Prospecting...Limited Organic Market

[ZenZeta]

So as part of my pre-qualification exercises for NWML, I was given the famous 200 list and 15 market analyses to complete.

Here's the deal: my organic market is limited. Despite my over 10 years in medical sales, I had no desire to buddy up with my docs/staff members and would have a hard time digging them up again.

Likewise, my circle of friends is small and intimate. I was a wall flower in high school and college so I don't have resources there. My family and I don't really speak... get it?

I need to know how much of a hinderance this would be. The prospect of bombarding my friends isn't appealing... besides... they're all broke and wouldn't know an investment if it hit them in the head, and I would feel more at ease developing business from scratch.

So... since I can't fill up this list (I have 67 facebook friends and only 30 contacts in my cell phone), should I rethink this?

Have any other agents been successful WITHOUT the 200 list? I don't mind putting in the time and effort to get the business. I would rather work with "strangers" .

 

[Larry Tew]

So as part of my pre-qualification exercises for NWML, I was given the famous 200 list and 15 market analyses to complete.

Here's the deal: my organic market is limited. Despite my over 10 years in medical sales, I had no desire to buddy up with my docs/staff members and would have a hard time digging them up again.

Likewise, my circle of friends is small and intimate. I was a wall flower in high school and college so I don't have resources there. My family and I don't really speak... get it?

I need to know how much of a hinderance this would be. The prospect of bombarding my friends isn't appealing... besides... they're all broke and wouldn't know an investment if it hit them in the head, and I would feel more at ease developing business from scratch.

So... since I can't fill up this list (I have 67 facebook friends and only 30 contacts in my cell phone), should I rethink this?

Have any other agents been successful WITHOUT the 200 list? I don't mind putting in the time and effort to get the business. I would rather work with "strangers" .

To be very candid, a good amount of my time in my career has been spent recruiting and training (office and in the field) people who come to the business just like you.

People on this board will trash the "Project 100" or 200 or however many identities you've been asked for, but the truth remains that career companies like NML, Penn, Guardian, NYL, Met, etc. rely on this and that's not going to change.

My experience says that while it's true that people with 200 or even 300 names "in the book" aren't guaranteed to succeed, people who can't list a hundred names simply don't make it in the time they are given to be financially solvent to the company.

It helps to understand exactly what a career company is looking for in a candidate. They aren't just looking for smart witty people who can deliver the company sales presentation. They are also looking for people who bring a natural market to begin with and who also have the ability to quickly begin to generate new prospects.

There are scores of people who are very smart at learning how the products work and other technical issues but are totally incapable of actually creating a market for themselves. But that is what the companies are looking for.

I would have a candid talk with your recruiter about your inventory of names and see what they say. Another option is to look for opportunities to get into a situation that will provide an initial inventory of prospects, and then begin to get referrals from those people.

 

[vic616283]

They aren't just looking for smart witty people who can deliver the company sales presentation. They are also looking for people who bring a natural market to begin with and who also have the ability to quickly begin to generate new prospects.

ZenZeta, LarryTew is cluing you on to something but I think I can be more clear.

I don't think they are looking for smart witty people at all. They are looking for natural markets to absorb. Watch this:

That's what NML's managing director is looking to do with recruits. After your project 100, your managing director will sit with you and look at a few of your market surveys. He will ask you how you know those people and how much money they make. If you want to be 100% sure they will hire you, you just need to do 3 things: 1) come with 200 names even if half are fake, 2) convey a strong work ethic, and 3) say each of the people in your list makes 250-500k. After that you'd have to take a dump on the MD's desk for him to turn you away.

"Basics day" will be 8 hours of them shooting koolaid at your mouth with a firehose. Sales school will be 10 days from 7:30am to 5:30pm where the mornings are spent drinking koolaid and the afternoons are spent listening to the most successful established reps. They will invest 50+ hours convincing you NML is the messiah of the financial services industry and they will bring in several established reps to give little talks and "product training." However product training is structured in such a way that you aren't taught much; all that happens is these veteran reps come in and basically make it very clear that they know a lot more than you know (which is probably the case unless you have a somewhat strong finance background), and the purpose of this is to reinforce the fact that you don't know enough to come up with a financial plan (which very well may be the case) and you need to bring a veteran rep on every meeting. However once you're in the field you realize 90% of meetings aren't planning meetings but term replacement meetings and a few non-qualified cash value vehicle pitches.

I would dare say that if you don't want to sell your friends and family you are not going to make a penny beyond the $4000 they pay you for training. Not a penny. But then again you won't even make those $4000 because they will not hire someone who doesn't come up with 100 warm names (I had 363 btw, none of them bogus) and openly states they don't want to blow up their friend's phones.

All the interns I saw who flew in from out of state without a natural market left empty handed after the summer was up. 3 months of cold calling all day begging for a financial planning meeting and at the end of it they didn't see a penny. But they did set a bunch of appointments that the veteran rep could follow up on.

The cold calling training (and language training in general) they give is very bad and your appointment setting ratios will be well under 5%, with 75% of those not keeping. The people in charge of training you will be people who failed out of the business themselves and are now "coaches" getting paid 30 grand.

Another thing is, no matter how amazing your warm market is, once it runs out you will hit a NASTY wall (unless of course you're a cold calling stud). NML gives you no support and you will have to figure out how to prospect all on your own, while having coaches second guessing you all the time and telling you "just get on the phone and stick to the language." You have access to no technology; no sales dialers, no voip lines, and some offices even forbid you from using a computer and make you use index cards to manage your contacts (I kid you not). You're also severely restricted in what direct mailing campaigns you can do and what email blasts you can do. You have to submit every single piece of marketing/advertising material to your supervisor and the turnaround time for his/her first review is usually a month.

If I were to go back in time, I would do pretty much what I did. Join up, sell 15k of low-hanging fruit in premium (some of my friends have money) while studying for my series 7 and 66, then leave. I'm still less than a year in the business but I've done 200 factfinders and I've seen northwestern's term come up once in the top 10 lines of a price comparison. If you want to do right by your clients you almost never want to sell northwestern term. And if you're not going to be selling NML term you might as well leave and be entitled to all your renewal commissions (when you leave NML you lose rights to your renewals).