From the Rebel Agent blog: (see Tam's picks) A great article on incorporating marketing into your game plan.

Do You Fish?

by Rebel Agent on June 22nd, 2007

You know that old saying, give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him forever?

Actually these are very true words and the other day I was asked by 2 agents in separate phone calls if I had any internet leads for annuity prospects. It occurred to me that this was like the fish fable, give them leads and they will ask again. Don’t get me wrong, I know we all need leads - but wouldn’t it make sense to have a system in place that devoted at least a solid percentage of an agent’s time to marketing?

From experience I know that the need for leads and someone to tell our story to is as basic as it gets. So to solve my problem I decided to overspend on marketing and it worked. The piece of mind of having too many people to see set me free. Try it and see how it makes you rethink the annuity business. Now that my business has matured I budget 10.5% of my gross income to marketing. It has been at that level for almost 5 years and those are numbers that are within budget and affordable.

To jumpstart your marketing try mailing 10,000 direct response (direct mail) cards over a 2-3 week period and I bet you will experience the same results as I did. If you realize a 2% rate of return then 200 hundred leads would certainly result in sales let alone a ton of activity.
Run the numbers yourself based on the products you wish to sell and you will see how affordable a crash marketing campaign really is.

Fish, baby, fish.