OpinionFeb 20 2017

Make it a habit

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I didn’t make any New Year resolutions this year, but I was full of the usual good intentions.

Eat better, drink less, exercise more... Some of the bigger ideas I had about cutting out sugar completely, or ‘clean’ eating never even started so at least I can’t say I failed.

I just didn’t quite start.  

I suspect that’s like quite a few of us when it comes to good intentions at the beginning of a new year. Ideas that quickly dissolve as the pattern of everyday life whirrs back into action.

The grand ideas of making the most of your evenings by enrolling in a night class, exercising at least five days a week or even taking freshly prepared food in to work for lunch can seem just too difficult to keep up with.

We go back to work, the kids get back to school, and life carries on pretty much where we left off. But it doesn’t have to be a big change to make a difference.

Getting off the bus one stop early and walking home will increase the number of steps you take; switching your regular latte for an Americano reduces the number of calories. These are small but manageable changes that you can quickly turn into good habits.

So what if it’s February and we’re already two months into the year? 

As luck would have it, the same theory applies at work. Making a small change to the way you do things could make a big difference to your clients, and your bottom line. It doesn’t have to be a laborious new process; just a small change to the way you do things could start to add up to a big difference.

I’m sure many of us will have gone back to work at the start of January reinvigorated after the short break. You may have had time to think about the year ahead and ways to make 2017 more productive and profitable. But how are you going to do that?

The obvious answer seems to be to find new customers, but what about those you already have on your books?

Do you go back to existing customers to find out if their protection needs have changed? Or, do you make contact with customers you have secured a mortgage for in the past to check if they have enough protection?

Contacting one or two people from your existing client base each week doesn’t need to be difficult, or time consuming, and we’ve got the tools to help you.

We have a section on our website dedicated to approach letters. There’s a range of letters to choose from covering the scenarios you’re most likely to come across.

For example, those who didn’t want to buy protection when they took out their mortgage, a letter for those who have no critical illness cover or income protection and a range for business protection customers. 

All the material has been pre-complied which means that you can just cut and paste the text onto your own email or letterhead, assuming your own compliance team approves.

By contacting just one or two customers each week, it shouldn’t add too much to your workload but could create more new business in the year ahead.

If we’re honest, protection is rarely high on a customer’s to-do list. And when you do get a customer through the door, you’ll probably hear every objection under the sun when you ask them about their protection needs – don’t need it, can’t afford it, the state will provide…

And these objections can sometimes be difficult to overcome without evidence to hand. This can sometimes lead to a lost sale or selling less protection than you know the customer really needs.

Providers offer a range of tailored marketing tools to give you a wide range of marketing material to help make the protection sale easier.

These include sales aids and interactive forms to demonstrate the real benefit of taking out a protection plan and how far just a small amount of protection can go.

One of our sales aids shows how to create a bit of wriggle room in your client’s budget by sacrificing just one or two of their ‘everyday luxuries’ like a takeaway coffee.

Some systems let you add your own logo and contact details to make the material your own. You could use it when discussing protection with a client face-to-face, or you could print them off to include with one of the approach letters.

You could embrace social media and share them on Facebook or Twitter too. So what if it’s February and we’re already two months into the year?

It’s never too late to pick up a good habit so don’t make contacting existing customers a failed good intention this year.

Sarah Scott is marketing consultant for Royal London