The Living Balance Sheet (LBS) is The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America’s proprietary sales system that is available as a subscription to all Guardian financial professionals. LBS provides subscribers with a comprehensive tool to present to clients, showcasing their complete financial picture.
While training delivered by the LBS Home Office (HO) team has been effective, the company has found that the more impactful training method is peer-to-peer narratives and best practices. As such, 14 LBS successful “super users”—Guardian financial professionals from across the country—were hand-selected and contracted as LBS Faculty to bring LBS training to life for the financial professional subscriber population.
Program Details
With each person having a unique background and various areas of expertise, these trainers offer field-facing training and system development work that includes case study and best practices virtual sessions, in-person training programs with role-play, presentations at national and regional forums, and monthly Webinars offered nationally.
The function of Faculty is unique within the Guardian system. Their formal role to help deliver messaging, content, and training to other financial professionals provides consistency in Guardian’s ability to deliver scalable training across each of its modalities from team LBS and partner teams. This approach allows financial professionals to learn, not from a home office-produced video or by dialing a call center, but directly from a peer who is doing the same work as them and is “doing LBS well” everyday with clients. Financial professionals are not charged for this service; instead it’s part of how Guardian builds and conducts training on its proprietary planning platform. The company finds there is no better way to learn a story than from the storytellers themselves.
The LBS Faculty role is one of a co-creator, user voice, ambassador, and teacher. With a focus on the LBS client experience and recent updates to what this looks like, the Faculty has spent time training on approach, what clients should expect, and how they should disseminate the technology.
Reinforcement includes:
- Follow-up virtual sessions with agencies after an in-person training session give financial professionals the chance to ask questions, etc.
- One-on-one help from LBS Faculty assists financial professionals with case work. LBS Faculty might provide financial professionals with case design and even a joint opportunity, if asked.
- Financial professionals can utilize the LBS HO team for case consultations and system navigation support.
- Most virtual training sessions are part of a planned, purposeful series of training sessions. Agency leaders develop an annual plan with the LBS HO team, which includes specific training sessions that will be executed throughout the year for the firm. The virtual sessions sometimes are aimed at specific groups, such as new or veteran financial professionals, and topics can vary from basic to advanced concepts.
- The continuity of annual agency engagement plans is prioritized. The HO team works with general agents (GAs) to analyze and plan training implementation through various methods of teaching and Faculty deployment. The goal is to boost the LBS culture within firms, help financial professionals become proficient LBS practitioners, and boost production.
- Some agencies have their own in-house trainers, who learn from the LBS Faculty and take their new LBS skills back to their ongoing training sessions with financial professionals.
Results
As of year end 2023, the median subscriber to LBS was 150 percent more productive than the median non-subscriber. As of second quarter 2024, Guardian was on track to achieve its goal of 65 percent of the field force attaining minimum production requirements (MPR).
