Before I joined this industry, I didn’t think much of people who won sales awards.

In my mind, an award meant you sold more, selling more meant you made more money from other people, and the ones who did it best were probably good at sweet-talking, with not much substance underneath.

So when I started, I didn’t care about awards at all.

I mention this because the Million Dollar Round Table, or MDRT, shows up on my own homepage, and I know how it can look from the outside. A recent Straits Times piece asked whether MDRT has become an overused honour. It made a fair point: the award measures how much business someone does, and says nothing about the quality of their advice.

I agree with that. I also think it leaves out the part that matters most.

What MDRT measures

MDRT is an international association of life insurance and financial services professionals. You qualify by reaching a set amount of business in a year. Court of the Table and Top of the Table are higher tiers, at three and six times the standard.

The Straits Times noted that the entry bar has barely moved in US dollar terms since 2001, which makes it lower in real terms, and that a large share of agents now hold it.

So an MDRT badge tells you that someone did a certain volume of business that year. On its own, it tells you nothing about whether that business was right for the people who bought it.

What changed my mind

In my first year, at a work convention, I got to know a senior consultant who had been in the industry for many years.

She was one of the most sincere people I had met: humble and full of care for her clients, always asking questions in training so she could understand things properly and advise in their interest, and she worked hard for them.

She was doing several times as much business as I was.

That forced me to rethink. If she was doing good work, and doing several times as much of it as me, then she was making several times the difference to the people she served.

Meanwhile, I had been feeling quite good about how sincere and client-focused I was, without seeing how much more good I could be doing.

When the number means something

Everything depends on one condition: whether the advice is good.

If someone is not doing right by clients, more business only means more harm: plans that do not fit, sold to people who trusted them. In that case my old view was correct, and a bigger award is a bigger warning sign.

When the advice is good, the same number reads very differently. It becomes a rough measure of the difference someone is making, whether that is helping more families or doing more for the families they already serve.

None of this is a knock on anyone with smaller awards, or none. Plenty of good consultants choose a smaller practice, and that is a perfectly good way to work. I was small-minded back then, assuming that doing a lot of business meant bad and doing little meant good. It took meeting her for me to see it differently.

I have qualified at MDRT level or above every year since 2013. I would rather you judged me on the advice.

How to judge the advice behind an award

If you are meeting someone with an award on their name card, a few questions tell you far more than the award does:

  1. Do they ask about your life before your policies? Your goals, your family and your work should shape the plan, and the products come after.
  2. Have they ever told you to keep what you already have? Good advice sometimes means buying less, or nothing.
  3. How do they decide what to recommend? Listen for whether they compare options for you, or start from one product.
  4. Can they explain the downside? Anyone recommending a plan should be able to tell you plainly what it does not do and what it costs.

Those answers will tell you what kind of work sits behind the award.

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