In this video, Roxanne Emmerich exposes the real constraint behind underpricing: scarcity thinking inside your own institution. You can push incentives, tweak comp plans, and preach value all day—but until belief changes, behavior won’t.

Most banks unknowingly train their teams to think price is a zero-sum game. The result? Discounting, margin erosion, and a slow drift toward commoditization. Top-performing banks operate differently. They understand that affluent clients don’t buy on price—they buy on meaning, differentiation, and confidence.

Here’s what must shift:

• Belief precedes pricing power—confidence comes before execution

• Affluent buyers decide based on value, not rates

• Category-of-one positioning eliminates price pressure altogether

If this problem stays unresolved, it won’t remain contained. It will cost you margin, culture, and eventually your independence.

That’s exactly why Roxanne is teaching this framework live at the Breakthrough Banking Blueprint™ Bootcamp. This is where banks discover how to shift mindset, reposition value, and equip their teams to charge what they’re truly worth—without discounting.

Seats are limited. Register now. 

Watch now. 

My mentor of three decades taught me something about abundance consciousness. He is one of the wealthiest people in this country, and he came to this country with fifty dollars in his pocket. But he showed me a system one time, and when I immediately began to implement the system, it worked.

Some of my colleagues went to him and said, “How is Roxanne doing this? How is she getting all this business at premium pricing?”
And he said to them something I’ll never forget. He said, “She’s ignorant. She doesn’t know she can’t.” Which is one of the best compliments I’ve ever received.

In other words, I’m not going to buy into the story of playing small. I’m not going to buy into the idea that I have to match somebody else’s pricing. I’m not going to play small because the rest of the world is playing small.

And yet, I know as an executive, you’ve got people you’re kicking and pushing and yelling at—doing everything you can with incentive pay. You’re trying the carrot. You’re trying the stick. And you’re getting nowhere getting them to charge premium pricing, because there’s a deeper-level problem.

They don’t believe they can.

There’s scarcity thinking. They think if they receive this, they’re taking it away from that.

They don’t understand that we’re not competing for pieces of the pie—we’re growing the pie. By creating a situation where that bank customer is so much better taken care of that their business thrives, they will make millions as a result of the extra ten thousand dollars that we charge. When our people get that, the magic begins to happen.

You’re going to need to do some lobotomies to help them understand that just because they believe price is the primary decision-making item, the affluent do not.

Most affluent do not buy on price—but they will if you don’t give them alternative information that matters more.

Thus, the correct sales process, built upon a clear differentiator that makes you the one and only—once you become a category of one—you can charge whatever you want.

There are steps along this pathway: defining how you’re different, getting your people some early big wins so they believe they can do it, and once that flywheel is turning, the rest come along too.

So if you’re still living with this problem, you’re not alone. Thousands of bank executives have been where you are.

But you can’t continue to live with this problem. You need a new, fresh problem. This one must be eliminated—because it will cause you to lose the name on your front door. It will take away your legacy. This one must be fixed.

I’ll see you at the Breakthrough Banking Blueprint Bootcamp where I’m going to show you how to get this done—because I can’t stand watching you suffer anymore.

Make sure you check in with me when you get there. I want to get to know who you are and how I can help—because I am committed to every community bank in this country keeping its independence. But you’ve got to be there so I can show you how.

See you there.

The post Why Your Team Can’t Charge Premium Pricing—And How It’s Killing Your Legacy [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.

I bet your strategic plan does not have anything in it that says, “We want to match rates. We want to shrink our net interest margin.”

“Oh, what can we do to match the rates of our desperate competitors?”

Those words are probably not in your strategic plan, and yet the way that your plan is being executed demonstrates a reliable, predictable pattern, which basically means your people are still matching rates. So we need to address rate matching, not only from a decommoditization standpoint, but also how you handle this strategically at the same time.

I’ll tell you what—it’s really easy to do what’s normal in banking: sit behind the desks, wait for the requests, match the rates, or, on the deals that you call out on, take them through a typical sales process but then end up having to match the rates anyway.

What is it about your strategy that’s wrong? If you knew that, you’d say, “Roxanne, I’d have this fixed by now.” Well, of course. But how long can you live with not fixing the strategy that doesn’t allow you to increase your pricing?

There are many false attempts, and many people try very hard in their banks, as good bankers, to command premium pricing, and yet the job doesn’t get done. There’s always the next excuse.

“It’s the competitors.”

“It’s that nobody is loyal anymore.”

There are lots of excuses, but what are the strategies that are going to take you out of that? How are you going to approach things?

Strategy, by definition, is this: with limited resources, what do you need to do to make sure you hit an outcome? Most people only talk about the limited resources. The “doing” has everything to do with: Do you have the right sales system? Do you have the right differentiation?

Do you have the right attentiveness to the right sales system? Does everyone know how to follow it? And the proof is in the pudding, as my grandfather used to say. If you’re commanding great premium pricing, your people are doing all of those things right.

The post Stop Rate Matching: The Strategy That Protects Your Net Interest Margin [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

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 peer group.

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 out a way to stop 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, in fact, know their secrets about 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 they bring that’s different is worth millions to them. Therefore, when they charge twenty thousand dollars extra, it is the bargain of the century, thereby taking them out of competing against competitors. 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, you will continue to match rate. I don’t think banks can 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 listen, there will always be room for the community bank that’s the boutique bank, that adds tremendous value, knows that they’re worth more, and doesn’t say those lame things like, “We have good people,” and, “We’ve been around for one hundred and twenty years.” That’s not going to command more than twenty basis points more, and you can’t make it on twenty basis points more. This is the time to really bring in additional pricing. So I hope to see you discover how to do that.

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

The post How Top Community Banks Increase Net Interest Margin Without Competing on Rate [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Several years ago, there was a gentleman who came into our Boot Camp. He was an EVP of a bank on the West Coast, and he told me that they had hired a firm. They’d spent several hundred thousand dollars, and they’d been in meetings for five months trying to figure out how to find their next most profitable customers.

I was thinking, Are you kidding me?

I said, “Well, how is it working?”

He said, “Well, we’re not done yet. We haven’t identified them.”

Okay. So what they should have done is identify them in, like, you know, a couple of hours by following a clean process of psychographics and firmographics, and then get busy bringing them in. That is the point, isn’t it?

And so, God bless him. He came up to me, and he was just distraught. Yet I get it. I’ve been part of those organizations where you get it and you see what needs to be done, but nobody else does. So it’s like, what do you do when you know everybody around you is going the wrong direction?

Here’s what happens when that person works for a bank that’s destined to become a top five percent-performing bank. They become a puppy dog with a sock in their mouth. They don’t let go. They just keep asking questions and kind of go, “Shouldn’t we already have figured this out?”

“Shouldn’t we be calling them? What is our process for calling on them? Do we really know we have the right target? What’s our process for organizing this?”

Those are top five percenters. They don’t watch the crazy going on around them, accept it, and say, “That’s just how things are around here. It’s just me. How will I ever move this mountain?”

Every great organization that’s become a top five percenter has had somebody who grew the backbone and decided to be a stand for, “If somebody can do it, we can do it—and we’re going to do it. So get the heck out of my way. I will just annoyingly keep asking questions until we get this right because I will not accept working for a mediocre organization.”

When was the last time you ever called home and said to your significant other, “Honey, today I performed average.”

Yeah.

Okay. That doesn’t happen.

We call home because we kicked some butt, took some names, and made something happen. That’s how a top five percenter thinks. They’re unstoppable in getting what they want when they know there’s a better way of getting things done, and they’re never going to sleep until they find the best way because success leaves clues.

As my mentor taught me years ago, only study with those who have their information in order and have done it repeatedly.

The post The Fastest Way to Find Your Bank’s Next Best Customer [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Every time I meet a new bank CEO, they say something very similar to what the three thousand-plus conversations I’ve had with bank CEOs sounded like. And what they say to me is this: “Roxanne, it’s different here.”

Here, we have to match rates. Here, we have competition for pricing. That’s just how it is here.

Now, I gotta tell you, I met two gentlemen years ago when they picked me up in their SUV. They were the CEO and the president of the bank, and we were about to do their kickoff.

The one said to me, “Roxanne, everybody complains that their deposit costs are high, but I can prove to you that we have the highest deposit cost in the nation.”

At which point, I stuck my fingers in my ears like a grown-up and I said, “I’m not listening. I’m not listening. I’m not listening.”

And I had a smile on my face. I was nice about it. They said, “Why are you doing that?”

And I said, “Because if your story becomes my story, I can’t help you.”

Markets do not dictate interest rates.

Let me say it again. The market doesn’t dictate the interest rates that you charge.

You dictate those through your differentiation and your ability to sell that differentiation.

If that were not the case, then every restaurant that has something other than the Golden Arches in front of it would be charging the same price as a McDonald’s hamburger.

It just isn’t that way, and yet in banking, we believe we’re the one great commodity that no one can break through.

Here’s the really sad part. Every time I hear a CFO or a chief lending officer say that to me, I should have always shorted the stock because I know that bank will lose its independence.

They’re right.

It is a commodity until you make it not a commodity.

So yes, in fact, they’re right. And there’s a whole other mountain of evidence, and you better get on that other mountain. You better get there fast because when you look at how we’ve moved from twenty thousand banks down to four thousand banks, we know where this is going.

The only banks that will be left will be the boutique banks that can command extreme premium pricing because they are worth it.

That’s the only game in town, and it’s a game you better master—and fast.

The post Why Premium Pricing Is a Leadership Decision—Not a Market Condition [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

In this video, Roxanne Emmerich exposes the real constraint behind underpricing: scarcity thinking inside your own institution. You can push incentives, tweak comp plans, and preach value all day—but until belief changes, behavior won’t.

Most banks unknowingly train their teams to think price is a zero-sum game. The result? Discounting, margin erosion, and a slow drift toward commoditization. Top-performing banks operate differently. They understand that affluent clients don’t buy on price—they buy on meaning, differentiation, and confidence.

Here’s what must shift:

• Belief precedes pricing power—confidence comes before execution

• Affluent buyers decide based on value, not rates

• Category-of-one positioning eliminates price pressure altogether

If this problem stays unresolved, it won’t remain contained. It will cost you margin, culture, and eventually your independence.

That’s exactly why Roxanne is teaching this framework live at the Breakthrough Banking Blueprint™ Bootcamp. This is where banks discover how to shift mindset, reposition value, and equip their teams to charge what they’re truly worth—without discounting.

Seats are limited. Register now. 

Watch now. 

My mentor of three decades taught me something about abundance consciousness. He is one of the wealthiest people in this country, and he came to this country with fifty dollars in his pocket. But he showed me a system one time, and when I immediately began to implement the system, it worked.

Some of my colleagues went to him and said, “How is Roxanne doing this? How is she getting all this business at premium pricing?”
And he said to them something I’ll never forget. He said, “She’s ignorant. She doesn’t know she can’t.” Which is one of the best compliments I’ve ever received.

In other words, I’m not going to buy into the story of playing small. I’m not going to buy into the idea that I have to match somebody else’s pricing. I’m not going to play small because the rest of the world is playing small.

And yet, I know as an executive, you’ve got people you’re kicking and pushing and yelling at—doing everything you can with incentive pay. You’re trying the carrot. You’re trying the stick. And you’re getting nowhere getting them to charge premium pricing, because there’s a deeper-level problem.

They don’t believe they can.

There’s scarcity thinking. They think if they receive this, they’re taking it away from that.

They don’t understand that we’re not competing for pieces of the pie—we’re growing the pie. By creating a situation where that bank customer is so much better taken care of that their business thrives, they will make millions as a result of the extra ten thousand dollars that we charge. When our people get that, the magic begins to happen.

You’re going to need to do some lobotomies to help them understand that just because they believe price is the primary decision-making item, the affluent do not.

Most affluent do not buy on price—but they will if you don’t give them alternative information that matters more.

Thus, the correct sales process, built upon a clear differentiator that makes you the one and only—once you become a category of one—you can charge whatever you want.

There are steps along this pathway: defining how you’re different, getting your people some early big wins so they believe they can do it, and once that flywheel is turning, the rest come along too.

So if you’re still living with this problem, you’re not alone. Thousands of bank executives have been where you are.

But you can’t continue to live with this problem. You need a new, fresh problem. This one must be eliminated—because it will cause you to lose the name on your front door. It will take away your legacy. This one must be fixed.

I’ll see you at the Breakthrough Banking Blueprint Bootcamp where I’m going to show you how to get this done—because I can’t stand watching you suffer anymore.

Make sure you check in with me when you get there. I want to get to know who you are and how I can help—because I am committed to every community bank in this country keeping its independence. But you’ve got to be there so I can show you how.

See you there.

The post Why Your Team Can’t Charge Premium Pricing—And How It’s Killing Your Legacy [VIDEO] appeared first on The Emmerich Group.