Loan Growth

Achieve Fast, Profitable, Low-Risk Loan Growth

Get Clear on These 3 Rules to Score A+ Loans at Premium Prices—Emmerich Can Help

You’ve got a loan growth problem.

Your community bank’s sales staff was lulled to sleep during the boom and those who are left, now a decade later, well… they don’t have the skills or the confidence to build your loan portfolio by snapping up quality accounts at rates that make you dance.

They sit in the office trapped, as if in a box of their own making, believing that it’s not possible to rapidly grow their portfolio with quality credits at premium pricing. That it’s not possible to win an account without matching rates. That the competition and YOU, your bank, are an interchangeable commodity.

It’s not your salespeople’s fault—they’ve all had their teeth kicked in too many times by customers and prospects who’ve halted everything at the closing table because they got a better rate from the bank across the street… and now insist YOU match it.

But there IS a solution. The Emmerich Group has unlocked the secrets of growing your loan portfolio quickly with much lower risk AND much higher profits.

In this article, I’m going to show how good banks, and even some struggling banks, transformed their loan growth, growing faster than they ever had before by targeting only A+ quality credits and winning those deals at premium prices.

The Secret to Winning More and More Profitable Loans is Simple

If you want to win more deals, you must be more valuable to a customer or prospect than another bank… even at a higher rate. And you’ve got to have a way to communicate your value to that prospect. You need Unique Selling Propositions (USPs).

in his book Reality in Advertising, Rosser Reeves, creator of the USP concept, laments that the USP is widely misunderstood and defines it in three parts:

  1. Each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer—not just words, product puffery, or show-window advertising. Each advertisement must say to each reader: “Buy this product, for this specific benefit.”
  2. The proposition must be one the competition cannot or does not offer. It must be unique.
  3. The proposition must be strong enough to move the masses, i.e., attract new customers as well as potential customers.

Let’s break that down and apply it to your bank.

Reaves says, “Each advertisement must say to each reader: Buy this product, for this specific benefit.”

Where Reeves says “advertisement,” think broadly. It means every place you promote a product or service to a customer or prospect: website, email, social media, signs, and more traditional ads on TV, radio, print, and direct mail, and the most important, in the sales process.

The proposition must be one that your competition cannot or does not offer.

In other words, it has to be unique. If not, there’s no advantage in using it.

The proposition must be strong enough to move the masses.

It’s not enough to talk about benefits—even unique benefits—if the benefits are weak and unimportant to your prospects. Those benefits must be listed as explicit or overt benefits in order for the prospect to believe.

Take a Lesson from FedEx on How a Single, Strong USP Can Allow You to Disrupt and Dominate

You think YOU have a tough competitive environment! When Fred Smith founded the company now known as FedEx back in 1971, he had only one major package-delivery competitor, but it was a biggie—the United States Postal Service, a government-sanctioned monopoly.

Yet, FedEx’s now-familiar USP turned the industry upside down:

“When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.”</>

FedEx hit right at the heart of its competitor’s weakness—slow, unreliable delivery.

For FedEx customers—businesspeople shipping important packages and documents—this was music to their ears. Now, let me connect the dots for you… it currently costs 58 cents to send a one ounce First Class letter from San Francisco, California to Boston, Massachusetts [reference]. Using the Postal Service’s Priority Mail Express, you’ll pay $27.10 to send that same one-ounce letter to arrive by 6:00 p.m. the next day  [reference].

To ship a one-ounce letter from San Francisco to Boston via FedEx Priority Overnight, the current rate is $54.85… and it will arrive by 10:30 a.m. the next day.

In other words, FedEx’s unique selling proposition is worth nearly 100 times more to a customer than the Postal Service’s First Class service and approximately two times more than the Postal Service’s later-delivered overnight offering.

Strong USPs unlock customers and deals. They attract the best customers, those looking for added value and willing to pay premium pricing.

Here’s what too many community banks miss: You don’t need just one USP, you need many—one for every product, target market, and way of doing business so you can match the needs of each customer.

The Emmerich Group’s Certified Community Bank Team Members can take you step-by-step through a proven process to identify and leverage your community bank’s USPs. Disrupt that commodity mindset–not just among your customers and prospects, but among your sales team, too! And dominate your competition by reliably growing your loan portfolio with value-savvy customers who gladly pay premium prices… taking risk out of the equation.