Gary Whitlock, Annuity Appointment Case Study

Introduction

Gary has been licensed twelve years and wrote $3.5M last year across fixed indexed annuities and life. He was not struggling, which is exactly what made his situation hard to fix.

His system worked like this. He bought form fill leads at about $45 each, roughly two hundred a month, around $9,000. He and a part time assistant dialed every one of them. Out of two hundred they reached about forty. Out of forty they booked ten. Out of ten, five or six showed up.

The business came out the other end, so on paper nothing was wrong. The cost was his calendar. He was on the phone from six to eight most weeknights calling people who had filled out a form about retirement income three weeks earlier and did not remember doing it. Some of those leads had been sold to three other advisors, so he was often the fourth person to call.

Gary's Situation

Gary is harder to help than a producer who has been burned, because nothing in his business is obviously broken. He has a lead source. It produces. He has been running it for years.

What he has actually built is a job inside his own business. The leads are cheap because they are the rawest thing you can buy, an email and a few answers, and everything required to turn that into somebody sitting across from him is work he does personally at night. Producers in this spot usually describe the problem as lead quality. It is not. It is that they bought the bottom rung and are personally climbing the other six.

Here is what he was actually after:

• The same appointment volume without spending fifteen hours a week on a dialer
• Prospects who were not already talking to three other advisors, because the same lead had been sold more than once
• People who remembered asking for the information, rather than ones who filled out a form three weeks earlier
• To spend his working hours in front of people instead of chasing them
• To not hand the follow up to an assistant and hope it got done properly

There is a belief that cheap leads are cheap. At $45 a lead Gary's cost looked like a bargain, and measured against people who actually sat down with him it was about $1,600 each. That number still pretends his own fifteen hours a week are worth nothing.

Overall Results

Gary spends slightly less per month than he used to and takes roughly twice the appointments, and he has not made a single outbound call since the first week.

Cost per appointment that showed

What each person who actually sat down with Gary cost him, before and after.

Across 90 days that produced 34 appointments and six signed applications averaging $240,000, so $1.44M in premium and about $93,600 in commission at his 6.5% rate.

Process and Strategy

Gary did not need better leads. He needed to stop being the setter.

Self Booking Instead of Dialing

Prospects come through the quiz, verify a mobile number by code, and pick their own time on his calendar. Nobody reaches that calendar without doing both. Because the prospect chose the time rather than being talked into it by somebody with a dialer, they turn up, and because the lead was generated for him rather than resold, he is the only advisor they are talking to.

Of the people who book, about 62% report $250,000 or more, and the average portfolio on his calendar runs around $253,000.

The Fifteen Minute Call

Not everyone books the first time. Anyone who finishes the quiz and does not pick a time gets worked by our setter sequence through text and email, and the offer we lead with is not a full appointment. It is fifteen minutes on the phone.

For this age group that is a much easier yes. A lot of them would rather talk for fifteen minutes than work out how to join a Zoom, and those short calls convert into real appointments more reliably than another reminder does. Gary is not involved in any of it. He does what he does best, which is talking to people and working out what they actually need, rather than sending texts and following up with forty emails.

"I used to buy two hundred names and go find the eight. Now eight show up and I stopped buying names."Gary Whitlock

Moving Forward

Gary is writing more business on slightly less money and has his evenings back. The two hundred leads a month are gone, and so is the assistant's dialing shift.

If you are buying cheap leads and working them yourself, you are not saving money. You are paying for them twice, once on the invoice and once with the hours you could have spent in front of somebody.

Figures cover 63 booked calls over three months. His prior cost per appointment is his own estimate from his lead spreadsheet and excludes his time.