Not everyone can sell insurance – but can you do it with a background in art, be fluently bilingual, and price the right coverage for a bear trap collection?
“And being bilingual is non-negotiable,” smiles Christiane Fischer, president and CEO of
AXA Art Americas Corporation. “We require a unique skill set here, and right now we want someone who is bilingual, with an art background and an underwriting background. We already know we don’t find that easily.”
AXA Art Insurance, which had been associated with many years with
Intact insurance before selling its P&C business, is now solely devoted to the art insurance market. And the tools necessary to sell insurance coverage at AXA Art requires not your run-of-the-mill insurance sales skillset, Fischer told
Insurance Business.
“The biggest problem we get is we have people coming to us and saying ‘I have this many years of experience in selling insurance,’ and I find that we have to ‘unlearn’ them,” she says. “And so we teach them.
“Often we hire people who have a set of interpersonal skills, skills of communication and interacting people and having a presence,” says Fischer. “The insurance part is probably the easiest. We can train for that, versus someone who has been selling auto insurance for 20 years will probably not be successful in selling with us.” (continued.)
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The addition of the
Job Board to the
Insurance Business website has drawn a number of companies and jobseekers over the past few weeks, with an average of 50 job opportunities on the site on a daily basis.
But, what about that bear trap collection?
“This collector, who is also the world expert in those traps, came to us with his schedule of bear traps that he had collected over the years,” says Fischer. “We ultimately issued an insurance policy on them, and now we probably insure the largest and only collection of bear traps in the world.”
