The sky's the limit for producers who do business with the highest degree of personal honesty and professional integrity — and who combine these characteristics with the know-how, can-do skills and will-do attitudes requisite to success in any marketing and sales career. If people in your markets see you as a knowledgeable, true-blue professional, your reputation will precede you in all the most favorable ways. But reputation is a two-way street, with traffic moving in both directions.

Depending on the nature and severity of an offense, the penalty for dropping the ball in these areas can include fines, imprisonment, suspension or termination of your insurance license, cancellation of your contract, professional liability, public humiliation, and (predictably) personal and family crises.

Psychologists tell us that the best way to influence behavior is to focus on consequences. Ordinarily, consequences such as professional and personal ruin will keep anyone with a right-from-wrong problem from cutting corners. However, as demonstrated throughout this unit, insurance and other financial products are such important, long-term purchases that promises made must be promises kept. And, where levels of risk are involved (as in variable life insurance products and securities), these risks must be assumed by fully informed clients with their eyes open.

Marketing, selling, and earning client relationships is challenging enough without the risk of showing up in the morning paper. Pushing the legal/ethical envelope doesn't make sense in our litigious society, with consumers filing lawsuits over almost any infraction (real or perceived), journalists trying to build reputations by "exposing" the financial services industry (or any other that's handy), and certain politicians and officials demonizing an industry some people have already been programmed to distrust.

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Ohio National is not affiliated with, nor does it endorse or sponsor, any particular prospecting, marketing or selling system.

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