How do you market one business to customers, partners and investors at once?
Most companies struggle to persuade one audience. For 23 years, as chief marketing officer of The Lifeline Program, I helped build a business that depended on persuading three.
Policyholders needed to trust us with a deeply personal financial decision. Insurance professionals needed confidence referring their clients. Investors needed to believe the assets justified their capital. Each audience wanted something different. None could succeed without the others.
The answer was one brand each audience could believe for its own reasons, without pretending their interests were the same. My job wasn’t simply to market a company. It was to help build the market that made the company possible.
How do you get people to sell something they didn’t know they owned?
You start by teaching them it’s an asset. Most people had never heard that a life insurance policy could be sold while they were still alive. The job wasn’t advertising a product. It was changing what the public understood about life insurance, then making them confident enough to talk about a deeply personal decision.
In the early viatical years, during the AIDS crisis, that carried a responsibility most marketing never does. I was helping people understand a financial option at a time when illness, stigma and financial desperation often met. In 1994 I put up the first billboard for a viatical settlement company, in Fort Lauderdale, and placed our boards in high-traffic gay neighborhoods. Years later, from 2018 to 2024, I was president of 2Cancer.com, a gay-owned life and viatical settlement company based in Atlanta.
As the market moved toward retirees selling policies they no longer needed, the message had to move with it. In 2005 I proposed Betty White as The Lifeline Program’s brand spokesperson. She held that role for a decade and gave a misunderstood transaction the most trusted face in America. Read the full story of the Betty White decade.
The objective: turn an unfamiliar, frightening transaction into an understandable, credible choice.
How do you turn insurance agents into a distribution network?
You give them a professional reason to bring you their clients, and the knowledge to do it well. Agents, brokers and financial advisers already understood life insurance. Many didn’t know their clients’ policies could be sold, or how. And they were the gatekeepers: the policyholder trusted them first.
So I built broker recruitment and referral programs and agent training, and I hired and trained the staff who ran them. I also created a dedicated, white-glove agent support line. Our top producers got immediate, priority attention, because an agent who gets an answer today brings you the next client tomorrow.
The most powerful distribution tool wasn’t an advertisement. It was education. I developed a continuing education course on life settlements, and through Quest CE, an approved provider, it was approved as life insurance continuing education in every state. Licensed insurance agents could earn required professional education credits while discovering a financial option they could introduce to clients. We weren’t simply recruiting agents. We were building a knowledgeable national referral network.
The objective: be the settlement partner insurance professionals trusted with their clients.
How do you sell an American insurance asset to investors abroad?
You translate it twice: into their language, and into terms their financial system recognizes. Investors weren’t buying a feeling. They were weighing a specialized asset: what a policy costs to acquire, how life expectancy is underwritten, who pays the premiums, and the risk in not knowing when a death benefit pays out.
Our investors came from Germany, Latin America and Taiwan. My part was the marketing: the positioning, the materials and the translations. I hired both written and spoken translation: legal and marketing documents in German and Spanish, and for Taiwan, both Traditional Chinese and Mandarin, each one accurate enough for a lawyer and clear enough for a buyer. The U.S. life settlement market runs on its own legal and regulatory framework. The work was making it make sense to people who had never seen one.
The objective: be seen as a serious, disciplined source of insurance assets worth investing in.
What happens when your audiences want different things?
You stay honest with each of them. The policyholder wanted the highest offer. The investor wanted a disciplined price. The agent wanted a good outcome for the client and a process that worked.
| Audience | What they wanted | What we had to show them |
|---|---|---|
| Policyholder | A fair payment, security and dignity | Trust, transparency, a real option |
| Insurance professional | Client protection, fair compensation, reliability | Professionalism, a clear process, partnership |
| Investor | Sound returns and disciplined buying | Underwriting, governance, risk management |
One brand had to be credible to all three without pretending their interests matched.
A brand that tells each audience only what it wants to hear falls apart the first time two of them compare notes.
Why does this matter for your business?
More companies sell to more than one audience than realize it. A platform needs buyers and sellers. A franchise needs customers and franchisees. A health company needs patients, doctors and payers. A startup needs customers and capital.
Building a marketplace taught me that marketing isn’t simply about generating demand. It’s about creating the conditions in which an entire business can work.
When customers, distribution partners and capital providers all need different reasons to believe, the challenge isn’t producing more campaigns. It’s building one coherent strategy that earns trust across every audience. That’s the work I bring to businesses today as a fractional CMO.
What is a three-sided market?
A business that only works when three groups take part at once. In life settlements, that meant policyholders selling policies, insurance professionals referring them, and investors funding the purchases.
Who were The Lifeline Program’s audiences?
People selling life insurance policies they no longer needed, the agents and advisers who referred them, and investors in Germany, Latin America and Taiwan who supplied the capital.
How did Stephen E. Terrell market to insurance agents?
He built broker recruitment and referral programs and agent training, run by staff he hired and trained; a dedicated white-glove agent support line that gave top-producing agents immediate priority; and a continuing education course he wrote, approved as life insurance continuing education in every state through Quest CE.
What were viatical settlements?
The sale of a life insurance policy by someone who is seriously ill. In the early years, during the AIDS crisis, many sellers were people living with AIDS.
Can a fractional CMO help a business with more than one audience?
Yes. The job is one strategy that each audience can believe, with one person accountable for it. See Fractional CMO.