and Strategy
Two things mattered here, and only one of them has anything to do with ads.
Verification Before the Calendar
Most vendors sell a lead the moment someone types an email. We do the opposite. A prospect answers seven questions covering retirement status, age, what worries them, what matters most to them, portfolio size and state, then confirms a mobile number by code. Only then do they see a calendar.
That friction is deliberate. Somebody who is actually interested will spend ninety seconds. Somebody killing time on their phone will not, and Dale never hears about them. It is the difference between a lead that is an email address and a lead that is a person with a confirmed number who answered seven questions about their retirement.
Filling the Pipeline Before It Pays
Month one produced zero closed cases. We told Dale to expect that before he spent a dollar, because the alternative is a producer who quits in week five having paid for a pipeline he never used.
Ads take about a week to settle, leads arrive over the following days, and first appointments land ten to fourteen days after launch. Appointments then take their own time. His first close came on day 52, a $240,000 rollover that paid $14,400 and covered his first two months of spend by itself.
| Appointments from | Showed | Closed in M1 | M2 | M3 | Still working |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Month 1 | 8 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Month 2 | 12 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 3 |
| Month 3 | 12 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 5 |
By month three he was closing out of three different cohorts at once with nine appointments still live. That is what people mean by momentum in this business, and it is invisible until the second month.
"The difference is they answer. I'm not chasing anybody. They picked the time, they confirmed it by text, and they're sitting there when I open the Zoom."Dale Foster
Moving Forward
Dale went from $19,500 spent on three vendors for one real conversation to $1.19M in premium written off 32 appointments in a quarter, with nine more still in his pipeline. He is now running at $6,000 a month in ad spend and deciding whether to step up.
If you have spent money with lead vendors and have nothing to show for it, the problem usually is not the ads. It is that nobody was responsible for whether those people ever showed up.
Figures cover 56 booked calls, March through May. Two applications were pending at the end of the window and are not counted.