Don't Be Scared to Sell Cyber Insurance

In failing to express the immediacy and potential magnitude of cyber liability issue we fail them by not constructing an environment where the purchasing decision is clear. How can we do a better job, protecting our clients from a calamitous cyber event that can hover the very survival of their businesses?

Five Ways of Cyber Awareness

• Don’t sell fear: Leave fear mongering to news anchors and investigative reporters. Your clients, mainly privately held businesses, are full of risk takers who have squared off against important risks in their careers and won. Although you may be able to scare someone into a decision, typically it will not stick.

• Use facts to convey issues: More information comes to the forefront on this matter and its impact on businesses. Subscribe to a newsletter to get familiar with the details. Offer your customers with information rooted in facts, not overstatement.

• Understand the policy offering: Get conversant with the coverage terms and conditions in the cyber policy from more than one carrier. Ask your underwriters questions. Read through an application so you can accurately convey the value your clients receive by going through the underwriting process.

• Position the policy correctly: Focus on the response team assembled by the carrier to respond to a data breach. This is similar to a D&O policy and the value gained when an experienced SEC attorney is in support rather than a Main Street litigator who doesn’t understand the nuances of the issues. Let the carrier’s response team make you look good.

• Do risk management work: Wouldn’t you rather your clients not have a claim? Help them build an infrastructure and process to preclude the more common causes of cyber loss. Internal measures which eliminate the use of thumb drives, locks on server room doors limiting access, IT audits and testing data systems and firewalls will provide your clients a better sense of what they must do and what they can control before a loss. It may assist them in getting a reduced premium.

Use your time with your clients and the current events of this past year to do the good, hard work your clients expect from you.