Raghav Bahl, the founder of Network18, a media conglomerate that owns CNBC-TV18, CNBC Awaaz, CNN-IBN, In.com, Moneycontrol.com and Forbes India, in his recent book titled Superpower? : The Amazing Race Between China’s Hare and India’s Tortoise underscores India’s relatively slow growth attributing it to “incremental and risk averse” mindset of country’s leadership.
But, it is not the India-China race that I wish to discuss today. I referred to it because I feel this “incremental and risk averse” mindset could also be the stumbling block for marketers of retail financial products in rising up to the challenge of a game change. If we wish to move ahead, we need to break from the past.
A fundamental theme in Buddhist and Christian doctrines is the idea of death as a precondition to life: those who wish to live, must die. Sounds strange on the face of it; but is strangely true. Perhaps the best illustration of the idea is a seed; unless a seed falls into the earth and loses itself, it cannot sprout into a new sapling; and unless that happens, the specie cannot survive and propagate. If the seed tries to preserve itself, it will simply decay and wither.
This is not mere philosophy; it is a fact of life. And this is what exactly we the marketers of retail financial products need to realise. If we wish to survive and prosper, we have to bury our earlier “role”. Incremental and risk averse approach will not take us far but will simply leave us by the wayside.
Now, what do I mean when I say we need to bury our earlier role? What was our earlier role by the way? We operated as the intermediaries between the manufacturers of retail financial products – the asset management companies and the insurance companies, and their customers – the investors and the policyholders. We searched out prospects, found out their needs, informed them of the available products, advised them on the choice and delivered them the products. From this, one thing is immediately clear: we played not one, but many roles.
Now the market for retail financial products is sufficiently developed to dispense with this multiple role marketer. Media has taken upon itself to educate and inform prospective investors and policyholders. Whether it plays this role effectively or not is a different issue. If it does not, then that is one opportunity for us to grab. After years of industry experience, we know better than most others what the customer needs to know; so who else can be better qualified than us to educate and inform the customer? But, can that be a business? Definitely yes; there is more than one revenue model that one can adopt. If we do not want to plunge ourselves full-fledged into imparting financial education, we can market our domain knowledge for a fee. AMCs, insurance companies, institutional distributors and many others conduct awareness and education programmes as part of their brand building and marketing effort which could be a market for our domain knowledge. Then there are formal training institutions operating in the industry and the academic institutions that are in search of persons with industry experience. Whatever the travails of the IFAs, the retail financial sector is growing and so is the market for domain knowledge.
But not all of us may be cut out for that. Domain knowledge might not have been the forte of all. Some of us might have thrived on our selling skills. No problem. The role of a salesman is not dead! No market has dispensed with salesmen. Salesmen will continue to be the backbone of the market for retail financial products. What the market needs today is the firmly established salesman, for whom selling goes beyond the money that it brings. It arises out of his conviction that his customer needs the product; and he will not rest till he has bought it.
I have been fortunate enough to work with such salesmen. I learnt my insurance marketing under a retired DM (Marketing) of LIC. He would make me scan every newspaper in the morning to search for the “Baby boy born to …” kind of advertisements; and make me dash off letters to the parents of the new born to tell them how important insuring themselves is for the future of their child. Then there was a colleague of mine who would suddenly disappear into the kitchens of the hotels where we held our sales meets. Over a period of time, most of the cooks and helpers in the city’s hotels were covered by the insurance company I worked for.
The result of such a passionate sales drive is high volumes. And, you will agree with me, if one can generate volumes in the retail financial products market, even at current “meagre” commission rates, the monthly income can be substantial. And, beyond the monthly income, the trail commission can be one’s pension for the twilight years.
This is not the end of the possible roles for marketers of financial products. We will need to be innovative to be successful.
Tensing has been active in the Retail Financial Products space, both in marketing and training, for last fifteen years.
