Marketing Strategies For MSME Business By Banks

Importance of MSME Sector The Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise sector is crucial to India's economy. Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) are amongst the strongest drivers of economic development, innovation and employment. The MSME sector also contributes in a significant way to the growth of the Indian economy with a vast network of about 63.38 million enterprises. The sector contributes about 45% to manufacturing output, more than 40% of exports, contributing 29 % of the GDP while creating employment for about 111 million people and manufacture around 8,000 quality products for the Indian as well as International markets, which in terms of volume stands next to agricultural sector.

- Janardan Gadi

The MSME sector in India is exceedingly heterogeneous in terms of size of the enterprises and variety of products and services and levels of technology employed. However, the sector has the potential to grow at a faster pace. To provide impetus to the manufacturing sector, the recent National Manufacturing Policy envisaged raising the share of manufacturing sector in GDP from 16% at present to 25% by the end of 2022.

Need for MSME Leads Generation:

As per the data published in the past, approximately 10 % of the credit requirement of MSME units is met from the institutional finance and remaining avail the finance mainly from unorganised sources. Thus there is vast potential in financing to MSMEs by Banks.

The processing of MSME credit proposals is now done at Central Processing Cells (CPCs) in most of the banks to ensure uniform quality of processing and reduce the turn around time for the growth of MSME Business. These CPCs are equipped with experienced processing officers who have capacity to process the proposals quickly and the functioning of CPCs have been well established and stabilised in most of the banks. CPCs have capacity to process large number of credit proposals; however this capacity is underutilized due to lack of leads for new MSME credit proposals. Hence there is need to generate large number of leads for MSME business growth and for optimum utilisation of CPSs.

Strategies for lead generation for MSME Finance:

The marketing for MSME proposals is done by Branch Managers, Marketing officers and also by Relationship Managers at CPCs. There are number of ways in which one can generate leads for MSME credit proposals, some of which are as under.