After completing my usual morning survey of posts on all things life insurance and related planning, I realized that a certain type of messaging from life insurance agents is likely to hit the mark with their audience. targeted. By “broad”, I mean not only that messaging is likely to go unnoticed, but also, even when it is noticed, it's unlikely to resonate because it doesn't address the audience's real needs and concerns.

The messaging I'm referring to basically involves agents using estate planning or, more specifically, the need to have an estate plan and keep it current as an avenue for selling life insurance. The messaging implies that life insurance is a core component of the estate plan, an approach that aims to give messaging a softer, more consultative and less commercial tone. Perhaps this works in very advanced markets. But when the market is just a rich couple, it's not. Not by a long shot. Here's why.

IN How agents can assess their readiness to trade in 2024I talked about how individuals are much more likely to focus on meeting their own needs for the rest of their lives than transferring their assets to the next generation. In terms of the stages of the financial life cycle, their highest priority is to preserve their money in their generation, not to distribute it to another. And simply wealthy estate planning, almost exclusively with distribution.

By positioning life insurance as a component of estate planning that most of this demographic doesn't care about, rather than a preservation component that they do care about, life insurance agents (and their agencies general brokerage (BGA)) are losing a lot of business. They are not connecting with these prospects at the epicenter of their most pressing needs and concerns. And they will continue to lose that connection until they learn to highlight the roles that life insurance can play in the conservation phase and why putting insurance in place long before they reach that phase makes sense. It's a paradigm shift that could make sense for those agents and their BGAs. It is also a paradigm shift that requires training on the part of BGAs. This can be a challenge for some, as I point out Life Insurance Planning for the Simply Rich AND A boomer at the crossroads of a vintage policy.

This paradigm shift is not necessarily a zero-sum game. Those who are simply more comfortable holding life insurance in the distribution phase may still be able to achieve this goal by expanding the definition of an estate plan to include financial insurance for the family, beginning with the surviving spouse.

Is this a purely academic, ivory tower notion on my part? No. When I think back on my experience counseling surviving spouses, I can't recall one lament about an estate plan or estate planning. Granted, problems with a plan, or lack of a plan in the first place, may show up after a while, but that would be for another day, if it ever does. Surviving spouses were almost always worried 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 stranded without a summary of what they owned, where it was, what the survivor should do, and who to call. The other big lament was, you guessed it, “Even though we talked about it for years, my husband didn't have life insurance or, if he did, not enough. And now, I might be in trouble.” While I am now retired, I suppose I would hear the same things today if I were still working.

Agents can only do so much for the first concern, although I think they are well positioned to show customers how to use technology to make that organization easier. But there's a lot they can do about the second concern. That's why agents' messages 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. This is the type of message if it is drafted in terms that readers will understand, that will resonate and motivate those readers. Messages 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 customers' real needs and concerns, agents will soon find they are having more productive conversations with more prospects. Try it, you will see.