This is 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. Even when your bank is flush with deposits, you should be actively increasing your non-interest-bearing deposits as a percentage of total deposits. It’s like Christmas every day—each month you wake up and know that each dollar used for loans is pure profit. This is good. Yet most banks lack a process and the skilled people to consistently bring in low-cost deposits. 

Instead, they put up billboards, run advertisements, open CD accounts, and offer ridiculous interest rates. They don’t understand that many customers aren’t that 
rate sensitive. What these customers want is someone who can make a meaningful difference in their lives and their businesses. This value far outweighs what they would gain from an interest-bearing account. But does your team have the skill set to deliver this? 

Does your team have confidence? One thing I know for sure, from decades of working with many Top Five Percenters™, is that those who achieve and maintain top 5% performance are masters at bringing in low- or no-cost deposits. It is a system and a skill set. It’s hard, but once people know how to do it, they can bring in one account after another. 

I recently called a bank CEO because I heard one of our recent graduates from the Accredited Banking Professional Program brought in a $14 million checking account from a local business. For a bank with less than $100 million in assets, this was significant. Not only did they bring in that account, but they also brought in the entire relationship, with 14 cross-sells. I called to congratulate the CEO, who said, “That’s nothing; my people bring in a $2-3 million checking account every week.” 

Don’t tell me it can’t be done because there are people doing it. They aren’t doing it by pushing brochures or using outdated sales tactics. Those methods won’t get you invited back to the table. To be a Top Five Percenter, your team must elevate their skill sets so that your bank can become a top 5% performer. Competing for deposits won’t get easier, but you can get a lot better quickly. You must act because your competitors are coming after your depositors swiftly.   

To your continued success, 

Roxanne Emmerich 

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

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

Why? Let’s say you’re out with other soccer moms, and somebody mentions they’re planning on building a new home. Hmm, there’s potential for a mortgage there, isn’t there? And since your mortgage lender isn’t present, you need to handle that inquiry and know how to move it forward. 

Now, imagine someone calls in and asks about your CD rates. God forbid someone grabs that phone, starts talking about the CD specials, and doesn’t know how to engage that person beyond the rate. It’s crucial to turn that rate inquiry into a business opportunity where the rate doesn’t matter. Let’s say you’re in operations and you see an opportunity while on the phone with a customer. Do you know how to have that conversation, or do you think that’s for the “big people” over there? 

In community banking, every job is a sales position. Sales isn’t a bad word. Sales is simply helping people get what they need. If people want to criticize the word “sales” in banking, why would we allow that? Just because someone embezzled once, do we want to say that accounting is a dirty word? Sales is about helping people buy the right things. When we understand the goodness in what we do, it becomes one of the most ethical things we can do. That’s when the magic happens. 

When organizations understand that everyone is in sales, they begin their journey to becoming a Top Five Percenter™. If everyone sees and seizes opportunities, revenue comes in faster and more profitably because we’re converting inquiries into full relationships, not just focusing on pricing. Employees feel better about themselves and feel like they’re making a difference for customers, rather than just handling inquiries and moving widgets from one side of their desk to the other. 

That is the essence of community banking—making a difference in people’s lives. Help your team members understand that everyone is in sales and that sales is the most noble of professions.  

To your continued success, 

Roxanne Emmerich 

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

The post Everyone Is in Sales appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

With AI we now have the tools to find your next best customers, but if you don’t bring wisdom to the tools, you have more junk.   

There’s a world of difference between information and communication.   

There’s a world of difference of being able to use AI to find customers and being able to use AI to find customers with the right parameters in the right way.   

There’s an old saying garbage in garbage out. That’s not true, it’s garbage in garbage stays. If we choose the wrong people to go after, and your people are working on them and it’s not working, you can be masters at your process of bringing them in. But if we choose incorrectly and we don’t have the right people, that can be a problem.

In the future, we’re going to have AI as it’s going nowhere. It will be one of the tools that we’ll be able to use in marketing (and by the way, everybody in banking is a marketer, when they really understand what marketing is).  When we use the tools correctly, and then we find the processes to get in front of them, that’s when the magic happens.   

Now more than ever critical thinking skills, expertise, and mastery need to drive AI because, again, garbage in garbage stays.

Can we afford, when we’re on our path to being a Top Five Percenter, to not have properly identified our next best customers and the best tools to communicate with them to break the relationship with their current financial institution so they can come to you with the entire relationship and make a quick decision? And make sure that you’re giving premium pricing on top of all that? That is what mastery looks like.

To your continued success, 

Roxanne Emmerich 

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

The post How Technology Can Help Scale Personal Relationships with Customers [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

But the real question is how do we find another 100 just like these?

Well, they have the same psychographics, and firmographics, and so we must study very carefully the psychographics and demographics of our current customers, and then find people who have things in common with them and know how to quickly disqualify.

By putting them in the right top 100 list and creating a warming situation so we build reputational equity with them, they start to fall in love with us and it’s then and only then that they’ll be open to taking the call from you to set up an appointment, once reputational equity has been created.

But you better know what you’re doing because you’ve got one chance when you’re working with the affluent. If you don’t add massive value, they will kick you to the curb and they’re not letting anybody from your organization back in again, for another 10 or 15 years. Why? Because they just saw somebody waste their time. And yet, we have organizations who have officer call programs, and they have people who don’t know how to add value, who have briefcases, who go up and down the street calling on businesses, kind of like they are out of control. Every time they walk in, you may as well put a sign across their forehead that says “vendor”, because they haven’t selected the right person. And they don’t know how to embark on that conversation. And here’s the thing, it’s not their fault.    

When I first started as a lender, I was an agricultural lender and then a commercial one. That’s what I did. Why? Because that’s what all the guys did before me. I was the first female to do what I was doing, so I did what the guys did.  They had a briefcase, I got a briefcase. They got in the car and drove out to the businesses, I got in the car and drove out to the businesses.  I had the same conversations that always brought it back to rate. Having those conversations that bring it back to rate is kind of like putting your face in front of their foot and saying don’t kick me. Of course, they’re going to bring up rate, why because I’m a vendor, and I came in here in a position of weakness.   

So we have to identify the right people, but then we have to position ourselves as bringing so much value that they’re pushing the button to their assistant saying, “Cancel my afternoon, I need to have this conversation because it’s time to switch our banking relationship.”

Do your people know how to have them at hello? That’s the game. And so first of all, we need to identify them. And then we need to build a process that has them at hello. That’s the game of those who perform in the top 5%. And those who are committed to getting there need to get in the right game, because it’s hard to be a top 5% performer when you’re not playing by the right playbook.

To your continued success, 

Roxanne Emmerich 

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

The post Finding Top 100 Customers [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

I don’t think we’ve ever seen loan pricing competition like we’re seeing right now, and I don’t think it’s over. I think it’s going to get much worse through 2022.

So, what do you do in terms of creating some loan pricing strategies that allow you to command premium pricing when others are undercutting your pricing on your very best customers AND the prospects that you’re going after?

Why doesn’t your loan pricing strategy work? 

Let’s start with what doesn’t work: buying profitability analysis software that allows you to figure out when you have broken even and then build something more into that.

I’ve been an eyewitness to bank after bank losing their independence because of that strategy.  That strategy never works because you can never command enough pricing on those when you don’t have enough profit built into them.

What else doesn’t work? 

Saying those things that all bankers tend to say: “We have good people” and “We have great service. Therefore, we’re worth more.” 

Sure, maybe you can occasionally get an extra 25 basis points on that despite the lack of differentiation, but that’s probably the upper limit, and it’s far from a “tried and true” approach.

It’s also kind of a lame way to go about it—it just doesn’t work well.

What does work?

Creating that extreme differentiation for your bank that far exceeds the additional premium pricing that you’re about to charge that customer.

When you create that differentiation, it’s a powerful way to create a distinction in your customer’s mind that you’re worth more.  That’s if you create a differentiation such that they can tell you that the value you bring is worth more— whatever that happens to be: $800,000,  $1 Million, maybe $2 million more, and you’re charging $10,000 or $20,000 additional, which sounds like a pretty good deal to them.

To make this work, it requires two elements:

• Your extreme differentiation, and 
• Creating a sales process (and having your team follow it) that works so well, your customer tells you why you’re worth hundreds of thousands of dollars more than what you’re charging.

As Wallace Wattles said so well, “Always bring ten times more value than the cash you asked for, and people will beat a path to your door.”  

Never is it more profoundly true than in banking sales when we’re up against desperate competitors trying to steal away our best customers by low-balling the loan pricing.

– Roxanne Emmerich

Discover where Elite Bank Executives go to revolutionize their sales culture strategies, improve every metric, and drastically improve loan growth at the Elite Banking Bootcamp: Revenue Breakthrough 2022. 

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

The post Why Loan Pricing Can Be An Extreme Differentiator appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

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You’re in luck…

At conference, after conference, after conference, when I speak to audiences of bank executives the talk lately has been “culture, culture, culture.”

Much ado about culture…why?

There’s good reason. Culture is proven to be the leading predictor of YOUR future growth and profitability.

Read that again…

CULTURE is PROVEN to be the LEADING PREDICTOR of future growth and PROFITABILITY.

Take that in for a moment.

That’s a scary statement for most bankers, heck for most business leaders anywhere. Most think culture is this touchy-feely, ping-pong-table-in-the-break-room thing.

Not even close.

Culture is all about accountability for results. You don’t want a “happy culture”…you want a “happy culture where everyone’s accountable for delivering bottom-line results.”

Both describe a culture.

One’s more profitable.

In today’s video you’ll discover the 5 biggest myths of “culture” that destroy results…watch the video and avoid them…

Click here to download the Team Selling Checklist

The post STOP! Motivating Bank Employees is a Waste of Time appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

I believe that it’s fun to win.

In this session, I’m going to share with you a way to help your lenders win more and better deals.

If you’re already bringing in nice deals and you’re fairly happy, you’re going to love this episode. I’m going to show you that, with that base, your lenders can bring in so much more and at better pricing.

On the other hand, if you are frustrated that you have a few lenders who are doing all the deals while the others don’t seem to catch on and replicate their results, you’re going to find out how to get your average performers playing in the big leagues.

And if you are frustrated because it’s just not working at all the way you want it to, watch all of this episode. I’m going to show you a system that we’ve used in hundreds of banks to crack the concrete barrier of mediocre or suboptimal performance to create epic results fast.

When you embark on a sales breakthrough in lending, there are usually three big, ugly challenges that seem to show up.

First, it’s time to do away with sales training “attempts” where everyone just pretends that they’re interested and that they’ll do the work. You need immediate behavioral changes. Let’s face it. Heads are nodding. Nobody is disagreeing… but you’re not seeing them creating the immediate results that should happen if they’re actually doing what they should. Passive-aggressive behavior is becoming normalized as part of your culture.

Second, a few of your lenders catch on and start to get some traction. But because so many others don’t, there is no shift of culture—you just have a few outliers and therefore achieve nothing sustainable or profound.

Third, your senior lender tries to keep the party going but meets so much resistance—game playing, people “forgetting to get their sales funnel right,” people “too busy” to do their calls—that eventually he gets “schooled” about how things are going to be and loses enthusiasm to be great. It’s not his fault. It’s a system problem.

Every bank has hit some of these barriers to a real, sustainable breakthrough.

I’m now going to show you three steps that will help you help your teams start to win nice deals at premium pricing in just a few weeks so that they can feel the joy of profound success.

Step 1: Instead of sales approaches that are “numbers games,” your lenders need to know exactly whom to call on. They are after the targeted few who have exactly the right firmographics and psychographics, so you get home runs with the right people who are likely to fall in love with you and bring all their business.

Step 2: In contrast to typical sales training, it’s not time to cold call. What most lenders don’t understand is that a prospect has not yet seen evidence of them caring about their success. Without built-up “reputational equity” to lead with, your lenders get treated like vendors—rejected at worst, or treated like commodity vendors at best. Your chance of getting a deal is low, and there is no way that a lender can get 100 basis points more than competitors even if they do get the deal.

Step 3: Forget about the “shoot from the hip” approaches and create an exact plan of how to warm prospects, how to initiate conversations, and how to demonstrate your Level 4 Unique Selling Proposition (USP)—the differentiating value that makes you worth switching to and doing so at premium pricing. Of course, you need a sales “system” that they all follow—one that is proven to get A+ credits at significant premium pricing.

Just three steps. First, target the few that you really want and will likely want you. Second, create a system that gets the prospect winking back and starting to dance before you ask them to get married. And third, make sure every lender, without exception, follows the same proven sales system that is explicitly designed to attract the very best credits at premium pricing.

Following these steps will get your lenders hooked on how fun it is to win and win and win. Bringing in all of your top, most desirable prospects at premium pricing is so much more fun than potentially closing those who were only considering you because of “rate matching games.” Once lenders know what it feels like to win, they’re hooked!

In the next session, I’m going to cover how you can get team selling in place to help you achieve an over 90% close rate on your Top 100 most desirable prospects while you get all their business.

The post Loan Growth Multiplier Strategies: How to Normalize Big Wins Fast appeared first on The Emmerich Group.