Let’s call this what it is: a silent epidemic in banking.

While everyone’s chasing deposits or watching rates, weak cross-sales are bleeding your bottom line.

2.2 products per customer isn’t a metric, it’s a warning sign.

Top-performing banks don’t rely on “just ask” pep talks. They install discipline. They engineer trust. And they triple their cross-sales while everyone else sleeps through another training session.

In this episode you’ll discover:

• Why cross-selling isn’t a tactic—it’s your most scalable profit lever
• How the best banks explode loyalty and margin with a single shift
• The daily system that transforms “good enough” into market domination

Cross-sales are either your slow death or your power play.

Do you know the fastest way banks sabotage their profitability?

Hint: it’s not loan defaults or interest rate shifts. It’s something far more insidious.

Hidden in plain sight: weak cross-sales.

Now before you tell me, “Roxanne, our people are cross-selling,” let’s look at the reality. The industry average for cross-sales is stuck at about 2.2 products per customer.

Those numbers aren’t moving. And every incremental sale left on the table represents thousands—even millions—in lost revenue every year.

Here’s how this usually plays out: You’ve invested in sales training—again. You’ve handed out quotas—again. And you’ve just told your people to “just ask for the sale”—again. Yet the needle never really moves.

Why?

Because cross-selling isn’t about asking or pushing products. It’s about building relationships so meaningful that customers practically sell themselves. But let’s face the brutal truth:

Most banks aren’t doing this. They’re pushing products, not solving problems.

Now imagine this: your cross-sales jump from a sleepy 2.2 to six or even eight per customer—within months. Your efficiency ratio improves dramatically, allowing you to achieve the same or more profitability with fewer people and lower expenses. And your customer loyalty skyrockets, making you virtually untouchable to competitors trying to poach your best customers.

Sounds too good to be true? It’s exactly what the top referring banks—the ones recognized by the Institute for Extraordinary Banking—do consistently. They don’t just have good intentions. They install a systematic discipline and a repeatable approach to cross-selling.

Here’s the secret:

Shift your mindset. Move your team from being product pushers to trusted advisors who add meaningful value with every interaction.

Engineer consistency.

Implement daily routines and accountability measures to ensure that your team isn’t leaving opportunities to chance.

Track ruthlessly.

Make cross-sales a core metric tracked daily, weekly, and monthly—and celebrate it openly and often.

And when banks do this, cross-sales don’t just inch upward.

They leap forward—predictably, repeatedly, profitably.

But even before that, here’s your assignment today: Look closely at your current cross-sales numbers. Ask yourself honestly: Is “good enough” really good enough?

Decide right now to implement a proven, predictable system that moves your bank from mediocrity to mastery.

Stop settling. Start performing.

Because the banks that get cross-sales right aren’t just profitable… they’re legendary.

See you at the top.

The post Why Most Banks Fail at Cross-Selling, And How the Best Banks Are Tripling Results [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

What separates those who break through from those who fall behind?

They stop chasing silver bullets—new CRM tools, worn-out sales training, and incentive gimmicks- and start building systems rooted in accountability, culture, and profitability.

In this video you’ll discover how:

• They throw out outdated sales training and invest in behavioral education
• They stop managing by vibes and start leading with data
• They connect every action to strategic outcomes like ROA, not volume

Take it from one COO who made the shift: six years of unbroken performance wasn’t magic, it was method.

Stop settling for the illusion of improvement. Start leading with systems that actually move the needle.

Here’s what I hear from top execs every single week:

“We used to be in the top quartile—but boy, it’s gotten a lot harder. We’re going to have to change something.”

So what needs to change—and what really matters now?

First, it’s time to toss out the outdated sales training programs that prioritize product knowledge over profitability. Hoping the next CRM rollout will boost activity? Relying on incentive bonuses as a substitute for true leadership and customer care?

Those days are done.

Traditional sales training completely overlooks how culture either fuels or kills execution. It assumes a one-time workshop will magically rewire years of habits—without creating any behavioral consistency.

And CRMs? Dashboards only work if you’ve built a coaching culture behind them. Without daily, data-driven accountability—tied to the right kind of education—nothing sticks.

Notice I said “education,” not “training.” Training is about what to do. Education teaches how to think and how to be.

Here’s the truth: These are all illusions of improvement. Real transformation requires leadership—not just tools, more sales training, or some AI-enhanced software your team will never use.

You need dashboards that track behavior and results, especially leading indicators. Every loan officer should be tied to ROA, not just volume.

And your board meetings? They must be aligned to strategy—not just regurgitating reports.

Let me introduce you to Sarah, a COO who led her bank through this exact transformation.

She stopped managing by vibes and started leading by data. Now, her CEO says: “We haven’t missed a quarter in six years.”

That’s not luck. That’s leadership—with a system.

The post What High-Performing Bank Execs Are Doing Differently [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Have you ever woken up on a Monday morning and said, “Let’s take the hill. Let’s go, kids. Let’s make this happen,” and you’re met with a barrage of excuses and stories? “I can’t because nobody told me. Boss, I got a hangnail. I need to go home early. My life is hard, don’t you understand?”

In a world where victimhood is so highly rated, people believe that instead of getting a result, a good story comes in kinda handy instead.

We have a problem as executives, and this is a common problem. And it’s called: the more we feed the victimhood paradigm, the more we have a difficult time accomplishing the results we need to accomplish for our organization.

But it’s a bigger picture than that. It’s not just that we’re not hitting the metrics because of it; it’s that we’re not saving the souls. Because if we don’t shift humans from being a victim archetype to something where they grow the backbone and they stand tall and they say, “I have no idea how to do it, boss. Give me a half an hour. I’ll have it figured out.” If we don’t show them how to be strong, how to be powerful, then every element of their life looks the same, and they’ll raise little victims who will raise little victims who will raise little victims. This is a ripple effect.

Learning how to be someone who says, “I can see this as impossible, but that’s why you put me on the payroll, boss, so let me add it. I will figure this out,” is something that feeds them. It feeds us. It feeds the organization. But as an executive, you’re going to have to be a different executive to combat that and move through that. And it’s one of the most difficult battles that you’ll have in your career as an executive, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not a battle worth fighting.

Decide every day to let your team know that you’ve got no ears for victimhood, that you are a stand for them being extraordinary, that you expect them to be an extraordinary banker every single day when they walk in that door and feel what it feels like to call home to their spouse and say something like, “Wow, I was great today.” Because nobody calls home and says to their significant other, “Honey, today I performed average.” They don’t do that. They call home when they kick some back in and took some names, and they had a blast doing it.

This is the calling of the executive: to learn how to bring forth from people that that they didn’t know that they had within them to do.

How do you take a part-time teller and make him or her into an extraordinary banker that can go out and command two- and three-million-dollar checking accounts every single week? Don’t tell me it can’t be done. I know a couple. Don’t tell me that you can’t take a young credit analyst and have them become your top lender within two years. Don’t tell me it can’t be done because I can name some.

It takes not only education of the right things, but it also means conquering the spirit and taking people past that little voice in their head that says, “I’m not enough.”

That is the calling of the executive: to take your team through that language to the language of power of, “That’s why you hired me, boss. Let’s go.” This is what it means to be a top-performing executive. This is what it means to be a top five percenter. Learning to be the kind of executive that has no ears for the victimhood, where you’re taking a stand for your people to be extraordinary.

I want to see you at the Breakthrough Banking Blueprint Conference, where we’re gonna go through the shift of the mindset and how you, as an executive, stand strong with grace and love in your heart to take people to a level they never dreamed possible for them. I’ll see you there.

The post How Top Bank Executives Break the Victimhood Cycle [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Let me start with the harsh truth. Most banks don’t have a strategy. They have a list. They call it a strategic plan, but it’s really a hodgepodge of projects and tasks cobbled together at the end of Q4 in a room full of people nodding and checking phones. If that hits too close to home, don’t worry. You’re not alone. But you are vulnerable.

Here’s what separates the top five percent from the rest. They build operating systems, not checklists. Let me give you an example. One of our clients, a five-hundred-million-dollar community bank, came to us with a sixty-four-item strategic plan.

They were proud of it—until we started asking questions. Which of these actually moves margin? Where are the lead measures? How do these lead measures tie into your key initiatives?

Which are the KPIs most important? How do those tie to your target markets? What is the BHAG, and how is everything tying into the BHAG? There was no connection between the parts.

It was a hodgepodge of a tossed salad on a sheet of paper. And when I asked them questions about how they were gonna make that work—crickets.

What they had was first-order thinking.

“If we do more, we’ll grow more.” That’s not how high performance works. As the book Intelligent Thinking explains, first-order thinkers solve the immediate problem without thinking through the long-term or hidden implications.

Second-order thinkers ask, “What happens next?” and “How does this tie into everything else?” That’s the difference between adding digital signage and engineering a culture that improves deposit acquisition by forty percent.

Within six months of switching to our Breakthrough Planning System, that same bank improved their efficiency ratio by twelve points, increased their premium pricing without attrition, and tied every initiative to one of five core performance drivers. They installed weekly rhythms to measure and adjust on the fly. And this isn’t theoretical. It’s happening right now at banks across the country. The game-changers in banking are the ones who figured out that strategy is a living system—not a document gathering dust on a shelf.

Are you done mistaking activity for alignment? Are you tired of first-order thinking in your strategic plan that has no hope of actually creating the results—because you’ve tried it so many times before and it never has? Book a call, and let’s walk you through the planning system used by banks that are tripling cross-sales, growing NIM, and winning Banky Awards. Because more projects is not a strategy.

It’s a symptom of a problem.

The post The Strategic Planning Lie That’s Keeping Banks Mediocre [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Hi. I’m Roxanne Emmerich, and I work with bank CEOs and their boards to help them align strategy, culture, and execution.

This week, we’re diving into the critical trends your board must understand—or risk making growth decisions in the dark.

Let’s be honest. Most board packets are long on reports and short on insights. But the top five percent? Their boards drive growth with precision because they understand the levers that matter: culture clarity, strategic discipline, and real-time visibility into performance drivers.

Let’s face it: the board is there for strategic purposes. You’ve heard the insight: minds in, fingers out. We go to our boards to make sure that they’re driving strategies and giving us ideas about how we can attract more high-profit customers that are lower risk—how we can move into other markets. These are strategic issues that should be covered in strategic planning, where we are actually getting information from the board about how they can bring their wisdom in to make sure that this bank thrives.

One of the biggest mistakes I see is so many banks seeing their executive team and their board not gelling together.

That’s just simply not okay.

The board is not just here to rubber-stamp, and the executive team is not here to ignore the strategic insights of the board. The executive team is here to get the strategic insights of the board, weigh them, and build systems to implement those things. And that’s where most strategic planning goes wrong. See, most banks have strategic planners that are more accountants. They tell you what numbers to hit—they don’t tell you how to hit them.

That’s the whole point. By definition, a strategy is basically this: given limited resources, how do I accomplish a miracle?

And this miracle is what is defined—that is the strategy. And most banks have a strategic plan devoid of any of those strategies about how to get it done.

That’s what you need to be thinking about right now, because it is strategic planning season, and it’s time to do your best strategic plan ever. Not a list of to-dos like most banks. Not a list of aspirations without the strategies to make it happen. But instead, a workable plan that drives a performance culture, drives a higher net interest margin, less risk, more growth, and—for goodness’ sake—more low-cost deposits.

That’s the game of high-performance banking, and that’s what the strategic plan must be about as you go into this next year to make sure that you create a bank that’s a top five-percenter.

And that is the game. Right?

The post What Boards Miss That Can Tank a Bank [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Most bank CEOs tell me, “We have great people,” and yet sometimes they suffer not-such-great efficiency ratios, return on assets, return on equity. And what they’re really saying: “We have good people, but they’re not great because they don’t know how they tie to profitability.” Well, I get it. When I first started in banking, people showed me what to do.

I moved things from the left side of my desk to the right side of my desk, and I thought that was the job, and I just did the job with a person who had had the job before me because that was the training that I got. I didn’t know there was another way. It wasn’t my fault, and let me assure you, it is not their fault. They don’t know what a top five percenter does.

They don’t know that instead of going out and calling on a whole bunch of potential accounts, if they know how to identify a top one hundred most profitable next account, that could bring in next year’s six or seven or twelve or thirteen thousand dollars of bottom-line impact every single month after you bring it in. If they don’t know how to do that, that’s a problem. If they don’t know how to pull that customer away from your competitor and get premium pricing and the entire relationship, that’s a problem. So instead, what are they doing?

They’re walking up the street, up and down the street, calling on people or seeing what walks in the door, and as a result of it, they’re not bringing in the quality credits, they’re not bringing the entire relationship, and, God forbid, if we ever have to match a rate again, that becomes a problem.

It’s not just in sales within banks. Every person must understand how they tie to profit on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis. But here’s the warning. And do I have little red flags? Are there fireworks going on here? Because there should be. Because when you hold people accountable for outcomes before they are ready, before they are winning, before they have the education, before they have the confidence, you’re going to have a mass exodus.

I probably have followed hundreds of sales training companies who totally mucked up cultures within banking organizations because they brought in the sales training and they said, “And these are the goals, and people should be hitting them, and if they don’t hit them, out you go.” Well, here’s the reality. No one thinks they can hit those goals, and the sales training is all done incorrectly because it feels like sales. When you’re a community bank, it should never feel like sales.

It should feel like helping someone along to make a better financial decision for them and to bring great value that far exceeds anything within your product line. It’s a whole new world of banking, and those who get out of commodity banking, those who get out of the same old, same old slugging of products and understand that now we have to bring true trusted advisor skill sets, those are the ones who will make it. If you want to be a top five percent, you have to figure out how to take your people and elevate them to the skill set of true trusted advisers. I had a CEO of a bank recently who was going through my trusted adviser certification, and he said these words. He said, “I thought I was a hotshot.”

“I’ve been helping bank customers for thirty years, and now that I’m taking this trusted advisor certification, and I’m realizing that I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and I really wasn’t very valuable at all.” And I’m thinking, if a bank CEO says that, just imagine what’s going on with your team members as they’re going out there slugging product lines as opposed to truly becoming the only banker they’ll ever need. If you want to be a top five percent performer, you’ve got to teach your team members to be the only bank that customer will ever need.

The post Build a Bank Performance Culture That Drives Profit [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Several years ago, I was invited to a friend’s house to help raise some money for a ten-year-old boy who was identified as someone who would probably be the best pianist in the world.

Because of his current abilities that were so far beyond what anybody—and this guy who was helping him had had many students through Juilliard—it was determined that this kid had some superpowers. But they said he will not be able to develop those superpowers unless he gets special training early in his life. And that’s what the fundraiser was for.

What I found most shocking was the young man did a concert, and I practically fell out of my chair watching this, thinking, I can’t even believe that a human could play like this, much less a ten-year-old. What could possibly have inspired this young man to be able to play the piano like this?

And then I learned a lesson. As he stepped away from the piano, he became a ten-year-old. He’s running around, he’s eating chocolate, he’s having a good time, he’s telling knock-knock jokes, and the whole time he’s playing with other friends, he has his iPad in his hand and he’s playing notes on his iPad.

He is practicing while he’s having conversations. He is practicing while he’s doing other things. His fingers never stopped going into that mode. He was always in the game.

I wonder if there’s something to be said for practice done to create exceptional behaviors, which creates exceptional performance. I gotta believe there’s something to that.

Sadly, in our industry, there aren’t enough people talking about this, there aren’t enough conversations, and there certainly aren’t nearly enough masters for them to study with to really get to be good at the craft of, “How do we bring extreme value to our customers in a way that we get to receive extreme pricing as well?”

Well, there are great opportunities when we figure this out. And I gotta believe that the banks that survive in the future are those who do figure it out. And so, it can be done. The question is, where do you get to go study with the elite best banks in the country and find out what they’re doing?

I bet you’re going to enjoy the panels at this year’s Best Banks in America Super Conference because, here’s the thing: they weren’t always some of the best banks in America in terms of performance. They just learned some things, and they kept their fingers on the keyboard, and they figured these things out.

And through the right practice of doing the right things that they did not understand before they started coming to the conference, they now are amongst the elite. And if they can do it, you can do it.

But most important, to get to the elite is one thing; to stay there is another. You’ll be hearing from people who have been elite performers for over a decade. Yeah, game on. That means during good times and bad times and disruptive times, they created a system that allowed for them to stay in the very top of performance.

And if they can do it, so can you. I hope you join the rest of them and get to learn from some of the other masters in the industry from the only conference that’s put on every year just for those who want to get to and stay in the top five percent of performers. Hope I see you there.

The post How Top 5% Community Banks Build, and Sustain, Elite Performance[VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Research shows that 70–90% of mergers fail to deliver their intended value—not because the financial analysis was wrong, but because leadership underestimated the importance of culture, alignment, and execution.

If your teams aren’t operating from a shared vision with clear accountability, even the best merger strategy can quickly unravel.

In this week’s video, discover why traditional strategic planning often falls short during mergers and acquisitions—and what high-performing community banks do differently to protect profitability while creating a stronger organization.

You’ll discover:

• Why most merger integration efforts fail despite extensive planning.
• The critical role culture and performance execution play in merger success.
• How elite banks align people, purpose, and profit to accelerate post-merger performance.

Whether your bank is preparing for an acquisition, evaluating future opportunities, or simply strengthening strategic execution, these principles can help you avoid costly mistakes and create lasting value.

Watch the video to discover how the highest-performing banks turn disruption into competitive advantage.

This week, we’re talking about what really determines the success or failure of bank mergers, and it’s not what your lawyers are telling you.

Most banks enter mergers armed with due diligence reports and legal documents, but completely unarmed when it comes to cultural alignment and performance execution—the whole reason you’re doing this. The research is sobering.

Seventy to ninety percent of mergers fail to deliver their intended value. Why? Most banks try to bolt a new organization onto a broken culture and hope for the best.

When I was in graduate school for strategic planning, I asked my professor a pointed question: “Have you ever seen this traditional strategic planning process we’re working on actually work?”

He paused and finally said, “Not really.”

That was the moment I knew we had to invent something different—something that actually drove results during disruption.

We created a strategic planning system built for high-performing banks—not project lists, but true alignment of people, purpose, and profit.

And it works.

We’ve seen clients avoid costly integration failures and emerge from mergers and acquisitions stronger, more profitable, and even more cohesive than ever before.

And you can too.

The post The Real Reason Bank Mergers Fail (It Isn’t Your Strategic Plan) appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

AI isn’t the threat. Stale thinking is.

In this video, Roxanne Emmerich takes off the gloves and exposes what no banker wants to admit: most teams are built for a world that no longer exists.

You’ll discover:

• “Transactional” roles are a death sentence in this new age
• Wisdom—not labor—is the new currency of performance
• Strategy built once a year? That’s a retirement plan, not a growth engine

If you don’t teach your people how to think in second and third orders, you’re complicit in their extinction.

This is not about getting ahead. This is about not being left behind.

Watch now. 

It’s an AI wild, wild West, and everything is happening fast. And most banks have no idea how to get aligned.

I’ve been mentioning to my bank executives to make sure that they’re getting their team prepared because we’re moving into a world of wisdom workers. So if you put something into ChatGPT or Perplexity or whatever tool you’re using, but you don’t bring wisdom to it, what you get out of it is a bunch of junk. And so now, the highest performers are those with the most wisdom.

Brian Tracy used to talk about how anybody who read eight or ten—I can’t remember the exact number—books in their area of specialty would become a top one percent performer in that industry because they would become masters of the knowledge.

This is the world where you need wisdom workers.

I have to share with you—I’m quite concerned about most people who work in banks right now who are transactional thinkers and transactional executors, because most of those jobs will be much more quickly and better done by machinery in the very near future. So where are these people going to go?

It is your ethical obligation to teach your people how to remain employable in a world where they will have to become wisdom workers to be able to make that improvement.

So in this world, we have to move from being that first-order thinking to second-order thinking—people who can see around corners, anticipate what’s going wrong, people who bring wisdom and understand what are the very best ways to do it. How is it changing based on what’s happening?

It’s a different world. It’s exciting.

We’re living in a world where Saudi Arabia is coming in and investing in the United States, where interest rates are changing by the minute. Gold prices are moving in directions beyond our understanding.

Bond portfolios are going through all kinds of crazy. It’s just not the world it was.

And we’re going to need to learn to be excited by the changes and be able to be mobile, to move quickly—because hanging on to yearly strategic planning—and please tell me you don’t do yearly strategic planning but that you do quarterly planning—but anybody who’s sticking to the yearly plan will certainly become dust, because eleven or twelve months after you’ve created that thinking, the world has already changed.

In fact, the way the world’s working now, it takes about a week.

And that’s where AI—and the ability to think in second-order—will come in.

So, as executives and board members of top-performing banks, you must be leaders in helping your team know how to work with AI, develop their next-level thinking, bring wisdom into their understanding, and really elevate these people to make sure that they can run AI—not be run out by AI.

The post AI Won’t Replace Your Bank. Transactional Thinking Will. appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

They focus on products, scripts, and sales goals. The best-performing banks focus on something entirely different: becoming indispensable to their customers.

In this week’s video, Roxanne Emmerich shares a powerful story from her banking career that reveals why customers stop shopping rates, deepen relationships, and view their banker as a trusted advisor rather than a vendor.

In this video, you’ll discover:

• Why conversations—not products—drive meaningful cross-sales.
• How trusted advisors eliminate rate shopping and strengthen customer loyalty.
• Why cross-sales are a lagging indicator of relationship depth, not a sales tactic.

The banks winning today aren’t pushing products. They’re solving problems, creating value, and building relationships that competitors can’t easily replace.

Watch now. 

I attended my very first bank CEO conference quite a few decades ago. And you know what the theme was when people were talking about cross-sales? They said these words: “My people are still order takers.”

Fast forward a few more decades, and I can tell you now, when I talk to CEOs, the first thing they say to me is, “My people are still order takers.”

How could we not have made progress within decades on such an important piece?

Because cross-sales is a measure of trust.

When you are the only bank they’ll ever need or want, they bring the entire relationship to you, and that’s called cross-sales.

So cross-sales isn’t about sales and slugging things. Cross-sales is about being such an expert at what you do, crafting each question so beautifully as a trusted advisor, and seeing the opportunities so that at the end of this questioning process, you can say, “Based upon what you’re telling me, I think I can help you.”

“I’m going to recommend this because you told me that you had a challenge with that.”

“I’m also going to recommend this because this will fix the challenge that you mentioned about whatever.”

“I’m also going to recommend this because you had whatever.”

And then you take them through that and say, “Do you have any questions, or would you like to get started?”

That’s essentially the process.

But the key here is: Do your team members know how to ask the right questions, and do they know how to be in the listening?

Are they listening soul to soul, or are they in their head?

Are they connecting with that person in a way that makes that person feel like, “Man, I feel heard, and this feels good”?

I’ll never forget. I had a woman who came to me when I was in banking, and she had a PhD in a very challenging topic. She and her husband had two children. She far out-earned her husband, and she was a saver while he was a spender, and they were this close to divorce.

So they came in, they shared all of this with me, and they said, “How can you help us work through our money issues?”

And I took them through a process that I now teach our Trusted Advisors as I certify them. I basically teach them how to have the kind of conversation with people whereby you can make a meaningful difference in their lives.

When I left full-time banking to start this firm, she came to me and said, “I’ll never find another banker who can do what you did. You saved my marriage. You saved my savings.”

“I’m never going to find another one.”

I said, “Oh yes, you will. I’m off to teach hundreds of thousands of people how to do this.”

And now we have lots of Certified Trusted Advisors who actually bring expertise and value to their customers such that they will say, “You’re the only banker we’ll ever need.”

One Trusted Advisor said to me the other day, “Roxanne, ever since I discovered this process, none of my clients bring up rate anymore.”

Yeah. That was the point we were talking about all along.

It’s never supposed to be about rate.

If they’re talking about rate, you are a vendor, and they have proclaimed you as such.

You are never to be a vendor.

You are to be their partner and trusted advisor well beyond lip service.

That’s the game.

Cross-sales is just a number that lets us know we’re getting that job done.

The post The Power of Cross-Sales: How to Grow Relationships Without Being “Salesy” appeared first on The Emmerich Group.