Looking for the quickest road to ruin for your bank?

Here’s the only roadmap you’ll need:

1. Not analyzing and breaking down your numbers
Do you know how many leads you are getting, the rates of conversion of leads and referrals per salesperson, or referrals per teller? Do you know how many cross-sales per new account per personal banker, number of aces in the sale funnel, or profit per account? What about your top 100 most profitable accounts, the number of sales by product, the average sale, and the rank of your most profitable products? No?

If you aren’t tracking and keeping the results visible, you aren’t making progress, and you’re well on your way into the tank.

2. Staying Stuck: Continuing to do what isn’t working
Are you stuck in the 1980s? Most banks continue to send out ineffective direct mail such as marketing via billboards, radio, and cable ads. They hire people based on personality and have no accountability plans tied to results and profit. They market to the masses, have no marketing linked to the sales process, and the list goes on.

It doesn’t work, so if it’s the tank you’re after, keep it up.

3. Matching rates, EVER
There is NEVER a good time to match rates. Never. It simply shows that your people have no idea what they’re doing. You may as well turn in the keys if you’re not eradicating rate-matching. If you have even ONE rate-matcher on your team, you have a profitability issue.

Address it or don’t, depending on the destination you want.

4. Wrong strategies
Yes, you need to have hundreds of strategies. Strategies for how you convert leads. Strategies for how to fully bond with a new client. Strategies for warming leads to turn them into clients. Strategies for getting centers of influence to refer you.

Unfortunately, most banks have only one strategy right now—cost containment. I will go on record now and guarantee that 95 percent of the banks in that camp will not be around in five years. You cannot use a short-term strategy to address a long-term problem.

It’s time to get out of the fearful crouch and grasp the reality that those who are merely slashing their budgets now will never catch up with those who are using brilliant and effective strategies to pull ahead.

5. Not prioritizing culture
Culture is the leading predictor of future growth and profitability. NOTHING is more important. If it’s not fun and people aren’t on fire, your profits are hemorrhaging while your head is deep in the sand, thinking that reworking the budget just ONE MORE TIME will fix everything.

Hey, good luck with that. You’re going to need it.