Welcome to The Top 5 Percenter™ Blog
Dive in for concise, powerful insights on elevating community banking. Discover strategies and success stories for superior performance, from boosting financial margins to cultivating a dynamic culture. These posts literally contain the secrets of the Top 5 Percenters™. Sign up to the newsletter so that you don’t miss a single post.
They Buy Today, You Cry Tomorrow
I drove by a bank’s temporary sign and gasped... “Best pricing on CDs... guaranteed!” We train our customers how to think about us. When we teach clients that we should always have the best pricing, they will surely expect that for decades to come... and you will be crying tomorrow. The reality is that people don’t expect you to have the best pricing. They will pay more for a Cadillac than they...
The Foundation for Successful Sales: Use Value
Most individuals and businesses are in need of someone who can understand their exact needs and can make sense of the myriad of options in financial services today. When a client feels good about you and your interest in them, they can entrust you with all the specifics of their dreams. They will tell you what they want and what they don’t want. With that, you have the basis for an enduring and...
Customer Service: So You Think You Have it Wired?
If everyone in your office handles your phones with great care—you all answer in two to three rings, answer with enthusiasm and confidence, handle the customers’ needs, transfer the call or put them on hold for no more than thirty seconds without coming back. Do this, and you’ll have customers raving about you. But if one person thinks he or she can smack the gum while talking to a customer,...
Body Language Magic
According to research by Ward-Green & Hill Associates, ninety-three percent of our insights are reached because of non-verbal communication. The human body can make over 700,000 different physical movements. If each one communicates a different message, what is your body language saying about you? How are your environment, clothes, facial expressions, gestures, posture, and all other non-verbal...
Praise to Change Behavior
Remember the pizza company that rewarded its employees for on-time delivery? If the pizza wasn’t delivered in 30 minutes, the customer received it for free. What they didn’t take into account was that getting the pizza there on time also meant fast and often crazy driving. The lesson? Be careful about what you are rewarding! Once you start down the appreciation path, the compliments become easy...
Leaping Out of a Sales Slump–or Any Slump
Your green light has suddenly turned red. What happened? You’re out of your zone? The cosmos are conspiring against you? Well, believe it or not, your sales funnel doesn’t depend on the stars (although it can seem just as futile to try to control your “bad luck” at times). Move past it. Everything is within your control—if you embrace the fact that it is. To flip the red to green, start using...
POWER Pictures
A picture is worth a thousand words. Cliché? Yes. Lie? No. The brain thinks in pictures, not words. When you are proposing your solutions, your prospect is much more likely to arrive at the decision you want if you paint a picture of what their world would be like with your solution in place. Grab hold of their attention and stimulate their imagination. Use analogies, metaphors, stories and...
A Windshield to Go with That Gas Pedal–Marketing with a Plan
Picture yourself in the driver’s seat of your dream car, ready to go—but the windows are all painted black, and there are no gauges. You turn the key, and the engine roars. You push the pedal to the floor, and away you go! You'll end up somewhere, but it won't be pretty. Many banks operate their marketing efforts in much the same way. They send out a few postcard campaigns and direct mailings,...
Acres of Diamonds – The Solution to the Yield Curve
I finally read it. I had heard about it from at least twenty people over the years who talked of it being a powerful book that shaped their world: Acres of Diamonds. It's a century old, and yet its truths are timeless. This pastor, lawyer, speaker, politician, and university president—who collected $11 million from his speech by the same title and donated it to students—spoke of the riches that...
Let the Bears Sleep While You Get All the Honey
The media seem to be doing their level best to keep folks jittery. So it's not surprising that consumers are sitting hard on their wallets, convinced that the monsters of recession and depression will suck the filling out of them if they so much as crack them open. And what are banks doing? Most are seeing the fearful hype as a huge problem, setting their alarm clocks for spring, and hunkering...
Seven Secrets to Catching the Hungriest Fish
A teacher read a story to her second grade class about a village of fishermen. “Take out a sheet of paper,” she said, “and I’d like you each to draw a picture of the lake and the fishermen from the story.” The class began drawing big blue lakes with boats scattered across the water. As the teacher walked around, she noticed the work of one girl. Instead of scattering the boats across the water,...
Just Say No to “Yes” Men
The message is clear: if disaster is what you’re after, surround yourself with “yes” men. They’ll be good company in the lifeboat.