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Time to praise brokers who are doing things right – Toni Smith

by: Toni Smith
  • 20/02/2014
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Time to praise brokers who are doing things right – Toni Smith
It might sound a silly question but how do you know you’re doing well? There are always plenty of people ready to be very vocal when things have gone wrong like your boss, the FCA, lenders, your network’s compliance officer, but how many people shout as loudly when you do it right?

Does your network put your name up in lights and shout about it? How about the company you work for?

There is increasing evidence that positive conversations motivate us to work harder than do critical ones. Of course we need to know when we’ve done something wrong so that we can do something about it, but we also need to know when we’ve done well.

After all, it can be easy to underestimate just how challenging it can be to achieve something like a protection sale. To a certain extent arranging a mortgage is simpler; people actively look for a house and know that they need the mortgage to buy it, but very few people wake up in the morning and decide that they want to buy critical illness cover.

Protection therefore needs advisers with the ability to persuade clients to take their advice; advisers who aren’t afraid of having the difficult conversations. I guess that’s why the number of protection products arranged per mortgage is dropping across the industry.

As an example, First Complete brokers achieve 30% more protection sales than they do mortgages by arranging family protection as well as just mortgage related insurances. That’s high for the industry but we feel the ratio could still be higher.

In the challenge to do what is right by the customer – even if they don’t always realise it at first – we should recognise those brokers who continually demonstrate a duty of care to their clients. Each company can do this but also each network. Recognising quality advice and business volume through individual awards plays a part in this as do simple things such as the ongoing publication of a league table.

This helps advisers to compare their performance with their peers and aspire to achieve the business quality and volume of those who are individually recognised.

It is always easy to criticise but can be more valuable to praise and every network should play its part in this.

Toni Smith is sales operations director at First Complete

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