In this video, Roxanne Emmerich dismantles the myth that today’s environment makes low-cost deposit growth impossible. Top 5% performers are doing it right now, bringing in multimillion-dollar checking accounts and full relationships without resorting to promotional rate gimmicks.

You’ll discover:

• Why growing non-interest-bearing deposits is “Christmas every day” for margin and profitability
• The real reason most banks fail at organic deposit growth—and why brochures and billboards won’t fix it
• What top 5% performers know (and do) that consistently attracts large, low-cost relationships

Your competition is already calling on your customers. This video shows you how to get ahead of them—fast.

Watch now. 

When everybody is competing for a scarce item, it gets a little bit hard unless you get better at it. And that’s exactly what we need to do with low-cost deposits. Let’s face it: There is no end in sight to the competition for low-cost deposits. And even during a time when your bank is flush with deposits, you should be actively increasing your non-interest-bearing deposits as a percentage of total deposits, because that’s like Christmas every single day.

Every month you wake up and go, “Everything we charge for a loan is profit. This is good.” And yet most banks don’t really have a process, nor do they have the people skilled to know how to bring in low-cost deposits over and over again. So they’re doing billboards, they’re doing advertisements, they’re opening CD accounts and giving them away with these ridiculous interest rates as a part of this—and they’re not understanding that there’s a whole bunch of customers out there that are just not that rate sensitive, but they sure want someone to make a difference in their lives.

And they want somebody who, when they come out to their business, knows how to make a meaningful difference for them that so outweighs what they would be getting on an interest-bearing account.

But does your team have the skill set? Does your team have the confidence? Listen, one of the things I know for sure—because I’ve had the great honor for decades of working with many top five percenters, those who get to and stay in the top five percent of performance—is this: One of the things they have mastery of is how to bring in low- or no-cost deposits.

It is a system. It is a skill set. It is hard.

But then once people know how to do it, they bring in one account after another after another. I called a bank CEO recently because I heard that one of our recent graduates of the Accredited Banking Professional Program brought in a fourteen-million-dollar checking account of a business in their area. And this was a bank that was a two-hundred-million-dollar bank. This was kind of a big deal.

And not only did they bring in that account, but they brought in the entire relationship. I think they said they had fourteen cross-sells. So I called to congratulate the CEO, and the CEO said, “That’s nothing. My people bring in a two- or three-million-dollar checking account every single week.”

Don’t tell me it can’t be done, because there are people doing it. But they’re not doing it by slugging their brochures and doing the “bada bing, bada boom, what-keeps-you-up-at-night, feel-felt-found” sales training. Let me assure you: They’re only going to come off as someone who will never be invited back to the table unless they bring their skill sets up to be a top five percenter—so that your bank can be a top five percent performer. Deposits aren’t going to get any easier.

This is going to go on for a while. But you can get a lot better, and you can do it quickly. But you’ve got to get into action because your competitors are coming at you—and your depositors—quickly.

The post Why Is It So Important to Hold On to Low Cost Deposits [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

In this week’s video, Roxanne Emmerich delivers a blunt wake-up call: overregulation isn’t the problem; execution is. Every bank faces the same regulatory environment. Only a small percentage choose to operate above it.

Top five percent banks stop complaining and start playing offense. They price loans for value, not fear. They build funding strategies anchored in non-interest-bearing deposits. And they execute a repeatable performance system, regardless of who’s in office or where rates land.

Here’s what separates the winners from the whiners:

• Premium pricing beats volume chasing when your credit discipline and value proposition are aligned

• Low-cost and no-cost deposits are built intentionally, not accidentally

• Top performers operate from a franchise system, not hope, hustle, or heroics

The market always rewards banks willing to execute at a higher level. It punishes those waiting for conditions to improve.

If you’re ready to stop reacting and start running your bank like the top five percent already do, this video will challenge your thinking and your excuses.

Discover how elite banks win inside the same constraints you face.

Watch now. 

Are we overly regulated as an industry? You better believe it. And yet, when I get my CEOs together on Fridays, many of them are the top five percent performers in this country.

One of them said it best. He said, “You know what? I don’t care who gets elected. I don’t care who does whatever, because at the end of the day, I still have to go out, make some loans, bring in deposits, and make a profit for my shareholders. So all I can do is just do what I do best in a world of crazy.”

That’s a really good attitude. I got a lesson that day.

Stop whining about the overregulation.
Stop whining about the interest rates.
Stop whining about how hard it is to get people.

Go get good people. Go understand that all of your competitors have the same overregulation you have—and get on with it.

At some point, we’ve got to pick it up, put on our big boy pants and big girl pants, and get out there and get it done.

The world is always creating space for those who make good quality loans at premium pricing and bring in non-interest-bearing deposits to fund them. Those are the ones whose names end up on the door.

If you keep complaining about overregulation—unless you’re going to get in there and fix it, which for many of us you can’t—here’s the thing:

Overregulation will continue. But all you’ve got to do is make premium-priced loans and bring in low-cost or no-cost deposits, and the world is your oyster.

Join me at the next Breakthrough Banking Blueprint™ Bootcamp, where I’ll show you the blueprint the other top five percenters use.

They weren’t top five percenters until they discovered it.

Why wouldn’t you want the franchise system that has taken hundreds of banks to top five percent performance? If they can do it, you can do it.

Am I going to see you there? I hope so.

The post Life in the World of Over-Regulation [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Hi. I’m Roxanne Emmerich, founder of the Best Banks in America Super Conference and chair of the Institute for Extraordinary Banking. In this video, I’m pulling back the curtain on what separates the best banks in America from everyone else.

You’ve seen their names. You’ve heard the buzz. But what exactly are the Banky Award-winning banks doing differently? The answer: pretty much everything.

They don’t tolerate cultural drift, and they don’t chase volume. They engineer value, performance, and premium pricing. They use systems, not slogans. They align every role to profit.

They build magnetic cultures that make people want to stay, buy more, and refer. And when I asked them, “What’s their biggest difference?” many told me it started at Super Conference. And that’s where they first saw what a performance culture really looks like, then came back and built it.

Every year at Super Conference, I hear from bank CEOs, “Oh my gosh. I got two years’ worth of notes for implementation ideas.” And I hear from many, including Jill Moss from Farmers State Bank, who basically came the first year and said, “How will I ever be performing at the same level as some of these banks?” And then, two years later, having implemented those processes, they were recognized as one of the top banks in the country.

It’s about taking the good and making it great.

You’ll want to be at the Super Conference along with your executive team, and bring some board members too, so that you have a cohesive team that all understands: if you’re gonna play this game, play it to win and be one of the top performers.

Let’s face it. Only the top performers will be allowed the luxury of independence in the future. And as a community bank, one of your most important goals is to make sure that your name stays on that door for years to come and that you keep making a difference in your community.

That’s the end game.

So let’s raise the bar, and I’ll see you at Super Conference.

The post What the Best Banks in America Do Differently [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

I’m telling you, I’ve heard it a thousand times. A CEO will say to me, “I am so tired of lenders walking into my office and saying, ‘Boss, I’m going to lose this deal unless we match the pricing.'”

Yep, this is true. At this point, it is true because they didn’t handle it correctly from the get-go. That lender got themselves into the position of having to match rate, and so yes, in fact, they’re in this mess. Maybe they can sweet-talk the customer into saying something like, “Well, you get me, and we have good people,” and maybe they can get twenty-five basis points more. But you can’t make a go of it and become a Top 5% performer with twenty-five basis points more on a loan deal, especially when you have desperate competitors pricing these things at crazy rates. And the deposit-rate competitors are just going through the roof on what they’re willing to pay. So margins are shrinking for those who don’t get it.

Don’t be that person. You need to be someone who gets it and understands we’ve got to have a four or even a five net interest margin—and it’s doable.

I can prove it. And you’ll meet many of these people when you come to the Best Banks in America™ Super Conference because there are many banks that are commanding well over a four net interest margin at a time when other bank CEOs are saying it can’t be done. And it’s true—they have a mountain of evidence. They really do.

Everyone is coming to them saying they have to match the pricing or they’re going to lose the deal. And it’s true. But there’s another mountain they need to climb: how to engage in those relationships correctly from the get-go so it doesn’t become about rate.

Listen, all you’ve got to do is watch the hard trend line. Dan Burrus, a dear friend of mine who is a futurist, talks about how being a futurist isn’t that difficult. He says, “Just watch the hard trend lines. They’ll tell you exactly where things are going.”

When I started this business, there were eighteen thousand banks. Now there are four thousand five hundred. I wonder where this is going. Yeah, we’re going to two thousand.

There are a lot of banks who are not nearly paranoid enough that they’re about to lose the name on the front of their door. They’re looking at the fact that they had a good year last year, which means nothing for this year because every year has its new challenges. Unless you pick yourself up and become a Top 5% performer among your peers, you’re always in a state of vulnerability.

So my buddy Dan Burrus talks about the trend line, and we’ve gone from eighteen thousand banks to four thousand five hundred banks.

We’re on our way to two thousand. There will always be two thousand great boutique banks that can command whatever premium pricing they want to and compete against all the desperate non-bank competitors.

And if you’re not on the path to becoming a Top 5% performer—one who can command four and five NIMs—you’re going to have challenges keeping your name on the door because we can see the hard trend line. We know where this thing goes, and denying it is not going to keep it from happening.

So please wake up to the possibility.

And here’s the thing: your team members will love you when you start commanding premium pricing because they’ll no longer feel like vendors. They’ll feel like partners, and they’ll love coming to work every day because, guess what?

It is fun to win.

The post Stop Matching Rates: How Top 5% Banks Command Premium Pricing Instead [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Most community banks are trapped in a pricing death spiral. Match the rate or lose the deal. Cut margin or lose relevance. Meanwhile, a small group of banks quietly charges premium pricing—and their customers gladly pay it.

This video dismantles the myth that higher NIM automatically means higher risk. The truth? Banks that stop competing on rate reduce risk, stabilize margin, and protect independence.

Here’s what top-performing banks do differently:

• They stop selling products and start selling differentiated value that customers can’t price-compare.

• They identify who will pay premium pricing—and stop wasting energy on rate shoppers.

• They reposition the conversation so customers decide the value is worth far more than the price.

Big banks will always win the rate game. Community banks win by becoming boutique banks—high-value, high-trust, and unapologetically priced for the outcomes they deliver.

If your margin strategy depends on squeezing an extra 20 basis points, you’re already behind. That model doesn’t survive the next cycle.

This is the moment to rethink how pricing really works—and how elite banks escape the rate trap entirely.

Watch the full video to discover how premium pricing actually protects your margin—and your independence.

Watch now. 

Net interest margin—three of my favorite words. Why? Because it is such an important component of what takes a bank to the top of its peers.

Listen, if you’re tired of being average and competing on rate, there is a way out of that mess. I would suggest that the banks that don’t figure their way out of having to match rates are probably not going to maintain their independence going forward.

Let’s face it—there is more competition than ever, and banks are undercutting each other on pricing. And yet, there are those who command premium pricing. What do they do? What do they know?

Why won’t they tell you their secrets? Well, you need to know their secrets—how they position themselves, how they identify those who are likely to pay premium pricing, and how they arrange the situation such that the customer is telling them that what the bank brings that’s different is worth millions to them.

So when they charge twenty thousand dollars extra, it becomes the bargain of the century—taking them out of direct competition. The only thing they’re competing against is not having that special uniqueness the bank offers.

You think it can’t be done?

Well, maybe you should hang out with the folks who are getting it done. Because if you cannot suspend disbelief and aren’t willing to say, “Maybe there’s something we don’t know,” I can guarantee you this—you will continue to match rate.

Banks can’t continue to do that anymore. Let’s face it, the big banks have a competitive advantage in pricing. We can’t compete in that space.

But there will always be room for the community bank that becomes the boutique bank—the one that adds tremendous value, knows it’s worth more, and doesn’t say lame things like, “We have good people,” or “We’ve been around for 120 years.”

That won’t command more than twenty basis points more—and you can’t survive on twenty basis points.

This is the time to bring in additional pricing. So discover how to do that.

I’m teaching a special class on exactly how to do this. I hope I see you there.

The post Higher Net Interest Margin With Less Risk – Fact or Fiction? [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

In this week’s video, Roxanne Emmerich delivers a blunt wake-up call: overregulation isn’t the problem—execution is. Every bank faces the same regulatory environment. Only a small percentage choose to operate above it.

Top five percent banks stop complaining and start playing offense. They price loans for value, not fear. They build funding strategies anchored in non-interest-bearing deposits. And they execute a repeatable performance system—regardless of who’s in office or where rates land.

Here’s what separates the winners from the whiners:

• Premium pricing beats volume chasing when your credit discipline and value proposition are aligned

• Low-cost and no-cost deposits are built intentionally, not accidentally

• Top performers operate from a franchise system, not hope, hustle, or heroics

The market always rewards banks willing to execute at a higher level. It punishes those waiting for conditions to improve.

If you’re ready to stop reacting and start running your bank like the top five percent already do, this video will challenge your thinking—and your excuses.

Discover how elite banks win inside the same constraints you face.

Watch now. 

Are we overly regulated as an industry? You better believe it. And yet, when I get my CEOs together on Fridays, many of them are the top five percent performers in this country.

One of them said it best. He said, “You know what? I don’t care who gets elected. I don’t care who does whatever, because at the end of the day, I still have to go out, make some loans, bring in deposits, and make a profit for my shareholders. So all I can do is just do what I do best in a world of crazy.”

That’s a really good attitude. I got a lesson that day.

Stop whining about the overregulation.
Stop whining about the interest rates.
Stop whining about how hard it is to get people.

Go get good people. Go understand that all of your competitors have the same overregulation you have—and get on with it.

At some point, we’ve got to pick it up, put on our big boy pants and big girl pants, and get out there and get it done.

The world is always creating space for those who make good quality loans at premium pricing and bring in non-interest-bearing deposits to fund them. Those are the ones whose names end up on the door.

If you keep complaining about overregulation—unless you’re going to get in there and fix it, which for many of us you can’t—here’s the thing:

Overregulation will continue. But all you’ve got to do is make premium-priced loans and bring in low-cost or no-cost deposits, and the world is your oyster.

Join me at the next Breakthrough Banking Blueprint™ Bootcamp, where I’ll show you the blueprint the other top five percenters use.

They weren’t top five percenters until they discovered it.

Why wouldn’t you want the franchise system that has taken hundreds of banks to top five percent performance? If they can do it, you can do it.

Am I going to see you there? I hope so.

The post Life in the World of Over-Regulation [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

In this video, Roxanne Emmerich dismantles the myth that today’s environment makes low-cost deposit growth impossible. Top 5% performers are doing it right now—bringing in multimillion-dollar checking accounts and full relationships without resorting to promotional rate gimmicks.

You’ll discover:

• Why growing non-interest-bearing deposits is “Christmas every day” for margin and profitability
• The real reason most banks fail at organic deposit growth—and why brochures and billboards won’t fix it
• What top 5% performers know (and do) that consistently attracts large, low-cost relationships

Your competition is already calling on your customers. This video shows you how to get ahead of them—fast.

Watch now. 

When everybody is competing for a scarce item, it gets a little bit hard unless you get better at it. And that’s exactly what we need to do with low-cost deposits. Let’s face it: There is no end in sight to the competition for low-cost deposits. And even during a time when your bank is flush with deposits, you should be actively increasing your non-interest-bearing deposits as a percentage of total deposits, because that’s like Christmas every single day.

Every month you wake up and go, “Everything we charge for a loan is profit. This is good.” And yet most banks don’t really have a process, nor do they have the people skilled to know how to bring in low-cost deposits over and over again. So they’re doing billboards, they’re doing advertisements, they’re opening CD accounts and giving them away with these ridiculous interest rates as a part of this—and they’re not understanding that there’s a whole bunch of customers out there that are just not that rate sensitive, but they sure want someone to make a difference in their lives.

And they want somebody who, when they come out to their business, knows how to make a meaningful difference for them that so outweighs what they would be getting on an interest-bearing account.

But does your team have the skill set? Does your team have the confidence? Listen, one of the things I know for sure—because I’ve had the great honor for decades of working with many top five percenters, those who get to and stay in the top five percent of performance—is this: One of the things they have mastery of is how to bring in low- or no-cost deposits.

It is a system. It is a skill set. It is hard.

But then once people know how to do it, they bring in one account after another after another. I called a bank CEO recently because I heard that one of our recent graduates of the Accredited Banking Professional Program brought in a fourteen-million-dollar checking account of a business in their area. And this was a bank that was a two-hundred-million-dollar bank. This was kind of a big deal.

And not only did they bring in that account, but they brought in the entire relationship. I think they said they had fourteen cross-sells. So I called to congratulate the CEO, and the CEO said, “That’s nothing. My people bring in a two- or three-million-dollar checking account every single week.”

Don’t tell me it can’t be done, because there are people doing it. But they’re not doing it by slugging their brochures and doing the “bada bing, bada boom, what-keeps-you-up-at-night, feel-felt-found” sales training. Let me assure you: They’re only going to come off as someone who will never be invited back to the table unless they bring their skill sets up to be a top five percenter—so that your bank can be a top five percent performer. Deposits aren’t going to get any easier.

This is going to go on for a while. But you can get a lot better, and you can do it quickly. But you’ve got to get into action because your competitors are coming at you—and your depositors—quickly.

The post Why Is It So Important to Hold On to Low Cost Deposits [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

In this week’s video, Roxanne Emmerich cuts through the industry’s most dangerous habit: thinking expense‑cutting is a performance strategy. She exposes why efficiency ratios stay stuck, why cost‑cutting crushes culture at the exact moment you need discretionary effort, and why the top 5% of banks outperform—year after year—without layoffs or fear tactics.

You’ll discover how to:

• Shift from cost‑cutting to profit expansion by driving revenue and productivity per employee.

• Give every role a direct line‑of‑sight to profit with stage‑appropriate accountability that creates consistent wins.

• Build an extreme learning organization focused only on what ties directly to bottom‑line improvement.

If you want a team that drives profit instead of consuming it, this episode shows the system high‑performing banks use.

Watch now. 

Does your team know how they tie to profit? Really? Well, when a study was done of six thousand people, where they were asked, “Do you perform in the top ten percent?” over ninety percent of employees said that they performed in the top ten percent. So yes, we do have a problem. And yes, people do not understand how they tie to profit, but they think that they do.

And that’s a problem to be solved—and solved quickly. For so many banks, efficiency ratio is an important thing, and they—and we—always solve it with the wrong approaches. “Oh, let’s see if your pencil is short enough before you can have another pencil. Let’s cut every little expense.”

“Let’s cut payroll.” Well, what if we got more revenue out of every team member? What if we got people to be far more effective and productive at what they’re doing and had them really understand what profit looked like for their particular jobs? Yeah, it’s tricky to get people to understand something when they’ve had a lifetime of experiences where they believe that they’re tied to profit.

And yet, it is something that, as a leadership team, will be very important during challenging times because it’s really bad for your culture to cut people just when you need them to be engaged and alive and passionate and doing better work than they’ve ever done before. So now is a good time to figure out how your people tie to profit, how you build the systems, and how you get them accountable by stage-appropriate accountability—never measuring anything until they are winning—and always making sure they have the right education that works, where they immediately have a lift up in performance every time they learn something new.

That’s the new game of banking. If you look at the highest referring banks in America, they have something in common: their people know how they tie to profit, and they are extreme learning organizations, learning the right things that tie to profit.

The post How to Tie Everyone to Profit [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

In this week’s video, Roxanne Emmerich exposes why “false-attempt” sales training fails and reveals what truly transforms performance.

You’ll discover:

• Why your people’s reluctance to “sell” isn’t the real problem—it’s confidence.

• The three steps to transform sales culture from transactional to transformational.

• How to permanently boost low-cost deposits and cross-sales without losing authenticity.

If you’re tired of spinning your wheels with programs that never stick, this video shows you how to create a winning sales culture your team loves—and your bottom line will thank you for it.

Watch now. 

I believe that people don’t like hassles. Who does? Whether it’s at work, home, or out shopping, it’s a dangerous attitude among your people because it causes them not to put one hundred percent into their sales conversations.

In this session, I’m going to show you how your people—like many bankers before them who couldn’t but now do—can get six to seven cross-sales and all the deposits in a way that never feels salesy.

If you’re the kind of leader who has been preaching to the point of losing your voice about the need to get cross-sales of deposit accounts to make sure those accounts are both profitable and sticky, and you’re a bit fit to be tied at this point, you’re going to love this.

Or if you have some people who are getting the full deposit relationship but also have many who are simply transaction people because they’re taking orders and not owning the relationship, then this is a can’t-miss episode.

Then again, maybe you’re really feeling good about your team’s ability to get deposits, but you know there is so much more potential profit available if you can boost your low-cost deposits as a percentage of total deposits.

If you just change a few things, then you’ll enjoy this as well. As always, there is some work ahead and three challenges in particular that you need to look out for. Most banks have been doing internal or external sales training for years. Now, after all that money and time, when they’re really truthful, they’ve realized that it just isn’t working. When they see other banks that are now averaging six to seven cross-sales and mastering attracting low-cost deposits away from competitors, they know they just can’t give up—but they just can’t have another false attempt because the team is now doing the slow walk, thinking management will soon give up.

Still others are finding that most sales training is, well… salesy. That’s why so many people flock from the big banks to community banks. They felt the bank was inauthentic and felt violated. With that belief system in the way, their heels are dug in, and they don’t want to sell—period. That is leaving you between a rock and a hard place because you still need to fix this to stay competitive in the future against those who are getting it. Also, many bankers lack the skill to be a trusted advisor. They do have the product knowledge, but they don’t know how to really bring the type of extreme value that is necessary to be that person’s trusted advisor.

Most importantly, they lack skills and confidence—but it’s not their fault. There just hasn’t been good advice and a good system that helps them win.

Every bank is facing at least one of these. Join the club. Now let’s work together to knock the issues down one at a time. I’m now going to give you three steps to create an effective sales culture system program and, if necessary, change the culture at your bank.

Incidentally, I don’t believe sales training works. Sales training teaches people what to do. Sales education teaches them how to be. You simply can’t expect a transformation with sales training. So let’s get going on this so you can get some sales breakthroughs in a few short weeks.

Step One:
In in-and-out sales training, a training cycle lasts a few months, and then—if there was any increase—you can count on it going away within a few short months.
To generate sustained positive results in sales, you need a cultural transformation to get people winning and loving it. To do that, it needs extreme integration with a well-thought-out, long-term, intentional, congruent system. You’ve heard the sad story from thousands of bank execs who attempted sales training only to find it didn’t work—unless you define working as the carnage of losing a third of their team. It’s not their fault. Sales training companies keep selling as if it could work.

One sales training company actually put a client’s logo on their website after two years of losses in their sales training attempts. After just a few years of their process, they are now performing in the S&L top 100 performers. Sadly, unsuspecting bankers see the logo and think they can actually create good results with their sales training. Have you ever heard a bank executive tell you that sales training’s impact was doubling or tripling cross-sales while getting dramatic growth with premium pricing on better-quality customers? As they say—said no banker ever.

Step Two:
Unlike so many false-attempt sales training programs, you have to get your people to come from their heart space—a place of extreme caring for the customer. With that as a base, they can then learn to ask questions in the order of how people like to buy what they need. Until they get the impact of what they are really doing—saving marriages from divorce due to fighting over money, helping people retire with ease, and guiding businesses to good fiscal management—they are always feeling as if it’s salesy, and the client will feel it too.

Step Three:
Create an ever-increasing accountability and visibility system. Most sales programs end up causing at least a third of the team members to run for the hills. That’s completely unnecessary and very unproductive. The problem is that sales training must be integrated with a true understanding of cultural transformation at a deep level where people are learning how to be, holding each other accountable, celebrating successes, and learning to live their word by understanding that their promises and their commitments are how they reveal their character.

The key is that every day and every week, as the blended learning of online/offline coaching and practicing happens—integrated with a management system and stage-appropriate accountability—a predictable weekly improvement is imminent. Remember, you don’t have a sales training issue; you have a confidence issue.

Again, three steps to a solid foundation of community bank sales culture transformation:

Step One: Ongoing cultural transformation with extreme integration
Step Two: Get team members at cause to bring extreme value—from transactional to transformational
Step Three: Develop a progressive accountability and visibility system that builds confidence

By doing this, you can sleep at night knowing your well-educated team can connect with prospects and customers effectively, attract all the deposits that you need consistently, and unhook from the dependence on results based on the economy or rate environment. Instead, you can have a system that makes you feel like you know you can consistently win—and you’ll have the pride of making all of that happen quickly and sustainably.

The post The Dangers of False-Attempt Sales Training [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

In this video, Roxanne Emmerich dismantles the “rate-match or lose” myth and replaces it with a hard-edged framework for extreme differentiation that commands premium pricing on both sides of the balance sheet. She breaks down the four levels of USPs—from weak “we give great service” claims (Level 1) and easily copied features (Level 2), to elite expertise (Level 3) and, ultimately, proprietary, client-valued processes (Level 4) that buyers say are worth 10× your fee increase.

You’ll discover:

• NIM lift without apology: How Level-4 USPs enable +150–200 bps over competitors while holding deposit costs in check.

• De-commoditize on contact: A sales motion that monetizes your USPs and shuts down “Can you match the rate?” before it’s asked.

• Cycle-proof stickiness: Evidence, certification, and process that keep top customers loyal in any environment.

If you’re done subsidizing competitors with your value, this is your blueprint to escape margin compression and become the bank that top customers chase.

Watch now. 

What if you could use extreme differentiation to get 150 basis points or more on the loan side and improve your deposit pricing at the same time? If you’re the kind of leader who feels strongly that you can follow the herd that believes 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. One: customers that love you and leave you for better rates. Two: customers believe you’re a commodity, and you might not be giving them a reason to think differently. And three: 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 these. 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 gadgets and products. Your super-duper free checking, your nifty online banking site, 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 are the special education and certifications that matter to discerning customers and put you in a league of elite bankers all your own. And level-four USPs are the pinnacle. They are the proprietary processes that clients tell you are worth at least ten times more than the additional amount that you charge. These take you way out of the commodity world.

Flex your level-four USPs with a sales process designed to monetize it, and you’ll pull away your competitors’ 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 confidence 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.

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