The New TIP's Blog

Banks Can't Sell!

There's a fuss in our industry right now about the possibility that banks may be given the right to sell life insurance.

Not to worry. Because banks can't sell.

Even if they're given the opportunity to, they are unable to sell successfully.

They confirmed it to me, once again.

I've been publishing a free online newsletter, TIP, for life agents for about four years now, and decided to start a paid version, New-TIP.

To pay for it subscribers were asked to complete a pre-authorized cheque (PAC) form and send it to me. As life insurance companies have been doing this for most of the past century, I anticipated no problems.

But to be sure it would work okay I showed my PAC form to someone at my own bank who was supposed to know about such things. She told me that it was fine but that I should send the completed forms to the subscribers' banks to be processed.

This made sense, so when a number of them were received from subscribers I sent them with covering letters to the subscribers' banks.

Within days these banks were phoning me to say they couldn't, or wouldn't do it.

They gave a variety of reasons. The most common was that the process had to be initiated by my bank. Yet my bank told me the reverse---that the subscribers' banks had to start the process!

The fascinating thing, and the reason banks can't sell insurance, is that none of them attempted to actually solve the problem. If the answer is to have my bank initiate the process, why didn't they just send the stuff to my bank to do it?

Selling is solving problems, not creating them.

But none of the banks who phoned me tried to solve the problem. All they wanted to do was get rid of it. And it was easier to say they couldn't do it than to take a positive step towards a solution. Yet, how difficult would it be to send what I sent them to my bank?

Which is actually very reassuring. It means we have nothing to fear from the banks.

If they can't solve such a simple problem as effectively handling a PAC request, how can they sell anything?

Selling, as you and I know, is a problem solving process. And, as my experience proves once again, banks are better at creating problems than solving them.
Fortunately, they have us around to solve at least some of the problems they create!

Don

posted by Don @ 4:20 PM