What Your IMO Won't Tell You
- Jim Fisher
- Business Growth
Key Takeaways (Tattoo These On Your Brain)
Key Takeaways (Tattoo These On Your Brain)
- The M in IMO is marketing to and through distribution, not marketing to consumers on your behalf. Distribution is you. The IMO’s actual customer is the carrier.
- When the IMO offers you “marketing,” it’s almost always somebody else’s. A login, a lead vendor, an outside webinar provider. The moment that relationship breaks, your pipeline breaks with it.
- A lead vendor gets paid when they sell you the lead, not when you close it. Their incentive is volume and margin, not your production. They’ll saturate your market until your edge is gone.
- The seminar, radio, and “start a podcast” playbook is a system for people who have already won. The entry price is wrong for the stage of business most advisors are in.
- The one question that exposes bad advice: are you actively using this, right now, with your own money on the line, and is it producing? If they can’t say yes, it’s theory.
- Calculate your effective rate. Total commission divided by total premium. If you’re under 5% on a 10-year surrender product, you’re either writing shorter-surrender business or being structurally underpaid.
1. The Five Stages of Awareness
1. The Five Stages of Awareness
The framework comes from Eugene Schwartz, one of the most respected direct response marketers of the twentieth century. It’s also the same framework we teach every advisor inside our AAB program, tested across millions of dollars in annual ad spend and tens of thousands of leads.
Every prospect you’ll ever talk to is sitting somewhere on this ladder.
Stage 1. Unaware. They don’t know they have a problem, or won’t admit it. We don’t market here. The journey to a buying decision is too long.
Stage 2. Problem aware. They know they have a problem. They don’t yet know what solves it.
Stage 3. Solution aware. They know a type of solution exists. They don’t yet know specific products.
Stage 4. Product aware. They know your product category exists. They’re not yet convinced it’s the right fit.
Stage 5. Most aware. They know your product, what it does, they’ve done the homework. They just haven’t pulled the trigger.
2. Why Hot Leads Are the Hardest
2. Why Hot Leads Are the Hardest
Most advisors want a prospect already on rung five. They want someone who knows the product, knows the rate, knows annuities, is ready to sign. The lead vendor pitch is always the same: “These people are ready to buy right now. You can just be an order taker.”
Here’s why that’s actually the worst lead you can buy.
Competition.
Somebody on rung five knows they want an annuity. Which means they’re talking to four other advisors. They carry preconceived product opinions. They don’t walk onto the call open to a diagnostic and consultative sales process. They walk onto the call ready to comparison shop. Ready to reduce you to a product, a bonus, and a rate.
Now look at the middle rungs. Problem aware. Solution aware. These prospects don’t have a preformed solution in their head. They’re still discovering. Which means you get to frame the whole conversation. Less competition. More trust-building room. Bigger cases.
The leads that felt “too early”? Those are the ones that turn into million-dollar cases. The ones that felt “ready”? Those are the ones that ghost.
3. Campaign by Campaign
3. Campaign by Campaign
The strategies we run are currently driving more than $300 million a year in annuity production. Here’s how the campaigns break down by awareness level, and what it does to production.
Personal Pension Account (PPA). Problem aware. Widest funnels we run. Reaches the broadest part of the market. Highest lead volume.
RMD Rescue. Problem aware. High lead volume, often higher than Roth at the same ad budget.
TSP Rescue. Problem aware. Narrower audience by design (federal employees with TSP accounts). Strong per-campaign performance in that niche.
Roth Rescue. Solution aware. Moderate lead volume. Prospects arrive already inclined toward Roth conversions as the answer.
Tax Free Trust Planning. Solution aware. Lowest volume of all of them. Highest per-prospect value. When these close, they close big.
My Best Annuity. Product aware. Moderate volume. Highest competition. Hardest to close. The prospect arrives already comparison shopping. Talking to multiple advisors. Including the lead vendor next door.
Problem aware and solution aware campaigns are the bulk of our proven marketing strategies. Product aware campaigns exist, but they’re the exception.
Here’s the Roth vs RMD test. Same ad budget. Which would you pick? Most advisors pick Roth. It sounds more sophisticated. Higher caliber.
Roth is solution aware. The prospect already believes a Roth conversion is the answer. RMD is problem aware. The prospect knows RMDs are a problem but hasn’t picked a solution. Because Roth conversions ARE the solution to reducing or removing RMDs.
When you move down the awareness levels, you broaden the market landscape. More people recognize impending RMDs as a problem than have decided Roth conversions are the strategy. At the same ad budget, the problem-aware campaign generates more leads AND gives you more framing power on the call, because you introduce the solution.
This isn’t about Roth Rescue being weak. Roth Rescue works. The point is the principle: lower on the awareness ladder catches a wider funnel.
4. The Painter vs the Painted
4. The Painter vs the Painted
You’re either the painter of the idea, or you’re being painted by somebody else’s preconceived notions.
Most advisors don’t run their own marketing. Their lead vendor or marketing partner does. And almost every one of them leads every ad with the word “annuity.” Every hook. Every headline.
So many retirees carry baggage about annuities. Their father had one. A friend had a bad experience. Something they read about high fees from years ago. When the ad leads with the word annuity, all those people opt out before anyone ever gets on the phone with you. You’ve been painted by their past. And you didn’t even know it happened, because it’s not even your marketing.
When the marketing leads with the problem or the solution instead, you get to paint the picture first. RMDs. Retirement income. A Roth conversion strategy. The word annuity doesn’t come up until YOU choose to bring it up on the call. By the time the prospect says “how do I solve this,” you get to introduce the answer fresh. No preconceptions. No baggage.
And when a prospect arrives pursuing a branded solution, a Personal Pension Account, a Roth Rescue, a Retirement Refi, the competition basically disappears. Because if they want THAT specific solution, they can only get it from the licensed affiliate in that territory. They can’t get a Personal Pension Account or a Roth Rescue from the advisor down the street. They can only get it from you.
That’s what it means to be the painter.
5. The Three-Step On-Call Sequence
5. The Three-Step On-Call Sequence
Even when you have a problem-aware or solution-aware prospect, most advisors still commit what we call the cardinal sin. They jump to product on the first call.
They hear “Roth” or “RMD” or “tax free,” they get excited, and they start pitching the annuity before they’ve done the diagnostic work. Problem and solution aware is not the same as product ready. If you skip the diagnostic, the prospect stalls. And stalls. And then ghosts. And you blame the lead.
The call runs in three steps.
Step 1. What are we solving for? A prospect shows up saying “Roth” and most advisors assume the problem is taxes. But what if they don’t have surplus qualified savings? What if they have an income gap? Then the problem isn’t taxes, it’s income. Start pitching a Roth conversion to someone whose real problem is income, and you’ve already lost the case. First: name the actual problem. Taxes? Income? Legacy? Long-term care?
Step 2. Why do we need to solve it? “I want to prioritize my family over the IRS.” “I don’t want my kids to have to take care of me.” “I want to keep what I’ve built.” The what gives you the problem. The why gives you the meaning. Without the why, the prospect has no reason to act.
Step 3. What’s the best way to solve it? Only after steps one and two do you earn the right to present the solution. The Roth conversion. The premium-bonus annuity that reimburses the conversion tax. When you present it at this point, it doesn’t feel like a pitch. It feels like the puzzle piece that completes the picture they already started building.
Step one gets you the problem. Step two gets you the meaning. Step three gets you the close. Collapse any of them together, and you’ve committed the cardinal sin.
The Bottom Line {#bottom-line}
The Bottom Line {#bottom-line}
If you’ve ever paid for a lead that looked perfect on paper and then watched it ghost you after the first call, what you’re seeing isn’t a lead problem. It’s an awareness problem.
Either the lead came in product aware and was never going to give you the framing power you needed. Or the lead came in problem aware, but you jumped to product before you earned the right.
Both are fixable.
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Jim Fisher
Jim is an award-winning marketer and licensed producer. He has helped over 1000 agents and advisors scale their life and annuity production to become top 1% producers.
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