``A relationship model has to be designed suggesting a regular meeting with the agents, moving along with them in the market and supporting them to constantly emerge as effective salespersons,'' he said . Speaking to The Financial Express, Kohli felt that the emerging scenario calls for a conscious and integrated effort at retaining agents, enhancing their capabilities to enable them to be ``market specific' rather than ``segment specific'' salespersons.``We need to improve our channel relationship to manage cost while containing the terminations and improving the production level,'' he said.

Emphasising the need for a more commercial orientation for the Rs 1,50,000-crore LIC, Kohli wanted a new management model for the organisation in the liberalised era.

It would be desirable for the LIC to have a fresh look at client management, new business processing, agent production tracking and also strategic corporate planning, financial and treasury management, he noted.

The strategic marketing of the LIC has to be more focussed, faster and flexible, Kohli said. The emphasis of the LIC has to be on multi-capability development for achieving strategic goals by educating employees, ad agents, use of e-commerce for market domination.

The competitive strength of the LIC would be seen only in a large marketshare, sustainable low-cost operations, ability to differentiate the market, adopting perspective strategies. For this the productions units, branch office and divisional offices need to co-relate the business profile with economic opportunities. ``Our budgetting process, our field management, and activities planning from top to the level of field operators, agents and development officers have to be based on potentials available,'' he suggested.

All marketing officials in the branch, division and the zone will have to develop market intelligence to know what is happening in the market and accordingly direct and support market operators, Kohli pointed out.

According to Kohli, the use of IT must leverage structural advantage in the areas of cost structure, innovative product line, highly effective distribution channels. New opportunities exist for both life and pension business. Pension market today is six per cent of GDP, around one lakh crore. It should be around 12 per cent of GDP by 2010. The market potential of life insurance would move from 61.3 crore to 76 crore. The market size would go up to Rs 264,000 crores in 2010 at the rate of 7 per cent growth in GDP.