Guns and smiles

Several years ago I had the privilege of working for a company that believed in giving people second chances. David was one of those people who had previously been jailed for armed robbery. Admittedly I was quite curious as this was a side of life that I had not explored. My curiosity soon overcame me and, casting aside any pretext of tact, I blurted out the obvious question to him: “So why did you rob the bank?” He responded by saying, “Well, that is where the money is.”

It took me a moment to recover before I responded by saying, “Yes, I get that, but guns get people all worked up.” With my response, he gave me an understanding look. It was the kind of look that a young boy gets when he goes to his friends and asks them to explain the facts of life. “You see,” he began with a sagely tone, “you get better service with a smile and a gun than you would with just a smile.”

Forgive and forget

In David’s case, being given a second chance paid off. From his humble beginnings in Soweto, he rose to become one of the best Information Technology (IT) managers. However, IT was not his only skill, he was also an outstanding presenter. He later explained that while the teller was packing the money bag at gun point he marvelled at her sense of enthusiasm for the task. It was then that he realised his gift as a motivational speaker.

In our subsequent discussions, David took me through his journey of learning how to motivate people without using any form of coercion that the state might frown upon. “Any ‘skollie’ can motivate people with a gun, but how do you motivate them without a gun? You must learn to see the problem itself as the gun you need,” he said.

Moral of the story

This advice obviously applies far beyond the scope of IT matters. Brokers, for example, need to contend with a host of problems. In addition to contending with compliance issues, staff issues, accounts queries, customer complaints and more compliance issues, brokers actually need to sell policies.

While we are discussing problems and misery in general, let us not forget that there are also lots of forms to fill out. From compliance forms, tax forms, tender forms, employment forms, to big forms, little forms, silly forms, arbitrary forms and let us not forget the insurers’ proposal forms. There is no hiding it… insurers have a thing for forms. Makes you wonder what they were like when they were babies. “Who is a cute baby? Hey, you spat out your dummy. No problem, Mommy brought you a form to chew on.”

So what would David have said?

He would have told me to see the misery, the forms and the compliance issues as a gun. However, he would also have told me to look at it not as a gun pointing at me but as one that I can use to motivate people and sell policies. So how do we use compliance and proposal forms to sell more policies? This is an opportunity that has not been missed by some of the more innovative insurers. They have been adapting their proposal forms into selling tools. These ‘smart’ forms not only ask questions, they do it in a way that exposes the client’s risks and offer solutions. They help the broker sell more policies and also reduce the broker’s professional indemnity exposure by highlighting and explaining the products on offer.

Commercial liability insurance in particular is an undersold market. There are glaring short-comings in the portfolios of most clients, and it is about time that insurers turned their proposal forms into sales tools.