people to New York right that day to
make sure survivor relations teams could
make contacts with families who had lost
someone in the attacks.
Another spoke of how working for USAA
fulfilled his own need to try to live up to the
legacy of his grandfather, who had fought
in World War II. Stories like these all exemplified how USAA’s culture is so out in the
open, that those who come to work here
are either down with the program or they
won’t bother to sign on. Put another way,
USAA seems like a cause surrounded by a
business rather than a business searching
for a cause. Most enterprises see themselves as the first, but are in fact the second. It is a distinction USAA is proudly
aware of.
USAA is a cause surrounded by
a business rather than a business
searching for a cause.
Wounded Warrior
The following morning, I met with life sales
advisor Kenny Sutton, a retired combat me-teorologist with the Air Force who served
attached to the U.S. Army in Afghanistan
and Iraq. He was seriously wounded in
combat after insurgents ambushed his convoy. While trying to drive and shoot at the
same time, he accidentally rammed his
Toyota Hilux into a boulder and was ejected through the windshield. He woke up to
insurgents stripping the gear from his body,
and to the sounds of his unit mates coming to his rescue. He was sent to recover at
Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam
Houston in San Antonio.
In need of a job now that he was retired,
he took a position as a life sales advisor
with USAA, where his own military experience gives him an edge in selling to members. To prove it, he showed me a picture
he keeps of himself being carried off the
battlefield in Iraq. Though he was a USAA
member at the time of his wounding, he
did not upgrade his life coverage to include
a traumatic injury rider, which for another
few dollars a month provides an instant
$25,000 payout to wounded soldiers. The
stress of Kenny’s recovery, both mental
and financial, almost destroyed his family.
That extra $25K would have made a world
of difference to him.
“I show this picture to people and I say,
don’t end up like I almost did,” he says,
though sometimes his own customers get
scared straight on their own. He spoke of
one call he took from an infantryman in
forward deployment in Iraq, who wanted
to update his car insurance. During the
call, Kenny heard the base come under
insurgent small arms fire—which instantly
reminded him of his own combat expe-
rience—before the call cut off. For three
days he tried to determine the safety of
the member until the member called him
back, reporting that he was okay, and that
if Kenny didn’t mind, he’d like to go over
his life insurance options, too.
Hearts and Minds
My visit ended with another meeting with
Eric Smith, this time for a one-on-one
interview. After a day and a half of cultural immersion, it was time to discuss
the practical challenges of serving a military client base, of figuring out the worst
individual life market since World War II
and building a bigger, better USAA. The
first point I touched on was the company’s
rejection of an agency distribution model.
USAA makes the vast majority of its sales
through cold calls, but the number of app
sales through iPhones, the iPad and the
Web is growing fast.
For Smith, agency sales represent a fundamental break with the whole point of a
group like USAA. Incentivized by commissions, agents may speak of servicing their
clients’ needs, but ultimately, that is just
a means to the end of moving product,
Smith says. With the agency world in turmoil because of low sales and regulatory
