“Life insurance is sold not bought” – a familiar maxim to people who work in the industry. But there’s opportunities being left on the table to sell more, according to the co-founders of Plum Life.
Those four co-founders include Manish Bhatt, who spent several years as MetLife’s digital leader; and Rahim Rajpar, who led marketing and direct-to-consumer efforts for John Hancock, In an interview, the executives explain that life insurance’s perceived complexity is keeping some agents away from tackling the product.
“If you ask consumers where they would buy life insurance, I think the No. 1 answer in the research on this is from their auto insurance agent,” Rajpar says. “But auto agents don’t necessarily sell life because it’s perceived to be difficult, which we’re changing.”
Digital direct-to-consumer efforts have been the life insurance industry’s standard way to bridge the coverage gap. But that only works for some consumers. What many reticent customers are looking for before diving into a life insurance contract is advice and guidance, Rajpar explains.
“There's a perception out there that anyone under the age of – I'm going to say 30, but you could extend it to 50 – doesn't wanna talk to an agent, and they want to do everything on their own, on their computer,” he says. “It’s true that they want convenience and they want the ability to transact digitally. But what isn't true is that they don't want advice. Research that I did found that buying journey of life insurance for the consumer is an emotional roller coaster filled with highs and lows. Am I buying the right amount? Is this the right product? What's all this legal ease? Am I doing the right thing? When there's no agent, what happens is inertia and the customer typically doesn't end up buying.”
So while investments in direct to consumer help in some ways, broadening the stable of agents that are comfortable working with the life insurance product was Plum’s goal, says Bhatt.
“The customer experience was getting a lot better for direct to consumer, but not really for agents,” he says. “We didn’t feel we needed to become agents, but we need to do is to make each of those successful parts of the business better.”
The founders say that Plum Life’s platform reduces the number of screens that agents need to use in order to perform the life insurance transaction, and provides marketing and outreach support to reach customers who might want life insurance. The target is auto and health insurance agents that haven’t sold life traditionally.
“These types of agents interact with consumers every single day, but the level of cross sell over to life is relatively low,” Rajpar says. “When we think about the agent we have a couple personas in mind and one of them is the person who doesn't necessarily wake up and sell life every day. And we wanna make the process as seamless, leveraging technology and as easy as possible for that agent to place business.
Plum Life recently secured $5.3 million in seed funding led by ManchesterStory with MTech Capital and Sonostar Ventures. It offers products from SBLI on the platform. In addition to Bhatt and Rajpar, other co-founders include Sanjay Mehra and Amir Weiss, who worked alongside Bhatt at his post-MetLife consultancy Hawthorne Advisors.
“We’re executives that have done hundreds of millions of dollars of sales direct. So we're bringing that knowledge to the consumer or to the agent to leverage,” Bhatt says. “We are enabling the agent to operate like a DTC business.”
