The best thing about pursuing insurance annuity leads is that the prospects are not looking for anything specific other than a conservative place to put their money.  Therefore, the potential universe of annuity buyers is much larger than prospects interested in life insurance.Additionally, there appear to be more lead generation firms focused on insurance annuity leads that life, LTC or other insurance products.

The first and probably most important aspect of working with insurance annuity leads is to learn what the lead generation source was – they may be telephone, Internet or direct mail generated. By knowing the medium by which your prospects gave up their contact information, you can tailor your initial conversation with them to the lead generation source.  It may sound like a moot point, but oftentimes the quality of leads varies, depending on the source.

Telephone leads tend to be of the lower quality, as they were probably generated by a call center using an auto dialer.  The lead most likely never had an interest in an annuity until they received a random phone call from one of the lead generation companies.   The question the prospect may have been asked, “Would you like to be contacted about safe placed to invest other than the bank?”  Those prospects that say “yes” become your insurance annuity lead.  This is not a bad place to start as long as you understand what the prospect replied to.

A better type of annuity lead is Internet-generated insurance annuity leads.  Unfortunately, the quality of these still varies widely, as there are many companies who offer incentives for the lead to give up their information.  These incentivized offers result in leads that have no interest in annuities – they just want their free gift certificate.  Of course, not all Internet leads are generated in this way, but you do have to be careful of how they were generated.

Direct mail leads are, by far, the best quality insurance annuity leads of the three.  The prospect has seen the physical ad, taken the time to call or go online and voluntarily given up their personal information.  These leads tend to know a little more about what they want and aren’t afraid to let you know what it is – making the job of closing the sale much easier.   In many cases, the prospect has replied to a card in a card pack with various offers.  The downside of direct mail insurInsurance Annuity Leadsance annuity leads is the time delay.  By the time you get the reply, 10 days may have elapsed since the prospect expressed interest and has long “cooled off.”

Once you have a good grasp on where your leads are coming from and what action the prospect took to get their information to you, then it’s time to work your magic with them.  The first stage, as you can imagine, is getting to know your prospects.

Getting to know your prospects doesn’t mean you need know all of their kids, grand children and dog’s names.  Instead, you need find out what makes them tick.  Why can’t they sleep at night?  Annuities are relatively mundane things and by finding out what the clients fear, hope, desire and dream about, you can treat them like a good friend instead of a prospect.  This will dramatically increase your close rate and decrease the number of prospects that slam the proverbial door in your face.The way to find the prospect’s hot button or source of motivation is to ask.  The best question to start with “Mr Smith, what motivated you to fill out a card about annuities?”

Lastly, you must have an automatic follow-up system in place for the prospect.  You have to have a way – preferably an outsourced way – to continue to connect with the prospect as they learn more and more about you, and consequently want to buy more and more from you.  Since not all prospects will agree to meet you immediately, you need a drip marketing system.

As you can see, the secret to building wealth through insurance sales truly lies in the ability of the salesperson to find well qualified insurance annuity leads and walk them through a follow-up process that’s designed to relate to the individual prospect and meet his or her long term income needs.