Yvonne Boyle at Marlow Wills has kindly given us a bit of an insight into her methods having just won the storer of the quarter competition.
“I don’t consider myself a natural sales person; I don’t enjoy being given the hard sell myself so avoid doing it to my clients. I always raise the issue of storage at the end of the first meeting once I’ve built up a rapport rather than sending a leaflet out earlier on.
On a very generic case I’ll simply raise the fact that the client should under no circumstances store their signed will at home, and explain that the Probate Office will only accept the original hard copy. I at that point bring out the NWS leaflet and say that we recommend them because, in addition to obviously keeping the wills in a secure facility, they send plastic cards to the client for the executors but more crucially, point out that NWS will register the wills on the national database so that, if the executors lose track of where the wills are being kept, it’ll take them a couple of minutes to search the database. Most of my clients are youngish professionals and very comfortable with IT so can see the advantage of the database.
On other occasions I tailor this part of the conversation to what’s gone on before. For example in the last couple of weeks I had a middle aged woman who jointly owns and occupies a house with her mother who’s in her 80s. Also living there is her middle aged brother who by all accounts is a bit of a ne’er do well. Relationships are very strained. I raised the issue of what would happen if the wills were kept at home; I just hinted that the brother may find and destroy them so that he inherits under the intestacy laws and they were at that point very keen to use NWS.
Also very recently I met with a young couple who, when I asked about specific bequests of jewellery etc told me that, very sadly, they’d been burgled so had no items of sentimental value. It was then very easy to suggest that, having been burgled once, it would be sensible to put all sensitive financial documents into safekeeping.
Generally I sell NWS as something which will give the client peace of mind at a reasonable price. I don’t push it if they don’t seem interested but nonetheless around 30 to 40% of all my clients take it up.
Although I have only been using the National Will Safe storage solution for about 18 months, I’m already seeing decent sums of money appearing in the bank every month. Hopefully by the time I retire in 7 years or so this will have grown to a point where it will be a welcome addition to my pension income!”
Thank you Yvonne for sharing with our subscribers, we agree “a hard sell” is never usually necessary but it is fair to offer the advice that storing documents at home is a bad idea. The way you are going now in 7 years time you will have a very nice extra stream of income when you decide to retire, keep it up!
If you would like to learn more about the opportunities with National Will Safe, please email enquiries@nationalwillsafe.co.uk