I just got back to my office from an interesting juxtaposition of back-to-back industry conferences. First was the annual conference of the Financial Planning Association. This was followed by the Life Insurance Sales Mastery Forum, sponsored jointly by The National Underwriter Company and Harry P. Hoopis.
Life insurance agents are familiar with the sentiment expressed in the headline of this column. This is the embodiment of the credo of the religion of life insurance.
Stories containing this line or something like it usually pack quite an emotional wallop. LIFE's ad tagline is a good example: Life insurance isn't for the people who die, it's for the people who live.
There was an abundance of these stories at the Sales Mastery Forum. The appeal is powerful because stories about delivering a check to an emotionally devastated widow with small children shows not only how valuable life insurance is but also shows the power of what love can do (in this case the husband and father's love for his family).
In a career where one of the major facts of life is facing rejection, life agents need to get juiced periodically. Stories about how important their services are to the continued welfare of families allow them to recharge emotional batteries drained by rejection.
Speaking at the Sales Mastery Forum, Joe Jordan, a senior vice president at MetLife, talked about how important it is to live a life of significance and that this is what agents do. "Success is about you," he said. "Significance is the effect on others."
Life agents have owned and mined this turf for decades. It is one of the main turbos behind the Million Dollar Round Table, for instance.
But this turf is being co-opted (if not invaded) by a different set of advisors who are coming at it from a different angle.
