Have you got the right skills for protection advice?

Protection advice is something that has always divided advisers. While there are some protection specialists in the industry, many more prefer to focus on mortgages. All too often, protection is tacked on to the end of a mortgage sale and many in the industry lack the necessary skills to put protection at the heart of the advice process.

This is understandable in many ways: by their very nature, protection and mortgages ask different skills of an adviser. Mortgages require advisers to focus on the ‘hard facts’; the financials, interest rates and affordability. Protection advice, on the other hand requires a different skill, which is essentially to paint a picture of real life situations that could occur throughout customers’ life stages which are relevant to their individual circumstances.

Advisers need to ask difficult questions to get the best outcome for their customers. For example, how long will the customer’s employer continue to pay them if they are unable to work? If they did find themselves without a source of income, whether through illness or injury, how much would they need to support their family during this period? Do they have sufficient savings in place? It takes a certain amount of empathy in order to engage with customers on issues close to their heart.

But what can we do to address this? One answer is to help equip advisers to ensure they have the right skills in place. This needs to start with the recruitment and training of advisers who are going to be able to deliver an effective protection conversation for both customers and for their firms.

Clearly, firms need to have confidence in the ability of their advisers to approach this sensitively. Training advisers in these skills can be timely and expensive. However, ideas such as shadowing qualified advisers can be useful, as well as attending a wealth of provider training workshops that often can be delivered through online webinars without having to leave the office.

Of course, not all advisers want to sell protection and where this is the case, we should allow them to play to their strengths. But ignoring the protection issue altogether is not an option: we still need to support the customer through this journey. In these instances, advisers should consider referring these customers on, whether that is to a protection specialist within the firm, or an adviser elsewhere.

It is not excusable in this day and age to deny referring your customers to a protection specialist, purely due to your reservations about customer ownership. Find a firm that you can trust and has the same mind-set as you to ensure your customers are protected.