Let's Talk IP

Bonus Episode! Matt's Top Tips Supercut - #2

• Income Protection Task Force • Season 1 • Episode 10

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In this special mid-season bonus episode, guest host producer Stevie is here to showcase Matt's Top Tips from Season 1, episodes 5 to 8. These episodes are jam-packed with excellent advice from regular hosts and "The Protection Coach" Matthew Chapman, so get stuck in and caught up ahead of Season 2.

We are also asking for your thoughts for season 2 as well, as we want to make the podcast the best it can be for season 2, please fill out this survey to support us, it all helps!

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Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to this second bonus episode of let's Talk Income Protection. I'm your host, stevie Arnoldi, producer of let's Talk IP, and in this episode in our season break, we have our final super cut of Matt's top tips. Right before we get into that and ahead of season two, we want to improve the podcast and we are asking for your help in doing this. We want it to serve our listeners and make it as engaging as possible. We have a survey link in the episode description. Please click that, fill it out and let us know your thoughts. It really does help, and we've also simplified the way you can communicate with us too. We want season two to be truly interactive, where you can get your burning questions answered, continue conversations and add your insight, or even disagree with matt entirely for a healthy debate. We would love it. We welcome all it, so please do click on the link in the episode description that says send us a message. It will open up an SMS messaging app on your phone and then you can type away. Just don't forget to give us your name, unless you want to stay anonymous, of course.

Speaker 1:

Right on to today's episode. As I said on the previous episode, this is going to be gold. So grab a pen and paper, take some notes as we check out the top tips from episode five and six of the podcast. When Matt discussed bringing up protection at the earliest opportunity, selling the problem, not the solution, asking the question, walk me through income stress testing with clients and embedding it into the advice process, leaning into value and continuous professional development. Tons there, so I hope you enjoy Take it away, matt. Tons there, so I hope you enjoy. Take it away, matt. Yo, matt, give me them tab.

Speaker 2:

Tips of the week okay, so let's just recap what we learned from Julie Botha and let me talk to you about some of the tips that I want to offer you as to how you can go out there, take what she's taught today and make practical changes to your conversations when you're bringing up IP Right. Number one this is really really important Bring it up at the first available opportunity, as Julie was talking about. It's how you set the scene, how you can overcome this idea that you're trying to sell them something or do something untoward, and you can demonstrate what your intentions are and how pure they are. If you bring up the first available opportunity and you don't try and covertly do it later, the clients can be more receptive to what you're going to say because you're emphasizing the importance of it and not in a salesy way. Number two she talked about selling the problem. Now, here's a way that I do it with my clients that has worked incredibly well. She talked about this idea, didn't she? About thinking off into traditions, getting the clients to have that moment where they've got to use their brainpower and they can recognize the need for income protection.

Speaker 2:

There's a question that I tend to ask clients if I'm noticing they're not fully engaged or they don't really understand the problem. I ask the question what's the minimum level of income that you need every single month to maintain a lifestyle that's acceptable to you? So try a question like that or something similar, because what you're going to do when you ask that question is force the client to imagine a life without income and they're going to physically have to compute what level of minimum income they need each month to maintain a lifestyle that they're happy with. Now why is this important? One, it creates the problem In their mind. They have to focus on a life without income and understand what that would look like. Two, they have to calculate a figure that they know is the minimum they need every single month to be acceptable. And then, three, once they tell you what that number is, you know you've got them bought in because at this point they've given you a figure that they can't then deny or run away from. That you can use to make that recommendation and ensure they've got that income they need. And then, finally, the other way to do it and again it's one of those moments where you can get the client thinking is to ask the question walk me through how sustainable your income is. So I often get advisors to do this at affordability stage.

Speaker 2:

Now, going back to what Julie said, this idea of walk me through as a more passive way to get the client engaged in the conversation and more involved, asking the question walk me through how sustainable your income is is going to drive a positive outcome. Why? Because the client's going to be forced to give you a response. Now, that response might be well, I don't know what do you mean. Or I earn money from my job. No, sorry, let me explain. What I mean is, when you can't go to work, does your income continue and if it does, for how long?

Speaker 2:

Now, at that point, they then have to walk you back through that situation and you're going to identify the clear gaps in their income protection needs. So, that is, even if they get good sick pay, you know that it's not going to be enough to manage them for the rest of their working life or even for the end of the mortgage term. And so you've got this opportunity like Julie was was talking about to bring it to life and create that need for the client. Now, what we learned from Julie was phenomenal, and I think you should all take a lot of those learnings away and apply them to what you're doing, and hopefully these tips have given you some practical ways in which you can embed what she's talking about into those conversations you've got with your customers. The key for me one was this idea of avoiding persuasion resistance, so hopefully those techniques I've just shown you will help you overcome that issue of persuasion resistance. Try it today and see how you get on, guys, matt's top tips of the week Right.

Speaker 2:

So today we're going to bash through these pretty quickly and I'll tell you what I thought. The interview with Sarah was brilliant. There is someone who's very much after the same kind of things as I am and behaves in the same kind of way that I do. One thing that she said was bring it up at the beginning and embed it into the advice process, and it's the same kind of question that Dylan was asking, which is well. What do you do when you're arranging a mortgage and the client then turns around and says, no, I'm not interested in the protection. So how can we embed it into the advice process?

Speaker 2:

One tip that I want to share with you is about an income stress test. Now, this is one that I used a lot when I was doing mortgage work and when I was trying to get clients engaged with protection early on. When you tell the client what you think they can borrow based on their income, their expenditure and their current situation, you can then talk about this idea of right now we know that and we're using this income to go and get you a mortgage. I need to carry out an income stress test just to assess how sustainable the income we're using to get your mortgages, then say to them how sustainable is it? And they're going to say what do you mean? And you can then explain what you're trying to say is, if we're looking for a mortgage of 360 months, for example, and we can see you've got six months of sick pay, what about the remainder of those months? And then you let them come back and say I don't know, do you get sick pay? You can ask these types of questions and from there you can both determine that actually the very income and deposit that's being used to obtain the mortgage is probably quite vulnerable, and then you can be very clear about the fact that you need to arrange income protection to make sure that the income and the deposit they're using towards getting their mortgage is sustainable. So that's a great way of introducing and embedding it.

Speaker 2:

So another great way is to lean into the value, and we talked this idea about calculating what percentage someone's prepared to spend on their mortgage versus what someone's prepared to spend on their financial resilience, and you heard the example we used earlier about that firm I was talking about, where they compared what someone's spending on their mortgage versus what they're spending on protection. So you could try that. In fact, you can go one stage further. This is a great tip for all of you. It's something I've done regularly that in fact, you can go one stage further. This is a great tip for all of you and it's something I've done regularly.

Speaker 2:

When you work out the kind of blue sky scenario you want your client to take for protection, why not calculate what that premium is a percentage of what they earn each year and you present it to them that way? And you can go one stage further and say, once you know what that percentage is, listen, if I could guarantee your income for the rest of your life, if I could make sure that you always have money in the bank, if it could make sure you could clear the mortgage and all these types of things, and you summarize in sort of aspirational language all the things you're looking to arrange with their protection and say, but it means you'd have to take a 2% pay cut in your income. Would you do that? Now most people would say yes, because if I said to anyone listening today, would you take a minute ago about this idea that if you buy lottery tickets, why are you buying a lottery ticket? Well, you're buying a lottery ticket because you want to win millions, yeah, great, why? Well, it's not for the boat or the car or the Lamborghini. It's really because you want the security that will bring you. Most people play the lottery not because they want the money to buy material things, but because they want the feeling of knowing they don't need to worry about money again. So, again, you can lean into that aspirational concept of people and then present it in such a way that it seems highly valuable. Ie, would you guarantee your income for the rest of your life if it meant a 2% pay cut in your earnings? Yeah, of course, I would Well. Look, I can do that for this much with this. And so it's just relating it back to protection again.

Speaker 2:

And also, we talked, didn't we, about continuous professional development.

Speaker 2:

I think for me, this is really, really important, and I think Sarah summed it up beautifully this idea that you should continuously develop yourself and learn and expand your knowledge.

Speaker 2:

It goes way beyond the firm that you operate in, and I think there's a danger that we all sit within our silos and echo chambers and it's really important to go outside of that. So one thing I did was seek support and help from a protection buddy. I made friends with someone outside of my organization and I spent time with them talking through the different solutions and things I was looking at doing. And then they did the same with me and I learned a lot from them and they learned lots from me, and it just meant that we weren't sitting inside an echo chamber and we weren't just consuming the kind of knowledge that was already in the organization chamber and we weren't just consuming the kind of knowledge that was already in the organization. It made me a much better advisor. So those would be my top tips, guys. It's all about embedding into the advice process, embedding value for your clients and investing in your own professional development.

Speaker 1:

Now next up, we have Matt's top tips from our final episodes of season one, from episode seven and eight, where Matt discussed simplification, the use of stories a big plug here to our seven family stories that you can find on the IPTF website, iptfcouk prioritization, listening and learning from your BDMs. Knowledge is power and changing your mindset. Over to you, matt. Yo, matt, give me the top tips of the week.

Speaker 2:

Go on, then, but only because you are so nicely Right. Today we're going to focus on three key things that came out of the conversation with Oli, and I thought it was a really fascinating dive into what they're doing at New Homes, and I thought I'd take some of what they're doing and turn that into some top tips for other advisors to assimilate and hopefully implement in their own businesses. The first thing was around simplification, and I think what Ollie said is absolutely true. We do tend to see and particularly when I'm coaching advisors they tend to go in straight for complexity, product technical elements, limitations, exclusions, how the process works, what the product is, what it's called, and I think actually they do so before they've even got the client to understand the benefits of the plan or why it's so important in the first place. You're focusing on product, not on solution, and so my advice there is simplification, because in order to create that need in the first place and in order to explain the benefits and the value of the policy, we need to try and use the simplest examples we possibly can.

Speaker 2:

Now, as you heard in the interview, I referenced income protection as being like your own private furlough scheme, or you could refer to it as permanent sick pay cover or whatever you want to call it, or lifestyle protector. It doesn't really matter what you use. You need to try and find simple ways to bring it to life and explain it to customers so they can get their head around why it's so important. And often one of the clever ways of doing this is to use simple examples of how the benefit would be used. Feed the kids, keep the lights on, keep a roof over your head all those things that actually drive and motivate people to take action the reason they very much get up and go to work in the first place.

Speaker 2:

When we do that, we're far more likely to get the client engaged. So use simple examples first, get the clients engaged and then, once you've got that commitment to go forward is when you can get into the technical elements of the product and explain exactly how it works. Otherwise, you're just going to bamboozle them, confuse them and they're going to feel like they're being sold to no-transcript. So if you can't find examples from you or your client to use, why not lead into the seven family stories and demonstrate the importance of either having or not having income protection, as the case may be, using those practical examples and even share those videos with your customers so they can see the impact of it.

Speaker 2:

Matt's top tips of the week. I've took a lot today in terms of my tips from what Andrew and I were talking about, and I think one thing I really want to cover off is this idea that you should listen and learn from your BDMs. Providers are an amazing resource of information, so you need to use that resource to its fullest potential. Now, obviously, you need to understand the product USPs and you need to understand you know how the product works, but there's also a lot of nuances out there, you know. We even heard the question from Anthony earlier about well, so what else can you use to differentiate one provider to another? Well, the truth of it is there's often underwriting nuances that would mean one product is far more suitable for your customer than anything else. So Andrew mentioned he finds gaps, those little areas where a particular provider could help offer better cover or outcomes to specific clients. So use your BDMs as resources to help you understand that. Now, one tip I've always said to advisors I'm coaching is when you get a BDM to come out and see you say, listen, in all honesty, I'm not that interested in the specific USPs of your product, right, because, quite frankly, they're much of a muchness. What you want from that BDM is help to understand how you can place more business, what specific things they do that no one else does is going to enable you to place business. So what specific type of client are you after? And get the BDM to help you, because that's going to really give you a positive matrix and framework of knowing where to place your business, and that means you can get more cover on risk, more clients protected and more revenue into the business. Now, often, believe it or not, bdms have amazing sales and coaching tips. Think about it. They're going around the country meeting with loads of different advisors and often they pick up and absorb all these amazing sales tips, coaching skills. So, by all means, lean into them as well and say look, I really need help with this, how can I have better conversations? What can I say? How do I overcome this objection? And they'll usually have a great, great armor of resources that you can use.

Speaker 2:

The second thing I wanted to talk about was this idea that knowledge is power. Now we at the IPTF, we've got a huge amount of resources, so please utilize it. Just access the information, ask for help, speak to your colleagues, access the IPTF resources, because you just need to do anything that's going to increase your knowledge of income protection and how it works, because Andrew was saying the biggest difference for him was when he really understood the product. It became so much easier and initially when he started out he thought it was very complicated. But actually it isn't that complicated. And off the back of that there's a couple of things I wanted to say.

Speaker 2:

One keep it super simple. Conceptually, just understand what income protection does. Keep it super simple. You can always get into the policy particulars and the specific conditions and things later on, but at the early stages just keep it super simple with you and the clients so you can get them bought in conceptually. If you just jump in straight into the technicalities, the client's going to feel like they're being sold to, it's going to be fairly overwhelming and they're just going to be like no, not interested. So initially just keep that concept really simple. Kiss, keep it super simple.

Speaker 2:

The second thing is change your mindset around IP. Right, because it's not complicated. It's not complicated at all, it's essential. And as soon as you change your mindset and you get out of your own way because you may be the biggest barrier to your own IP sales without even realizing it, purely because you're assuming it's complicated or you don't understand it. So either get support, get information, learn about it, get help from someone else or just start thinking differently about it. And you also mentioned this idea of being comfortable with being uncomfortable right, and I think that's really important. Naturally, these are not pleasant subject matters, but they are important to discuss because if you don't have that conversation with the customer, who will? Right? So you've got to see the importance of your role, take it seriously, be far more proud of what you do and the difference that you can make to people.

Speaker 2:

And then, finally, my top tip and this is probably the most important one I'm going to tell you right now is this idea of prioritizing correctly.

Speaker 2:

I did a post about this recently where I talked about how it was game changing for me to understand how to prioritize my recommendations properly, because it meant I could go into every conversation and move through the recommendations with confidence and clarity, going through the same process with every customer and simply asking right, this is number one priority.

Speaker 2:

Do you have this, do you need this? Bang, bang, bang, bang bang. Use that model that you build, that prioritization model, to educate customers around the importance of priorities, which cover should come first and why. Because that will give you confidence and make you seem far more knowledgeable. Now naturally and this is wonderful to know income protection is going to feature at the top of everyone's list because it is pretty much for most cases, the most important, the most essential cover anyone can have. But having that knowledge and being able to prioritize correctly will make such a difference to your conversations because you'll enter them with far more confidence and the clients will see that There'll be subtle changes to your tone of voice and the way you carry yourself and they'll be far more inclined to take your recommendations.

Speaker 1:

So that's it. That's all the top tips from season one distilled into two bonus episodes. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did and you want to ask Matt a question ahead of season two, or even debate him about something on today's show, click that send us a message button at the top of the episode description and fire away. Just remember to leave your name if you'd like to. Just remember to leave your name if you'd like to.

Speaker 1:

Now, just to finish up, there are loads of fantastic resources at your fingertips on the IPTF's new website. Just go to iptfcouk and check out everything that's there. I highly recommend going and looking at the seven family stories. There's some brilliant case studies there that you can use in your client conversations. A brilliant piece of resource. Please do go check it out. We're going to be updating the website as often as possible, so please do bookmark it and keep checking out and coming back to see what goodies are there. Now let's talk. Income protection is produced by c studios. Executive producers are joe miller andrewibley and Vicky Churcher, and I'm Stevie Arnoldi. Empower yourselves, empower your clients and let's talk IP.