In my role as National Account Manager at Uinsure I spend much of my time talking to brokers and trying to make them understand the importance of adding protection products to their offering – both for their business’ sake and their clients.
One barrier I always face is that brokers believe insurance is too hard a sell, in comparison to what they will receive per sale. I don’t disagree that insurance can be a difficult product. Customers tend to want to cut corners, particularly when buying a property and dealing with the expense that comes with that, and often cutting corners means ignoring protection altogether.
As I always tell the brokers I speak to, there is no better way to illustrate the importance of protection than to use real life examples and we are currently approaching the anniversary of one particularly emotive one.
It’s now around a year since the floods that devastated Yorkshire. Few people will have forgotten the images we saw flashed across our TV screens of heartbroken families assessing the catastrophic damage to their properties. Sadder still were the stories of those families and businesses who had no protection in place. Indeed, these people are still trying to pick up the pieces 12 months on.
These terrible events show exactly why it is essential to have adequate protection in place and brokers often find that drawing on a real life – and recent – example like this suddenly brings home to clients how important insurance is.
Buying a new home is an exciting and happy time. Often borrowers don’t want to be saddled with thoughts of things going wrong, hence their ability to ignore insurance, but you need to make them understand the risks involved in doing this. All of that expense spent on buying a new home and getting it just as you want it could be destroyed in a matter of hours. And the cost of repairing it could run into the tens of thousands.
Let your clients see the reality of side stepping protection products. Believe me they’ll appreciate it should the worst ever happen.
Mark Hutchings
Uinsure
