A quote funnel I designed for PolicyAdvisor that does something no Canadian insurer's flow has done: it takes someone who came to buy the cheapest product — term life — teaches them what they're missing, and lets them assemble a comprehensive plan themselves. The cross-sell happens in the funnel, before an advisor ever speaks.
PolicyAdvisor
Designer + build (design & front-end)
Scenario-led · first in market
Shipped · live in production
They want term life. The naive funnel respects that literally: take the order, quote one number, hand the lead to an advisor and hope they can pivot the customer to whole life or critical illness on a cold call. That pivot almost never lands — the customer never asked for it and doesn't know what it is.
So I didn't design a term checkout. I designed the funnel around this exact moment: explain the gap term leaves behind, then give the customer a builder where they compose the comprehensive plan themselves. By the time an advisor speaks to them, the customer is the one bringing up whole life. Every screen below exists to serve that.
Nobody upgrades to a product they can't explain. So the funnel doesn't show one term quote — it shows the customer exactly what term leaves on the table, in their own words, side by side.
The actual coverage screen, live on policyadvisor.com. The customer who came for term sees term framed as "most affordable" with its gaps stated plainly — and the blended plan sitting in the middle as "most popular". The cross-sell is the layout, not a banner.
Three honest options beat one pushed product. The customer chooses up because they understood the gap — not because someone sold to them.
Pick the blended plan and you don't get quoted a number — you get a LEGO set. Total coverage, the term/whole split, critical illness, all live. This is the first hybrid builder of its kind in the Canadian market.
The real builder, running. It auto-plays once: starts at the balanced 90/10 recommendation, drags the split toward more whole life, then adds critical illness — the same interaction model that's live on the site. You can also grab the handle and the coverage slider yourself. Figures are illustrative of the real pricing model, not live telemetry.
A plan you assembled yourself is a plan you've already decided to buy. Authorship is the conversion mechanic — not persuasion.
Live on the site, customers who came for term now walk into advisor calls already asking about whole life and critical illness — because they built the comprehensive plan themselves and understood why each piece exists. The conversation the advisor used to fight for is the one the customer now starts.
A funnel sells one product. This had to make the customer want three.
The whole design came from refusing to start at a term checkout. The easy version of cross-sell is a louder pitch — a "recommended" badge, an upsell modal, an advisor script. A customer who said "just the cheapest term" reads every one of those instantly and pulls back.
The decision I'm proudest of is the smallest: the builder never argues. It explains the gap once, hands over the pieces, and shows the price the whole time. It looks like restraint. It's actually the entire thesis — persuasion done by the customer, to themselves, earns a conversion a sales script never will. That's why advisors are now closing near two policies per customer instead of fighting for one.