Welcome to the Top 5 Percenter™ Blog

You Deserve More and Better

by | Sales & Marketing

I believe that accepting limiting beliefs as fact is too common in banking today.

Today, together, we’re going to blow up the biggest limiting belief in banking. It’s so bad, it’s keeping you and your team from attracting the very best credits AND getting extreme premium pricing.

If you’re the kind of leader who:

  • Has a team that’s already getting premium pricing AND attracting the best credits, you’re going to love this because I’ll show you how you can get even more and get them faster.
  • Or maybe you are a leader who has a group of lenders who just came back from a conference and they have a strong belief that higher pricing happens only for weaker credits, I’ll show you how to flip that belief and go get the best credits in your market, and get a 50, 100, even 150 basis points above market. (Yes, it’s very possible if you do what I’m going to show you!)
  • Or maybe you personally believe the conventional “wisdom” that higher pricing is only for weaker credits and you’re sure you learned that in graduate school of banking, so it must be true! It’s not your fault. It IS true, but it is also true that you can get extreme premium pricing from the very best credits. Let me show you how!

There are a few challenges to getting the best credits to pull away from their current bank AND pay you 100+ basis points more.

First, you must get your team to challenge the mountain of evidence they have telling them that good credits will never pay anything but the lowest price because your competitors will cut and cut and cut to get the business. It’s just not true.

Second, you’re going to have to be worth more. Saying “we’ve got great people” or “we turn around your loans fast,” while great things, are NOT enough differentiation to get you that premium pricing.

Third, you have to turn the ship—belief systems, differentiation and sales process must all change together, or it will remain a pipe dream instead of an ongoing reality where you ALWAYS get paid more while attracting the very best quality loans.

In this episode, I’ll share three steps to help you get some serious traction on pulling in better prospects and premium pricing in just a few short weeks.

  1. Unlike how much most marketing is done in banking today, you need to target the precious few. A study done last year showed that the average community bank’s TOP 100 customers account for more than 50% of their profits. The fastest path to more profit is obvious. Find another 100 just like your current top 100. You’ll double your profits without adding people or infrastructure. The first step is to figure out who those customers are.
  2. Next, you need to figure out the similarities—specifically the psychographics and firmographics they have in common. Psychographics are things about ways of thinking or being such as “active American Farm bureau members who are second generation with the first generation still involved.” Firmographics are like demographics for businesses. An example is “medical device manufacturers with over 30 million in revenue.”
  3. Finally, unlike most marketing and sales approaches normalized in banking today, you have to figure out how to get prospects to pay attention to you—in fact, fall in love with you BEFORE you contact them. When you start the conversation, you want them to see that meeting with you is an honor, not just another inconvenient meeting with a “vendor.”You don’t want brand awareness, you want brand insistence.

Again, three steps:
1) Find out who your current most profitable customers are.
2) Determine the intersection of psychographic and firmographic similarities and
3) Create the system to build reputational equity.

Don’t miss the next episode where I cover how to build differentiation that gets the attention of A+ quality prospects to help you win more and better business fast.

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