Evangelise life insurance: Emphasise to all stakeholders — agents, employees, distributors, bank partners, etc. — that there is a noble purpose to selling life insurance. You are helping people protect themselves from life’s uncertainties. This helps prevent opportunistic behaviour from the start. 

Eat your own cooking: Do you own products of your own company? If you don’t, you have no business to be selling those products to other people. The best way to inspire confidence in your company and its products is when you are yourself a customer.  

Remember your fables: Like Aesop’s fable about the goose that laid golden eggs, you can gain a windfall or two by milking an opportunity. But if you get a customer for life, you get multiple business opportunities and referrals leading to more business. 

Take a long-term view: Life insurance is not a products business. You need to marry financial needs with solutions — the products you sell are only an outcome of that. If you have a short-term career horizon or consider this another consumer product, this is not the place for you.  

Leverage systems and processes: Training in insurance products is mandatory, as is a strong escalation and disciplinary mechanism to tackle wrongdoers. We are testing tablets for our agents where product demonstration won’t show up if the financial need analysis hasn’t been completed. We also make a welcome call to all potential customers before issuing the policy where we confirm they’ve understood it completely.