I believe rate matching is the most destructive force in community banking today. Because of it, community banks are underpaid for the value you deliver. I believe you should be paid more.

Today, I’m going to show you how to stop your prospects from asking you to match a rate to “win the business” and start getting paid more within the next two weeks.

Deal?

Great!

You’re going to love this IF you’re the kind of person…

• Who has team members at your door saying, “we can do this deal if we match the rate” (and you know that’s no good).
• Who has one team member who’s already getting premium pricing, and you want more.
• Who has team members that believe they have a “moral obligation” to match rates—don’t worry, it’s not their fault, and I’ll show you how to get them to come around.

In this video, you’re going to discover three things:

1) The three elements of a USP that actually make it work
2) The most common banking USPs (and why you should never use them)
3) The biggest mistake we see banks make when creating USPs

Let’s dive in…

Step 1: UNLIKE so many branding efforts that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars but never really deliver the new, profitable customers you want, USPs will act like magnets for the best customers in your market…if you build them the right way.

For any of your USPs to be successful, each must meet three criteria:

• Matter to customer
• Be dramatically different than anything else in your market
• Be worded as an explicit benefit

Step 2: Get rid of the weak, lifeless, “me too” USPs that most banks try to lean on, such as…

• “We have great people!”
• “We have great customer service!!”
• “We’ve been in business for 132 years!!!”

Nobody cares. The only one of the three that carries any benefit for today’s customer is customer service, but it’s not unique, and saying it that way makes it not believable, and it’s merely your ticket to the dance. It’s time to up your game if you’re serious about getting rid of rate matching.

Step 3: Finally, the BIG MISTAKE…
No explicit benefit in your USP. There’s got to be a benefit that matters to your customer…a reason why they should do business with you over the other 30 banks in your market.

What makes you different in a way that actually matters to your future customer, and is said believably?

When you put all of these things together and use them properly in your sales process, you can see big results within days and weeks. A few years ago, we had a bank bring several execs, including JJ Blake, their president, to one of our events. We took them through an exercise to develop their USPs.

When they went back to the bank, the very next week, JJ wrote me excitedly to say that one of their CSRs had used the USP with a prospect and the prospect pulled out an additional $250,000 check beyond what he was going to invest in starting the account.

USPs unlock big accounts, without ever having to match a rate.

In the next video, you’ll see that all USPs are not equal, and I’ll show you why you need a particular type of USP—a Level 4 USP—if you want to get extreme premium pricing.