GET MET: IT PLAYS (OR SO IT HOPES) FOR RICH PEOPLE

Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., which has cultivated a mass market following by using the cartoon character Snoopy as its spokespooch, wants to take on the dog-eat-dog world of courting the rich.

The New York giant has quietly been skimming off its top-producing agents and beginning this month, it will give them advanced training in retirement-, business-and estate planning. So far, it has assembled 200 reps — known in-house as “market champions.”

But some doubt Met Life’s bite can match its bark. It may take more than a few savvy reps to match the panache and handholding skills of old-line private banks like J.P. Morgan & Co. Inc. and U.S. Trust Corp. and big Wall Street brokerages like Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. to lure clients with a minimum of $500,000.

Indeed, Met Life may even seek to acquire its own bank, confirms a spokesman.

Like other big insurers, Met Life wants to position its agents as financial planners, rather than product pushers, in a year when it’s preparing to change from a mutual holding company status and go public.

Nadine O. Vogel, 35, the director of the campaign, is keeping the reps on a tight leash. About 200 will go through the program each year. Ultimately, those who don’t drum up more business among certain types of consumers will be stripped of their specialist status.

“There are a lot of financial institutions that say they market to different markets. We’ve taken that to a new level,” says Ms. Vogel, a former field rep who is now an assistant vice president of marketing.

“(Reps) will sign agreements where they have to adhere to certain guidelines and if they don’t, they are out of the program.”

The initiative is part of Met Life’s effort to diversify beyond the mature life insurance business by getting its army of 6,500 reps to sell a broader array of financial products.

“The profitability of serving the mass market is in decline, especially when you try to sell through the big dedicated face-to-face sales forces,” says David Kaytes, managing vice president of First Manhattan Consulting Group in New York.

one-trick ponies?

“The affluent segments are four to 10 times more profitable than the average segment and the level of effort to sell them is not that much harder. The challenge becomes how do you convert 10,000 one-trick ponies into full-service suppliers?”

Met Life tipped its hand to its plans to go after deep-pocketed consumers in 1996 when it merged with Boston’s New England Life Insurance Co. — now New England Financial — which has a much higher profile among the wealthy.

“It’s got New England to go after the super rich,” says Colin Devine, an analyst at Citigroup’s Salomon Smith Barney unit in New York, “but the basic Snoopy is going after the upper middle income person, like the small business owner who needs some estate planning.”

Met Life signaled its financial planning aspirations last year when it acquired (through New England) New York-based independent broker Nathan & Lewis Securities Inc.

Once public, it could use its stock to finance more deals, although it isn’t likely to do so right away, since insurers that demutualize typically trade at a discount to book value until their return on equity catches up to more financially disciplined publicly traded insurers.

In 1997, the most recent period for which figures are available, Met Life’s revenues were up 5.1%, to 24.37 billion, while profits rose 40% to $1.2 billion. Not bad. But broader cultural change won’t come easy.

Efforts to focus more on financial advice than sales at Equitable Cos. and Allmerica Financial Corp., for instance, resulted in massive defections among agents, says analyst Mr. Devine, who predicts that Met Life will eventually lose about a third of its reps. “You focus on keeping your profitable agents, not just your productive agents, and you make their standards higher.”

Met Life’s push now focuses on four groups: those with $500,000 or more in assets, female business owners and women in senior management, consumers over age 70 and families with “special needs” children.

Ms. Vogel says the latter group is very large, has unusual estate planning demands and craves help accessing non-profit organizations and medical benefits.

Her reps, she adds, “had to have the highest measures, not only in selling, but in keeping the business on the books. They couldn’t have customer complaints. They had to really be the top of the top.”

Despite a strong brand name — Met Life wants to begin putting its moniker on financial products offered by its subsidiaries — and one of the biggest field forces in the insurance business, it remains to be seen whether Met Life has come too late to the financial planning game.

What’s more, its investment subsidiaries are better known with institutions than individuals. State Street Research and Management Co. of Boston runs the biggest chunk of Met Life’s mutual fund business, but ranks only 77th out of 600 fund companies as measured by its $8.3 billion in mutual fund assets.

In the variable annuity business, Met Life ranks No. 11 as measured by sales of $2.3 billion through the first nine months of last year, says analyst Mr. Devine. Meantime, competitor Hartford Life Inc. sold three times that amount.

“It’s hard to sell life insurance well, much less have a person who is so great that he is a stockbroker” too, adds David Schiff, editor of Schiff’s Insurance Observer in New York. “So far, nobody has been really all that great at this cross-selling stuff.”