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Editor’s Letter Welcome to this issue of Producers Today Magazine. Being successful in this business isn’t just about writing more business. It’s about becoming better at what you do, building real relationships, and developing the discipline to keep going when things don’t always go your way. This issue is built around that idea. Inside, you’ll find practical insights on improving your conversations, understanding your numbers, finding opportunities within your existing client relationships, and building a business that can last. One of the highlights of this issue is our conversation with Tom Hegna. Tom’s career is a great example of what happens when you stay curious, learn from great mentors, keep producing, and share what you’ve learned with others. His story is a reminder that there is no shortcut to becoming great at this business—there is only the willingness to keep learning and keep showing up. As you read through these pages, I encourage you to look for one idea you can put into practice right away. Sometimes the smallest change in how you approach an appointment, a client, or your daily numbers can make the biggest difference over time. My hope is that this issue gives you a fresh perspective, a few ideas you can use immediately, and the motivation to keep building the kind of career you can be proud of.

Dennis M. Postema Founding Editor & CEO

The content in Producers Today Magazine is made available on the terms and conditions that the publisher, editors, contributors and related parties, shall have no responsibility for any action or omission by any other contributor, consultant, editor or related party; disclaim any and all liability and responsibility to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident or any other cause; are not responsible in any way for the actions or results taken by any person, organization or any party on basis of reading information, or contributions in this publication, website or related product. 2

TABLE OF CONTENTS 02

EDITOR’S LETTER

AN APP A DAY KEEPS DEPRESSION AWAY

THE INCOME CLIFF YOUR CLIENT HITS THE MONTH AFTER THE FUNERAL

SOUNDS GOOD IS THE SOUND OF A CASE DYING AT THE KITCHEN TABLE

MOST INSURANCE AGENTS QUIT IN YEAR ONE OVER MATH THEY NEVER DID

MEDICARE AGENTS OWN A BOOK. THE ONES WHO LAST OWN A BUSINESS.

THE $43,000 SAVINGS ACCOUNT IS THE CASE, AND NOBODY EVER ASKS ABOUT IT

Founding Editor & CEO

Coach D (Dennis M. Postema, RFC)

Dennis Postema:

HOW DID YOU EVER GET INTO THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY? Tom Hegna: It’s a great story. I was a captain in the U.S. Army, a company commander out of Fort Ord, California, and there was a MetLife agent going through my unit selling whole life insurance.

An App a Day Keeps Depression Away Retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, Fortune 100 senior executive, bestselling author of six books, and a familiar face on CNBC and Fox Business, Tom Hegna has delivered more than 5,000 seminars on every stage from the Million Dollar Round Table main platform to 80 million PBS living rooms across America and Canada. A dual inductee of the NAFA Hall of Fame and the man who took New York Life to a 42% market share in guaranteed lifetime income, America’s retirement expert walks the walk every single day. Here, he talks with us about building a career that lasts—from the five-pay whole life policy that started it all to the one habit that keeps producers producing.

At the time, I was a buy-term-andinvest-the-difference guy, and I said, “Who’s this guy ripping off my soldiers? Bring him to me”—because when you’re a commander, you can do that. They said, “Okay, sir, he’ll see you tomorrow, but he wants your birthday.” He comes into my office, and I start ripping him up one side and down the other for ripping off my soldiers. And he says, “Oh, no, sir. I’m helping protect their families. I’m helping them save for their children’s college education, for a down payment on their first home. I can give them tax-free income in retirement. Your soldiers were nice enough to give me your birthdate, so I ran a printout for you.” This tells you how old I am: it was a five-pay whole life, before the seven-pay test. You pay for five years, and you have it for the rest of your life. I’m looking at this printout thinking, I pay for five years, and by the sixth or seventh year I’ve got all my money back, it’s growing, and the death benefit’s growing. I said, “Why would anybody buy term insurance when they could 4

buy this? Do you get paid to sell this?” He said, “I get paid real well to sell that.” I said, “I could sell that.” And that’s how I got into the business. Everybody thinks I’m the annuity guy. It was five-pay whole life that got me into the industry. Dennis Postema:

WHAT PRODUCT LINES HAVE YOU OFFERED OVER THE YEARS? Tom: I was the number five P&C producer for MetLife at one time, so I wrote some property and casualty, but I wrote life insurance, annuities, mutual funds. If they had a checkbook and could spell MetLife, I was at their house. I was brand new in the business, twenty-seven years old, just trying to do the very best I could for people. I made MDRT my very first year. Very few people do that—it’s very difficult. I remember a gentleman who’d been in MDRT for thirty years told me, “If you don’t have this on your card, you’re not really in the business.” So I said, “Well, I want to be in the business,” and I fought really hard and made it the week before the end of December. I was so proud—and then I got the note from MDRT: you’re not allowed to use the logo until you’ve qualified two years. That was the rule back then. I put it on my card anyway. I’d worked hard for it. Come and bust me. Well, I never got busted, and they don’t have that rule anymore.

Dennis Postema:

HOW DID YOU GENERATE LEADS AND FIND YOUR NICHE?

on 85% of your Social Security; now you’re paying zero. Don’t you think some of your golfing buddies would want a look?” And boom—I would get calls.

buys low and sells high?” These were brilliant things. I put them in my practice, used those same words, and had tremendous success. I watched those Kinder videotapes—VHS tapes—over and over and over. Pretty soon I’d walk into an appointment like I was the Kinder brothers. They give me an objection, I know exactly what to say. And it all worked. Now I try to pass that on.

Tom: When I was brand new, I’d buy Dennis Postema: a list of people who had just bought a house in Arizona, and we’d call HOW IMPORTANT IS them about mortgage protection: MENTORSHIP, “You’ve got this new house—you ESPECIALLY WITH THE don’t want to leave a debt to your INDUSTRY’S family.” I did that for a long time, and SHRINKING RANKS OF then I figured out a lot of these peo- EXPERIENCED ADVISORS? ple were seniors. I’ve helped thousands of agents beTom: I couldn’t have done it by my- come millionaires and multimillionSo I figured out how to help them self. If I didn’t have the Kinder broth- aires, because I’ve gone through the reduce or eliminate the taxes on ers, Jack and Gary Kinder, and Joe tough times and I share the stuff that their Social Security benefits. A lot of Jordan, I wouldn’t be where I’m at worked. them had CDs, and a lot had tax-free today. bonds—because they thought taxI tried 87 things—62 of them didn’t free bonds were tax-free. How do you learn thirty or forty work, and 25 worked really well. years of business as a brand-new That’s what I focus on, so I can help But 100% of tax-free bond interest person unless you learn from them? agents get better faster, just like my counts toward the taxation of Social Otherwise it’s going to take you thir- mentors helped me. And this stuff is Security and toward IRMAA premi- ty or forty years to learn lessons they timeless. ums on Medicare. They didn’t know learned thirty years ago. Joe Jorthat. I’d say, “Right now you’re pay- dan was the senior vice president The Kinder brothers have both ing tax on 85% of your Social Secu- in charge of annuities at MetLife passed away, and Kinder Brothers rity. and one of my mentors. He was a International is bigger than it’s ever dynamic speaker; he made it fun. been—they’re all over South AmeriIf we just change the address on this I would drive as far as I could drive ca, all over everything. CD and move it over to this fixed to go watch him, and he gave me annuity, it pays you a higher inter- the words and language that really My youngest son is getting out of the est rate, it’s guaranteed not to go helped me. Army right now to become my chief down—and if we move those taxoperating officer, and I told him: Payfree bonds over too, I can get you He created the Equity Generator: checks and Playchecks, Don’t Worry, down to zero tax on your Social Se- you put all your money in the fixed Retire Happy—these will be accurate curity.” Their eyes would light up. account, and every month the inter- in a thousand years, because the baest goes into the market. It was basi- sics don’t change. They can change I always say there are riches in nich- cally the first indexed annuity, if you the age of an RMD, but they don’t es. Find your niche, and it will make think about it—you’re guaranteed change RMD maximization. you rich. I worked the senior commu- you can’t lose, and you’re investing Dennis Postema: nities in East Mesa and East Phoenix your profits. and helped a lot of seniors reduce or YOU’RE FAMOUS FOR eliminate taxes on their Social Secu- He did the Equalizer, which was au- BRINGING FACTS AND rity benefits—I don’t know that any- tomatic rebalancing: “How do you THIRD-PARTY body else in the whole country was make money in the market? REFERENCES INTO THE really doing it—and that’s how I got FIELD. WHY DOES THAT into the annuity business. Buy low, sell high. Then I’d encourage people to recommend me: “You were paying tax

Wouldn’t it make sense to have an automatic way that every quarter 5

MATTER SO MUCH FOR PRODUCERS?

Tom: I’ve always carried third-party references to back up what I’m saying, because what agents don’t realize is that they have a conflict of interest with the client. If the client buys, they get paid. If the client doesn’t buy, they don’t get paid. The client knows that, you know that, I know that. So you want to bring references from people who don’t get paid—people who don’t have a horse in the game. BlackRock doesn’t sell annuities, and they say if you buy an annuity, you’re going to have more upside in your portfolio and lower downside risk. Goldman Sachs doesn’t sell annuities; they say you’ll get a higher payout if you incorporate annuities into your portfolio. Barclays is an investment bank; they say fixed index annuities outperform bonds. The Wall Street Journal wrote about why you should move some of your bonds into annuities. Dr. Wade Pfau wrote a book saying it shouldn’t be stocks and bonds anymore—it should be stocks and annuities. The simplest way to help a client is to remove the bonds from their portfolio and replace them with annuities. The research shows a retiree should have 20% to 40% of the portfolio in an income annuity, and it will do three things. Number one, it improves portfolio performance because of mortality credits—annuities have outperformed bonds for the last fifty years, and they will for the next fifty. Don’t compare annuities to stocks; that’s where you’ll lose. Compare annuities to bonds, and you’ll win 100% of the time. Number two, the research shows people with guaranteed lifetime income are happier. And number three, people with guaranteed lifetime income live longer. If the portfo 6

lio does better, they’re happier, and they live longer—I don’t understand how anybody can be against that. Dennis Postema:

We add content constantly, and there are group discounts—the more producers, the lower the cost; we can work deals for major companies and groups.

Tell us about the training producers can And if you don’t have any money access through you. yet, I’ve got a free YouTube channel.

Say, “I’m looking for a dynamic speaker on guaranteed lifetime income, annuities, life insurance, and long-term care—who would you recommend?” Guess whose name pops up? I didn’t have anything to do with that. That’s just thirty-five years of doing business.

Go to YouTube until you make some Tom: I have Tom Hegna On Demand. money, and then I can really help It’s a monthly service—we also sell you with the advanced stuff. annual and lifetime memberships, Dennis Postema: and if you watch my webinars, we WITH A SHORTAGE OF have special deals. And we’ve just created the Tom Hegna AI Playbook. NEW TALENT, HOW

So I’d challenge the agents out there: if somebody says, “I’m in Podunk, Kentucky, and I want to talk to an agent,” wouldn’t you want your name to pop up? It will—if you keep posting, keep loading things in, keep being visible.

Right on your phone, you’re on an appointment, somebody gives you an objection—you can read it or type it, and my answer pops up, along with two or three videos of me answering that objection and third-party articles that back up exactly what I say.

AI will pick that up and recommend you.

Tom Hegna On Demand does three things. Number one, training: I put my brain online so you can soak up my brain. Number two, coaching. Before every appointment, you go to Client Coach. Is your client single or married? How old? You hit “single, 72,” and a video of me pops up: “You’re going on an appointment with a 72-year-old widow. Here are her key concerns, the products you’ll probably use, the questions to ask her, her objections, and how I would answer them”—and I coach you for five to eight minutes. The next day you’re seeing a married 35-year-old couple, and I coach you totally differently than I did for the widow. Number three, client education: Retire Happy U, where I walk through the seven steps of Don’t Worry, Retire Happy.

SHOULD AGENCIES THINK ABOUT RECRUITING—AND ABOUT AI?

Tom: I think it’s the companies that are incorporating AI. I was in a meeting in Vegas, and during the Q&A one of the agents said, “Tom, I presented a fixed index annuity illustration to a client, they loaded it into AI, and AI said they shouldn’t do it. What would you have done?” I said, “I would have loaded it into AI first.” Say, “This is my potential recommendation—what could I do to make this better?” and have AI help you improve it, so that when the client loads it in, AI says, “That’s exactly what you should do.” We’ve got to use AI as our friend, not as our competition. And here’s what really blows me away. I’ve been in the business thirty-five years. If you go on Claude or ChatGPT or Grok and ask about me, they know me. Ask, “Is Tom Hegna real, or is he a scam?” They’ll tell you: he’s the real deal. 8

Dennis Postema:

NOBODY EVER CATCHES YOU OUT OF AN ORANGE SHIRT—YOU ARE ON BRAND 100% OF THE TIME. HOW IMPORTANT IS BRANDING FOR AGENTS? Tom: My wife gets mad that I wear orange every day. If I’m in public, on a stage, or playing in a golf tournament, I’m in orange. When I travel, I wear black so nobody recognizes me—I used to get stopped in airports and hotels all the time—and when I get there, I put on my orange. That’s the brand. But here’s what I’d tell agents: post on social media every single day. You have to develop a brand. And if you don’t know what to post, just share my stuff. That’s my whole media strategy—I post the things you should be posting but don’t have the time or the know-how to create, so you can share them. And don’t just post—watch your feed. We used to have to buy new-

home leads, baby leads, marriage leads. Now people tell you when they’re having a baby, when they got engaged, married, or divorced, when their mother died. These are all life events, and they’re telling you for free. When I was at MetLife, I’d buy Snoopy bibs—they cost about 75 cents. Anybody has a baby, I’m at their house with a Snoopy bib: “We need to talk about a 529 plan for college. I’ve got four kids—it happens really fast. You both need more life insurance, and we should put some on the children, too.” Every day you’ll have two or three people you have a reason to call, because they posted something. Dennis Postema:

ANY FINAL WORDS OF WISDOM FOR PRODUCERS RIGHT NOW? Tom: Here was the thing I didn’t like about the business: I’d write a big case, be all excited, and then the client would talk to their brother-inlaw, who’d say, “That’s stupid,” and they’d call and cancel.

planned for fallout. You’re going to lose 10, 20, 30% of your cases. Plan for it. If you need ten policies a month, you’d better be writing fifteen. My first year, I wrote something like 487 policies, and 350 placed. It happened to me, I’ll bet it’s happened to you, and I’ll bet everybody reading this has lost cases they shouldn’t have lost, because some person told the client it was dumb or they tried to do it themselves. Life is unfair—but if you control the numbers, you won’t ride that emotional roller coaster. Plus, it keeps you sharp. When you’re constantly producing, you’re good. Too many people write a big case and think, “Okay, I’m good for this month,” and chill out. That’s the worst thing to do. When you’re touching things that turn to gold, don’t stop touching. Keep touching everything—it’ll turn to gold. Find Tom at TomHegna.com, follow @TomHegnaSpeaks on LinkedIn, Facebook, and X, or subscribe to his YouTube channel to keep up with his training, playbooks, and events.

It’s an emotional roller coaster—you go up with the ups and down with the downs—and I hated that. So here’s what I came up with: an app a day keeps depression away. If you write two policies and lose one, that’s 50% of your cases, and you’re bummed out. But if you write thirty and lose two? That’s just the business—get used to it.

“BEHIND EVERY FINANCIAL DECISION IS A HUMAN STORY.” A reminder that listening comes before planning.

What made a big difference for me was a top producer telling me he 9

Frameworks

Smarter Decisions

Planning Today For Brighter Tomorrow

Strategies For More Confident Tomorrow

Connect

Practical Insights For Whats Next

on paper. Ray and Diane, both sixty-seven, married forty-one years. Ranch house on two acres, paid off. Two cars, paid off. A folder on the table with three statements in it, because Ray is the one who handles the money and Ray came prepared. Six hundred twelve thousand dollars across a rollover IRA, a small Roth, and what’s left of a brokerage account his father started for him. Ray tells me they’re in good shape. By the only number Ray tracks, Ray is right.

The Income Cliff Your Client Hits the Month After the Funeral Coach D (Dennis M. Postema, RFC)

Two checks come into that house every month. One of them stops. Not reduced. Stops. When the first spouse dies, the survivor keeps the larger Social Security check and loses the smaller one. If there’s a pension, it drops to whatever survivor option he picked in an HR office nineteen years ago in under ten minutes. He doesn’t remember picking it. Most of them picked the biggest monthly number, because the biggest monthly number is what a fifty-eight-year-old picks when nobody is sitting there asking him what happens to his wife. That’s the cliff. It is the most predictable event in a retired couple’s financial life, and it is the one thing almost nobody at that kitchen table has ever had drawn out

So I stop looking at the folder, and I ask Diane a question. “Diane, if Ray gets hit by a truck on Thursday, what shows up in your checking account in November?” Ray laughs. He says something about how she’d be fine, she’d have all of it. Diane doesn’t laugh. She looks at the table for a second and says, “I don’t know.” We figure it out together, out loud, on a legal pad. His Social Security, twenty-six fifty. Hers, thirteen ten. His pension from the plant, nine forty. Forty-nine hundred dollars a month comes into that house. Then I ask Ray what he elected on the pension, and he goes quiet, and then he says, “I think I took the single life. The number was better.” So we write the other column. If Ray goes first, Diane keeps twenty-six fifty. The thirteen ten goes away. The nine forty goes away. Forty-nine hundred becomes twenty-six fifty. Her income drops by nearly half. Her house costs exactly what it cost 12

the month before. The property taxes don’t attend the funeral. The homeowner’s premium doesn’t send flowers. Diane is not looking at the table anymore.

ANNUITY BRAIN, AND WHY $612,000 DIDN’T HELP ME Here’s the mistake I made for years, and the one I watch producers make every week. I’d hear six hundred twelve thousand and my brain would switch. I’d start talking. Growth, rates, what the market’s done, what a rollover could look like. I call it Annuity Brain, and it costs more cases than any objection ever has. It fails three ways. It fails because the balance was never the problem. The problem is the shape of the income, and you just answered a question nobody asked. It fails because the second you start talking about performance, you’re in an argument with a man who reads his statements every quarter and has opinions. Ray doesn’t need a debate partner. He needs somebody to show him something he hasn’t seen. And it fails because it turns the appointment into a transaction. A transaction gets you one case, if it closes. What you actually want out of that kitchen is a household — Ray, Diane, their daughter’s term insurance, Diane’s sister who’s about to retire from the school district.

The moment a client feels the conversation change from questions to a presentation, they stop telling you things. Everything you needed was in what she was about to say next.

say nothing.

The property taxes don’t attend the funeral. The homeowner’s premium doesn’t send flowers.

Twenty-six fifty against a thirty-nine hundred floor — a twelve-hundredand-fifty-dollar hole every month for a woman who will be seventy-something and grieving and in no condition to make a decision.

FLOOR & FUN Here’s what I do instead. Four steps, and you can run them with a legal pad and no product knowledge whatsoever. One. Count the floor. These are the words: “Let’s do something simple before we look at any of these statements. What has to get paid every month whether or not anybody feels like paying it?” Then you write while they talk. Taxes, insurance, utilities, food, the Medicare supplement, the medications, gas, the phones. Not vacations. Not Christmas. Not the grandkids’ birthdays. The floor is the number that keeps the lights on and the doors open. For Ray and Diane it came to thirty-nine hundred. Two. Count only the income that can’t quit. “Now let’s list the money that shows up whether the market is up or down — and keeps showing up if one of you isn’t here.” That sentence does a lot of work. It sorts every dollar in the house into two piles without you having to say the word annuity, and it puts the survivor question on the table as arithmetic instead of a scare. Three. Name the gap, and then

Write it. Forty-nine hundred today against a thirty-nine hundred floor — comfortable.

Then close your mouth. This is the hardest thing in the business. The silence is where they do the work, and if you fill it, you own the conclusion instead of them. Four. Book the desk. “That gap is a specific problem with a specific fix, and we have a desk here that does nothing else all day. Can they sit down with the two of you next Thursday, same time?” You did not recommend a product. You did not say a word about suitability. You asked four questions, wrote two columns, and booked the second appointment where a specialist runs it with you in the room and you split the case.

THE THREE RETIREMENTS The reason the floor matters more than the balance is that retirement isn’t one long flat stretch. It’s three. There are the Active years, when they travel and the money moves. There are the Steady years, when they’re home more and the spending settles into something predictable. And there are the Cared-For years, when somebody else is helping, and the costs go up, not down, at exactly the point when the household’s income has usually already taken its hit. 13

A pile of money has to be managed correctly through all three, by somebody, in every market, forever. A floor doesn’t. That’s the whole argument, and it’s an argument about arithmetic, not about products. Cover the floor first. Then talk about the rest. Say it that plainly and a couple will repeat it back to you at the next appointment, which is how you know it landed. I’ll tell you the part that surprised me twenty years in. Diane wasn’t scared by that legal pad. She was relieved. Somebody had finally said out loud the thing she’d been half-thinking for three years and had no words for. Ray wasn’t offended either — Ray was a little embarrassed about the pension election, and then he was grateful, because he’d spent forty-one years taking care of her and nobody had ever shown him the one place his plan had a hole in it. That’s the transcript test. If they read a word-for-word transcript of your appointment a year later, do they feel served or do they feel handled? Two columns on a legal pad passes that test every time. Next appointment: before you open a single statement, ask what has to get paid every month whether or not anybody feels like paying it — then ask what income keeps showing up if one of them isn’t here. Comment FLOOR on the reel and I’ll send you the one-page version. The conversation continues at producers.community.

is exactly what makes it dangerous. Nothing bad happened in those twenty-two appointments. That is not the same thing as having done it right. Picture the table. A retired shop foreman and his wife, coffee cups, a manila envelope with a life policy from 1994 in it, and a producer who has just spent thirty-five very good minutes explaining what an old 401(k) at a company he left in 2019 is currently doing. The producer is good. He’s warm, he’s prepared, he hasn’t oversold anything.

Sounds Good Is the Sound of a Case Dying at the Kitchen Table Coach D (Dennis M. Postema, RFC)

I pulled thirty-one recorded appointments one winter and listened to the last four minutes of each one. Twenty-two of them ended with the client saying some version of “sounds good.” Nine of those twenty-two ever issued. The producers had all written the same thing in their notes. Went great. Here’s what I’ve come to believe after twenty years of hearing that phrase: “sounds good” is not agreement. It’s manners. It is the most polite way a human being can say I would like this conversation to end now and I don’t want to hurt your feelings. It costs the client nothing, it commits them to nothing, and it feels wonderful, which

He gets to the end and asks if that makes sense, and the foreman says, “Yeah, that sounds good. Let us think about it and we’ll get back to you.” The producer stands up, shakes hands, gets in the truck, and writes hot next to their name. That case is already dead. It died about ninety seconds before he stood up, in a moment he didn’t notice, and I can tell you exactly where. Twelve minutes earlier the wife had said, “We just don’t want to be the ones who mess this up for the kids.” And the producer, who was listening for objections and not for words, said: “Right, so you want to make sure you’re protected.”

ing understood and started being sold to, and everything after that was politeness.

THE TWO MISTAKES UNDERNEATH IT The first one I call the translation. You hear what the client says, you convert it into industry language, and you hand the translation back to them like it’s an improvement. Time becomes “you’d like to think it over.” We’ve been burned before becomes “you have some concerns about market risk.” Every translation is a small message that says: I heard the category you belong to, not the thing you said. The second is taking pleasant for decided. Most of us do it because the appointment felt good and we want it to have gone well. So we write hot in the notes, we skip the confirming step, and we spend the next eleven days leaving voicemails and calling it follow-up. Both mistakes come from the same place — we’re managing our own comfort at the end of an appointment instead of the client’s clarity. “Sounds good” costs a client nothing. Commitment always costs them something small, and that’s how you know it’s real.

She said “mess this up for the kids.” He said “protected.” Those are not the same sentence.

THEIR WORDS BACK, THEN THE SAY-ITBACK RULE

Hers has fear and guilt and forty years of family in it. His is a brochure word. The second he swapped her language for his, she stopped feel-

Two moves. The first one runs all the way through the appointment; the second one goes at the end, every time, no exceptions.

One. Give them their words back, exactly. Not your version. Theirs. She says, “We just don’t want to be the ones who mess this up for the kids.”

the entire test. Compliance comes back vague and pleasant. Commitment comes back with details the client generated — a day, an account, a number, a person.

You say, “Say more about messing it up for the kids.”

And if what you get is the vague version, you have not lost anything. You have found out at the table instead of on day eleven. So you say the third sentence: “That’s fair. If there’s one thing making you hesitate, what is it?”

That’s it. That’s the whole move. Six words and a pause. You are not solving, you are not reassuring, and you are absolutely not upgrading her vocabulary. What comes back is almost always the real case — the brother who got taken on something, the mother’s estate that took three years and a lawyer, the daughter who they know will be the one handling everything. Write down her exact phrase. Not your summary of it. When you speak an hour later, use her words: “You told me you didn’t want to be the ones who mess this up for the kids. Everything we just talked about is about that.” Watch her face when your sentence sounds like her sentence. Two. Make them say it back. At the end, before anybody stands up: “Before I go — if you were telling your daughter tonight what we talked about, what would you tell her?” Then you shut up and you listen to which one it is. Politeness sounds like: “That we’re gonna look into some options.” No specifics, no ownership, all of it in the passive. Commitment sounds like: “That we’ve got an old account from the plant that isn’t doing what we thought, and somebody’s coming Thursday to look at it with us.” You didn’t put those specifics in their mouth. They proposed them. That’s

One thing. Singular. It keeps them from listing five polite reasons and gets you the actual one, and about a third of the time it’s something you can answer in a sentence, and about a third of the time it’s something you’d never have guessed, and the rest of the time they tell you it isn’t the right month and they mean it — which is real information you can plan around instead of a maybe you keep feeding. There’s a version of this for the phone, too, because half of you are running these on Zoom now. On a screen you lose the pause — people talk over the silence because the lag makes them nervous. So you name it out loud: “I’m going to be quiet for a second while you think.” Then be quiet. Ten seconds on a video call feels like a minute and it is the most productive minute in the appointment. Every one of these moves is the opposite of pressure. Nobody gets hurried, nobody gets cornered, nothing gets decided by a technique the client didn’t notice. All you’re doing is refusing to accept a polite noise in place of a real answer, and clients respect that more than they respect a smooth close. 17

A client reading a transcript of that ending would see somebody who wanted to be understood correctly. That’s the only test that matters. Never let a client say “sounds good” and let it stand. Ask what they’d tell their daughter. I still hear it come back vague sometimes, and it still stings a little, and I still say the fair-enough sentence. The difference between me at thirty-two and me now is only that I no longer drive home believing something happened when it didn’t. My follow-up list got shorter and my issued count went up, and it wasn’t because I got better at explaining anything. Next appointment: write down one exact phrase the client uses, say it back to them word for word before you leave, and end with “if you were telling your daughter tonight what we talked about, what would you tell her.” Comment WORDS on the reel and I’ll send you the one-page version. The conversation continues at producers.community. THE KEY TAKEAWAY

CLARITY BEFORE COMMITMENT “Sounds good” is not the same as being understood. Real commitment begins when clients feel heard, can explain their concerns in their own words, and know exactly what happens next.

BEYOND THE POLICY Building trust. Understanding people. Creating relationships that last.

Every client brings more than numbers, policies, and financial decisions to the table. Behind every conversation is a story, a family, and a future worth understanding.

the dollar, and he could not tell me a single input that produced them. He didn’t have a lead problem or a talent problem. He had a nobodyever-made-him-count problem, and by month ten it had turned into a mood, and moods are very hard to argue with. Here’s what I’ve watched for twenty years: producers rarely quit because the business didn’t work. They quit because they had no way of knowing whether it was working, so a slow six weeks felt exactly like failure.

Most Insurance Agents Quit in Year One Over Math They Never Did Coach D (Dennis M. Postema, RFC)

A producer called me in month ten to tell me he was done. Good guy. Licensed in March, worked hard, ran appointments, wrote business. He said the words almost everybody says: “It’s just not working.” So I asked him how many families he sat with in September. He said a bunch. I asked him for the number. He didn’t have it. I asked how many of those turned into an application, and how many of those actually issued, and how many second appointments he booked off them. Silence on the phone. Then: “I’d have to look.” He’d been in the business three hundred and some days and he could tell me what his commission checks were down to

THE SCREENSHOT NEVER SHOWS THE APPOINTMENT COUNT Somebody is going to show you a number this week. A carrier portal screenshot, a check, a car, a leaderboard slide. What they will never show you is what sat behind it — how many fact-finders that took, over how many weeks, how many of those families said no, and how many months of nothing came before the month in the picture. That’s not because they’re all liars. It’s because the appointment count is boring and boring doesn’t travel. So the new producer builds his expectations out of other people’s highlight reels, and then measures his own Tuesday against them. Tuesday loses. Tuesday always loses. Three ways this kills people who would have made it. It makes a normal cold stretch feel terminal. Every producer has a run of appointments that don’t write. 20

If you don’t know your own ratios, you can’t tell the difference between a bad month and a broken business. It makes you change everything at once. No numbers means no diagnosis, so you swap the lead source, the script, the carrier, and the calendar in the same two weeks and learn nothing from any of it. And it makes coaching useless. When a producer brings me stories instead of counts, there’s nothing for either of us to grab. I can’t fix “it’s just not working.” I can fix “I’m sitting eleven a month and only two are couples.” A slow six weeks and a failing business look identical from the inside. Counting is the only thing that tells them apart.

THE FOUR NUMBERS Four. That’s the whole system, and it fits on an index card taped inside a folder. Sits. A sit is a real fact-finder with a real person in front of you, in a kitchen or on a screen, where you asked questions and wrote answers down. A quote over the phone is not a sit. A friendly coffee is not a sit. Be strict about this one, because everything downstream is calculated off it, and producers who fudge sits are lying to the only person the number was for. Apps. Written and submitted. Not “he’s sending it back to me.” Issued. Placed, paid, on the books. The gap between apps and issued is where most first-year producers are actually losing their year, and almost none of them know it, because the app felt like the finish line.

Underwriting, missing signatures, a client who ghosts the phone interview — that’s a fixable problem hiding in plain sight, and you cannot fix what you never wrote down. Second appointments. This is the one that decides what kind of producer you become. It’s the count of families who agreed to sit down again about something you found — the old 401(k), the IRA at the bank, the CD that’s been rolling at the same institution since the wedding. A producer who sits a lot and books no second appointments is running a one-visit business forever. A producer with a steady second-appointment rate is building a practice. Now the math the producer in month ten never did. Take your last ninety days. Divide apps by sits. Divide issued by apps. Divide second appointments by sits. Those three fractions are your business. They’re personal to you, your market, your product mix, and how you run a table — mine are not yours and yours are not the guy’s on the leaderboard. Once you have them, the entire fog lifts. You stop asking “is this working” and start asking “what would have to be true for this month to look like the month I want,” and that question has arithmetic answers instead of emotional ones. If your sits are down, that’s a calendar problem and you know where the calendar problem lives. If your sits are fine and your apps are down, it’s what’s happening at the table. If your apps are fine and your issued is down, it’s your process after the signature. Three completely different problems that all feel iden-

tical when you don’t measure. Nobody’s promising you an outcome here — the effort produces the outcome, and the ratios are yours to earn. What I’ll promise is that a producer who counts these four for ninety days knows more about his own business than most agency owners know about theirs. There’s a fifth number some producers add once the first four are habit, and it’s the one that tells you whether your business will exist in five years: how many of this month’s sits came from somebody who already knows you. Referrals, past clients, the CPA down the street. Nobody needs that number in month three. Everybody needs it by year two, because the producers who are still standing at year ten are the ones whose calendars stopped depending on strangers.

WHAT I ACTUALLY ASK When a producer wants to contract with our group, I don’t ask what he made last year. I ask three things: how many families did you sit with last month, how many of those did you set yourself, and what happened to the ones that didn’t close. Answer those three and we can build almost anything together, even if the numbers are small — especially if the numbers are small, honestly, because a producer who can tell me he sat six is a producer who can sit nine. Can’t answer them, and there isn’t a lead program on earth that fixes it. I’d be doing you harm to pretend otherwise, and that’s a thing I’ve done before and won’t do again. You cannot coach a story. You can coach a count. 21

Here’s the part I want the ten-month version of you to hear. That producer who called me? He didn’t quit. He started counting on a Monday, and eight weeks later he called me back with actual numbers — his sits were fine and his second appointments were near zero, which meant he’d been leaving the biggest thing in every house on the table because he never asked the one extra question. That’s a two-sentence fix. It was never a career problem. It was a measurement problem wearing a career problem’s clothes. Next appointment: open a note on your phone before you get out of the truck and log the sit, then log what came of it that same night. Four numbers, ninety days, starting Monday. Comment NUMBERS on the reel and I’ll send you the one-page tracker. The conversation continues at producers.community. THE BIGGER PICTURE

THE NUMBERS TELL THE REAL STORY Success in the insurance business isn’t just about working harder. It’s about understanding the numbers behind every appointment, application, and issued policy. When agents track what truly matters, they can identify what’s working, fix what’s not, and build a business based on clarity instead of guesswork.

FOUR NUMBERS THAT CHANGE EVERYTHING 1. Appointments — The conversations that create opportunities. 2. Applications — The commitments put into action. 3. Issued Cases — The business that actually moves forward. 4. Second Appointments — The relationships that build tomorrow.

Medicare Agents Own a Book. The Ones Who Last Own a Business. Coach D (Dennis M. Postema, RFC)

Four hundred and ten households. That’s what a Medicare agent I know had built over eleven years — Supplements, some Advantage, a handful of dental plans. Four hundred and ten families over sixty-five who take his call on the first ring, who have his cell number in their phone under his first name, and who have told him things about their health they haven’t told their kids. His renewal income covered his life. Then it covered a little less. Then a plan exited his county and a chunk of the book had to be moved in six weeks, and the commission on the replacement wasn’t the commission on the original, and he spent AEP

working harder than he’d worked in five years to end up roughly where he started. That’s not a bad agent. That’s a good agent with one revenue line he doesn’t control. Here’s the part that gets me. Sitting inside those four hundred and ten households is more retirement money than most life producers will see in a decade, and in eleven years nobody had ever asked about it. Not because he couldn’t. Because it never occurred to him that the review was the place. Watch a Medicare review sometime. He’s at a kitchen table with a woman who’s seventy-two. He already asked what doctors she sees. He already asked what medications she’s on and what pharmacy she uses. He already asked whether her husband is on the same plan and what her daughter’s situation is, because that’s how you place a plan correctly. She has answered questions about her body, her marriage, and her prescriptions. And in eleven years the one thing nobody asked her was where her money comes from. She’s got a 403(b) from twenty-six years in a school district. It’s been sitting exactly as she left it in 2019, invested the way a fortyeight-year-old should be invested, held by a seventy-two-year-old who does not know that’s what she owns. The only person advising her on it is whoever’s name was on the enrollment packet at the district office in 1998.

THE THREE WAYS A BOOK STAYS JUST A BOOK

out during a bad AEP. Two: the agent decides he’s “not an annuity guy.” Fair. Most of the Medicare agents I know who tried it alone got lost in suitability and paperwork, wrote one case badly, hated the whole experience, and went back to what they were good at. That was never an argument against the client having the conversation. It was an argument against having it alone. Three: the review is treated as a compliance chore. It becomes a form to complete instead of the single most natural annual appointment in this entire industry. Nobody else in financial services gets a scheduled, expected, welcomed sit-down with a household every twelve months. You have that. Most producers would trade their whole lead budget for it. She answered questions about her body, her marriage, and her prescriptions. Nobody ever asked her where her money comes from.

THE MEDICARE SECOND QUESTION One sentence added to a review you’re already running. Three steps around it.

Step one. Ask it near the end, after the plan work is finished, in the same tone you asked One: renewals feel like a business about her pharmacy. and aren’t. Money that arrives “Before I go — is there anything besides Social Security paying whether or not you work is a wonderful thing and a danger- you every month? A pension, ous teacher. It hides a shrinking an old 401(k) or 403(b), an IRA, a CD sitting at the bank?” calendar for years, and you find 24

That’s the whole question. Notice what isn’t in it: no product, no opinion, no lead-in about how important retirement planning is.

cides that isn’t for her, you’re still her Medicare agent, because you never became a salesman in her kitchen. You stayed the person who knows her doctors. One It sounds like the rest of the re- more thing about the room itself. view because it is the rest of the In most of these households the review. Step two. Write down the client’s daughter is on speakeranswer and say nothing about it. phone or sitting at the end of the This is where producers blow it. table, and she is the one who will She says “well, there’s the 403(b) eventually handle all of it. Bring from the school district, I never her in on purpose. touched it,” and every instinct you have says start explaining. “Your daughter’s here — she Don’t. Write it on the form. should hear this part too.” The Medicare book that turns into a Ask if there’s anything else. Then practice does it through the secgo back to finishing her Medicare ond generation, and the second business the way you always do, generation is already in the house and finish it well, because that’s at review time. Nobody else in what she invited you there for and this business gets that door held it is still the most important thing open for them once a year. on the table. Step three. Book it on the way out, with a desk, not Ask the question at every rewith you. view. Write the answer down. Let somebody else run the second “You mentioned that 403(b) from meeting. There’s a compliance the district. That’s not my end of point here I’ll say plainly, because the business, but we have a this is the lane where it bites harddesk here that does nothing else est. Everything about how you all day. Would it be all right if they record, disclose, and document sat down with you next Thursday, a Medicare appointment still apand I’ll be there too?” You didn’t plies exactly as it did before you recommend anything. You didn’t asked one more question. touch suitability. You aren’t holding a license risk you The question doesn’t change the didn’t sign up for. review; it just means the review produced something. Keep your A specialist runs that second ap- recordings, keep your scope, pointment, you sit in the room, keep your notes. The producers you split the case, and after three who get in trouble in this lane or four of them you’ll know the almost never get in trouble over paperwork by watching instead what they said — they get in trouof by reading a carrier guide at ble over what they can’t show midnight in October. And you they said. I’ll leave you with the protected the relationship, which arithmetic that made my friend is the real asset. If she ever de- with four hundred and ten house25

holds change how he runs his year. He wasn’t going to become an annuity producer. He was going to add one sentence to a conversation he was already having, in a house where he was already welcome, about money that already exists, for a client who has nobody else asking. Pull up the last twenty reviews you ran. Count how many of those households you could name the retirement assets for. If the number is low, that isn’t a failure. That’s a year’s worth of second appointments sitting in a filing cabinet you already own. Next appointment: at the end of your next Medicare review, ask what besides Social Security pays them every month, write the answer down, and book the desk on the way out. Comment REVIEW on the reel and I’ll send you the one-page version. The conversation continues at producers.community. THE BIGGER PICTURE

BEYOND THE POLICY. BUILD THE RELATIONSHIP. A lasting Medicare business is built on more than annual reviews and policy renewals. It’s about understanding the people behind every plan, recognizing their changing needs, and creating relationships that extend beyond a single appointment. The agents who build lasting businesses don’t just manage policies. They become trusted partners in their clients’ lives.

Secure Your Assets

Create Lasting Impact

Build Wealth

Align Your Finance

have a statement that goes down. I have watched producers walk past that account in a fact-finder to go hunting for a rollover. The rollover is real and the rollover matters. But the savings account is where the family’s actual anxiety lives, and the family will follow you to the rollover once you show them you understood the savings account. Here’s the appointment.

standing the household, and the fastest way to finish a page is to stop asking follow-ups. It searches for what you sell.

If you’re a life producer, you’re listening for coverage gaps. If you’ve just been trained on annuities, you’re listening for qualified money. Both of those are you hunting for your product in their house instead of looking at their Two people in their early sixties, house. a kitchen table, a producer with a fact-finder form and a pen. He’s doing everything right on paper — asking questions, writing answers, not pitching.

The $43,000 Savings Account Is the Case, and Nobody Ever Asks About It Coach D (Dennis M. Postema, RFC)

Forty-three thousand dollars in a savings account at the same bank since 1987. It earns essentially nothing. It has earned essentially nothing for eleven years. The couple who owns it can tell you the balance to the dollar because they check it on the app, and if you ask them what it’s for, they will say — every time, in almost these exact words — “that’s just our emergency money.” Their actual emergency fund needs to be about twelve thousand. The other thirty-one thousand isn’t an emergency fund. It’s a decision they made once, decades ago, and never revisited, sitting in the one place in the house nobody looks because it doesn’t

It solves on the first visit. The producer hears one thing he can fix, and the search stops right there. Everything after that first solution is him waiting for a chance He asks about savings. The husband to present it, and the client can says forty-three thousand, and says feel the change in the room even the word “emergency,” and the pro- if she can’t name it. ducer writes 43,000 in the box on the form.

The reason a family keeps more cash than they need is never And then he goes to the next box. about cash. That box was the case. Not because thirty-one thousand dollars is a big case — it isn’t — but because of what would have come out of that couple in the next ninety seconds if anybody had asked one more question. His mother’s nursing home. The eighteen months in 2009. The reason they keep more cash than they need is never about cash. Most families don’t need more money. Most of the families you sit with this year have enough. It’s doing the wrong jobs.

THE MONEY ALREADY THERE Stop treating the fact-finder as a form. Run it as a search. Three steps. One. Ask where every dollar is, out loud, with a legal pad. “I’m not going to recommend anything today.

I want to build a picture. Where is everything — checking, savings, anything at work, anything from WHY THE FORM IS THE an old job, anything at the credit PROBLEM union, any of the kids’ stuff you’re holding?” Write it as a list, not a Three ways a fact-finder quietly form. A list has room. A form has turns into a data-entry exercise. boxes. It rewards completion over curiosity. A form has boxes and boxes Two. Ask what job each dollar want to be full. is doing, and use their words for the job. Point at a line. “This So the producer optimizes for fin- forty-three — what’s its job?” ishing the page instead of under- Emergency, they’ll say. Then the 28

follow-up, which is the whole article: “How much of it would actually have to be there for you to sleep at night?” Now be quiet. They’ll do arithmetic out loud in front of you. They’ll say fifteen, then look at each other, then say maybe ten is honest. And somewhere in that back-and-forth one of them will tell you why the number is what it is — the layoff, the mother, the brother who lost a house. Write down the exact sentence they use. You will use it again in twenty minutes and it will land harder than anything you could have composed. Do the same thing down the list. The old 401(k): “What’s its job?” Nobody knows. That’s the point. A dollar with no job is the easiest dollar in the house to have a conversation about, because nobody’s defending it. Three. Ask which job they’d fire. “If you could take the dollars that aren’t doing much and give them a job you actually picked — which ones would you move first?” That question does something a presentation can’t. It puts the client in the chair where the decision gets made, using their own list, in their own order. What they tell you is a suitability record and a priority list at the same time, and they built it, so they own it. Nobody was steered, nobody was hurried, and if they read the transcript of that conversation a year from now, they’d see somebody helping them think — not somebody working them.

about this house I didn’t know an hour ago. I’d rather not shoot from the hip on any of it. Let me sit down with our desk, and let’s meet Thursday with something worth your time.”

years I ran fact-finders to qualify people. I was deciding whether the appointment was worth my time, and clients could smell it, and my referral count showed it.

The year I started running them There’s a rule underneath this as an actual search — no product that keeps you clean. You are in my head, a legal pad instead of looking for money that already a form, one extra question exists and asking what it’s doing. on every line — was the year the You are not manufacturing ur- business changed. Not because I gency, not putting a clock on found more money. anybody, and not building a case for a product before you’ve built Because families started calling a picture of a household. me when their neighbor asked who they use. The suitability work belongs to the licensed specialist on the The dollars were always there. second appointment, where it The only variable was whether should be. Your job on visit one is anybody in the room was curious the list and the questions. enough to ask what they were doing. And the list is longer than you think. Cash sitting for no reason Next appointment: leave the is only the first line. There’s the form in the truck, bring a legal credit card they carry a balance pad, and ask one question about on while forty-three thousand every line — what’s its job. earns nothing three inches away on the same page. There’s the car Comment HOUSE on the reel and loan they’re proud of paying ear- I’ll send you the one-page ly. There’s a tax bill they’ve paid version. The conversation continevery April for nineteen years ues at producers.community. without ever asking anybody THE BIGGER PICTURE whether they had to. There’s a term policy with three years left that nobody has looked at since EVERY the youngest was in high school. Every one of those is a dollar with a job the family didn’t consciously assign, and every one of them is a conversation that doesn’t require you to know a single product to start. A fact-finder isn’t a form you complete. It’s a search you run.

Then you stop. You do not solve. Here’s my own mistake, since I’ve You say the sentence that ends been asking you to look at other the appointment properly: people’s. For the first several “You just told me three things 29

DOLLAR HAS A PURPOSE

The real value of a savings account isn’t just the balance. It’s the purpose behind the money. When financial professionals ask the right questions and listen to the answers, they uncover the needs, concerns, and priorities that numbers alone cannot reveal.

‘‘Where Knowledge Meets Financial Confidence’’