Most banks don’t have a customer acquisition problem—they have a decision-making problem.
One bank spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and five months trying to identify its next most profitable customers. The highest-performing banks? They would have identified them in hours and immediately started building relationships.
Top-performing organizations don’t waste time studying problems. They build repeatable processes, ask better questions, and refuse to accept mediocrity as “the way we’ve always done it.”
In this week’s video, you’ll discover:
The banks that outperform their peers aren’t necessarily smarter—they simply refuse to tolerate unnecessary complexity. They keep asking better questions until they find the right answer, then they execute.
Watch this week’s video to discover how top-performing banks identify and pursue their next best customers before their competitors do.
Several years ago, there was a gentleman who came into our Boot Camp. He was an EVP of a bank on the West Coast, and he told me that they had hired a firm. They’d spent several hundred thousand dollars, and they’d been in meetings for five months trying to figure out how to find their next most profitable customers.
I was thinking, Are you kidding me?
I said, “Well, how is it working?”
He said, “Well, we’re not done yet. We haven’t identified them.”
Okay. So what they should have done is identify them in, like, you know, a couple of hours by following a clean process of psychographics and firmographics, and then get busy bringing them in. That is the point, isn’t it?
And so, God bless him. He came up to me, and he was just distraught. Yet I get it. I’ve been part of those organizations where you get it and you see what needs to be done, but nobody else does. So it’s like, what do you do when you know everybody around you is going the wrong direction?
Here’s what happens when that person works for a bank that’s destined to become a top five percent-performing bank. They become a puppy dog with a sock in their mouth. They don’t let go. They just keep asking questions and kind of go, “Shouldn’t we already have figured this out?”
“Shouldn’t we be calling them? What is our process for calling on them? Do we really know we have the right target? What’s our process for organizing this?”
Those are top five percenters. They don’t watch the crazy going on around them, accept it, and say, “That’s just how things are around here. It’s just me. How will I ever move this mountain?”
Every great organization that’s become a top five percenter has had somebody who grew the backbone and decided to be a stand for, “If somebody can do it, we can do it—and we’re going to do it. So get the heck out of my way. I will just annoyingly keep asking questions until we get this right because I will not accept working for a mediocre organization.”
When was the last time you ever called home and said to your significant other, “Honey, today I performed average.”
Yeah.
Okay. That doesn’t happen.
We call home because we kicked some butt, took some names, and made something happen. That’s how a top five percenter thinks. They’re unstoppable in getting what they want when they know there’s a better way of getting things done, and they’re never going to sleep until they find the best way because success leaves clues.
As my mentor taught me years ago, only study with those who have their information in order and have done it repeatedly.
You’ve heard it before – the bankers who are STILL calling on clients asking hideously inept questions such as, “What kind of things are you looking for in a bank?” or “Tell me about your business,” or “What kind of things are keeping you up at night?” UGH.
Is your strategic plan the right plan—and one that can and will get completed?
If you’re like most bankers, you probably pulled your strategic plan together eight or nine months ago. But is everyone in the bank on a weekly process to make sure they all hit the outcomes?
You are hearing everywhere that those who run their banks like they ran them five years ago won’t make it in the not-so-distant future. Heck, based on the news reports over the past year, they may no longer be in business.
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Studies show that 70% of your employees are checked out at work... and it's costing you! Have you seen the 2013 Gallup State of the American Workplace Report?...
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If you ask commercial lenders how they’re doing, most would say they’re performing strongly. But performance for them too often means sitting in the bank, waiting for B and C credits to walk in, interviewing them, getting their data, sending it to the credit committee—then trying to sell the committee on how to make that loan work, even though it has risks.
A lot of bad things happen around acquisitions. If you’re being acquired, it’s rarely pretty. And if you’re the one acquiring, the Wharton School of Business says your chance of failure is greater than 83 percent. And even if you don’t go down in flames in the opening round, the real heartaches continue for two years after the acquisition as two dark forces are inevitably unleashed: