Amid falling protection sales and a growing protection gap, Pink and Aviva have teamed up to provide a protection training academy for mortgage advisers and people new to the industry. Mark Graves explains why.
It is simply not the case that you can ‘tell’ a mortgage adviser to sell protection and they can just bolt it on to what they do. The first fundamental difference is that people ‘buy’ a mortgage but they need to be ‘sold’ a protection policy.
If someone has just found a new house they are excited; they want to take out a mortgage so they can buy the house that they want. On the other hand, people rarely go to a financial adviser excited because they woke up that morning wanting some life assurance or a critical illness policy.
The client is often unwilling to even face up to why they might need protection. For a mortgage adviser therefore this is a very different sale; this is all about dealing with difficult conversations, talking about uncomfortable subjects and overcoming objections.
Often a client needs to be persuaded to take out protection or life assurance and to make sure that it has been placed in trust.
The client’s body language is key and so, therefore, is the adviser’s ability to read this. Being in someone’s house and knowing whether to ask a client to turn the television down or off, whether to put the dog in another room and knowing which signals indicate when a client is finally ready to buy are vital – because any adviser trying to close when the client is not yet at that stage is heading for a fall.
Read the triggers
Being able to read the triggers is a vital skill when selling protection. No-one likes to dwell on poor health or mortality but by denying illness is even a possibility, people avoid thinking about what would happen to their loved ones should the unexpected happen.
Too many families assume that someone else will look after their family if they were not there to provide for them, but it is crucially important that people take steps to protect themselves and their families.
The reality is that people need to think about how they would pay for their accommodation, their food, and all the other costs of living, should they suddenly lose an income and the Pink/Aviva protection academy will help advisers to have those difficult conversations and to get to the heart of what is of most concern to a client and what drives their decision making.
Another important aspect missing from many sales teams now is the opportunity to get together with other advisers on a regular basis, to compare notes and discuss their experiences. Before the days of computers this would have happened on a weekly basis and had a hugely motivational effect.
