A colleague left a comment on a recent article I wrote for consumers about the sales training culture in life insurance. He pushed back, thoughtfully, and he deserves a serious response.
After more than 25 years in the business, he wrote, he has witnessed both the best and the worst in sales techniques. The difference, he said, hinges on principles, values and moral clarity. A salesperson with the client’s best interests at heart will educate and provide all the evidence — but may still need to sell the client on the purchase, because clients are not always logical in their decision-making.
He is right about human behaviour. He is right that being a salesperson is not inherently a bad thing. And he is right that guiding a client to a principled and effective decision, based on both evidence and emotion, is genuinely skilled work.
But his comment raises a useful question. If good values produce good outcomes, why does the system keep producing bad ones?
Start with the symptom. Every advisor reading this knows it. You are at a dinner party and someone asks what you do. You say you sell life insurance — and you watch the face across from you change. The smile becomes polite. The body turns slightly. The conversation finds somewhere else to be.
Some of you have stopped saying it that way. You say financial advisor. You say wealth planning. You say protection specialist. Anything but the plain words.
And if you are honest with yourself, you know why. Not because life insurance isn’t valuable — it is, profoundly. Not because your work isn’t skilled — it is. But because the industry has built a reputation that its best practitioners spend their careers trying to quietly distance themselves from.
The consumer’s recoil and the advisor’s hesitation are the same signal. They are telling you something true about the system that produced them. Good values didn’t prevent it. Individual integrity didn’t prevent it. Because the problem was never the character of the people in the industry. It was the design of the training that shaped them.
The training system that shapes most life insurance salespeople was not built around the advisor’s values. It was built around the advisor’s activity. Call volumes. Appointment ratios. Closing rates. The emotional manipulation techniques — needs analysis designed to surface fear, objection handling scripts, closing techniques — are not aberrations. They are the curriculum.
The advisor with 25 years of principled practice developed that integrity despite the training, not because of it. He brought his values into a system that did not select for them, survived the pressure to abandon them and built something worth defending. That is genuinely admirable. It is also not scalable.
The system doesn’t replicate him. It replicates the techniques. And in the hands of someone without his values and his years, those techniques are not benevolent nudges toward good decisions. They are pressure applied to a person who came in wanting to understand something and left having been closed.
The behavioural economics defence
The strongest version of my colleague’s argument is the one grounded in behavioural science. Clients procrastinate. They underestimate risk. They discount future benefits in favour of present cost. They need to be moved.
This is true. Daniel Kahneman documented it. Richard Thaler built a career on it. The research is not in dispute.
But there is a significant gap between acknowledging that clients are not perfectly rational and concluding that the solution is to deploy psychological pressure before the client is educated. The behavioural economics argument justifies the nudge. It does not justify the script. It does not justify the close applied before the client understands what they are being closed on.
The question is not whether clients need guidance. Of course they do. The question is whether guidance requires manipulation — or whether it requires education delivered with enough patience and honesty to ensure that the client’s own judgment, imperfect as it is, can actually function.
Here is what concerns me about defending the current model, even its best version.
Every new entrant to this industry is handed the manipulation toolkit first. Scripts before substance. Closing techniques before product knowledge. The assumption baked into the training is that technique substitutes for understanding. For the advisor who eventually develops deep product knowledge and genuine client commitment, the techniques become unnecessary. But they were learned first and they leave a residue.
More importantly, the clients who were closed before they were educated — and there are millions of them — carry the consequences. Policies that don’t fit. Premiums they can’t sustain. Illustrations presented as projections that are really assumptions. Products chosen for commission compatibility rather than client suitability. These are not failures of character. They are failures of design. The system produced them reliably and predictably.
The information asymmetry is gone
There is a practical dimension to this that the industry needs to reckon with.
The sales model described above — and its behavioural economics defence — rested on a structural condition: the advisor knew things the client didn’t, and the client had no efficient way to close that gap. The information asymmetry was real. In that environment, even imperfect guidance was better than none. The client needed the advisor to navigate complexity they couldn’t access independently.
That condition is ending. A client today can spend an hour in conversation with an AI chatbot and arrive at your office educated. They have seen the illustration math examined. They have heard the jargon translated. They know which questions to ask. The closing technique applied to that client is now offensive. They can identify the script because they did their homework.
The advisor who thrives in that environment is not the one who mastered the close. It is the one who never needed it.
But here is what I want to say directly to every advisor reading this: the education-first approach is not a competitive response to AI disruption. It is not a fiduciary standard waiting to be imposed from outside. It is not a requirement that current industry sales regulations demand — because they don’t. Under the rules as they stand today, none of what follows is obligatory.
That is precisely the point.
The advisor who is waiting for the market to force this change, or for regulation to require it, has already answered the question about whose interests come first. Education first is not a strategy. It is a choice about how to treat another person. It was the right choice before AI arrived. It will be the right choice after the regulations catch up. The only question is whether you are making it now.
The advisors I have watched build practices around education first share something worth naming. They are not fearless because they are brave. They are fearless because they are protected.
When the math is on the table, there is nothing to hide. When the recommendation is documented, there is nothing to defend. When the client understands what they are buying and why it was chosen over the alternatives, there are no uncomfortable questions — only informed ones. The foundation does the work. The advisor who builds it is wearing a suit of armour that the closing-technique practitioner simply does not have.
That protection is structural. It does not require courage. It requires commitment to a standard.
Three practice standards worth defending
My colleague is right that the problem is not salespeople. The problem is a system that equips salespeople with the wrong tools and measures them on the wrong outcomes. The constructive offer is not to stop selling. It is to build a practice around standards the client can verify.
- Compared to what? Document why this product was chosen over the alternatives. Not in the compliance forms — in a form the client can read, question and share with their accountant or lawyer. If the recommendation doesn’t survive that scrutiny, it wasn’t the right recommendation.
- What does the contract actually say? Show the client where to find what is guaranteed versus what is projected. The illustration is a tool for understanding, not a promise. The client who knows the difference is a better client and a more durable one.
- Is this in writing? The recommendation, the math, the rationale — in a form the client can keep. Not because compliance requires it. Because the client deserves it. And because an advisor who puts everything in writing has nothing to hide.
These are not idealistic standards. They are practice standards that any advisor with good values is already operating close to. The question is whether they are explicit, documented and consistent — or whether they depend on the individual character of whoever happens to be across the table.
My colleague has that character. His clients are well served. The system should be designed to produce that outcome reliably, not to require that every advisor bring it independently from home.
The fearless advisor is not the one who has conquered rejection. It is the one who has made rejection irrelevant — because the work speaks for itself, the math is on the table and the client is at the centre of the transaction.
Jeff Cait, MBA (Finance), CFP, TEP is an independent life insurance consultant and founder of the Trusted Advisors Network. He has more than 40 years in the industry.