Tired of watching life insurance advisors fail because they were not trained to sell professionally, renowned advisor coach Jim Ruta says he has decided “to fight to bring back life insurance sales training in the industry.” His solution is the creation of SOLIS, a school of life insurance sales.

Is Solis an initiative to replace the “career agency system”?

Ruta, who in addition to his coaching is a motivational speaker and a columnist for Insurance Journal, says no because the career agency systems entailed a lot more than just training. It also covered recruiting, selection, supervision, and education. “But SOLIS does help advisors replace the critical sales training that they used to get in a career system and often don’t get enough of in the managing general agency (MGA) system either,” says Ruta. He sees this new program as an “Open MGA” where advisors get the back office help they need from their traditional MGA, but then get their sales and business development from SOLIS. 

The extent of the sales training gap in the industry was revealed by the surveys conducted by The Insurance Journal Publishing Group in 2021 for the Canada Sales Congress and the Life Insurance Convention events. The results of these surveys, which examined sales practices in Canada’s advisory network, showed that many advisors lacked mentoring and coaching. Due to this lack of training, many find that their sales results have suffered; at times to such a degree that they may leave the industry altogether.

Ruta says he is confident that Solis can help enhance life insurance advisor sales training. His program includes meetings featuring a different top life insurance sales advisor each month whom he calls “icons”, information handouts after the meetings, sales videos, books and 30-minutes coaching sessions. More tools will be added throughout the year, says Ruta.

The Solis program will start on March 1, 2022. Interested advisors can register at: https://www.advisorcraft.com/solis