For Katrina Johnson (pictured), winner of the Underwriting Agencies Council Underwriting Agency BDM of the Year at this year’s Insurance Business Australia Awards, the key to success lies in being an active listener.
“As a business development manager, you need to be listening to your clients’ needs while also being there to offer support and advice,” the BDM at CHU Underwriting Agencies told Insurance Business. “Assisting clients to nurture and grow their businesses by focusing on their individual business needs to, in turn, give their own clients the best possible insurance solutions and customer experience – this is what I aim to do at CHU.”
Having joined CHU in 2017, Johnson believes that a collaborative and supportive approach to teamwork is essential if BDMs are going to work with underwriters to deliver better solutions.
“It’s integral for us BDMs to understand and obtain all the relevant information from our clients,” she stated. “This way, we can ensure that our underwriters are armed with the comprehensive knowledge needed to provide the best possible solutions for clients’ needs at the most competitive premium that we can provide.”
A clear impediment to this kind of collaboration, and indeed all working relationships, has been the COVID-19 pandemic. However, in Johnson’s view, the transition to remote working has allowed many in the insurance industry to “rethink the way we interact with our clients” and has, ultimately, presented a silver lining of sorts for BDM work.
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“Virtual platforms have afforded us the opportunity to continue to maintain and build on relationships in a number of new ways,” she noted. “We can offer training to large groups at a time without having as much downtime between meetings and are able to deliver expedited turnaround times to customers by using online quoting platforms. By utilising these new tools at CHU, our emphasis is clearly on being able to offer flexible solutions and thereby enhance our customers’ experiences.”
Johnson added that winning the BDM of the Year Award was a pleasant surprise, one that demonstrated the value her clients place in her work.
“To be honest, it was really lovely that my clients considered nominating me for the award in the first place and provided such positive feedback about our interactions,” she said.
