18 Apr Why some IFAs succeed
There are some IFAs who succeed and some who don’t. The reasons behind their success isn’t much to do with their investment knowledge or intelligence.
To a large extent the ability to demonstrate discipline and follow systems and processes plays a very big role in success.
While having reasonably good knowledge is a minimum requirement I can assure you that the knowledge alone isn’t sufficient.
People succeed because of the following:-
1) Conviction in the profession
2) The desire to change lives of others
3) An audacious goal like having 20000 investors in 5 years ( India provides the opportunity)
3) To spend on yourself and your business
4) Great communication skills
5) Great relationship skills. Spending money out of one’s revenue to provide some interesting experience for your customers. It could be sponsoring a movie, a dinner, a weekend etc.
6) Not selling but making the customer wan to buy. We should know that selling a product or “sales talk” is a total “put off” and hence having non-sales discussions is vital to relationship building while ultimately leads to sales. Luckily we manage money and life has an intricate relationship with money and hence we should learn to have non-sales discussions about dreams, goals and fulfilment.
7) It is essential to focus on personal branding which entails the way you look, the way you dress, your interests, you hobbies, whether you are interesting or not, your reputation etc. One must learn how to build one’s personal brand and communicate that same.
8) One needs to possess educational skills. Unless we educate people we cannot sell. Hence education is a precursor to success. It builds reputation and trust.There is a process involved in educating that must be learnt.
9) It is important to speak the language of the customers. Unfortunately we have become slaves of jargon and unless we speak the customer’s lingo we will not succeed in driving up his or her interest. And we understand that unless a person is interested he will not want to buy.
10) Ethics and regulations. To succeed in this business one has to keep ethics and regulations in the forefront. Being a fiduciary business where we are managing other people’s money, it is imperative that we do it ethically and follow all systems laid out by the regulator. This calls for sacrifice in the beginning but ultimately learning to do things the right way will become your biggest competitive advantage.
11) Technology and Tools : With shrinking margins, the only way to survive is to ramp up volumes and India with 50% of its population below the age of 25 and 70% under 40 is well poised to offer this volume. The only way to scale up profitably is by the use of technology and tools.
12) Operations and Execution. While learning is a good thing executing it is much sweeter. Unless one understands operations and procedures ideas shall remain ideas that cannot be put into practice.
At the Financial Pathshala we hope to cover all that is needed to become an Excellent Mutual Fund Distributor
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