How Top 5% Banks Drive NIM Through the Roof—Without Raising Rates [VIDEO]
Net interest margin is under pressure—and if your bank is still waiting on rate changes to save your profitability, you’re already behind. In this sharp, no-fluff...
Most bankers think that internal culture means friendly tellers, free coffee in the lobby,, and someone to greet customers as they come in the door. No, no, no! Have you ever found one bank that was able to get 100 to 150 basis points more in net interest margin with that insipid belief system?
Of course not. Because that’s not what culture is.
Culture asks, “Will your people leap over tall buildings in a single bound to make sure your client is successful in their business or personal financial goals?” “Will you go beyond bank “product” to create Unique Selling Propositions that rock their world and cause hundreds of thousands of dollars of impact for them? And will your people have fun doing it so that your system is sustainable?
In fact, “system” is everything—from the selection of your employees…to the rewarding of your people…to the celebration of critical drivers…the one-page strategic plan creating focus, the tying of the critical drivers into the key strategies…and even how you deal with dissidence (including teaching your team how to have healthy dissidence and inviting them off the bus when they don’t).
Culture means everybody’s pulling in the same direction and having fun doing it—knowing that their good efforts are not going to be negated by someone else who’s doing it halfway.
Culture is not about putting on your clown nose and jumping onto the happy bus. It’s all about fun, yes—but fun tied to critical drivers that are the precursors to the numbers that banks need to grow the capital Basel III will require while lowering risk. When a bank CEO goes to a front-line person and says, “Hey, let’s go get a Return on Assets of 2.0 this year,” the front-line person is confused. If she says, “One of your five critical drivers is to get at least five cross sales on every account that comes in here,”—now we’re communicating in a way that makes sense AND allows for that ROA to happen. That’s a start to a culture that can move mountains.
In most banks (perhaps yours), people on the team rarely make that connection.
So the key is to drive home those critical drivers—but we don’t start measuring a thing until we’ve already won their hearts over.
Do You Have 5 Minutes to Find Out If Your Team Is Ready to Achieve Breakthrough Growth at Your Bank? Click here and find out with our new High-Performance Team-Readiness Analysis.
********************************************
Discover how to grow organically in TODAY’S competitive environment without matching rates
At the Profit-Growth Banking™ Summit where I’ll deliver a hands-on marketing, strategy, culture and sales management “boot camp” dedicated to giving you REAL strategies that I’ve used to help banks double cross-sales and customer service scores regularly within 3 to 6 months.
It will literally transform the working culture of your bank—and get your entire team on board a new bus, driving in a new direction—with systems, strategies, accountability and workable sales dialogs that re-focus EVERYONE on bringing in better margins, better quality accounts and better performance in every area of your bank.
We recently closed a $5.4 million loan with a great company one hour away from our nearest branch. There had to be a hundred banks closer than Blackhawk. Proximity wasn’t important nor was price. At no time in all of the discussions, did the issue of price come up. When the principals closed the loans in my office, they remarked that our way doing business was nothing like they had ever experienced before. It showed skeptics of the Profit-Rich Sales™ process that you can get premium pricing even in a cutthroat competitive environment.
—R. Bastian | President
Blackhawk Bank
Call (952) 820-0360 today and ask for Chris.
********************************************
Net interest margin is under pressure—and if your bank is still waiting on rate changes to save your profitability, you’re already behind. In this sharp, no-fluff...
Bankers, let me ask you a brutal but necessary question:Why are you still playing checkers while the top-performing banks are playing 4D chess with deposit growth? If...
Do you agree that high quality customers love high quality attention? Let's explore how you can transform your safety and profitability by creating the kind of...
What if you can use extreme differentiation to get 150 basis points or more on the loan side and improve your deposit pricing at the same time? If you're the kind of...
You deserve to get paid more. Rate matching is the most destructive force in community banking today. And because of it, as a community bank, you are underpaid for the...
Does every team member on your team know how they tie to profit? I mean really know? When a study published in Businessweek revealed they had asked 6,000 employees, "Do...
Everyone has patterns of disbelief. Some people believe that in politics, there is one side or the other, and they're unwilling to look at the alternative. Still others...
I hear the same thing everywhere I go—"We need to build an accountability culture!" Great idea, right? But here’s the problem: we’ve been saying this for decades, and...
I have a book that I love—a book I read a couple of times last year and still reference often. It’s called Intelligent Thinking—which, let’s be honest, sounds like a...
Are you still working off a to-do list? Well, I’ve got a suggestion for you: throw that list out—and do it now! Not all tasks are created equal, and that's a big reason...