You have probably already heard that protection sales numbers are predicted to be low in 2022.
The focus will be on remortgages with interest rates coming to an end, and the conversation for protection will go through the floor as it usually does when mortgages take priority.
This may sound a bit doom and gloom but, even if it is the case, it means that there are more opportunities to review your customers’ protection requirements.
We will still be talking about the pandemic and how it has affected nearly everyone in the past two years, so the protection message should be stronger now than ever.
Budgets may be tight with inflation and the increase in everyday living, but this also highlights that if a customer does not have any protection in place then they have no hope of finding the money to pay for everything if they are unable to work due to accident, illness or injury.
With the number of protection policies selling far less than the number of mortgages being taken out, we are still missing a massive proportion of our customers and not offering them the best outcomes.
While I understand that we cannot add more hours to an already busy 24, without sounding like a cliché, we can start working smarter not harder. We just need to be prepared to ask for a little help.
Frequent communication
The world has changed and so have your customers. We need to be speaking to them more regularly and, with all the means of communication we have at our fingertips, there really is no excuse anymore.
It has been reported that more than 60 per cent of younger customers prefer to have their financial advice in a face-to-face setting, but having the right technology in place can save you a lot of time when it comes to quoting and processing applications.
Gone are the days where you needed to quote on every insurer’s website, speak to their pre-sales teams and then answer 50 pages of medical questions.
We are now at a place where we can do all of those things on one platform, which can dramatically reduce our administrative time, freeing up more time to be spent with customers.
Some businesses have even gone one step further and incorporated an electronic fact find into their sales process, so the customer is in control of the data they provide.
This also means that, at their first meeting, the adviser is already aware of the hard facts so can focus on the soft facts and getting to know the customer, as well as offering relevant solutions with indicative pricing so there are no shocks once the policy has been underwritten.
