During challenging times, the one thing you can count on is that desperate competitors and fly-by-night organizations are going to come in and try to take away your best customers.
Let’s face it, your top 100 customers, for any bank under $2-billion asset size, account for anywhere between 50 to 140% of your profits.
That’s a significant thing to understand. They are precious. They pay for all the bills, and you must, of course, keep all of them.
I don’t know about you, but I loved the movie The Founder, probably because I’ve been a systems thinker all of my life, and I truly believe there’s one way that’s the best way to do everything.
I believe that when you obsess over how to get the fastest way from A to B in everything that you do in your business, things begin to really shine quickly. (more…)
A dear friend asked me a question one time, “Oh really, can you afford not to?”
And I thought that was one of the most brilliant questions I’ve ever heard.
Let me pose it to you this way.
Can you afford not to figure out how to increase your net interest margin by 100 basis points while bringing down your cost of funds and bringing up the quality of the loans you’re making?
If your top 100 customers do account for 50 to 140 percent of your profits, like they do for most every bank with under $2 billion in assets, you have to ask yourself: Do you really know how to identify your next top 100 potential customers?
I am a nerd. I’ve always been a nerd.
When I was a little kid, I used to go to the library every other day and I would drag books all the way up to my chin back onto the bus and back off of the bus, then back to the library. I’d fill up with books about twice a week.
I’ve always had a passion for learning and discovering and finding out what other people know—rather than having to discover everything myself. I have some favorite books. One of them, I think, is really important during strategic planning season for your executive team to get their brain unlocked from where it has been,
The past decades and even centuries have witnessed much banking innovation. Consider pneumatic capsule transportation (1799), the credit card (1950), and the ATM (1967).
Those innovations were external—easily visible to everyone. But there is also a history of innovation that’s internal to the industry, with bellwether changes to banking sales management and its increasing focus on the customer.
Over time, we went from standard bankers to “personal bankers.” For the affluent, there were
“private bankers.”
Personal bankers could open deposit accounts, but then universal bankers started to make personal loans and mortgages.
Marketing isn’t what it used to be. For many banks, it’s changing how you should be investing your marketing dollars and the strategies that you should be using. (more…)
I was speaking recently for a bank marketing association and what occurred to me was that I made a big discovery. I asked them how they move net interest margin. And I got that “huh?” look.
When I first left day-to-day banking to start this business, my first client was voted every year as the country’s top franchise.
Although I did their management development curriculum and educated their people about how to run that business, one of the things that I’m sure is true is that I learned more from them than they learned from me. I learned the concept of franchise thinking.
How do you do AB split testing to find out the best way to do things?
What’s the best way to hire a lender?
What is the best way to identify your next best customers?
Terry Slattery, the Legend of IBM, the person who brought in more business for IBM than anyone has before or since, has been a dear friend and partner of mine for almost two decades now, helping our banks figure out how to grow their revenue streams.
Terry recently said he has never seen a harder sales environment in his career across every industry.
