A life insurance death benefit is paid by contract. The carrier looks at the beneficiary designation on file and pays the person named there. Your will is not part of that transaction. A form you filled out in 2011 and forgot about beats a will you signed last month, every time, and the carrier is not going to call you to check.
Two lines on that form do most of the work. The primary beneficiary is who gets paid. The contingent beneficiary is who gets paid if the primary is already gone. A lot of people fill in the first line and skip the second, and then the primary dies first and the money defaults to the estate. Now the death benefit is stuck in probate for months, it's visible to creditors, and the tax-free, private, fast payout you paid premiums for turns into a court file. Naming a contingent takes about ten seconds.
I don't like naming minor children directly. An insurance company can't hand a check to an eight-year-old, so the money waits while a court appoints someone to manage it, and that someone may not be the person you'd have picked. The usual fixes are a trust named as beneficiary or a custodial arrangement under your state's UTMA rules. I'm a licensed insurance broker, not an attorney, so the trust language itself is a conversation for one. The point here is that the default outcome is a courtroom, and it's avoidable with a phone call.
Then there are the updates nobody makes. Divorce is the big one, and some states revoke an ex-spouse designation automatically while others leave it standing, which means your ex may still be on the form. Remarriage, a new child, a named beneficiary who passed away, a business partner who left the company: each of those should trigger a look. If your policy has a role in a buy-sell agreement, the designation and the agreement have to say the same thing, and the business setup falls apart when they don't, and nobody finds out until the claim. This is the one item on the annual policy review that costs nothing and protects the most.
Don't go by memory, and don't go by what you think you wrote on the application. Call your carrier's service line or log into the policy portal and request a written beneficiary confirmation. Read the names and the percentages. If either one is wrong, they'll send you a change form, and it's usually one page.