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.

Video: Keeping Your Top 100 in Your Back Pocket

And you also can’t be matching the rate.

At the time of the inquiry, when someone calls in and says, “Hey, I’m one of your best customers, and I just got this offer from someone else and it’s looking pretty good,” is the time when your team member needs to get this exactly right.

Because if they stall, and if they say, “Well, we’ll take a look at that,” the assumption that the customer makes is, “Hmm, they’re probably going to work on giving that to me.”

Then, if and when you don’t, they will be disappointed—and that relationship is at risk.

It’s been important for a very long time for your team members to be impeccable about their sales processes and know exactly what they need to do to make sure that they conveyed the added value. Words like:

• “Well, you get me,” and,
• “We’ve been around a long time,” and
• “Isn’t service worth something to you?”

…are not the kind of things that will withstand this kind of pressure.

So, take some time to reflect about what it is you’re going to do next to make sure your entire team is impeccable about knowing how to answer that question in a way that you know that you will not lose any of those customers that pay all your bills.

To your continued success,
Roxanne Emmerich

P.S. Keeping your best customers begins with intentional congruence in your strategic plan—matching the goals to the strategies to the systems that carry them out. Get a jumpstart on your laser-focused, one-page strategic plan at my upcoming complimentary masterclass, Profit-Rich™ Strategic Planning Masterclass on August 18th. Looking forward to see you there!