Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Michael McMillan President of Financialize Discussing Lead-Generation for Financial Advisors

Episode Date: September 9, 2025

Michael McMillan is the President of Financialize, where he leads the company’s transformation into one of the insurance industry’s most innovative lead generation and sales enablement platforms. With a background spanning contact centers, SaaS, revenue operations, and customer experience, Michael brings a rare combination of operational rigor and entrepreneurial vision.At Financialize, he is driving growth through advanced technology, transparent pricing models, and a relentless focus on agent success — guided by the company’s North Star: “If our agents win, we win.” His leadership is marked by building scalable systems, streamlining operations, and empowering teams to deliver measurable results.Learn More: https://financialize.com/Financialize.com LLC is a marketing and lead generation company. We are not a licensed insurance agency, and we do not provide tax, legal, or investment advice. Leads generated by Financialize are referred only to licensed professionals who are authorized to discuss and recommend insurance and financial products. All financial decisions should be made in consultation with a licensed advisor who understands your specific situation. “At Financialize, we don’t just generate leads—we build platforms that help agents perform at their highest level. My background in sales and marketing training has shown me that when agents are given the right tools, coaching, and clarity, they deliver better results for families. Our focus is always on helping agents win, because when agents succeed, clients achieve their retirement goals with confidence.” – Michael McMillan, President of FinancializeInfluential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-michael-mcmillan-president-of-financialize-discussing-lead-generation-for-financial-advisors

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with us Michael McMillan, who's the president of Financialize, and we'll be discussing lead generation for financial employees. advisors. Michael, welcome to the program. Mike, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate you. Hey, you're welcome. I want to dive into what you do, how you do it and who you do it for, but give us a little background on your story. How did you get into the industry and what led you to financialize? Definitely. It's funny. When I first kind of stepped up into insurance,

I thought I was going to be the odd duck since I never really came from it. I'm actually a call center guy by background. I'm second generation call center owner. I've owned multiple business process outsourcing companies globally, built, bought, sold kind of thing and actually literally grew up in that field. And during that journey is where I actually came to discover insurance originally. One of the companies I was with, I was a vice president at that organization, we were the first CMS rated call center in the nation working with Medicare and that side of it. And then later on, I was owning another company down in Mexico.

And this is right around the time when California decided to mandate 401Ks, for companies of five employers and hire. And one of my buddies is like, Michael, you've got all this infrastructure. He's like, you should do this. You'd kill it. And I was like, yeah, it makes sense. Let's look into it. And as luck would have it, I started asking around because I needed a licensed advisor back

then because I wasn't. And that's how I met my now business partner where we own an agency still. And we built out our first company. And that's what really got me in. I ended up getting licensed shortly after and really just fell in love. with this industry. It's one of the few places, like I've said, I've really built my success over the years on the backs of people's hard work. And then I finally saw this place to where I could actually build success off of helping people. And when I saw that and I really was able to feel that,

I really fell in love with the space and just kind of went all in. And financialized came along. This year, there was a group who was doing an investment into Financialize. They were looking for new leadership for the company. and they came knocking on my door. They're, you know, with, like, with your insurance background and your, uh, and knowledge, as well as your call center background. They're like, this seems like the perfect fit. And we'd love you to come lead this team and really inject your belief in culture and

structure into this business. And that's what led me to where I am at today. Awesome. I love it. And, you know, at every point along the way that you just described, you could have viewed that as, oh, this is just a stepping stone. So I'm just going to, you know, get, get to the next thing. but if you had done that, you would not have made the right connections with the right value,

with the right depth of providing extra value, and that reputation would not have preceded you. So I think that's a lesson for us all. Wherever we're at, bloom where we're planted so that the next step when it comes along is the perfect fit. So I think that is just a, we could probably talk for three and a half days on that one point alone. But let's dive into what do you do? You know, lead generation for financial advisors, role of the eyes. here we are talking about buying leads providing leads lead generation everybody in their brother you google one thing or get on social media and you're going to see 10,327 lead providers why you

what sets you apart yeah so i mean i'd say one of the biggest things is we've been doing this now for almost 20 years and i mean and that's uh that is like a noah's arc type of moment i mean for building of a for a lead generation company some of these organizations are here kind of fly by night. They're in, they're out, they're gone. They're somewhat new name. Financialize has been a trusted partner in this space for, like I said, almost 20 years. And along that way, what's really guided us as a company is what I call our North Star. And our North Star is, you know, if our agents win, we win. And what that means is that we go far beyond just generating a name and a phone number and an email address to get a hold of someone. We really invest in our agents. We're giving them guidance.

We're giving them support. We're helping training them on here's how you actually engage with these leads. Here's how what you should be discussing. Here's how you can convert it from an initial conversation to running your financial needs analysis and how to get them towards the close. And if you don't engage them, here's how to nurture them so you can actually have them come back around. And it's really what we found is by doing that and partnering with our agents and partnering with our IMO and FMO partners, we've really helped generate this environment of a closed ecosystem to where you actually have a business model that you can then generate maids in growth from.

And our data and our long history with our agents has just proven that. You know, we know on average within typically 90 to 120 days of an agent getting a lead from us, they're going to convert between 26 and 38%. If you take that and extrapolate that out over what that investment is, minimally inside of the first year, actually really, within the first two quarters, you should really, at that point, be playing with the house is money. And you're not really should have any more additional investment. And so that's the type of environment that we bring is the true business model of like,

this is how you work with us. This is how you stay here and be successful. And yes, it takes investment. But the ROI from it is calculated and understood over years and years and years of data crunching. You know, I know you're a book, so here's a pop quiz for you. Have you read the book, The Go Giver by Bob Berg? I have, actually. That has been, that is, that was a while back, but that's a, that's a good, that's a good, that's a good claw back there.

That's a good one. I've interviewed him twice. He, Bob is spectacular. The book is wonderful. And what you just articulated is one of the main driving, teaching points in that book. Provide value. Give. Serve. Educate. Be an advocate for your, you know, prospect. So it shouldn't just be like next up sell, next up sell. It should be exactly what you just said. And when people can tell that you're giving and serving and providing. value rather than smelling commission breath, you know, air quotes, all of a sudden now people, that trust level goes up. So what are, what are some of the things that you have found that you're articulating to your advisors when they're working with your leads to help them convert that initial interest into a client, but also a long-term client relationship? Yeah, that's the fantastic question right there. And it's the right ask there. Because what we always explain to advisors is, and you're tapping around that too, is that if you're, if you walk into

this call desperate, you've already lost the deal. And, you know, one of the things that I talk with our advisors about a lot is how critical the words and the emotional state of you as an agent are as you're going into these meetings and as you're going into these conversations. And I explain to them, you need to go in with an understanding and a true belief that you are here to help and assist, period. nothing more, nothing less. If commissions come from it and if you actually get ongoing business, that's upside. But your true goal needs to be, I am here to assist you.

And because a lot of what a lot of agents miss these days is what it takes. You know, you're going to need to dig into certain clients and get into some nasty stuff that they don't want to talk about. And so you have to be able to build a level of trust far beyond what most agents are. ready to do because I always remember back to one of my first cases that I had when I was actually right after I got licensed. It was with a teacher in California. This lady was the sweetest lady I've ever met in my life. And it's hilarious because I didn't actually end up writing any business from her at all. Now granted, I got almost 13 referrals from her that I wrote a lot of business from, but I didn't write anything from her. And the reason was because she was, you know, in her upper 60s, I think she was

67 or 68 at the time when we met. And she, her goal was to return. hire at 70. Well, we ran all the math and we looked at it and she was on Calsters, which is their pension program. And we looked at that. We actually also looked at her social security side and some of her 401k savings from previous pieces. And we ended up figuring out that she had about an $1,800 a month gap in what was going to take for her to realize retirement. And then I had to be the unfortunate person who had to sit here and explain to her saying, you know, ma'am, unfortunately, you are, the only shot you have is to work to 75, cash out all of this stuff now, sell your home, move to a state with better, you know, income tax ability after you retire.

And you're going to have to do all this and you're barely going to scrape by. And it's not a fun place to be. But the reason I was able to do that and why I always mentioned this success story, because it is a success story. By doing that, I helped this lady get into a place where retirement was actual feasible. Otherwise, she would have retired in two years and had nothing. And went upside down, been drowning, and at least you were truthful. She realized that real is rare.

And the hard truth then gave her at least something to work at and go, okay, at least I can get here and gives her something tangible. Well, and on top of that, too, those referrals were no joke. I mean, just an annuity premium alone, out of those 13, deals. A bunch of them ended up being life. But I ended up writing about 1.2 million an annuity premium out of those referrals alone. So was it worth it? I think so. I mean, granted, yeah, I spent probably 80 hours in the phone with that lady. But guess what? I mean, I got a couple million dollars annuity premium. It more than paid for it. Yeah. All gets back to that trust, the credibility. You know, it's kind of like what is the old Maya Angelou quote, you know, people will never, forget what you said to them, but they'll never forget how you made them feel. And you made her feel, listened to, heard. She trusted what you had to say. And then, of course, she never would have said to all of those referrals if there was that level of doubt or distrust. So what are you guys

doing these days with working with your advisors with the lead revival? I understand you've got a lead revival program. Tell us a little bit about how that works. Yeah, so a couple things. One of the things we rolled out. So when I took over in May, one of the first initiatives I did was to really take a very forward momentum push into our agent education. So we're out on the road. We're actually out there. We're actually doing keynoting. We're doing speaking at gigs. We're actually doing seminars with our agents nationwide to actually help teach them. We're doing conferences, things like this on video. We're creating out a huge video library to really just bring anything and everything to help make them successful. Along with that, one of the things that you mentioned, which is our lead revival program,

lead revival really came from a simple concept that I had even at my own agency back in the day, which is I have all these leads and they're almost impossible to keep up with. Now, I use automation because I'm a tech forward person. I'm a recovering developer. So I'm always going to embrace the new technology. But a lot of my agents were not. A lot of my agents, I mean, their cell phone was still already difficult enough for them to start talking about AI agetic bots and all this stuff. That's a whole other ballgame. And so what we did was we decided to take our enterprise level infrastructure and open it up to our agents.

So this is actually opening up. This is September 8th. So we're actually going to be opening this thing up actually in the next two weeks publicly to where agents will be able to sign up, upload their lead list. We will re-scrub their lead list for compliance for them and then actually re-engage all of those leads on their behalf and allow for them to keep up and keep nurtured so they can actually start generating

and monetizing things out of their lead database. And we've already done some piloting on this. The results have been phenomenal. And we're really excited to bring this back to these agents because they've got gold in those hills. They just need to go dig it back out. And a lot of them are just not willing to throw that pickaxe anymore. And we are and we're built for it.

So again, it goes back to always that North Star metric because if we can help our agents win, we know we win. So I love that you talk about technology and automation and also that human touch. Where do you advise advisors to blend those two worlds? Because if you only relied on automation and technology, you could push people away because they can feel that as being impersonal. If you only relied on that high touch human relationship, you could implode because there's only so much time in the day.

And let's face it, advisors aren't going to pick up. the phone and call those leads as much as they could or should. So where do those two worlds collide? Now, and that's a great question because one of this, I mean, truly the secret sauce to financialize for the last, you know, almost 18 years has been in our place of, we have a U.S.-based contact center. We're fully remote, so we have agents all throughout the United States who are actually calling and speaking to these leads. And that has truly been the big differential in us because we are starting that formation of the relationship with a human to human connection. And I always tell everyone, this is an industry.

It's still cheek to cheek. And you've got to understand that that is what it is because in the annuity space specifically, you know, we're asking people to trust us with their life savings and to give us everything they got to support them until their last days. And so it's a big, it's a big decision. And so we really respect and understand our position in that. So that's where we bring in the human element. The automationing, and we have a lot.

I mean, listen, from emails, SMS, even some phone stuff, what we're utilizing that for is it's a noisy world and it really is. And it's just getting noisier by the day. People are on so many channels or on so many things. Getting their attention is damn near impossible these days. And so you need scale. So we use automation for that scale to be able to hand up. all of that weight to be able to keep in front of them and keep their attention.

So like I mentioned, everything from social media direct messaging engagement, social media retargeting ads, emails, SMS for text messaging, and then even some phone call in engagements to actually continue to try to nurture them. All of those things, we do have technology that handle it, but truly the root and who we will always be is that human element at the end who's going to talk to them and start that relationship. Yeah, because at the end of the day, all you can do is provide a verified lead with verified data and maybe some of the automation to remind that lead that this, but to get them on that advisor's calendar, that advisor still needs to jump on the phone or Zoom or whatever and

have a human conversation and still needs to knock it out of the park because you can do all of this and get on the phone and the advisor might have had a bad day and not said the right thing. So all of those things need to be working together. Talk a little bit about the verified data because here's what I, and I'm not in the industry of lead generation and purchasing leads, but I'm in the financial services industry and the marketing side of it. And I hear things. And I hear that there's a lot of leads that are just junk. Talk about the power of having that data verified. Absolutely. I mean, if you look at right now, I mean, like you mentioned earlier, if you go online these days and you look up, you know, annuity leads or financial services leads or whatever,

you're going to see, you know, 20,000 pages of companies who are offering it. And one of the things they most have in common is, is they're running Facebook ads and they're doing some light data scrubbing, maybe, maybe, that they're going to send to you. And what you end up finding is, is you look at our numbers, right? You know, off of just one of my lead partners that we, that helps us with generating leads, we generate with them about 20 to 30,000 leads a month. Out of that, we only have about a 22% acceptance rate of what we will ingest from them. From that 22%, we will then only pass through another 50 to 60% actually out to our agent population. Because what we're doing in all of those is we're scrubbing and we're making sure we're eliminating the noise. Because as an agent myself for years, I didn't want to deal with that.

Because it's not just, do I have a human being on the other side of the phone with maybe some money? it's do I have a human being on the other side of phone with money and intent? And that last part is the key is do they have intent to want to make a purchase? And that's what we're verifying. We're confirming beyond the nuts and bolts of name, phone number, location, investment amounts or, you know, demands for life or whatever it may be. We're also going into is what is that true intent level and then giving that out to the agent with, detailed agent notes from our side, from our, we call them lead activation specialist LASs, who are actually engaging these leads to make sure here's their level of intent and why you should

be engaging them right away. So it's wonderful to hear the data is accurate. We verified name, address, email, phone, all of that stuff. But then when you take it to that next level, like you just mentioned, that the intent is there. And when you give them a call or email, or skids or show up on that appointment, that they're like, okay, yeah, thank you for showing up. To me, that is huge because, yes, knowing that this email isn't, you know, monkey junkie at AOL.com and you're like, nobody's checking that. Knowing that it's valid data is huge, but that intent to me takes it to the next level. Absolutely.

Absolutely. And I mean, and, you know, like I tell everyone, no, there is all quality and styles of leads for all different types of agents. because when you're just starting out as an agent, you might not have the budget to buy our top of the heap, high intent priority leads. We call them priority or our hot leads. You just might not have the budget. That's why we then have our auction marketplace for our entry level

and or just our agents who need to fill in some gaps where, yeah, do they have the intent? Maybe not as much, but we call it out in there. So you know what you're working with. This might be, you know, Sally May, who's a year out from retiring and her plan is to use the proceeds from an extra home that she just got from one of her family members passing away and she's planning on selling in six months.

Great. That's not a high intent lead that's going to close right now. But that's a long-term lead that could be paying out huge commissions, but you now know what you're getting yourself into. And that's the big thing with us is all of our leads, just so you know, Mike, too, is there, as you mentioned before, they are exclusive. So our leads are one-to-one, right? So one lead equals one agent.

And we have, in our almost 20 years, have never broken that. We are very, very strict on that. And we will never change that policy. But on top of that, too, is that those leads, when you are getting them assigned, you're only paying for what you buy from us. And that's why we always tell agents, like, if you're not signed up with us, like it makes no sense. It didn't cost anything.

Come and look at what's available. because reality is we have neighborhood, I'm sorry, actually more like regions, and our regions are based on zip codes and bigger cities, etc. But we have areas that are still unfulfilled. I mean, we cover the nation, and there's only so many agents.

And unfortunately, we're in a world that age and population is diminishing. We're always looking for agents to come in and we always tell them, look in your local background and your backyard first because you might be shocked how many leads we have sitting there waiting for you. I love it. Let's wrap up with this, Michael. I know that in your career, your storyed, well-heeled

career, you've had a mentor or a three. What's a lesson that you've learned from a mentor, that you really find yourself using some of that advice, you know, over and over and over again in your business even now today? Yeah, one of, you know, I've got a number of mentors. I mean, from my mom who really is where I got my start even in being an entrepreneur, but one of the mentors who literally is in my head every single day has got to be Jack daily. I've worked with Jack now for a very long time. He is a very accomplished, very well-known sales trainer globally. And what Jack really taught me and something I hold really near and dear to my heart is that success can only be achieved when it's been designed. And to design success, you need to understand

where you're going. So what is your vision for where you're going? And then breaking that all the way back down to its finite steps of what are you going to do each day that's helping you propel your way to the ultimate place that you're trying to get to. And I have lived and died by that for a long time at this point. And I mean, and just to give you some, a specific example, when back in 2009, I actually used to weigh 420 pounds back in the day. And in 2009, so shortly after I met Jack, I got inspired by him. He's an accomplished triathlete as well in Ironman. And I got inspired by that. And I said, you know what?

I need to do something to change my life. And so I put it out on Facebook. I ended up doing this whole TEDx talk about this. But I put it on Facebook about how I was going to lose weight and run the Chicago triathlon the next year in 2010. Over that next year, I made a plan. I had my goal. I set it publicly.

I surrounded myself with people who had achieved this. And through that path, ended up losing about 115 pounds. I finished the Chicago triathlon. Jack actually came out and ran it with me, and I saw that success. Later on, I ended up continuing to go down. I ended up losing over 200 and some odd pounds. I've continued to keep this off all these years later. And I share that as a personal success because it's me applying it into my personal life,

the same way I applied into my business life. And I tell everybody, if you don't have a plan, you're planning to fail. And if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. And ultimately, you're going to fail. and those two aspects of how, and that's how I run businesses. And the big part, and I didn't mention it in here too much,

but the other part of that too is is surrounding yourself with like-minded people who have achieved what you've tried to, wanting to achieve. And that is something I force my team very much on is that, you know, we always are going to be, you know, we're going to think clarity over chaos. We're going to move fast but not hurry,

but we're always going to be evolving. And those core values are what, guides our company and guides our team to ultimately see the success that them and us are trying to achieve. And in our business, success is shared. It's that if our company wins, our team wins. And we make sure that every level of our team shares in that success equally. And that's why we've got the team we do, because at the end of the day, I mean, I can sit here doing these calls with you all day long and do these type of meetings, but it's my team who's back at the house, you know, pushing out the sausage out the other end of the factory. And that's what's done. Exactly.

And they're making the world go out. That's so awesome. Well, I love it. And if anyone is interested in tapping into that energy and that team and really the machine that you've built, what's the best way that they can learn a little bit more and reach out and connect with Financialize? Definitely, Mike. I think appreciate that. So yeah, they can go to financialize.com. You can go on our website. You can sign up for free. like I said, you'll have access immediately into our marketplace and auction leads. And I would encourage any of your listeners as well as follow us on. We're on all the social media channels.

We're on TikTok. We're on Insta. We're on Twitter. We're on Facebook. Follow us because on those channels is where we're really pushing out content and strategy to be able to help you be more successful. And it's all free. I mean, really our goals, like we always say, is right in accordance to the North Star.

If you win, we win. And that is what we're going to continue to guide ourselves by. Awesome. Michael, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you today. Thanks, Mike. I appreciate you. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders.

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