Playbooks/Term conversion
It pays like new permanent business, needs no new underwriting, and reaches a client who already trusts you. It is also invisible, sits behind a deadline buried in the contract, and cannot be recovered once it passes.
A term conversion exchanges a term policy for permanent coverage without new medical underwriting, under a right written into the term contract. The insured keeps the health class they originally qualified for.
That last part is the entire value. A client who was preferred at 35 and has since developed a condition that would decline them today can still obtain permanent coverage at their original class — but only while the window is open, and only if someone tells them it exists.
There is no single rule, which is most of why this gets missed. The contract can impose several limits at once, and the earliest one binds.
The consequence is that the real deadline is frequently years before the client, and sometimes the producer, expects it. A 30-year term bought at 45 under an attained-age-70 cap is convertible for 25 years, not 30. The same term bought at 50 is convertible for 20.
Check one policy now. The term conversion deadline calculator takes the issue date, term length and whichever limits the contract carries, and shows every limit's date with the binding one marked. It runs in your browser and nothing is uploaded.
Conversions are compensated as permanent business, so the commission is not a servicing fee, it is new-business economics on a client you already have. Set against a prospecting case, there is no acquisition cost, no underwriting delay, no medical exam to schedule, and no risk of a decline or a rating changing the plan halfway through.
It is also genuinely good advice much of the time, which matters for how the conversation goes. A client whose circumstances have changed, whose health has changed, or who now has an estate or business need that outlives a 20-year term is often better served by permanent coverage. The conversion privilege is the cheapest route to it they will ever have.
Not because anyone disagrees that it is valuable. Because of how the information is stored.
The deadline is not a field. It has to be derived from the issue date, the term length, the insured's date of birth and the contract's specific limits, and the limits differ by carrier and product and issue year. No agency management system computes it. Nothing goes red. There is no notification, because there is nothing to notify from.
Then it has to be re-derived, because the answer changes. A window that was six years away at the last review is inside ninety days now. A single pass through the book is a snapshot, and snapshots go stale.
And when the window closes, nothing happens. No alert, no report, no lapse notice. The option simply ceases to exist, and neither the client nor the agency ever finds out what it was worth.
You need four things per policy, and a standard export usually carries all of them: policy type or product, issue or effective date, term length (often readable from the product name if there is no separate field), and the insured's date of birth. Carrier and product name help, because the conversion limits are carrier-specific.
Our export guides cover pulling that out of the main agency management systems with the right columns intact.
Then, per policy: compute each limit the contract imposes, take the earliest, and sort by how soon it lands. The ones inside a year are the call list, and the ones already past are the lesson.
Do not open with the word conversion. It is jargon, it sounds like a sales manoeuvre, and it makes the client defensive before they know what is being offered.
Open with what is true and what expires. They have an option in their policy to move to permanent coverage with no medical exam and no health questions. It runs out on a specific date. After that date it cannot be reinstated. Most people, told exactly that, want to understand it, and the ones whose health has changed since they bought understand it immediately.
Give the deadline enough runway to be actionable. Ninety days before is a conversation. Two weeks before is a scramble that ends in a missed window and a client who is annoyed they were not told sooner.
One policy is a calculator. A book of several thousand is a standing process: the arithmetic across every row, re-run as dates move, ranked by the commission on the table, with outreach written and sent for each one before its window closes.
That is what Pendwell Life does. Send a spreadsheet export and the first scan comes back free with what is in your book, including how much of it is already inside a closing window. You can strip client names for that first look; the deadline arithmetic does not need them.
A term conversion exchanges a term life policy for permanent coverage under a right written into the term contract, without new medical underwriting. The insured keeps the health class they originally qualified for, which is the whole value of the option: someone whose health has since declined can obtain permanent coverage they could not otherwise buy.
If the policy carries a conversion privilege and the conversion window is still open, yes. That is what the privilege is: the right to convert without proving insurability again. Once the window closes the option is gone and the client has to qualify on health like any new applicant.
On whichever contract limit comes first: the end of the level term period, an attained-age cap such as 65 or 70, or a policy-year cap covering only the first several years of the term. Because the earliest limit binds, the window frequently closes well before the term itself ends.
No. Convertibility is a contract feature and the limits attached to it differ by carrier, product and issue year. Some products are convertible for the full level term, some only for the first few policy years, and some stop at a fixed attained age. Always confirm against the policy contract or the carrier.
It pays like new permanent business, requires no new underwriting, and reaches a client who already trusts the agency. It is also invisible: no system flags it, the deadline sits in the contract, and once it passes it cannot be recovered. That combination is why it is the largest opportunity sitting unworked in most life books.
Not advice. This page describes how these situations generally work. Policy terms, carrier rules and state regulations vary, and the governing document is always the contract. Confirm anything you act on with the carrier, and take compliance questions to your own counsel or compliance officer.
The scan is free and there's nothing to integrate. Tell us about your agency and we'll come back with who to call, why, and what it's worth.