Challenging times require great transparency of information going to the executive team and also going to the board. For instance, if I’m a bank CEO, I want to know if the account managers who are assigned to my current top 100 and top 1000 customers are in contact with each one of them, or if they’ve just left a voicemail, or if they’ve actually had communication. I want to know if anybody’s on the outside. I want to know if anybody has called in and asked for a lesser rate to match something that they’re getting in terms of an offer someplace else. I want to know if someone’s already proactively contacted that customer to let them know there will be a lot of people calling with lesser pricing, and here are the risks of that, and here’s why many small businesses won’t survive because they’ll take that great price, and it ends up by far the most expensive option for them.

Video: How to Manage for Profit in Challenging Times

This is the time for teams to come together to give that information to executives, at least on a weekly basis, so that you know exactly the status of every customer, so we don’t lose any of our top 100 most profitable customers. And it’s also the time to make sure that revenue is the answer to getting us through this. And so that we find another top 100, just like our current top 100, so we can double profitability, while increasing safety, by systematically pulling them in because no one’s going to be paying attention to their best customers right now. It’s never been easier to pull ahead, emerge stronger, and become one of the banks that stands out, that’ll be untouchable for the next couple decades, as a result of what’s happening right now, over the next couple months, in your bank.

– Roxanne Emmerich

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