Many experienced advisors have reiterated this over the years: success hinges on prospecting. This is the case for business coach Sandy Schussel in his column published in the Expert Corner section of the Insurance Portal on December 10, 2025. According to him, advisor growth essentially depends on one thing: having more conversations with the right people. In his opinion, this is the essence of niche marketing.
But how do you have these conversations? Should everything be reinvented in light of new technologies? What should we keep from tried and true practices? Three speakers offered several insights during the sales summit session entitled Are Yesterday's Winning Business Practices Still Effective? This sales summit took place during the Life and Health Insurance Congress, an event organized by the The Insurance Journal Publishing Group in Montreal on November 18.
Acting like an entrepreneur
“Today’s practices are still relevant, but will be outdated in the near future,” contends Frédéric Perman, Vice-President of Business Development at Financière S_Entiel, a managing general agent and member of Groupe AgenZ.
Perman adds that the distribution network has forgotten the main point: providing added value to the new generation of clients. According to him, managing general agents can do this by establishing a presence on social media and working as a team. “We have a lot of ground to cover; we need to start now,” says Perman, who began his career in the industry in 1995 as an advisor with the Freedom 55 Financial network, then part of London Life (now Canada Life).
“Over the past twenty years, the industry has promoted the arrival of self employed workers rather than entrepreneurs. We are now in an era where entrepreneurs need to position themselves. In the next five years, the independent advisor (self employed worker) will be less and less effective, unless they possess a rare skill in the market,” says Perman.
Before becoming an independent advisor in 2020, Patrice Therriault entered the industry through the career agencies of iA Financial Group. He questions what constitutes the best practices of the past. “Project 100 [a list of prospects compiled from the recruit’s network], newspaper ads, and radio appearances: are these still relevant? We need to adapt and follow the new market,” says Patrice Therriault, an advisor whose name has become his trademark. Therriault is also a mutual fund broker representative with Sentinel Financial Management Corp.
According to Therriault, best practices boil down to "staying in touch with clients and keeping them informed, in a way that makes you indispensable to them." He points out that social media is a way to do this that didn't exist 20 years ago.
Artificial intelligence is essential…
The entire industry is in a state of incredible acceleration.
– Sophie Babeux
Co-owner of Virage Coaching and a trainer specializing in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools by advisors, Sophie Babeux spent many years in the Registered Education Savings Plan distribution network, as an advisor and manager. Babeux shares the sense of urgency of the other two speakers. According to her, it's crucial to start paying attention to AI now, because this powerful tool "is evolving rapidly."
"The entire industry is in a state of incredible acceleration," adds Babeux. “When the Web came out 20 years ago, we had light-years to prepare. Now, five years of AI is like 20 years of the Web. We no longer have the luxury of sitting back and waiting to see which way it will go. Deciding today how you will run your firm will have a direct impact on where you will be in just five years.”
AI doesn’t do everything for me; it accompanies me
– Patrice Therriault
Patrice Therriault has seized the opportunity. He says he has integrated AI at all levels of his business. “AI does my newsletters, my portfolio analyses, and part of my investor profiles…” Therriault confides that it can suggest solutions to take his business to the next level, depending on the question he asks. The advisor does, however, offer a word of caution: “AI doesn’t do everything for me; it accompanies me and I review what it does.”
…but not automatically.
The elite advisor no longer handles the day-to-day operations of their firm; he manages it.
– Frédéric Perman
When she provides training to advisors, Sophie Babeux recounts that some advisors ask her if they can "sit back" while the AI does everything else. She then has to "burst their bubble": the tool doesn't work that way. She encourages them to familiarize themselves with AI to understand what it can do for them. "If you've already integrated business processes, you have a head start, because AI can't be integrated into your business without processes," she explains.
Frédéric Perman, for his part, expresses reservations about the use of AI. "We overestimate AI's importance in improving the sales process. AI is all well and good, but if we don't see the clients and offer them the full picture, it's useless," he asserts.
According to Perman, “Today’s elite advisor is an entrepreneur; they no longer handle the day-to-day operations of their firm; they manage, visualize, and organize it.” He believes the elite advisor will play the role of conductor, surrounded by a competent team that will use AI. “Consumers want to work with a team and be able to applaud their conductor and the firm’s leader,” he believes. “AI is just another tool to achieve this.”
Become an AI reference
Babeux encourages advisors to optimize their website content so that AI recommends it to its users. “It’s no longer enough for an advisor’s website to be found on search engines,” she says. “These days, people get their information from AI more than from a search engine like Google.” The strategy of indexing your website for search engines is called search engine optimization (SEO) in the jargon. According to Babeux, it's time for advisors to move on to GEO, or generative engine optimization, in order to be recommended by generative AI.
"SEO aims to rank web pages in traditional search results, while GEO optimizes content to be cited in the responses of AI engines like ChatGPT from OpenAI and Perplexity from Perplexity AI. GEO won't just search your website; it will search everything you do on social media, podcasts, etc. The more consistent your message, the more AI will recommend you," she explains.
Fewer policies sold and the challenge of succession planning
Frédéric Perman addressed the decline in the number of life insurance policies sold each year since 2010, a drop that regularly amounts to 100,000 policies. The Life and Health Insurance Conference dedicated an entire session to this topic, featuring presentations from industry leaders. The entire industry acknowledges the problem, as evidenced by this opinion piece from invited experts published on the Insurance Portal on November 27, 2025.
According to Perman, there is a reason: "the fact that there are very few advisors under 40, and very few sales to clients under 40." The family market is therefore less penetrated, he says, "because it is less profitable."
Perman observes that the segment targeted by the distribution network in Canada is primarily affluent individuals aged 50 and over. The estate and retirement planning segment commands higher insurance premiums and is therefore more profitable for advisors, he says.
The problem, according to Perman, is that death benefit capital leaves the industry. “Beneficiaries reinvest their inheritance with the banks. This creates a considerable loss of revenue in our industry because we haven’t approached the next generation, the new generation that could renew our clientele,” he says.
“Will we be able to resell our portfolio at the value we want? Not certain, because we have very few successors to buy these clients,” he continues.
How can we attract these successors? Perman says he is convinced that offering support compensation to new recruits to help them establish themselves will be the right thing for managing general agents to do. Among others, IG Wealth Management has implemented such a program, as reported in the Insurance Portal on October 6, 2025.
Regarding the low profitability of the middle-class market, Patrice Therriault says that the compliance burden can discourage many advisors from serving this segment. “The problem is, we don’t sell vacuum cleaners; we sell services. After the sale, you have to follow up, otherwise, compliance will come back to haunt you,” he says.
Therriault points out that the responsibility will be the same, whether it’s a “small sale of $15 a month or one of $50,000.” He adds that both transactions involve “the same paperwork and the same administration” for significantly less profitability in the end.
