This post is recounting the great conversation from the second session of our May Protection Forum, which focused on what the pandemic has taught the industry about protection sales.

100%

of attendees found the session relevant to their organisation

100%

of attendees found the session useful to their practice

We always keep in contact with our clients online. We never do any selling on the first meeting, we just talk to them informally and get the information we need.

Cover My Bubble’s website

Emma’s LinkedIn profile

Emma Astley:  We tend to do things a lot differently and we chat with our clients, especially on Instagram, and get to know them, engage with them and just build in that trust really. And that’s where we get all of our referrals from, is the online platforms and the recommendations. And so the client comes through. We arrange a chat and keep it quite informal and then we do the fact-find, take the basic information from them. We never do any selling there and then, I don’t believe in it. I know, and I might get hit for that, but I don’t believe in it. I think the best build in all of the options for the clients. We don’t talk about quotes either. We just talk about options, email it over to them, and then we just tweak it and have further discussions from them. And that, again, just builds that reassurance from the client and helps build the relationships. And they understand and they know why they need the insurance, what they’ve got, and that’s why they stay on the book a lot longer. But we also have a full 12 months where we keep in contact. We send them treats as a thank you and always still keep in chatting with them and stuff like that. So getting engaged with your clients, getting to know them is massive and has helped our business massively over the last 18 months.

Has Covid increased the amount of enquiries about protection?

I’ve been doing lots of educational videos for clients online, but they’re mostly interesting in family insurance.

Cover My Bubble’s website Emma’s LinkedIn profile
Emma Astley: No, I’d say no. It’s just, again, totally different. I’m doing a lot more educational videos giving people examples on what’s happened to recent clients and giving them an understanding of why they would need insurance. It’s all about that, educating clients and letting them know what is available, what to look out for, what would they need. And you know, Covid has caused people to maybe look into it. But actually, with our followers, it’s all about the family insurance, making sure each other is protected. The children are protected as well, especially in the critical illness side. And we’ll just look at that. We’ve built quite a good following online now where we are getting the referrals and engagement. But getting to know your clients is massive.

The key is staying in communication with clients and giving our advisers tools and helping them stay proactive.

Setul’s LinkedIn profile

Setul Mehta: I’m very much in the same camp as Emma just described our advice to the advisers that we look after is communicate with your clients regularly, engage with them regularly. We will have the tools. We saw them provide our trigger points. So we will send mailing lists or client lists when we know which of our mortgages are unprotected. We might know when clients are maybe going to turn 40 and you might want to have a conversation before just because it’s going to create a hike in price. We know that clients who haven’t got CIC but do have life. And that’s when we share that with the advisers saying, “look, you probably have this on your list anyway, but here’s some data to go and engage in that conversation.” So that’s a proactive from us. And then around it is the periphery stuff that talks about what are the tools you are using not from your non direct engagement. So we’ve got some protection animation videos that we would advise people to put on their Facebook and Twitter and their website, various different tools to keep that conversation of protection and its importance front of mind, but not overtly in a subtle way. And that will help people, friends of mine. So those 12 months have been all about communication. There’s no real change in that approach, nor should there be for the next twelve months or the twenty four months or thirty six months?

Keeping in contact is also how you continue to sell products and make referrals.

Roy Mcloughlin: It’s sort of Day One of financial adviser training school, hopefully. But keeping in touch with people who has several advantages. One, they don’t tend to lapse and go elsewhere. But the other commercial advantage is, you’re going to sell them other things as time goes by and or advise them. But this is how referrals work. And there’s lots of people on this call who have built fantastic businesses based on referrals. And if you keep in touch with your clients, they will keep in touch with you. I think the game changer to the earlier point is people’s attitude to our industry has changed in the last year or so, which is not as exploiting the situation that’s happened. It’s just the fact people understand protection in a way they’ve never done before because no one’s indestructible in the way they thought they were before. Let’s face it, the biggest objection to us guys was the indestructibility people thought they had. “It won’t happen to me,” we’ve all heard that a hundred times. Who can really honestly say that now about themselves or people close to them? So I think and several sort of grandiose people in our industry have called on us to keep in touch with people much more. And I think it’s a moral responsibility to do that. But there is also a commercial reason. And if people can’t remember what your name is and what you look like, they’re not going to refer you on to people. Whereas if you keep in touch with people and absolutely, we need to look at the different ways of social media and all of that sort of stuff, but it doesn’t sort of matter. Just keeping in touch with people is pretty basic stuff. So I think it’s in our interest. Plus also, I know there’s lots of people on this call who last year were forced to do lower sum assureds because of the ridiculous situation we’ve got with underwriting. And we’re certainly once GP surgeries are going to talk to us again, going to go back and increase those sum assureds, because any of us were we’re writing this up to free cover limits because we were hamstrung in doing that. So there’s that whole book to go back to. So I think it’s very, very encouraging.

Social media has totally changed our business, and we try to be available whenever our clients have the time to contact us.

Cover My Bubble’s website

Emma’s LinkedIn profile

Emma Astley: I think social media has just changed our business and changed everything that we do, the way we do it. We just adapted through these times. And you’re right. I never thought I’d say to a client “oh, just send me a DM or a WhatsApp.” And obviously we keep everything on our CRM system. So it has the full client journey there for security for them in the future. But it helps that quick reaction for them to sort out their insurance is what these younger families want. And, being available in the evenings, weekends, bank holidays, that’s what they want. If they want to talk when they put the kids to bed at nine o’clock at night, I would jump on the phone and speak to them. If they want to call in the weekends, I’m more than happy to do that. So that flexibility and getting to know your clients, we don’t buy any leads now. Everything is from social media because our clients know us, but our retentions are really, really low as well, which is something I’m really proud of. And another recent report from Royal London, it was under one percent. So that shows how the quality of business from these clients is just the way forward really for this industry.

It is about staying front of mind for the client.

Setul’s LinkedIn profile

Setul Mehta:

It just helps to keep you front of mind, and we’ve seen it work really, really well in mortgages rather than protection. But you get people tagged in and then you follow up off the back of that. You know, whether it’s Facebook, whether its Instagram, it doesn’t really matter. But we certainly seen it play its part in just keep in front of mind. And it’s done well. It’s pretty easy whether you get it done third party or yourself. But if you do it well, it really does create greater referrals and greater imbedding of your service.

But it’s the front of mind point, if you think of insurance or mortgages, you want to be thought of as that’s the company you want to go to and the company that are more often than not remembered, they’re the ones who are more active, especially with a younger client bank.

Large insurance companies can’t get away with the casual social media content advisers can.

Paul McDowell: Well, it’s just a question, because obviously when I sit this side of the fence working for a large insurance company, any content that we put out has to go through sign off and all sorts. But I see stuff on social media, TickTock videos, et cetera, which I think are great, but we wouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. And I don’t hear them going, with all the usual caveats that “your home could be repossessed,” et cetera, et cetera. So I just want to know what it’s like working on the networks out there and what the rules are, because it seems that we are certainly corralled by a set of rules that are very, very cautious approaches, as you’d expect from an insurance company. But just wondering what it’s like out the other side.

You have fewer issues with compliance if you focus in the concept and sowing the seed of the idea.

Roy McLoughlin: Yeah, just a quick point on compliance. Obviously, as you can imagine with Seven Families, we went and got some advice on this before we launched this because it was conceptual. We were talking about a concept. That’s why we didn’t have an issue, because we were sowing a seed. We were making people think about something and what was brilliant about Seven Families and became, too, because most of them are on this call up and say, seven or eight insurers not only took it onboard, but went out and advertised it on their own sites as well. So I think, you know, it’s sometimes we can hide behind compliance and compliance has got a rightful point. But when you talk about conceptual issues that’s not the case. And just a reminder, there is no intellectual property on Seven Families or so. Anyone can use any of our information.

It’s easier for advisers to broach difficult ideas with clients that they have relationships with and they can tailor the conversation to them.

Emma Thomson:

I think when advisers have got relationships with their clients, that its probably a lot easier for them to actually do hard messages because they can kind of just assess the tone and assess how the client can potentially accept that message because they’re going to know why that client is interested in protection in the first place. Well, they might not have been interested in protection the first place, the adviser might have actually talked about it for the very first time with them. But a lot of people will be contacting advisers because they’ve had something terrible in their lives. They’ve lost a loved one. They’ve seen somebody that they know that’s actually been able to claim.

So with those clients, you’re probably more likely to have a far more honest and open conversation about the risks compared to somebody that’s never considered protection before, where advisers have got to be perhaps a little bit more careful about how to approach the subject so that they’re not putting people off. And, lots of people still refer to the Widow’s Story, which is obviously a very old approach, but it was very direct. And, Seven Families had its own directness. And, there are lots of different ways to do it. But ultimately, you’ve just got to tailor it to the clients in question. And I think that’s why it is difficult for insurers when they are developing just a broad brush advertising campaign, because for some clients, that is going to work but for a lot of consumers, that’s just going to put them off. And it’s really difficult, which is why the value of advice really comes in, because advisers can tailor it.

It’s all about having that relationship and our clients trusting us.

We’ve learned to be more flexible and adaptable over Covid.

Cover My Bubble’s website Emma’s LinkedIn profile

Emma Astley:

I think I agree with Emma, but it’s all about that relationship building, really. And the client. We have a lot coming through with BMI at the moment, unfortunately. But it’s easy for us to actually have that conversation with them to say, “because your BMI is at forty one point nine or at forty three, you know, we can’t get you critical illness. So we can do this or we can do that.” But they understand because they know us. And it’s just such an easy journey to explain even that you’ve been rated 200 percent because of this, but here they are, here’s three options for you where we can tweak it to them, make it affordable. But no, you’re right, it’s just it makes our job a lot easier once we get to know our clients and they trust what we’re doing for them, really.

We’ve always been telephone based in a way, but the way we have changed things through Covid is being available for our clients when it’s more suitable for them and being able to chat on Instagram or on WhatsApp or email or a quick call with the kids in the background, which I do love, I’m chatting with the kids as well. And just being flexible, being flexible, personal, and available when they need to speak is what’s changed things really for us. You’ve just got to adapt. I know that’s not easy for some companies. It’s me I can jump on at home and it’s easier for me probably to do the process that we’re doing. And it’s not really available for some companies. But, you know, that’s what we’re doing that’s been changed.

How people are employed is changing, and lots of people will have multiple jobs going forward.

Roy Mcloughlin: I think what’s great about, and this call is a great example, is that there is much more collusion going on between insurers and advisers. And I think what we need to think about is what the post-Covid world is going to look like. And I think we need to be aware of the fact that people will have different types of work, they will probably be having two jobs, a lot of people, and they will probably be getting paid in a different way. So you talk to any employment lawyer, they’ll tell you that the way we we’re going to be employed is going to be different going forward. So and I imagine insurers are all doing this already, but I think we need to adjust policies to probably be more flexible than they’ve been in the past. I think particularly there’s going to be more and more self-employed people out there. And one person companies and I think particularly on the IP side, we need to do something there. But I think flexibility is probably the best example. And if all the signs are right and it’s going to be lots of people with two jobs going forward, actually we need to make sure that particularly Income Protection is fit for purpose so that people are covered across.