Yesterday, I attended a press luncheon held jointly by LIMRA, ING and SelectQuote to bring the press up to date on where life insurance sales are, what new products are being developed to make life insurance more accessible to the public, and how life insurance sales need to be reconfigured to improve overall sales.
The first speaker was Bob Kerzner, the head of LIMRA, and probably the best guy to speak to if you want to get statistics on the life insurance industry. Seriously, if you care about industry figures and you don't belong to LIMRA, then you are doing yourself a pretty serious disservice. Bob's remarks noted how underinsured the American public is currently. One in three people have no life insurance whatsoever, life insurance ownership, while recovering, is still at a 50-year low, and the drop in life insurance sales has been across all economic strata.
Clearly the need for life insurance is there, Kerzner said, but there are multiple, interconnected reasons for not buying. People have competing financial priorities, they have a lack of knowledge on the products themselves (confusion between different life insurance offerings is both common and crippling to actual sales), and there is simple procrastination. Everybody dies, of course, but in america, where we seem to have developed a deep immortality complex, dying is something that will happen to your neighbor before it happens to you. So why bother (today)?
Butch Britton, CEO of ING and recent winner of the National Underwriter 2011 Industry Elite award for Market Innovation, added that what further impedes sales is the lack of access, given that the number of agents themselves is shrinking, and the new blood to replace the veterans is hard to come by and needs time to skill up. The agent interaction is crucial to sell a product that people never wake up think, "today I want to buy some life insurance," Britton said. He's got a point there.
The answer, Britton said, is education, a point echoed by Charan Singh, founder and CEO of SelectQuote, who perhaps put it best: "People have so little understanding today of the benefits of lfie insurance. They don't understand what life insurance can do for them. If they don't understand it, they will not buy it."
Singh noted other challenges to selling life insurance, namely that unlike other insurance products (personal auto, homeowners), it is not a mandated buy. People still inherently distrust any insurance transaction, but especially a life insurance one because they cannot immediately appreciate what it is they're buying. (SelectQuote is battling this by partnering with figures such as Suze Orman.) And, life insurance is just not an exciting product. Personally, I get deep satisfaction from knowing that I am adequately insured. But can I say I am really excited about it? No. Because to get that invested in my insured nature is to be a bit more ready to accept my own mortality, which itself has a natural ceiling in anyone with a well-defined survival instinct.
The opening comments, which were all both intelligent and informative, ended with an appeal to the press to help get the word out to the wider public that life insurers are open for business with a product people need. I instantly sympathized with them – to sell life insurance is a hard thing because you have to sell people on the concept of it. It is, ultimately, an abstraction and who can easily wrap their heads around that, even if buying something relatively simple and cheap, like term life?
But it was in the Q&A that followed that we started to get into more interesting elements of the problems with life sales. I started off by asking why the life industry insists on selling its products based on an intellectual appeal. Every time I hear from an insurer that people need to be educated on their products, I wonder, why educate them when you could just remove the need for education right off the bat? Why not offer incredibly simple gateway products that need no explanation, and get folks used to owning life insurance first before upselling them on products with bells and whistles?
