Key Takeaway:
Good life insurance sales training covers two skills new agents tend to skip. The first is earning the conversation by giving value and sharing stories before you ever ask. The second is knowing where a client fits before the application goes in, by sorting clients into a few health categories and asking the right medication questions. On the Unstuck Call recorded October 1, 2026, Brian Delaney coached agents through both.
“I can talk to a complete stranger.” Heather said that on Getting Unstuck with Brian Delaney 10/1/26, and she meant it. She’s been in the industry for a few years, and the paid social media ads she runs have been working. But when it came to people who already love her, friends, family, and business owners who only knew her as a friend, something locked up.
Near the end of the same call, a newer agent named Guadalupe raised a different problem. Every time an underwriting question came up, Guadalupe reached out to a mentor, got overwhelmed by the information, and fell back on a lookup tool.
Two different problems, but both sit in gaps that most life insurance sales training skips. This article covers what Brian Delaney, founder of the Delaney Agency, coached on each: how to earn a conversation with people you already know, and how to learn underwriting so you know where a client fits before you apply.
Inside the Unstuck Call on October 1, 2026
The Unstuck Call is a live coaching call. Agents raise their hands, name what they’re stuck on, and Brian Delaney coaches them through it on the spot. In the call recorded on October 1, 2026, Brian opened by explaining why he shows up for it. He was introduced to the business more than 15 years ago by Edward Pritchett, and he says his job now is to give back. In his words, he’s not just after his slice of the pie, he’s “back in the kitchen making more.”
Several agents were coached that day. This piece focuses on the two segments that are pure sales skill. If you’re still deciding whether this career is for you, start with what a life insurance agent career looks like at the Delaney Agency.
How Do You Market Life Insurance to People You Already Know?
Heather’s question was really two questions. How do you go back to a warm market that has already said no, without sounding repetitive? And how do you approach friends who own businesses when they’ve only ever known you as a friend? She described it as not being able to get past the threshold from friend to business professional.
Brian didn’t answer either one right away. He asked Heather for the one-sentence question that sits at the foot of the problem. His reason: the quality of our lives is determined by the quality of the questions we ask. When Heather got stuck, Brian offered one himself: “How do I effectively market to my people and how will I know when I do?”
Then he explained why the second half of that question matters. According to Brian, marketing has an art and a science, and most people only do the art. He compared it to his two-year-old son, who believes he’s coloring but fills the whole page with marker, inside the lines and outside them at once. Heather named it: scribbling.
For an agent, scribbling might look like posting, messaging and asking without a plan for what each touch is supposed to do, and with no way to tell whether it’s working.
Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: Value Before the Ask
To move Heather from scribbling to coloring, Brian Delaney gave her a simple framework. “Jab equals value. Jab, jab, jab. Right hook is the ask.” Value, value, value, ask. Agents in the chat pointed to where it comes from, Gary V’s book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, which Brian called a great marketing book.
According to Brian, most agents spend their time only throwing the right hook, then get frustrated when people don’t respond. He pointed to Ed Mylett, whom the agents had all watched recently, as an example of the opposite. In Brian’s words, Ed “jabbed for an hour and hooked for a minute.” It worked because he had something so compelling to give that the ask was only service.
Brian’s test for any ask follows from that. Is it service, or is it trying to get something? He admits it’s always a little of both, but it should be mostly service.
So what counts as value? For Brian, it’s stories. He describes himself as a collector of stories, a library, whether he’s building his agency or sitting down with a client.
Then he showed Heather how it works, live. Brian shared a story about a client family his work had protected, with no ask and no conclusion attached. Heather responded by sharing a personal story of her own. Afterward, Brian walked her back through what had just happened. “Did I come to any conclusions on my story? Or did I just share the story?”
His point: “People think they live by facts, but they live by stories.” When he shares a story without an ask, he gets a story back. That’s what he wants, because a person’s story shows you where they actually live.
He also reframed Heather’s job. It isn’t to force people across the bridge. “It’s just to build a bridge.” Whenever people are ready, they can cross it.
This is a useful answer to how to get life insurance leads from a warm market that feels tapped out. Heather admitted on the call that saying her warm market was depleted wasn’t really true, because there are plenty of people in it. The people hadn’t run out. What runs out is value, so the fix is more jabs, more stories and fewer hooks.
Brian closed the segment with something easy to miss. A lot of the time, people just want to be listened to, and he includes himself in that. Sharing a story gives other people room to tell theirs, and he says so few people are taught to be storytellers.
How Should New Agents Learn Life Insurance Underwriting?
Guadalupe’s question came in the last slot of the Unstuck Call. When an underwriting question comes up, Guadalupe reaches out to a mentor, Venus, gets overwhelmed by the information, and goes to the matrix, an underwriting reference tool. Guadalupe already takes notes and is building a visual board of conditions such as A1C levels for diabetes, but said, “I feel like I bother Venus every single day,” and wants to learn to do it independently.
Brian Delaney started with football. If Brock Purdy couldn’t call an audible at the line, would he still be the 49ers’ starting quarterback? No. He’d get read like a book and sacked, play after play. Underwriting, by that logic, is reading the defense before you run the play.
Then Brian gave Guadalupe something most new agents need to hear: “I just want to give you permission to be in the beginning.” Plenty of agents at the Delaney Agency started there. Tim Penso came from retail and is now a Regional Agency Director. Brian’s instruction was to write every underwriting situation in the same place, every time, and build a personal guide from it.
On the matrix, Brian was direct. He said the tool Michael Veal created is great, but people can build a false dependency on it. A crutch is fine to get over a break. “If you stay on crutches, it’s no different than your foot remaining broken.”
According to Brian, the cases that taught him the most were the ones that got declined. Each one showed him how precisely a carrier reads the details on an application. His habit was to slow down and “take the five minutes to learn something for the rest of our life.”
He also said to go to the source: the carriers. Telling a carrier your mentor said a case would be fine won’t reverse a decline. Brian used his own mentor, Edward Pritchett, as the example. Carriers may know who Edward is, but he isn’t one of their underwriters.
Three Plays, Two Carriers and One Question
Brian Delaney describes the professional’s job as making complicated things simple. Most people, he says, do the opposite.
His own simplification is three rough categories of clients:
1. Up to about age 55 and generally healthy
2. Around 55 with some mild health challenges
3. 65 and older, with moderate health issues or more serious ones
Brian estimates those three categories cover about 75 percent of his audience. Each one gets its own play, a go-to carrier, and he recommends keeping those plays to two carriers if you can. He learned that the hard way. “I almost went broke by trying to use all the carriers,” he said. He’d learn one carrier, fall for the next one, and move every client there, only to find the qualifications didn’t match.
The facts that place a client come from one question: “What medications does your doctor have you on?” Then you keep asking “and what else?” until you get down to zinc and vitamin D. Brian asks whether a client is in pretty good health first, then goes straight to medications, because most people believe they’re healthy.
He compared it to a car. Take it to the same mechanic over and over, and they’ll say it’s running great, because they’re the one who’s been fixing it. A different mechanic might disagree. “We don’t go by the doctor’s opinion. We go by the facts.” Those facts live in the medications, the hospital visits and the health history. Brian added that the agency’s script is already set up to gather them, so new agents don’t need to understand everything in it to follow it.
When he wanted to write more business with one carrier, Mutual of Omaha, he didn’t guess. He called and asked an underwriter directly who their target client for a term policy was.
Gift Wrap Every Application
The last skill Brian Delaney described happens after the application goes in. A lot of agents, he said, send business up as if it doesn’t matter what they do afterward. He does the opposite. “I gift wrap it.” He puts in all the notes and gives the underwriter every reason to approve the case “with the truth, not my opinion.”
He breaks gift wrapping into three parts:
1. Set it up in the pre-appointment.
2. Underwrite properly.
3. Follow up on your business quickly
Following up quickly, Brian said, showed carriers that he cared about them and about his business. He was honest that it won’t work every time. But the hit rate climbs with practice, and his summary of the next step was two words: “repetition and intention.”
Disclaimer: Individual results vary and depend on effort, skill, consistency, market conditions, and other factors. The Delaney Agency offers independent contractor opportunities in a performance-based, commission environment. Results are not guaranteed.
Brian’s last advice to Guadalupe went beyond underwriting. Don’t worry about bothering Venus. Learn how to become an asset to Venus, because one day a new agent will show up with the same questions, and Guadalupe will be the perfect person to help. This is where a sales skill turns into leadership: you learn something well enough to teach it to the next person.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should life insurance sales training cover for new agents?
On the Unstuck Call recorded October 1, 2026, Brian Delaney of the Delaney Agency coached two skills new agents often skip. The first is earning the conversation by giving value and sharing stories before asking. The second is learning underwriting well enough to know where a client fits before the application goes in, then following up quickly on submitted business.
What does “jab, jab, jab, right hook” mean in insurance sales?
It’s a marketing framework from Gary V’s book of the same name. Each jab is value given with no ask, and the right hook is the ask. Brian Delaney teaches it as “value, value, value, ask,” and says most agents only throw the hook, then get frustrated when people don’t respond.
How do you approach your warm market about life insurance without being pushy?
Brian Delaney’s approach is to share stories instead of pitching. When you share a story with no ask attached, people tend to share their own, and their story shows you what they actually need. Your job is to build the bridge, not to force anyone across it.
How do new agents learn life insurance underwriting?
Brian Delaney recommends writing every underwriting situation in one place to build your own guide, learning from declined cases, and going to the carriers directly. He suggests sorting clients into about three health categories, each with a go-to carrier, and keeping those to two carriers if you can.
What’s the most important question for uncovering a client’s health?
According to Brian Delaney, it’s “What medications does your doctor have you on?” Then keep asking “and what else?” until nothing is left. Most clients believe they’re healthy, so the facts come from medications, hospital visits and health history, not from opinion.
Ready to Be Coached Like This?
The Unstuck Call is one of several live calls agents at the Delaney Agency join every week. If you’re exploring a career in life insurance and want training that covers the real skills, not just the license, start on the Get Hired page.
