Q&A with...
Regional sales director, Michelle Draycott, speaks to Jo Culley, sales director and Rob Brookes, sales manager at Shropshire-based nine-branch estate agency DB Roberts.
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very successful AR of MAB for over four years, DB Roberts has an average of over £160k of banked income per adviser, and 2013 was their best year yet.
Q: You have both been a part of an excellent team here at DB Roberts. How is your MAB business supported by the estate agency staff? Is a strong lead generation key to any successful business?
A: There’s no secret recipe to getting the best out of an estate agency team when it comes to FS, but over the years we’ve found that the key factors are integration, communication and monitoring.
Integration is simple. The more the team like you and want to help you, the more mortgage appointments you’ll get. The best way to improve your integration into a branch team is to always make plenty of brews - never underestimate the power of a cup of tea and a chat with your negotiators.
This all ties in to the communication side of things. It’s vital to communicate effectively to your branch teams; always give feedback after appointments, keep them updated on how you’re getting on when chasing a client, and talk to them about how they’re getting on finding them a property - that way you can work together to get the house sale and the sign-up.
It’s also important to formalise this communication in regular morning meetings, which is where the third aspect comes in – monitoring.
It’s really important to have a handle on what’s coming through the front of the office. How many applicants did they register yesterday? Who’s out viewing? Who has come onto the market or are there any offers? Then you can work together to get those people in for FS appointments.
Q: Your KPI penetrations for yourselves and your other advisers are pretty good and, overall, are the best for my region. Well done! How have you done it?
A: Protection is a key part of our business. It is best advice for our clients and it is best practice for us as a business. We take the view that when someone is buying a car, a key consideration of the car that they buy is the cost of insuring it. Why should it be any different when buying a house and taking on the financial commitment of buying a mortgage?
Some people will say that it’s not the same because you’re legally required to have car insurance, but how many people have more cover than the legally required minimum? We’d suggest most people do; so why should their mortgage, home and family protection be any different?
Most people want to have cover, they just don’t think that they can afford it, that it doesn’t pay out or any other countless excuses. It’s our job as professional advisers to show them that cover is affordable and is worth having.
Protection is our key focus. Our advisers are targeted on business value and case size so number of mortgages written doesn’t come into it. At an average of £770 per case, protection makes up over 50% of my team’s case size. If you’re writing lots of mortgages but not doing the associated protection, the chances are that you’re losing the business more money than you’re earning and you’re not giving the clients the best advice.
We monitor this through the weekly reporting of figures and monthly sales meetings. We’ve found that the most effective way to sell protection is to have a separate protection appointment in the days following the mortgage sign-up.
That appointment is always booked at the point of mortgage sign-up. We find this more effective because the clients are more focused on protection and they’re less ‘number blind’ by doing it in two separate hits rather than one big blur of figures, percentages, and terms.
They also have a better understanding of what policies they are signing for and so tend to keep them. We make sure to have a variety of policies prepared in advance so that we are able to quickly and effectively handle client objections around cost with alternative levels of cover.
Q: You seem to have no issues at all with selling Buildings and Contents - why would you say the team at DB Roberts are so successful at it?
A: Our B&C penetration is running at 73% and, mine personally is running at 83% year-to-date. We arrange Buildings & Contents cover for our clients in the protection sign-up meeting.
As clients know they need to have buildings insurance as a condition of the mortgage, we take that approach as our role to advise and assist them, making it easier for them to do everything all in one in place.
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