How do we change what ‘most people know’?

A good friend of mine is a painter. Every time we talk, I learn something about paint, or home maintenance, or building (he used to be a builder) that I never knew before. Sometimes what I thought I knew was completely wrong, but usually I just didn’t know. I never walked around feeling uncomfortable about that lack of knowledge or how it might be wrong.

If a client has at least decided to have a meeting with you, then they have already made the first admission that there might be more to this than meets the eye. Don’t be shy about helping them further down the road. Allowing them to understand that insurance advice is, genuinely, more complicated, and therefore they may need a hand to get it right, is a good thing. I don’t much like ‘selling on fear’ but you can get insurance wrong. Clients can easily get disclosure wrong. Clients can choose a poor product. Clients can misunderstand what ‘disability’ means. Clients can be baffled by what they are covered for when presented with documents that are dozens of pages long.

But in the same way clients can approach the subject of insurance with all sorts of expectations, we can too - unless we have a regular process for organising our thinking. A common question clients ask is, "What do other people buy?" It depends.

Other people like you, the insurance adviser?