Follow the Data: Improving the Life Insurance Sales Funnel to Boost Sales Growth

The challenges facing life insurers

About five minutes. That’s all the patience the average financial services customer has for an online application experience. According to the Financial Brand, at least 60% of applicants are likely to abandon if a self-guided online process takes any longer than that. That’s why an optimized life insurance sales funnel is critical to growth. 

But life insurers face a perfect storm of challenges that cause sales friction and ultimately slow growth. 

On the customer side, long or confusing online applications create friction and cause drop-off. LIMRA reports that 92% of life insurance shoppers begin their journey online, which means every slow-loading screen or clunky step risks losing them before they ever hit “submit.”

Agents feel the squeeze as well. Outdated systems and disconnected workflows force them to spend valuable time chasing documents or stalled applications, limiting their ability to close policies efficiently. This doesn’t just hurt lead-to-policy conversion — it may be contributing to the industry’s agent retention problem, with some studies suggesting that as many as 20% of new agents leave the field within their first six months.

Underwriters face similar pain points. Manual, disconnected processes create inefficiencies, increase processing times, and often leave both agents and applicants in the dark about case status.

And behind it all, carriers are often hamstrung by legacy technology and limited internal resources. Disjointed systems make it difficult to implement a truly seamless, digital-first funnel, and attempts to build in-house can quickly go over budget or past deadline.

The good news is that advancements in life insurance SaaS and insurance process automation are giving carriers the tools to address these challenges head on. 

How thoughtful UX can transform the life insurance sales funnel

Reducing sales funnel friction all starts with UX. A user-centered approach to technical innovation can drive better experiences, better results, and importantly, return on investment. 

Forrester reports that every dollar invested in UX can yield up to $100 in return — while conversely, 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a poor experience.

Here’s a look at the pillars that make up a user-centered design strategy:

Usability - Prioritize intuitiveness. If it’s your first ever visit, are your paths obvious?

Accessibility - Follow Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to help users who may have visual, auditory, or other impairments. 

Efficiency - Where possible, reduce the number of steps and total time it takes to complete key tasks (like submitting an application).

Minimized cognitive load - Reduce the amount of mental processing needed to complete a task. In other words, don’t overload the senses. 

Transparency - Clearly communicate details about products, processes, costs, terms, etc.  

Bestow’s life insurance technology platform follows these UX best practices closely. “Our job is to make the process as intuitive as possible for users, whether that’s a consumer, an agent, or even an underwriter,” says Dan Hauk, Staff Product Designer at Bestow. “We collaborate with our clients and the end users to create simple, efficient product flows. The goal is to find that sweet spot of a user-friendly experience that also drives business results.”

The thoughtfulness of this approach can pay dividends. Case in point, after launching a new D2C digital sales funnel experience with Bestow, one client reported a 200% increase in conversion rate.

“We’ve also seen great results with our agent-led products and sales dashboard,” adds Hauk. “Giving agents the support they need to track in progress business, easily start or jump back into applications, and follow up with applicants all inside one digital platform experience helped one client increase their agent-led final expense sales by 35%.”

On the underwriting side, a well-designed workbench experience can save valuable time, too. “Our workbench puts everything at an underwriter’s fingertips. There’s no hunting around for hidden info. They have the ability to order extra data with the click of a button — and again this is all inside one platform experience.”

The takeaway here is that better UX design means better functionality, and better functionality means better performance. To wit, Forrester reports that companies that implement top design practices grow twice as fast as the industry benchmark growth rate.

The secret sauce: automation, data, and intelligence

User experience is mostly concerned with what’s visible. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, there are dozens of concurrent backend processes that play a role in keeping the funnel moving. Optimizing these processes is typically the point where a life insurer comes up against legacy technology, siloed data, broken workstreams, and the prohibitive price tag for fixing it all. 

The key is to leverage advancements in digital automation and data/intelligence technologies. 

Underwriting is an obvious first candidate for automation — but perhaps not in the way you may think. While automated underwriting for life insurance has opened the flood gates for lightning fast policy approvals that don’t require human intervention, the same technology can be used to help your human underwriters work more efficiently and make smarter decisions. 

With Bestow, for example, carriers can control which cases are referred to underwriting, and if desired, what preliminary data calls are automatically made before a human even sees the case. Combine this with built-in tools to help streamline an underwriter’s workflow (like making additional data calls or even requesting more information directly from applicants or agents), and the payoffs are obvious. Cases move more quickly and cost effectively, resulting in faster decisions, less waste, and happier customers.   

But automation is just the beginning. Life insurance process optimization relies on data — capturing, structuring, and leveraging information at every step of the funnel. With real-time insights, insurers can spot bottlenecks or performance issues, make market-informed adjustments, and measure performance results across distribution channels. This kind of intelligence not only improves operational efficiency but also enables insurance customer journey optimization, allowing carriers to deliver a more personalized insurance buying experience.

Bestow’s Recommendation Engine is a feature that does just that — combining data technology and journey optimization to offer customers real-time differentiated experiences based on simple data inputs and algorithmic logic to determine likelihood to be approved for or purchase certain products. The results are faster service for customers, better customer-product fit, and up to 22% underwriting costs savings.

In short, automation and actionable data insights are key to boosting funnel performance. And while an in-house build to accomplish all that is technically possible, insurtech SaaS platforms like Bestow are purpose built to offer that in weeks or months, rather than years — allowing life insurers to improve the funnel and scale growth without adding headcount or navigating other burdensome hurdles. 

Conclusion: build a smarter, faster life insurance funnel

A better funnel means more policies issued, faster decisions, and happier customers and agents. When you combine thoughtful, high-quality UX with automation and data-driven life insurance solutions, you create a sales experience that reduces drop-off, accelerates underwriting, and converts more leads into policies.

That’s where we come in. Our cloud-based life insurance platform was built specifically to help carriers remove friction, create a unified funnel experience across stakeholders, and achieve life insurance process optimization without overhauling the entire tech stack. 

If you’re ready to see how to improve the life insurance sales funnel and turn it into a true growth engine, we should talk. Email [email protected].