I’ve always really admired companies that offer a lifetime guarantee on their products. You have to be supremely confident in your offering to be able to stick your neck out like that.

That’s why so few do…

But business nowadays gravitates toward the “on risk” model because hype is easy to generate, talk is cheap, and boardrooms are littered with empty promises. The real winners today are the teams that understand their product or service so intimately that they will take their own money and back the outcome.

A year ago, we put this philosophy to the ultimate test with a major funeral insurance brand in South Africa. Following a recent acquisition, the direct arm of their business was placed under the microscope. An audit revealed a massive hemorrhage: an untenable long-term situation. 

They really had two choices:

1. Close the direct arm of their business.
2. Contract with a new partner entirely on risk.

They chose the latter, and we stepped into the arena.

The Reality of Skin in the Game

When you operate on a true performance-based model, you lose the luxury of hiding behind vanity metrics like “impressions” or “brand awareness.”

You get right into the weeds when you back yourself to make funeral cover sales. We negotiated a strict pay-per-sale fee structure. That meant Crisp Solutions had to carry all of the upfront marketing costs – which quickly run into millions of Rands – on the one hand as well as the heavy operational overhead of our 70-seat call center on the other.

If the phones don’t ring, or if our agents don’t close, we take the hit.

• The Client’s Risk: Absolute zero.
• Our Risk: Total loss of time, resources, and capital if we miscalculated.
• The Ultimate Motivator: Total alignment. When our revenue is tied directly to their growth, we cease to be a “vendor” and effectively become equity partners in that campaign’s success.

Balancing the Scale and the Science

How do you absorb that level of risk without going bankrupt? You do it by mastering the data.

To survive an on-risk model, you cannot afford guesswork. We had to analyze their target demographic with surgical precision, optimise our lead-generation funnels, and ensure our new 70-seat call center operated with elite efficiency. Every script, every dial, and every compliance check had to be flawless. When it’s your own balance sheet on the line, you don’t look at marketing as an expense-you look at it as a precise science.

The Payoff: A True Business Partnership

A year later, that funeral insurance business hasn’t just stopped the bleeding, it has shown unprecedented growth with us. In fact, we banked 8,000 funeral policies for them last month alone, and since we stepped in they’ve landed each one of those policies at exactly the right cost. 

Taking the risk off the client’s shoulders isn’t a sales gimmick; it’s the ultimate filter for competence. If you aren’t willing to back your own product with your own balance sheet, why should a client trust you with theirs?

Do you have an insurance policy you want to sell at scale?

Then why don’t you get in touch with us today?

Let’s set up some time to look at the marketing and policy acquisition metrics that make sense to your bottom line. Then, we might just bake you a loaf of bread you can eat today and pay for tomorrow.

Until next time,

Ian Faught

Chief Exec

Crisp Solutions