5KEYSto Selling IUL Virtually

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Why Partners Advantage?
As the nation’s leading developer and distributor of Indexed Universal Life (IUL), Partners

Advantage has a proven track record in dissecting the indexed life insurance market and

finding the most effective ways to use the best products available. Our pioneering moment

came in 1999 when we chose to focus on IUL because we believed this product would

transform the way people protected their families and saved for retirement. We continue to

lead the industry to this day through our extensive distribution network and product

development opportunities.

Ongoing Product Innovation

IUL has been the fastest-growing life product over the past few years representing almost

30% of all fixed insurance sales. We’ve proven our expertise by developing ten top-selling IUL

products over the years. Recently, Partners Advantage captured the industry’s first patent-

pending design feature that cuts Cost of Insurance (COI) charges by 30% while increasing

cash values by 50%, dramatically helping clients get more out of their IUL policy. No other

Independent Marketing Organization that promotes IUL can claim the pioneering spirit,

product development expertise, proven production, distribution reach and overall product

knowledge.

The future success of any insurance product is the amount of innovation that occurs behind

the scenes within that product segment. Indexed Universal Life is “the” product with ongoing

innovations. When you look at other life products, the amount of money and resources

dedicated to IUL at the carrier-level is staggering.

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Distribution Of Income
Over-funded cash-value life insurance products are typically purchased with the understanding

that the client at some point in the future will want to efficiently harvest income from the

policy. The expected trend within IUL is the offering of guaranteed income at some point in

the future, much like we have seen from the annuity product development over the years.

From the carrier’s perspective, guaranteed income out of a life product is expensive to

provide to the client, however, the industry is moving this way due to consumer demand and

we can put you in touch with a carrier currently offering guaranteed lifetime income from a

top-performing IUL policy. IUL continues to innovate the way clients interact with the carrier

by improving the customer experience through no-fluid underwriting. This is a huge step

forward and typically means a policy will issue in under 3 days … meaning you get paid faster.

Belief System
Partners Advantage cares about good, honest and ethical advisors who want to enrich the

lives of their prospects and clients. We appreciate that they give back to the communities

they serve and make a profound impact — both personally and professionally — upon those in

which they come in contact. Our best advisors are good people who just happen to be in the

financial services industry.

If you’re a financial professional who believes your client is at the center of everything you do,

we want to work with you. If you accept that your role involves finding creative and suitable

financial solutions for your client’s money — regardless of how the solution compensates you

— you’ll find that our values are aligned. When you independently appoint through Partners

Advantage you receive outstanding service with access to the industry’s best Indexed

Universal Life, Fixed and Indexed Annuities, Long-Term Care and Asset-Based LTC

combination products.

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1— Have A Proven Prospecting Program
When you ask most producers, what do they need to help them grow their business, they

often say, “I need more people to see.” We agree, leads are the seeds that every successful

agent needs. But there’s a big difference between leads and pre-set IUL appointments.

A lead is really just someone who may or may not be interested in moving forward, and that’s

why just buying “leads” often results in lack-luster sales results. Instead, you should work with

an organization that can provide pre-set IUL appointments. Partners Advantage can put you

into our Pre-Set IUL Appointment program and you can even learn how you can receive FREE

pre-set appointments.

Granted a pre-set IUL appointment doesn’t always lead to a sale, but from the beginning

you’re sitting in front of an individual that provides you with a better shot at making that sale

as they’ve already been pre-educated. If you have the following four keys, you should see

great success selling IUL virtually.

Don’t Do It Alone

Generating pre-set IUL appointments takes a lot of money, experimentation and experience.

For the past four years, we’ve been working with testing, refining, and honing the process to

generate the pre-set appointment that revolves around national advertising campaigns.

These campaigns aren’t cheap, and it would be hard to replicate on your own because there

are so many moving parts. And why would you want to replicate the program when we’re

offering a proven program? Most insurance advisors are good at selling, so it might be best

to stick to that. Leave the marketing, advertising, and appointment setting up to someone

else so you focus on revenue-generating activities and delegate the rest to an expert team.

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2 — Have A Selling Style That Helps You
Communicate Better Over The Phone
The top performing life insurance producers we work with commit their business to a specific

area of focus. In other words, they specialize not generalize. Sure, it’s nice to be able to be a

jack-of-all-trades, but it often results in being a master of none. To reach the highest level of

success in the insurance sales game, you need to clearly define who you want to work with

and what specific problem you’re going to solve for those clients.

In the personal insurance market, most successful producers position IUL as a compliment to

their retirement nest egg. They validate for their prospects that a properly funded and

structured life insurance policy provides more benefits with less risk than the alternatives.

When you have a proven sales presentation that actually closes business, it makes the whole

process a lot easier. We offer such a presentation that you can use in your virtual selling

situations. The personal market is often the place producers start their practice, and many

stay there during their entire career.

In the business insurance market, most producers present IUL as a way to either recruit, retain

or reward the key executives of the business. They use nonqualified executive benefits and

use life insurance as the funding vehicle for those plans. Obviously there are a myriad of

ERISA rules and regulations that must be followed to ensure the plan is just covering a select

group of highly compensated employees. You can also target the rank-and-file employees

with the Financial Wellness@Work program.

Willing to Walk Away

When selling to people’s problems, the biggest challenge you must face is being willing to

walk away from a prospect when the opportunity isn’t right. I know, sounds absurd, but the

most successful insurance producers choose to not work with some prospects because the 


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opportunity for mutual benefit doesn’t exist at the present time. Many people may disagree

with this approach, but the reality is if you have a full pipeline of prospects to work with, why

would you choose to work with someone that either you can’t help, or doesn’t want to be

helped? You can always nurture these prospects and in time they may be willing to buy … see

key number five to learn more about automated nurturing programs.

You also need to consider the psychology of the interaction with a client not willing to move

forward at the present time. The customer doesn’t want to admit that they have a problem,

and you trying repeatedly to convince them that they have a problem doesn’t help. If you

aren’t willing to walk away it can make the insurance producer appear desperate, and

prospects can smell desperation from miles away. If you’re thinking that, “I need to make this

sale at all costs,” you’re not putting the client’s interests first, nor are you looking to solve the

client’s problems first, which opens up a number of possible problems down the road.

Consider Using the Sandler Sales Technique

Sandler selling flips the old-school selling styles and instead it incorporates the secrets used

by the world's most successful sales people. You'll learn:

• How to control the selling process by directing your prospects' behavior

• Why prospects lie and what questions will uncover the "real" truth

• Why it's wrong to do research or prepare illustrations when a prospect asks

• Why jumping to do favors for customers spoils your relationship

• How to conduct yourself in every selling situation to generate results

Transforms your practice with the Sandler selling technique. It puts you in complete control of

the selling environment while you skillfully guide prospects through the sales process.

Sandler selling leverages Neuro-Linguistic Phrasing which helps clients connect with you.


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3 — Have A Product That Overcomes The Three
Main Objections To An IUL
Selling IUL over the phone is relatively easy … if you have the best product to overcome one

of the big three objections to buying life insurance. The first objection you’ll typically hear is

that life insurance is expensive. Let’s just put that argument aside for a moment, because

remember most people don’t have an internal meter telling providing a real-time cost-benefit

analysis. Let’s put that concept aside for just a moment as we’ll cover it more thoroughly in

key four.

As an insurance agent, you know that one of the biggest expenses in a life insurance contract

is the Cost of Insurance charge. Cost of insurance charges are monthly charges for mortality,

administration, and other aspects of expenses on the part of the life insurance company. They

are assessed against the policy based on the insured's attained age, the original rating class,

and the current net amount at risk. In most cases, the cost of insurance is deducted from any

premium payments made before crediting the account's accumulation value. Since

underwriting class from super-preferred to table z come into account, finding a way to reduce

these charges leads to a more efficient policy design, and ultimately more cash value for the

client.

Game Changing Product Design

Partners Advantage invented a new and unique death benefit option called the Cash Value

AmplifierTM which positively enhances cash-value performance of a life insurance policy. The

new patent-pending feature allows an insurance company to amplify a policyholder’s cash

value without violating the product’s tax advantages, carrier profitability or producer

compensation. 


The Cash Value Amplifier significantly reduces the death benefit costs within the insurance

contract. These lower costs directly lead to considerably higher cash values. Those higher

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cash values, and the available tax-advantaged income, will appeal to customers seeking both

death benefit coverage and tax-advantaged distribution of income. When a client adds the

Cash Value Amplifier to the product, it becomes the most efficient accumulation oriented

product. With the game-changing design of an IUL product with the Cash Value Amplifier, if

you ever face a skeptical CPA, unrelenting attorney, or difficult prospect that says life

insurance is just too expensive to use when accumulating wealth, you have a secret weapon

to overcome that objection. Believe it or not, but there are some people out there who will

claim “life insurance” is a bad investment. That it’s really expensive. First what I’d like you to

realize is that “price” is an issue in the absence of value. In other words, what are you getting

for the money you are spending is important.

If you’re spending a lot of money and getting nothing in return that’s expensive, right?

Conversely, if you’re spending a lot of money and getting a lot of value, then it’s not

expensive because you value the benefits it provides.

Beyond significantly reducing the cost of insurance charges, there are products available

today that provide additional policy credits. One of the most common policy credits is a

persistency credit which increases cash value to the client for being a long-term customer

with the carrier. When evaluating carriers, or looking at illustrations for your clients, it’s

important to understand how some carriers illustrate their persistency bonus — EVEN if they

claim the bonus is guaranteed.

Think back to the movie “Tommy Boy” when he discusses guarantees. Just because the

carrier says that it’s guaranteed or perhaps that carrier over-illustrates how that guarantee

bonus actually works, that doesn’t make it better than one that’s not guaranteed. You see, in

order to provide that guarantee, the carrier at some point in the future may have to make

other trade-offs or pull different pricing levers if the guarantees ultimately get too expensive.

The carrier can consider lowering caps or increasing charges to pay for those guaranteed

bonuses in the future, which means the client may suffer more with a guaranteed bonus than
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one that isn’t guaranteed. More important than the guarantee of persistency bonus, is the fact

that the carrier is actually setting aside and reserving the money to pay the bonuses in the

future. That company would be more nimble and be able to not need to pull other pricing

levers in order to provide the future bonus. If you had a choice of one carrier reserving and

accounting for that reserve today — even without the guarantee — that’d be the company

worth considering over the one with a guarantee as that company is better positioned for

long-term success versus short-term sales goals.

An IUL Product that Pay Dividends?

Now we all know that IUL products don’t pay dividends, only whole life policies are structured

to pay policy dividends. In fact, whole life dividends are paid out based on the company’s

experience. But some pioneering insurance companies that we work with are developing

new products and features within an IUL policy that positively impact the client’s cash value

based on how that client structures and funds the policy (not what the carrier does or

experiences). These policy credits when added to the cash value can significantly impact the

long-term performance of the product. They can be structured many different ways, but

generally they provide significant long-term benefits that will appeal to clients.

What About Product Performance?

Another question some clients raise is that they’ve been told that IUL won’t perform over the

long term, in other words the policy performance isn’t as rosy as illustrated. We agree, before

AG 49, many producers over-illustrated the power of IUL, and today those new guidelines

help temper some of the more outrageous claims. However, many carriers are finding unique

ways to enhance policy performance by reducing the costs to buy the indexing options. For

years, IUL has almost exclusively offered a 1-year point-to-point crediting method with 100%

participation up to a cap. However, the sustained low interest rate environment, and high

market volatility has made those options very expensive, and therefore caps have steadily

decreased over the years. What many insurance producers don’t realize is that the cost to

buy the option is tied to the overall volatility of the option. In other words, if the option is
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volatile the costs are high, meaning a lower cap. Moving to a low-volatility option can make a

lot of sense and perform very strongly over the same time period. The S&P 500 Low Volatility

option makes the options cost more affordable for the carrier and this is allowing some to

have uncapped performance over a one-year period. And the back-casted results look

amazing.

One Year Comparison

45.0%

40.0%

35.0%

30.0%

25.0%

20.0%

15.0%

10.0%

5.0%

0.0%
Min 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% Max

Index Account A One Year Low Vol

S&P 500 Low Volatility

Average Crediting Rate 7.3% 8.9%

Probability > 0% 72% 80%

Probability > 10% 50% 44%

Description S&P 500 | 12.5% Cap


100% Participation
S&P 500 Low Volatility | No Cap

90% Participation

What the chart above depicts are the annual crediting rates for every business day over the

past 10 years. And with the low volatility option you can see that in just 20% of the results

would the client have earned 0% compared to 28% of the time with a traditional crediting

option. And it makes sense, when you look at the least volatile companies, the reasons that

they are considered “low volatility” is that they don’t make big gambles or take unnecessary 


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business risks. By carving out those companies from the overall market you can see that not

only does your client get more opportunities to earn a positive return, that in close to 20% of

the cases they earn more than 15%. You’d have to admit that in the previous 10-year period

the market has seen its share of ups and downs and how happy your clients would be with an

8.9% average crediting rate. We all know that past performance is no guarantee of future

results, but if an index option can perform in the market we just experienced, just imagine

what it can do in the future.

Client Want Guaranteed Income

For years IUL illustrations were simply numbers written on paper showing projected future

values and possible loan amounts. That’s fine, but with so much focus on annuity products

and the guaranteed income they provide for retirement, the life insurance carriers are starting

to move in that direction. Today, insurance companies are introducing guaranteed lifetime

income from an IUL policy, so that the cash-value that is in the policy can be paid out,

guaranteed to age 100. Now that’s a game-changer for a client who purchased an IUL

originally to protect their family, but now that they’ve grown they are ready to harvest income.

They can efficiently access their cash values and receive a guaranteed retirement income.

Last Big Objection — Clients Hate the Underwriting Process

It’s no secret that our industry makes the client go through some inconvenient procedures to

buy our product, and one of those is having a needle stuck in their arm, being prodded and

probed by someone they’ve never met and giving additional bodily fluids (yuk). Not to

mention that this process is slow and means you need to wait over a month on average from

the time you submit an application in good order to the time the company makes an

underwriting decision. We all know you don’t get paid until the policy gets issued. So now

you can speed that up through the amazing advances happening with express underwriting.

When you sell IUL virtually, you’re often not meeting the client face-to-face, other than

through a screen share or video conference. Sometimes this makes it harder to keep the
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policy moving if you need to wait 3—45 days before policy issue. By speeding up the process

and improving the client experience, the issue of being hundreds or thousands of miles away

is really a non-issue. Plus, your clients can receive a standard, preferred or super-preferred

underwriting class without fluids or a medical exam. This isn’t an express issue product with

all sorts of built-in additional fees to cover the risk at the carrier level. The carrier is using

publicly available data to help them make an underwriting decision because they’ve found

specific correlations between the data that’s available publicly and can make an informed

underwriting decision without the need for an exam or fluids. Ultimately, this means your

policies can get issued in many cases under three days, and that means you get paid faster.

Can you overcome that objection now? I think so.


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4 — Have A Software That Helps Show Clients Their
Retirement Gap And The Best Way To Close It
Success Strategy — Sell to People’s Problems

Let’s be clear that successfully selling life insurance can be challenging, however the most

successful life insurance agents approach this market with the ability to sell (and solve)

people’s problems. In solving their problems, they position life insurance as the most viable

solution possible. For most of the producers that work with Partners Advantage, they select

Indexed Universal Life insurance as the product to position in front of their clients.

Understand How People Make Decisions - Even Bad Ones

Most people when given two financial choices will ultimately narrow down the two options

and pick a single solution that provides them the best economic value. What’s really

interesting if you’ve ever studied Behavioral Economics, is that sometimes when people are

presented with financial choices, many times people make a bad economic decision. In other

words, when presented with the choice that ultimately provides them the best economic

value, they pick the other option that doesn’t provide the best value because they fail to

understand the trade off.

Human behavior is fascinating because humans rarely choose things in absolute terms. We

don’t have an internal value meter that tells us how much things are worth. Rather we focus

on the relative advantage of one thing over another, and estimate value accordingly. For

instance, we don’t specifically know how much a six cylinder engine is worth, but we can

assume it’s more expensive than a four cylinder engine. What’s truly fascinating about

Behavioral Economics is that most people don’t know what they want unless they see it in

context. Most people don’t have an internal meter that tells them that a properly funded and

structured lUL policy is better than other financial vehicles because they have no context

upon which to make that decision. However, if you can structure your presentation to clearly 


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lay out the various options they have with their money, the decision to purchase a life

insurance policy is almost a “no-brainer.” When provided with a list of options where the

inherent economic value is clearly depicted, the prospect can clearly see that what you

present is superior.

Most of our top advisors selling IUL to individuals as a way to compliment their retirement

nest egg use a software system that was designed with Behavioral Economics in mind. We

hear time-and-time again from advisors using this software in a client presentation, the client

quickly closes themselves. The client actually says, “I want the life insurance option,” because

the software clearly demonstrates the true economic benefit of using life insurance as a way

to protect against premature death, and when properly funded and structured can provide

outstanding income benefits during the client’s life. Think back, if you just asked someone if

they wanted to purchase life insurance with no context, what would your answer be?

Probably most people would say, “not interested.”


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5 — Have A System That Automatically Nurtures
Those Not Ready To Buy
There’s a big difference between mass email blasts and marketing automation. Marketing

automation involves discretely tracking how each individual interacts with your content, then

intelligently either sends them the next message in the nurturing campaign if they did one

thing, or sends them down a different path if they did another, blast emails don’t do that.

There are some amazing tools out there that simplify the process of marketing automation

and we offer Prospecting 365.

Prospecting 365 automates your marketing messages so you can prospect 365 days-a-year

and continue to nurture those pre-set appointments that weren’t ready to buy at the time you

initially met. You also receive access to a web-based Client Relationship Management (CRM)

platform so you can automate several regular “stay-in-touch” events like annual reviews, and

age-based milestone triggers like RMDs, Social Security, Medicare and more.

Within Prospecting 365 there are more than 100 different automated marketing campaigns

and triggers you can use to drip market on your prospects. If you have a large existing client

base, or if you use the pre-set IUL appointment program, Prospecting 365 will help you

convert more prospects into clients. Benefits of Prospecting 365:

• Easy-to-use pre-built templates

• Works everywhere and every day behind-the-scenes

• Connects your CRM, marketing, website and social media

When you subscribe to Prospecting 365, we take care of everything from importing your

client list, to customizing your CRM so it stores the data you need for building future

automated marketing campaigns. You also have access to over 100 different nurturing

campaigns that we will help you set up so they run automatically.


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Partners Advantage
You face many choices in your business whether you’re a new producer, seasoned veteran,

agency owner or marketing organization. The biggest decision you make is selecting a

distribution partner. To keep driving your business forward you want to work with a company

that’s been down that before and has already helped more than 40,000 advisers and

hundreds of agencies for more than 25 years.

We know you cherish your independence, but joining us doesn’t mean you work alone. You

deserve the peace of mind that comes from knowing you can access more than 50 different

insurance carriers promoting annuities, life and linked benefits.

A Full-Service Offering

We’ve developed partnerships and strategic alliances with many distribution outlets to

provide our producers with a full array of products and services including:

• Indexed Universal Life • Second-to-Die Life

• Term Life • Annuities

• Universal Life • Long-term Care

• Whole Life • Single Premium Whole Life

Our ability to provide you with great contracts and top-notch carriers — regardless of the type

of product — means you have a one-stop-resource to help you solve all your client needs

under one roof.

Dedicated Resources

At Partners Advantage we have staff dedicated to help you develop cases and address

questions. We also provide turn- key prospecting programs so you can position the

opportunity and present the most suitable product, along with an extensive array of online

resources to help you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at www.partnersadvantage.com.

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 888-251-5525

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