Right from the time when I started my business in 2006, I was promoting SIPs as the best way to build wealth. Most of my clients had invested for a term of five years. But unfortunately, the expectations of my clients were not met even after staying invested for 5 years.
As a result most of them were reluctant to start fresh SIP investment or extend the investment span. Often when I visited the investors for new investment they would start calculating the return for previous investment. Investors would often subtract the cost of investment from the value provided on their statements of accounts and then divide it by the number of years to arrive at the supposed returns. Thus a monthly SIP of Rs. 1000 which had yielded Rs. 80000 at the end of 5 years would be assumed to have provided a return of only 6.6% per annum when in truth the correct figure was 9.4% p.a.
I tried to explain investors that in SIPs, the returns had to be calculated considering the average tenor of the instalments. Moreover, AMCs also stopped publishing 5 year SIP returns in their fact sheets, which further complicated matters.
Therefore to win back the confidence of the investors, I had to offer my investors a reliable medium, wherein they could actually assess the returns delivered by their MF investments and make an informed choice.
I launch my own website www.triple8invest.com, the name being a derived from my ARN which is 37888. The website has been developed with an objective of providing value added services to my investors which includes a 24X7 update on their portfolio of mutual fund investments, financial planning & several other useful features.
The response to this initiative has been phenomenal, with several investors actually enhancing their SIP amounts and some investing in FMPs, debt & liquid funds for the first time. I have also seen a huge upsurge in the number of referrals as investors have gone out of their way to recommend me to their close friends.
Gopi Kishna Agarwal, IFA from Kolkata developed a two pronged strategy to build his retail as well as HNI clientele during recession
I stepped into the financial advisory world after working as an employee for 25 years. My entry coincided with the market crash and my problems compounded with the entry load ban. Not wanting to look back, I thought hard about different strategies to survive in this situation.
I then decided to segregate the business in two parts – retail and HNI. I joined hands with AMCs and started conducting seminars for creating awareness among retail investors and simultaneously also arranged one-to-one meeting with HNIs.
It is difficult to convince HNIs and we wanted to manage the full basket of investment for each HNI. So we carried out a number of meetings with them for six months to one year before the HNI was convinced to entrust us with his investments.
It usually takes three months to understand nature of investment of HNI clients and in a volatile market, it is tougher to face such clients. But I used to constantly provide them with different analysis and reports, trying to meet them at least once in two months and give them a brief about the market and also suggest the best vehicle for investment too.
It took me one year to build my client base. But during that period through seminars, I met a lot of retails prospects who later became my clients. Slowly I also started building my HNIs clientele too through my continuous effort to win their confidence.
