Luring in Baby Boomers With No-Pressure Approach : Marketing: Financial planner’s program lets insurance customers browse through services. Its salespeople work for a salary, not on commission.

Here’s a new concept: Customers call on insurance salespeople instead of the other way around.

A pilot program by the Principal Financial Group uses interactive computers and no-pressure sales tactics to help baby boomers calculate their financial needs. Principal believes the program, if it works, will give it a shot at the estimated $8 trillion boomers will inherit in the next two decades.

The company, a subsidiary of Principal Mutual Life Insurance Co. of Des Moines, Iowa, is targeting better-educated, middle-class insurance consumers who reject traditional sales tactics in favor of no-commission sales.

At PrinSource Financial Center, a suburban shopping mall storefront invites customers to come in for some financial planning. After casually scrolling through a series of computer programs on how much it costs to retire or send children to college, customers should be ready, willing and able to talk with financial planners.

No sales types are visible when customers walk in. A receptionist directs customers to a touch screen that gives them an introduction and a pass to use in private, individual kiosks.

Once inside the kiosks, customers can work through the financial planning programs and actually leave the premises without ever talking with a salesperson.

The financial planners customers do talk to are paid a salary, not a commission based on how much life insurance, annuities or mutual funds they sell. That is important, said Jim Hunt, a Concord, N.H., actuary affiliated with the nonprofit Consumer Federation of America Insurance Group.

When financial planners are salaried, they’re more likely to help customers select the financial products they need, rather than what the planners want to sell. Hunt has long advocated no-load or low-load--low or no-commission--life insurance and other products.

Baby boomers, the 76 million people born between 1946 and 1964, need financial advice but are leery of sales pitches, according to Jim Schwartz of Englewood, Colo., president of the Society of Independent Financial Advisers.

“They have to be able to buy instead of being sold,” Schwartz said.

Baby boomers distrust traditional investment practices and insist on being shown the advantages of different insurance policies and other products, he said.

“In this society of blame . . . there is a cry for authenticity, trust and reliance,” he said, adding that boomers want to know: “Are you on my side of the table or not?”

“We have a self-directed consumer out there. The ‘pro-sumer’ is involved in the production and consumption. What will now occur in technology is the self-directed baby boomer who has a low trust factor will be gravitated to this,” Schwartz said.

Such no-hassle sales approaches have worked well for Saturn automobiles and have been adopted by many other automotive companies.

At the storefront business, “you educate them and let them decide where to go,” said Jeff Edwards, manager of PrinSource Financial Center.

“This concept is to provide the same type of service and products we’ve provided in a traditional way. There’s less pressure than an agent coming out to your house,” said Joseph Schmitt, field vice president for the Principal Financial Group.

The company has its eye on the money boomers stand to inherit from their parents over the next 10 to 20 years. But Schmitt noted there’s a big market for financial help aside from the people expecting to receive a big windfall.

“It’s not just the one-shot, ‘I’ve got $20,000. What do I do with it?’ person. We’re talking about the $30,000- to $60,000-a-year income person who doesn’t have financial advisors,” he said.