Business insurance focus for 2012

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The business insurance market is under the spotlight this year with two different initiatives to target the sector and new products.

Tuesday, January 3rd 2012, 9:14AM

by Benn Bathgate

TNP plans to launch a sales school for advisers to target business insurance, while Newpark will begin a lead programme in Auckland aimed at the business-to-business market.

“We’re going full bore, there’s huge opportunities in the business market right now,” said Newpark managing director Darren Gannon.

“We’re always pushing people to the business market outside of the mum and dad market. With so many small businesses in New Zealand it’s a massive part of the market, you can’t afford not to be involved in that.”

TNP director of development Dr Dave McMillan the group wanted to introduce new business to its members.

“We feel we’ve taken (members) as far as we can on the kitchen table type environment, so we want to introduce them to new markets, of which the business market is an obvious one.”

TNP’s new course was developed on the NZQA framework so offered advisers a qualification – and a new challenge.

“When advisers have been in the family market for quite some time it’s easy to get bored, there’s quite a lot of intellectual challenge getting your head around the issues with business.”

McMillan and Gannon agreed business insurance offered advisers’ a chance for enhanced remuneration.

‘We want to help our people so they become more skilled and frankly get paid better because they’re solving bigger problems,” McMillan said.

Sovereign recently launched two new business insurance products, and chief distribution officer David Haak said some advisers had seen substantial increases to their remuneration.

“The ones that are using our programme – which we can monitor and measure – are now almost doubling the size of their average sale, because they’re getting far more information and they’re going much wider in their questioning searching for the real risk issues,” he said.

Benn Bathgate is a business reporter for ASSET and Good Returns, email story ideas to benn@goodreturns.co.nz

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