Why Your Life Insurance Agents Don’t Implement Your Training

Did you ever notice that McDonalds, not the US government, is the employer of last resort? They graciously hire people who are retarded, have physical disabilities and if not impaired, have communication limitations (such as listening to your order). Yet, the fries are always great!

That’s because McDonalds has translated the fry making process into a simple set of instructions that anyone can master. What’s this got to do with selling life insurance?

Because if you trained your agents like McDonalds trained its workers, you’d make a lot more money and would stop complaining about life insurance agents’ lack of ability or motivation. Because most life insurance agent training is not that good, agencies take the position that it’s easier to just keep recruiting agents than to make the existing agents more productive. Wrong. Every study on the issue shows that it’s far more profitable to keep and enhance the value of a current “customer” than recruit a new one.

I proved this to myself when many years ago I managed an office for a large investment firm. I taught the stockbrokers how to market and the office revenues jumped 44% in six months. But how I instructed them was very different than the training I see across our industry.

Training I see is typically a collection of macro directions such as:
Give seminars and invite affluent people
Use the newspaper to advertise or send out invitations
Present issues of interest to your audience

I call these “macro instructions” because there is an assumption that the agent can take these broad and vague directions and translate them into a plan of precise action. That will never happen. Here’s how to train agents to give seminars (or do any other type of marketing):

1. Call ABC list company at 800-xxx-xxxx. Tell them you want a list of people age 60 and over, income of $50,000 plus who own homes. To select your zip codes go to www.census.gov….
2. Send out this flyer to the list. Call this company at 800-xxx-xxxx and they can do the mailing for you. All you want to do is open the invitation using MS Word and drop in your name, the seminar location and date. If you have any problems using Word, call Microsoft at xxx-xxx-xxxx
3. Enclosed is a video and audiotape of the presentation and the word for word script. Review each of these 3 times and you will know the presentation
4. Have your seminar in the 4th week of the month. Mail your invitations 12 days before the presentation and so on.


Life Insurance Agents are literal. You must provide them exact instructions with every step spelled out. Most training fails to provide this detail because most trainers do not think like engineers, but they need to. Engineers know that a missing piece in the plan can bring a building down and similarly, vague instructions lead to agent inaction or poor results.

If McDonalds can train the employees they do to make great fries, you can train your life agents to sell more policies.