If a client wants to buy a house it’s easy to see why they want to take out a mortgage, but what about all their other financial purchases?
Confidence plays a big part. The market has picked up hugely in the past three months since pronouncements that lenders are lending again and people can now get a mortgage. In actuality, not much has changed, but consumers feel more confident so have started to move house and remortgage in a way that they wouldn’t consider six months ago.
One question is whether people are becoming over confident where mortgage rates are concerned? The Bank of England under Mark Carney’s leadership is professing a new era of openness and transparency and has announced that interest rates will not rise in the immediate future, but as the economy picks up they will surely rise.
Many people who are sitting confidently on a standard variable rate would be hit very hard were rates to rise, so with record low fixed rates now could well be the time for clients who couldn’t cope with a rate rise to switch to a fixed rate.
If we can fully understand our clients’ motivators then we can understand how confident they are about the future and what their hopes and fears for themselves and their families really are, which is key to selling the right protection products. It’s also key to a lasting client relationship.
Governments prepare their statements very carefully to manage confidence – as witnessed in the budget this year and in the US Federal Reserve’s announcement that it ‘may, at some point’ reduce monetary stimulus. They calculate what they say carefully to help influence and manage people’s behaviour.
Do we do the same with our clients? Do we bear their key motivators in mind when we communicate, not just to sell more but to truly understand why they are making the decisions they are and manage their confidence? If we take the effort to understand we may be surprised at just how much more influence we have.
Toni Smith is sales operations director at First Complete
