Salene Hitchcock-Gear oversees teams handle all kinds of activities related to life insurance planning, serving people in all walks of life.
But Hitchcock-Gear, the president of Prudential Financial's Prudential Individual Life Insurance business, wants agents and advisors to remember that they have the power to protect ordinary families from disaster, and to help those families use cash-value life insurance to build little pots of wealth that can turn into something bigger.
"It's not something people really want to talk about," Hitchcock-Gear said Tuesday, during an interview in ThinkAdvisor's offices. "But there's an $11 trillion gap."
Hitchcock-Gear — who took over as the head of the original heart of Prudential's business in 2018 — is walking into news organization offices this month to support Life Insurance Awareness Month 2025, which started Monday, and to get reporters, consumers, policymakers, employers and anyone else who will listen thinking about life insurance.
She cited estimates that 100 million Americans are living in households without enough life insurance, or any life insurance.
For advisors, Hitchcock-Gear said, the bright side is that the market is wide open.
"There's a lot of need," she said. "You can see immediate opportunities."
What it means: The idea of serving high-net-worth clients may sound exciting, but Walmart and McDonald's created giant businesses by selling affordable staples to ordinary people.
Prudential and some of its biggest competitors started out as providers of industrial life insurance, with agents going to working-class customers' doors to collect the premiums every month.
Hitchcock-Gear wants advisors to recognize the value of reaching out to ordinary people to sell them life insurance.
Advisors' role: Hitchcock-Gear said she is especially interested in reaching financial professionals with roots outside the world of insurance, who might be uncomfortable with the idea of having to ask clients to go through underwriting exams or talk to them about death.
Getting advisors excited about educating the public about life insurance is the key to showing consumers that the product is something they can own, Hitchcock-Gear said.
"Most people think that life insurance is far more expensive than it really is," she said.
Few people know that they can use life insurance to accumulate cash value, and few know that they can buy life insurance policies with features, such as accelerated death benefits, that can help them cope with emergencies, she added.
Prudential's own studies show that people who work with financial professionals tend to have a much better understanding of how much life insurance costs and how they can use their policies, she said.
One of her favorite Prudential programs is Blueprints to Black Wealth, a company effort to reach out to consumers in an underserved sector by matching advisors with community organizations that can help the advisors connect with people who need good advice but don't know how to get it.
The nest egg challenge: Today, one challenge facing life insurance marketers is that the aging of the American population is creating an urgent need for retirement income planning solutions.
A few years ago, financial professionals who helped clients buy annuities were doing battle with financial talk show hosts who portrayed annuities as the source of all evil.
Today, annuities are so hot that some of the people discussing them appear to be unaware that they have any relationship with life insurance, or that owning life insurance is another way to increase financial security.
Hitchcock-Gear emphasized the importance of taking a steady, holistic approach to financial security.
"Everything gets a turn in the sun," she said. "But we should never forget about life insurance."
Salene Hitchcock-Gear, president of Prudential Financial's Prudential Individual Life Insurance business. Credit: Prudential
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