After completing my usual morning survey of the postings on all things life insurance and planning related to it, I realized that a certain kind of messaging from life insurance agents was likely falling wide of the mark for their intended audience. By “wide of the mark,” I mean not only is the messaging likely to go unnoticed, but also, even when it’s noticed, it’s unlikely to resonate because it doesn’t address that audience’s real needs and concerns.
The messaging I’m referring to essentially involves agents using estate planning or, more particularly, the need to have an estate plan and keep it current as a pathway to selling life insurance. The messaging implies that life insurance is an essential component of the estate plan, an approach intended to give the messaging a softer, more consultative and less commercial tone. Maybe that works in the very advanced markets. But when the market is the merely well-to-do couple, it doesn’t. Not by a long shot. Here’s why.
In How Agents Can Assess Their Readiness to Market in 2024, I talked about how individuals are far more likely to be focused on meeting their own needs for the rest of their lives than transferring their assets to the next generation. In terms of financial lifecycle phases, their higher priority is the conservation of their money at their generation, not distribution to the next. And the merely well-to-do associate estate planning almost exclusively with distribution.
By positioning life insurance as a component of estate planning, which much of this demographic doesn’t care about, instead of as a component of conservation, which they do care about, life insurance agents (and their brokerage general agencies (BGAs)) are losing out on a lot of business. They’re not connecting with these prospects at the epicenter of their most acute needs and concerns. And they’ll continue to miss that connection until they learn to highlight the roles life insurance can play in the conservation phase and why getting the insurance in place well before they reach that phase makes sense. It’s a paradigm shift that could make sense for those agents and their BGAs. It’s also a paradigm shift that calls for training on the part of the BGAs. That could be a challenge for some, as I point out in Life Insurance Planning for the Merely Well-to-Do and A Boomer at the Crossroads of a Vintage Policy.
That paradigm shift isn’t necessarily a zero-sum game. Those who are just more comfortable keeping life insurance in the distribution phase may still be able to achieve that goal by expanding the definition of an estate plan to include providing for the financial security of the family, starting with the surviving spouse.
Is this some purely academic, ivory tower notion on my part? No. When I think of my experience counseling surviving spouses, I can’t recall one lament relating to an estate plan or estate planning. Granted, issues with a plan or the lack of one in the first place could surface after a while, but that would be for another day, if ever. Surviving spouses were almost always concerned about one of two things and often both.
One was that the deceased spouse who handled their investment accounts and worked with their advisors, left them adrift, without a compendium of what they owned, where it was, what the survivor should do and whom they should call. The other major lament was, you guessed it, “Though we talked about it for years, my spouse didn’t have life insurance or, if they did, not nearly enough. And now, I could have trouble.” While I’m retired now, I assume I would hear the same things today if I were still working.
Agents can only do so much about the first concern, though I think they’re well-positioned to show clients how to use technology to make that organization easier. But there’s a lot they can do regarding the second concern. That’s why agents’ messaging should bypass estate planning and go straight to the heart of what matters most to most of their readers, which is having more security and less stress. That’s the kind of messaging if crafted in terms the readers will understand, that will resonate with and motivate those readers. The messaging shouldn’t just tell readers why to buy life insurance. It should also tell them why they should buy from the messenger.
By speaking directly to their prospects’ real needs and concerns, agents will soon find they’re having more productive conversations with more prospects. Try it, you’ll see.
