Watch the video below to learn how to install a performance culture that sticks—and changes everything.

Let me say something uncomfortable but true. Most bank teams don’t have a performance problem.
They have a pretending problem.

People pretending not to know what excellence looks like.
Pretending they didn’t see the standard.
Pretending they didn’t hear the deadline.

And when pretending becomes the culture, accountability dies.

We’ve conducted the largest nationwide accountability culture survey. And here’s what we found…

Eighty seven percent of employees believe their coworkers pretend not to know what’s
expected of them.

Let that sink in. That means that almost nine out of ten people think their teammates are
willfully avoiding ownership. And in that kind of culture, you don’t get execution, you get excuses.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Most people don’t mean to undermine accountability. They’re good people.
They’re just part of a system that tolerates fuzzy expectations, no follow through, and vague
coaching like let’s just do our best.

What they really need? Clarity, structure, measurement, feedback, and celebration.

That’s what a performance culture delivers.

When accountability becomes your cultural standard, cross sales rise, deposits grow,
morale improves, and profits soar because suddenly everyone knows,“Oh, this is how we play here
and we play to win. It’s not about pressure. It’s about purposeful pursuit of performance.”

The best banks aren’t the ones who demand results with a stick, they’re the ones who install systems
that create self led teams where people take ownership and actually like it because people want to win.

They just need a scoreboard and a coach who believes they can. But let me be clear. This isn’t going to happen
with another staff meeting or a memo or my personal favorite, a new poster in the break room about excellence.

Accountability isn’t a slogan. It’s a system. And when the system is installed correctly, stage appropriate,
it changes everything.

Incidentally, you’ll never guess what the one trait every bank award winner has in common.

It’s not a logo. It’s not a branch count. It’s not a flashy website. It’s accountability.

They have cultures where execution happens because the system demands it and the people embrace it.
That’s why they’ve been named one of the best banks in America.

And if you’ve built a culture like that or you’re on your way, you should apply for a Banky Award
at BankyAwards.com because culture like that deserves to be seen. 

So if you’re tired of nudging people, who should already know.

If you’re done tiptoeing around performance and if you’re ready to build a culture of accountability that
drives results without drama, get your Banky Award application in at BankyAwards.com
and let the world know you don’t just have a culture, you have a performance culture.

That’s what changes everything, and it starts now.

To your continued success, 

Roxanne Emmerich 

Please watch the video above and share it with your exec team and board. 

The post How to Build an Accountability Culture in Banking | The Banky Award Difference appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

In this week’s video, you’ll discover why most bank branding mistakes start with a weak or irrelevant unique selling proposition for banks, and how that one flaw kills your pricing power and repels high-value clients.

Uncover how elite institutions use bold positioning in banking to dominate their markets and attract core deposits—without caving on rate or wasting marketing dollars.

Watch now to see what separates the best from the rest.

Let’s get honest about something that’s quietly killing your deposit growth, sabotaging your pricing power, and making your marketing dollars evaporate…

It’s not your message.
It’s your positioning.

Most community banks have been duped—by well-intentioned branding firms…who took hundreds of thousands of dollars…designed beautiful logos, catchy taglines…and then gave you one half-decent USP like: “We approve loans in 36 hours.”

Which, okay, that’s something…

But is it enough to make your ideal customer say:
“Whoa. We HAVE to talk to that bank.”?

Not even close.

Marketing only works when it’s tied to one thing: Positioning.

If you can’t articulate why your bank is the best, or the only… you’re just another option in a saturated market.

And your team?

When they get asked, “Why should I bank with you instead of the other guy?”

They’re saying things like:

“We’ve been around for 80 years…”
“We have great people…”
“You’ll get me.”

Let’s be real.
Those aren’t selling points.
They’re red flags that you have no positioning.

A real Unique Selling Proposition does one of two things:

👉 Proves you’re the best
👉 Or proves you’re the only

If your USP doesn’t do that, it’s not a USP—it’s wallpaper.

And here’s the real cost.

Without a strong USP…

🚫 Your marketing falls flat
🚫 Your sales team doesn’t have the tools to close premium business
🚫 And you’re forced to compete on rate instead of value

Which is a race to the bottom.

So, here’s the test…

Ask your frontline team this question: “Why should someone bank with us instead of anyone else?”

If you hear silence…or clichés…you’ve got a positioning problem.

Incidentally…there’s one USP that instantly separates a bank from the rest of the pack.

The one line that makes prospects stop scrolling, stop hesitating, and start saying: “Well, obviously we should talk to them.”

That USP? “We’ve been named one of the Best Banks in America by the Institute for Extraordinary Banking.”

That, my friend, is positioning.

The Banky Award doesn’t just sit on a shelf.
It gets you into the room.
It closes the deal.
It proves what your marketing claims.

So if you’ve already built a performance culture…
If your team is aligned…
If you’re growing low-cost deposits and delivering real results…

Get your Banky Award application in.  Go to BankyAwards.com.

Because the banks who win this award?

Don’t just market better.
They close better.
Lead better.
And bank better.

To your continued success, 

Roxanne Emmerich 

Please watch the video above and share it with your exec team and board. 

The post Your Marketing Isn’t Broken. Your Positioning Is. appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

If you’re the kind of leader who feels strongly that you can’t follow the herd and believes that net interest margin compression is inevitable, you’re going to love this.

Or if you have some lenders who get premium pricing but are frustrated that others still fall back to rate matching, you’ll want to watch this.

Or maybe you’ve given up on getting premium pricing because you believed the conventional wisdom that banking is a commodity that you’ve heard at the industry conferences and if so, this is for you.

Here’s why. When you get it, you’ll have a blueprint for catapulting yourself past the three biggest problems in banking right now:

Problem 1: Customers who love you and leave you for better rates.
Problem 2: Customers believe your commodity and you might not be giving them a reason to think differently.
Problem 3: Your people mean well and offer great service, but they don’t know how to sidestep the whole rate conversation trap.

Every bank is facing these three. Today you will learn about four levels of USPs and why you need dozens of them.  But to get extreme premium pricing, you need to create level four USPs.

Level one USPs offer basic differentiation. If you’ve ever believed that great customer service was your key differentiator, then you’re working with a level one USP.
Level two USPs are our gadgets and products. Your super-duper free checking, your nifty online banking site, and your instant approval mortgage are all level two USPs. You need them, but they’re too easy to copy.
Level three USPs are where it gets juicy. They’re the special education and certifications that matter to discerning customers and put you in a league of elite bankers.
Level four USPs are the pinnacle. They are the proprietary processes that clients tell you are worth at least 10 times more than the additional amount that you charge. These take you way out of the commodity world.

Flex your level for USPs with a sales process designed to monetize them, and you’ll pull away your competitor’s best customers at 150 basis points or more.

Some of our banks regularly average at least 200 basis points more than what their competitors get. So don’t tell me it can’t be done. Also, you’ll have the peace of mind that you are profitable and safe during good times and bad.

What if you could use your USPs in your sales process to make sure you never hear those ugly words, “can you match the rate?” So you and your people can feel the competence of knowing that you are an elite, prestigious organization worth more.

Get your USPs right and stop worrying about what the economy or desperate competitors do to your profits. That’s for those other banks.

To your continued success,

Roxanne Emmerich

Please watch the video above and share it with your exec team and board.

The post Master the Four Levels of USPs [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Get ready because you could stop your prospects from asking you to match your rate to win the business and start getting paid more within the next two weeks.  How does that sound?

If you’re the kind of person who has team members at your door saying, boss, we can do this deal, we match the rate and you know, that’s no good.

If you’re the kind of person who has one team member who is already getting premium pricing, and you want more, you’re going to love this.

Or if you have team members that believe they have a moral obligation to match the rates. Don’t worry, it’s not their fault. I’ll show you how to get them to come around.

In this video, you’re going to discover:

The three elements of a unique selling proposition or USP, that actually make it work.

The most common banking USPS, and why you should never use them.

The business mistake we see banks make when creating USPs.

Unlike so many branding efforts, that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, but never really deliver the new profitable customers you want, USPs act like magnets for the best customers in your market. If you build them, right.

For any of your USPS to be successful, each has to meet all three criteria:

They must matter to your customer.

They must be dramatically different than anything else in your market.

They must be worded as an explicit benefit.

As opposed to the “we love them all the same” approach to customer service, the job everyone must get is that you take very good care of all customers, but your Top 100 customers and your Top 100 prospects are the reason you exist.

There’s got to be a benefit that matters to your customer, a reason why they should do business with you over the other 10 to 100 banks in your market. What makes you different in a way that actually matters to your future customer and is said in a way that is believable

It’s time for you to up the game. If you’re serious about getting rid of rate matching. When you put all of these things together and use them properly in your sales process, you can see big results within days and weeks.

A few years ago, we had a bank that brought several of their executives and their President to our event. We took them through an exercise to develop their USPs. When they went back to their bank the very next week, the President wrote me excitedly to say that one of their CSRS had used the USP with the prospect and the prospect pulled in an additional 5 million dollars the next day, after opening the account for what was supposed to be a $250,000 checking account.

USPs unlock big accounts without ever having to match rate. And by the way, not all USPs are equal.

In the next video, I’ll show you why you need a particular type of USP, a level four USP if you want to get extreme premium pricing.

To your continued success,

Roxanne Emmerich

Please watch the video above and share it with your exec team and board.

The post Stop Matching the Competition [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

If you’re the kind of leader who feels strongly that you can’t follow the herd and believes that net interest margin compression is inevitable, you’re going to love this.

Or if you have some lenders who get premium pricing but are frustrated that others still fall back to rate matching, you’ll want to watch this.

Or maybe you’ve given up on getting premium pricing because you believed the conventional wisdom that banking is a commodity that you’ve heard at the industry conferences and if so, this is for you.

Here’s why. When you get it, you’ll have a blueprint for catapulting yourself past the three biggest problems in banking right now:

Problem 1: Customers who love you and leave you for better rates.
Problem 2: Customers believe your commodity and you might not be giving them a reason to think differently.
Problem 3: Your people mean well and offer great service, but they don’t know how to sidestep the whole rate conversation trap.

Every bank is facing these three. Today you will learn about four levels of USPs and why you need dozens of them.  But to get extreme premium pricing, you need to create level four USPs.

Level one USPs offer basic differentiation. If you’ve ever believed that great customer service was your key differentiator, then you’re working with a level one USP.
Level two USPs are our gadgets and products. Your super-duper free checking, your nifty online banking site, and your instant approval mortgage are all level two USPs. You need them, but they’re too easy to copy.
Level three USPs are where it gets juicy. They’re the special education and certifications that matter to discerning customers and put you in a league of elite bankers.
Level four USPs are the pinnacle. They are the proprietary processes that clients tell you are worth at least 10 times more than the additional amount that you charge. These take you way out of the commodity world.

Flex your level for USPs with a sales process designed to monetize them, and you’ll pull away your competitor’s best customers at 150 basis points or more.

Some of our banks regularly average at least 200 basis points more than what their competitors get. So don’t tell me it can’t be done. Also, you’ll have the peace of mind that you are profitable and safe during good times and bad.

What if you could use your USPs in your sales process to make sure you never hear those ugly words, “can you match the rate?” So you and your people can feel the competence of knowing that you are an elite, prestigious organization worth more.

Get your USPs right and stop worrying about what the economy or desperate competitors do to your profits. That’s for those other banks.

To your continued success,

Roxanne Emmerich

Please watch the video above and share it with your exec team and board.

The post Master the Four Levels of USPs [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Get ready because you could stop your prospects from asking you to match your rate to win the business and start getting paid more within the next two weeks.  How does that sound?

If you’re the kind of person who has team members at your door saying, boss, we can do this deal, we match the rate and you know, that’s no good.

If you’re the kind of person who has one team member who is already getting premium pricing, and you want more, you’re going to love this.

Or if you have team members that believe they have a moral obligation to match the rates. Don’t worry, it’s not their fault. I’ll show you how to get them to come around.

In this video, you’re going to discover:

The three elements of a unique selling proposition or USP, that actually make it work.

The most common banking USPS, and why you should never use them.

The business mistake we see banks make when creating USPs.

Unlike so many branding efforts, that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, but never really deliver the new profitable customers you want, USPs act like magnets for the best customers in your market. If you build them, right.

For any of your USPS to be successful, each has to meet all three criteria:

They must matter to your customer.

They must be dramatically different than anything else in your market.

They must be worded as an explicit benefit.

As opposed to the “we love them all the same” approach to customer service, the job everyone must get is that you take very good care of all customers, but your Top 100 customers and your Top 100 prospects are the reason you exist.

There’s got to be a benefit that matters to your customer, a reason why they should do business with you over the other 10 to 100 banks in your market. What makes you different in a way that actually matters to your future customer and is said in a way that is believable

It’s time for you to up the game. If you’re serious about getting rid of rate matching. When you put all of these things together and use them properly in your sales process, you can see big results within days and weeks.

A few years ago, we had a bank that brought several of their executives and their President to our event. We took them through an exercise to develop their USPs. When they went back to their bank the very next week, the President wrote me excitedly to say that one of their CSRS had used the USP with the prospect and the prospect pulled in an additional 5 million dollars the next day, after opening the account for what was supposed to be a $250,000 checking account.

USPs unlock big accounts without ever having to match rate. And by the way, not all USPs are equal.

In the next video, I’ll show you why you need a particular type of USP, a level four USP if you want to get extreme premium pricing.

To your continued success,

Roxanne Emmerich

Please watch the video above and share it with your exec team and board.

The post Stop Matching the Competition [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

In this session, I’ll show you how to get everyone in your bank thinking about how to go get the next best customers at premium pricing.

If you’re the kind of leader who has the traditional marketing department and they do “their thing” and nobody quite understands the why or the how except those in the department, that’s very typical.

You’re going to love knowing that you can expand that department so that everyone in the bank believes they are a marketer.

If, on the other hand, your people, both customer facing positions and back office, are already actively involved every day in landing the next best customers and taking your current most profitable and kissing them on the lips until they chap, good for you!

I have a few more things for you to keep that party going.

Or, if you’re thinking, “Really, one more thing to think about, Roxanne? I have to run a bank or grow my department and now you want ME to be an extension of the marketing team…?”

Well, YES. And when you do this correctly, you will spend LESS time in the office…I promise.

Most every bank would say that their team members don’t consider themselves marketers.

I’m now going to give you three steps that will help your team grow new, more profitable accounts in just a few weeks, REGARDLESS of their positions:

Step 1: Volume is not equal to profit
UNLIKE so much education in banking that encourages people to be excited about the number of new accounts, if you’re a typical bank, there’s only about 100 who account for ALL the profits for the entire bank.  Your team needs to know that. Stop chasing every new account you can get on a free checking deal, just to count the numbers, and get focused on what really matters—the next most profitable few.

Step 2: Not all prospects are the same… stop treating them that way

As opposed to the “we love them all the same” approach to customer service, the job everyone must get is that you take very good care of all customers, but your Top 100 customers and your Top 100 prospects are the reason you exist.

Literally.

Without them, there is ZERO profit.  They’re not the meaning of life…but they ARE why the doors remain open. It’s the job of everyone in the bank to flip on the brain and think about how to add meaningful value to these people every day.

Step 3: Turn off the noise, and build a wall around your Top 100 customers and prospects

Get everyone and everything aligned to make sure that you never lose a Top 100 customer. Have systems to keep going back until you get all their business. Get all your marketing and sales efforts focused on the Top 100 list. Everything else is noise that can never be used as an excuse to not be impeccable on the delivery for your Top 100 initiatives.

Again, first get your people to understand real life “bank math” so they understand the best way to help the poor is to not become one of them.

Second, focus your efforts on getting more Top 100.

Finally, take your current Top 100 and build “kiss them on the lips until they chap” approaches to service.

By getting everyone in your bank thinking like a marketer, you can create a sustainable and profitable bank that sees economic downturns as an opportunity to thrive more because you’ve built so much safety you can sleep like a baby every night.

To your continued success,

Roxanne Emmerich

Please watch the video above and share it with your exec team and board.

The post How to “Turn Off the Noise” and Finally Get Marketing That Works [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Well, here’s the problem with that. Any bank that can only command 25 basis points of premium pricing will probably not have its name on the front door five years from now.

Our industry is now in a significantly disrupted environment. Just because your bank has been in business for 120 years doesn’t mean that you will still be standing five years from now.

If you’re not paranoid, you’re not paying attention to how quickly the disruptors are becoming sophisticated and are about to target your best customers.

Implementing a proven sales culture system is the only way to lift yourself above your competitors to be the only bank that a prospect would consider. Your customers should be telling you: “This is worth a million to me, and that is worth $500,000 to me, and you’re only charging an extra $10,000—it’s a no brainer.”

If your people don’t know how to get that, and if you don’t give them the differentiation to do that, you send them out set up to lose.

You can’t expect to fix this by asking them to make more calls. We’ve all been there. We’ve all called on people when we didn’t really have anything unique and different to offer, and our good looks and charm just weren’t enough. So they sent us packing.

Every time we have another loss, our self-esteem goes down, so the next time we go out, we anticipate rejection: “Yeah, you’re probably going to say no, but would it be okay if we talked for five minutes anyway before you throw me out?”

When would be a good time to figure out that extreme differentiation?

When I talk about unique selling propositions—those differentiators that help you get paid more—I don’t mean getting one of those slogans that most branding companies will charge you half a million dollars for. I’m talking about having a plethora of differentiators that fit different industries. When you do your pre-call plans, your people will know: “I’m going to use these three because they will resonate with the prospect in front of me. And they’re going to tell me we’re worth at least half a million dollars of financial impact here and $200,000 there. So, when I say to them, “we’re $10,000 more,” they’re going to say, ‘that’s a bargain!’—because it is!”

Mastering how to do that is a vital part of the equation, but most banks just don’t get the verbiage right. This is not a game where “close enough” wins. This is a game where getting it right wins.

It’s not rocket science. So why do banks still keep paying branding firms to solve this for them? And why do branding firms never deliver premium pricing opportunities when that is what they’re hired to do?

Set the intention that this is the year when you create extreme differentiation. But know that that’s not enough. You also have to figure out how to use it in your sales process, which means your team must know how to use it. They can’t just talk about their stuff like a traveling salesman opening his tattered suitcase. They have to know how to get the person to say what the financial value and impact is to them. That’s a game to be mastered, and that’s something where sales training has failed the banking industry miserably.

Most sales training feels icky. But when done correctly, differentiating yourself and knowing how to use that differentiation feels like the greatest gift you’re giving that prospect or customer in front of you. That’s a game-changer because, as a community banker, your job is to be a source of wisdom, honesty, integrity, and authenticity. That’s what relationships should be built on.

When we bring differentiation to that relationship, that changes everything. We bring significant financial impact to our customers.

As challenging times continue, we know one thing for sure: Whatever is happening on the outside, you can change your approach in response.

One of the best things you can do is to create differentiators that are extreme enough to stimulate your prospects to say: “Whoa, you’re playing a different game. Why don’t all banks do this? I don’t want anyone else.”

– Roxanne Emmerich

Please watch the video above and share it with your exec team and board.

The post “I Don’t Want to Work with Any Other Bank but You” [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

For most banks, the marketing budget is driven by shiny new ideas from conferences that marketing people attend or based on what was done the year before.  From the newly attended conference “pitches,” they go shopping for new software, new branding, new social media packages—all the marketing offerings du jour. Sadly, they are all guaranteed to create a negative ROI before they even start.

What you really need is for your marketing team to understand that only about 100 of your customers ultimately contribute all the profits, so they had better start thinking about how to elegantly bring those in.

Measure the Right Things

You don’t want to measure the number of leads or new customers since 87% of your customers are unprofitable. Those are terrible marketing metrics.

Let’s do the real math here. Let’s say that you spend a million dollars in your marketing budget, and you bring in 1,000 leads from that. Okay, now we can do some division to figure what it cost per lead that responds to you: $1,000.

Now let’s determine the ROI from those who call in. How many convert to an appointment? Of those appointments, how many become customers? Of those who become customers, how many do so at premium pricing? And what will the cross-sales ratio be on those accounts? Those are the metrics that really matter.

So why on Earth are so many banks still measuring things like number of new customers or number of new leads instead of shepherding those leads all the way through and making sure that they’re creating a full relationship with profitable customers? Why?

When we’re using the wrong metrics, we’re going to have a problem. When I do my Breakthrough Banking Blueprint Conference where we cover what the elite-performing executives do to create a sustainable sales culture that works, I’m constantly telling executives: “You have a role in understanding the marketing and sales process because, ultimately, you are in charge of your revenue model. And if you don’t understand that role and abdicate responsibility for outcome and strategy, you’re going to have a problem. You’ll have this big expense called ‘marketing budget’ with a very low return on investment from those dollars.”

All bank executives, no matter their roles, need to understand the basics of what it is that pulls in your next most-profitable customers and how to convert them. What is your role as a bank executive in driving the strategy to make that happen?

– Roxanne Emmerich

Please watch the video above and share it with your exec team and board.

The post The “New Math” to Measure the Right Things [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

In this session, I’ll show you how to get everyone in your bank thinking about how to go get the next best customers at premium pricing.

If you’re the kind of leader who has the traditional marketing department and they do “their thing” and nobody quite understands the why or the how except those in the department, that’s very typical.

You’re going to love knowing that you can expand that department so that everyone in the bank believes they are a marketer.

If, on the other hand, your people, both customer facing positions and back office, are already actively involved every day in landing the next best customers and taking your current most profitable and kissing them on the lips until they chap, good for you!

I have a few more things for you to keep that party going.

Or, if you’re thinking, “Really, one more thing to think about, Roxanne? I have to run a bank or grow my department and now you want ME to be an extension of the marketing team…?”

Well, YES. And when you do this correctly, you will spend LESS time in the office…I promise.

Most every bank would say that their team members don’t consider themselves marketers.

I’m now going to give you three steps that will help your team grow new, more profitable accounts in just a few weeks, REGARDLESS of their positions:

Step 1: Volume is not equal to profit
UNLIKE so much education in banking that encourages people to be excited about the number of new accounts, if you’re a typical bank, there’s only about 100 who account for ALL the profits for the entire bank.  Your team needs to know that. Stop chasing every new account you can get on a free checking deal, just to count the numbers, and get focused on what really matters—the next most profitable few.

Step 2: Not all prospects are the same… stop treating them that way

As opposed to the “we love them all the same” approach to customer service, the job everyone must get is that you take very good care of all customers, but your Top 100 customers and your Top 100 prospects are the reason you exist.

Literally.

Without them, there is ZERO profit.  They’re not the meaning of life…but they ARE why the doors remain open. It’s the job of everyone in the bank to flip on the brain and think about how to add meaningful value to these people every day.

Step 3: Turn off the noise, and build a wall around your Top 100 customers and prospects

Get everyone and everything aligned to make sure that you never lose a Top 100 customer. Have systems to keep going back until you get all their business. Get all your marketing and sales efforts focused on the Top 100 list. Everything else is noise that can never be used as an excuse to not be impeccable on the delivery for your Top 100 initiatives.

Again, first get your people to understand real life “bank math” so they understand the best way to help the poor is to not become one of them.

Second, focus your efforts on getting more Top 100.

Finally, take your current Top 100 and build “kiss them on the lips until they chap” approaches to service.

By getting everyone in your bank thinking like a marketer, you can create a sustainable and profitable bank that sees economic downturns as an opportunity to thrive more because you’ve built so much safety you can sleep like a baby every night.

To your continued success,

Roxanne Emmerich

Please watch the video above and share it with your exec team and board.

The post How to “Turn Off the Noise” and Finally Get Marketing That Works [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.