Marketing Wiz is a joint initiative between Kotak Mutual Fund and Wealth Forum, where we share insights on how distributors and advisors can accelerate their business growth by understanding and applying essential marketing concepts and practices.

Times when you slip up on service are occasions that you would not want to talk about. Smart marketing however suggests that you can actually turn this adversity into an opportunity. You can highlight the slip up in your service and actually win more business! Here's how.

Smart marketing is all about using every opportunity to highlight your services to your clients and prospects. Its about driving communication that constantly reassures existing clients that their money is in good hands, and its about making prospects seriously consider giving you business.

Times when you slip up on service are often occasions that you would not want to talk about. They are instances that you might want everybody to forget as quickly as possible, because its not something you are really proud about.

Smart marketing however suggests that you can actually turn this adversity into an opportunity. You can highlight the slip up in your service and actually win more business! If you run a firm that scores very high on process control, here is a smart way to make a big noise about an occasional slip up, and drive home the bigger message of how strong your service really is.

Highlight strengths by admitting shortcomings

Lets say you have a rule in your firm that a complete set of all tax related calculations will be sent out to every client by 15th of April every year, before they or their CAs start asking for them. You pride yourself on a 100% delivery success rate across all 450 clients, by the deadline, each year, for the last 10 years. This year, due to unavoidable circumstances, you couldn't complete the task by 15th April, and managed to do so by 25th April - still well within time for tax computations and return filings. You can either keep quiet about it, or actually do something smarter, which highlights your strength by admitting a shortcoming. You could start your next month's newsletter with these words:

We are sorry, we slipped up in serving you

At Perfect Planners, we have maintained a record over the last 10 years of ensuring that each one of our 450 client families get a comprehensive tax computations folder delivered to their doorstep no later than 15th April of the new financial year. We have prided ourselves that we never ever receive a single query from our clients or their CAs for transaction statements, dividend statements and capital gains summaries - because our folders reach every client before they even ask for it!

This year, our 11th year of business, we busted this. We are truly sorry. We only managed to complete this process by 25th of April - a full 10 days later than what we targeted to accomplish. There were truly unavoidable circumstances that caused this delay - but in this were valuable lessons for us on strengthening our processes to ensure this does not happen again. As I write to you, I can confirm that we have already implemented process changes that will ensure that we never slip up on our commitment again.

Its true that we didn't have any clients complaining about this 10 day delay - but that's not how we measure our service to our clients. We pride ourselves in exceeding client expectations on service and in setting standards for service in our profession. To all of you who may have raised an eyebrow when you received the folder later than you usually do, but chose not to complain, thank you for your patience. We slipped this time, but will ensure we don't slip again.

While this note in the newsletter says sorry, it actually highlights a key strength of your firm, a service standard that is way ahead of what most of your competition delivers. When your prospects read this headline in your newsletter, they are bound to read the detail, and are more likely to be impressed with your high service standards than worried about a 10 day delay. When your clients read this, they are more likely to feel reassured having you handling their finances, rather than worried about a 10 day delay. The delay meant really nothing to most clients - but what you have achieved with some smart communication is to highlight a strength by admitting a shortcoming.

This analogy can be extended to diverse aspects of your practice, such as:

1. Highlighting your delay free redemption processing track record due to the annual data updation exercise you always carry out across all clients. This can be highlighted in a month where one delay happened for some reason

2. Highlighting your meticulous adherence to quarterly in-person portfolio reviews across all clients, in a quarter where you couldn't complete a couple of reviews due to unavoidable circumstances

What's important here is that your firm has to be pretty strong in process controls in the first place - only then can the odd exception be made to stand out to highlight your strength. What's also important is that this strategy ought to be used sparingly - you can't make a habit of saying sorry too many times, and hoping to drive up your business with these apologies!

All content in Marketing Wiz is created by Wealth Forum and should not be construed as views of Kotak MF.

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