Things we should stop doing

Then someone said ‘you need one life to act as a reference and all the benefits for the others hang off that.’ Why? Can’t we have a policy number and change the people insured that attach to that?

Another person said ‘you can’t have a policy without a person being insured, so you have to choose at least one’ to which I said “I agree, but then if that one is declined for cover and the ‘secondary life’ is accepted what happens?” When they told me that the insurer would decline the case, and ask for the application to be re-issued with a new “Primary Life” which is a silly waste of time.

This fiction, almost suggestive that one life is somehow more important than another, has been taken to a ridiculous extreme. Of course, the truth is, it is just a case of system limitations, around which an eco-system of rationalisations has sprung up. Systems written like that are dumb and they make the job of advising on insurance harder – because of the duplicate paperwork and the clients that get grumpy about it. When we build new systems we should eradicate that thinking.

Increasing the Price at Every Step in the Sales Process