RMs have always been pressed for time, and today’s focus on credit quality and the heavy burden of new regulations further reduce RMs’ capacity to call on prospects. Unfortunately, this means that RMs are so busy that they neglect to make time for prospecting.  Oxley Bank (a pseudonym) faced a similar challenge a few years ago, when tasked with a very aggressive growth mandate, found that only 10% of their RMs met their individual calling targets.

The Challenge: Oxley wanted to improve customer acquisition efforts by managing sales activities centrally, but they realized they needed to balance a centrally-driven strategy with the individual market characteristics and differences in individual portfolio size and complexity.

The Solution: Instead of setting the minimum number of calls an RM must make, Oxley works backwards and determines the maximum number of calls an RM could make each year. From there, they require RMs to estimate the number of calls they must make to their existing customers and the number required to convert prospects. Sales managers and regional sales leads pressure test RM estimates, as Oxley soon found that RMs overestimate the number of calls they need to make to existing customers and underestimate the number of calls required to win a prospect. Afterward, a rigorous call prioritization process ensures that RMs focus calls on the highest potential customers and prospects and allows bank executives to monitor the revenue outcomes of each call made.

The Results: Before the call allocation program, Oxley grew below the local market rate, and only a handful of RMs achieved their call goals. Five years after the program first began, over 60% of RMs reach or exceed call targets and Oxley Bank now grows loans and deposits faster than the market average.

 Board members,  read a step-by-step walkthrough of Oxley’s practice on our website.

The branch has become a really popular topic for our members recently, and their interest is understandable. Banks have high goals, and business bankers want to maximize the return they get on each and every channel.

To help, the BBB research team has launched a study on how to generate more business banking revenue through the branch.

We’re still in the early phases of our research, and one of the main questions we have right now is, “why is this time different?” The branch has always been a challenge and has always been among our members’ top priorities. (In fact, based on member feedback, we completed a whitepaper back in early 2008 that outlines different methods for banks to increase branch-based small business sales ) However, the level of renewed interest in the branch now suggests that something – the challenges, the opportunity, or the urgency – has changed.

We want to understand what (if anything) about the branch has changed, and what that means for the solutions members should pursue. Here are a couple of hypotheses we have heard on both sides of the argument:

Why It’s the Same:

-          Like always, branch staff turnover frequently. It’s hard for banks to develop the expertise needed to serve business customers through the branch when few branch staff stay in seat for longer than one or two years.

-          Mindshare isn’t there. Branch staff have always had many different tasks, and today’s no different. Small business sales fall to the bottom of their to-do list.

-          Confidence is lacking. Because they encounter business customers less frequently than they encounter retail consumers, few branch staff are fully confident when interacting with business customers.  

Why This Time Is Different:

-          Decreased retail consumer traffic through the branch means that business banks have unprecedented opportunity to capture branch staff mindshare

-          New technology, such as the ability to resolve problems online, has changed the nature of business requests that come through the branch.

What are the biggest challenges your team faces when trying to improve branch-based business sales? How are they different from the challenges you experienced 5 years ago? Please share your feedback, and contact us to schedule a time to speak with our research team. We would appreciate your input as our research progresses.

With Europe’s future literally teetering on the brink amid the sovereign debt crisis, executives must navigate seismic shifts in regulation, technology, and business behavior, many of which challenge the most foundational assumptions of the traditional advisory, sales, and service distribution models. Yet while there is growing acknowledgement of the need to change, there is little consensus around the type of change required, and even less on how we might go about accomplishing it.

The only certainty, almost three years on from when crisis first hit – things will not get better by themselves.  Uncertainty around global economic and business growth, if anything, has become more pronounced; learning from past mistakes, businesses are hoarding cash, slashing investments in new projects and minimizing borrowing costs; given rapid technological advancement, new ideas have become new competitors, with niche non-bank players already competing in the online and mobile payments space.  Alongside a number of high profile keynote speakers, the conference will offer a series of executive work-shop sessions to drill down on the following key competitive challenges in the commercial bank:

Help Relationship Managers Succeed: Stop trying to deliver trusted advice to business customers and start providing what they seek at the right time.

Analyze Innovations in Business Banking across the Globe: Learn how to help your business clients achieve revenue goals and restore growth.

Boost SME Revenues through Branches: The branch is critical to the SME customer but remains under-utilized. Discover strategies to increase efficiency and sales.

Improve Performance using Prescriptive Analytics: From forecasting to decisioning, improve business results through the use of business analytics.

Implement Mobile Solutions: Realize opportunities the mobile channel presents for commercial customers including payments and social media.

Manage Operational Risk: Understand how to effectively manage capital and solvency requirements in the commercial bank while taking out cost.

Register for this free event today, or visit www.CEBTowerGroup2012.com for more information.. The decisions you make today will likely determine relative market positions for many years to come.

The results are in from our 2012 Survey of Business Bank Executive Priorities.  We asked Business bank leaders representing over 30 banks worldwide to rank their top objectives for the upcoming year and rate their confidence in executing these objectives.

• 73% of Business Bank Executives running small business and middle market lines of business ranked delivering a world class customer experience as their top objective for the next 6 to 12 months.  
• Frontline support initiatives, such as improving sales manager effectiveness and creating lead generation tools followed as the next highest priorities.

Of the two objectives, executives expressed more confidence in executing on customer experience than building frontline support tools.

These top business banking priorities and areas rated with low execution confidence will be the focus of our research agenda for the next year.  We’re looking forward to it

BBB members can review the results of our 2012 Survey of Business Bank Executive Priorities.

We hosted more than 30 business bank leaders from North American and Latin American banks at our Annual Executive Retreat last month, and one of the most  thought-provoking conclusions attendees reached is that business banks cannot manage small business and middle market the same. Read More »

Relationship managers are increasingly offering discounts or waiving fees to win prospects and keep customers happy — an understandable response to today’s hyper-competitive market, but the trend is squeezing banks’ already-thin margins.

Most business bank leaders we talk to these days are worried about the uptick in discounting, but few have been able to prevent RMs from extending unwanted price cuts. Many fear that uniform pricing policies don’t give RMs the flexibility they need to remain credible with customers.  Others who have tried to enforce uniform pricing struggle to get RMs to adhere to the guidelines.

But there’s hope. Read More »

Online banking and payments offerings have been on the rise from banks around the globe as these institutions continue to fight for retail and business banking market share.  Myriad technology vendors have sprung to specialize in building and leasing online banking platforms to financial institutions around the world.

In its latest bid to maintain its position as a global business banking service provider, Citigroup has launched CitiDirect® BE Mobile, a mobile browser-based application allowing clients to receive notifications and authorize payments using their mobile phones.  Citi has built this technology in-house and increased its applicability by making it an open application capable of running on any operating system or platform.

Interested in business banking product innovation?  Check out our product innovation library where we profile dozens of the most novel offerings from banks around the world.

Relationship Manager productivity is and has always been one of the most crucial factors to ensuring success for Business Banks.   But, in the push toward greater growth through one dedicated RM channel, many banks have potentially over complicated their own delivery process.

Past Business Banking Board’s research has found that an average RM serving the needs of an average customer is expected to master a range of 25 different skills and liaise with 18 different internal partners during the regular course of their work.

Leading business banks unbundle customer relationship, favoring depth over breadth in order to maintain RM focus on acquiring and managing relationships whilst still providing existing business clients with solutions made for their specific business needs.

A few years ago we profiled a bank that took it a step further.

After evaluating its entire business banking activity chain, Arsenal Bank determined that the relationship manager would be wholly responsible for building knowledge about the customer while a new role, the solutions strategist, assumes responsibility for understanding the business needs and crafting solutions to solve them.

Faced with limited demand opportunities, it is imperative that RMs execute flawlessly during critical moments in the customer relationship. However, we’ve found that 85% of middle market RMs and 70% of small business RMs gravitate to actions that are actually detrimental to goal achievement.

For example: 

Middle market RMs focus too much of their cross-sale conversations on uncovering new customer needs instead of discussing the credit process and evaluation needed for the customer to acquire the solution. 

When convincing a prospect to move their most critical financial product to the bank, small business RMs overinvest in explaining how the bank works with other customers instead of explaining the operational benefits of the purchase to the customer’s business.

To help RMs succeed now, business bank executives must provide coaching and support through these critical moments in the customer relationship.

Join us for our November 16^th webinar Bringing Precision to the Relationship Manager Job  where we’ll outline seven ways you can help your RMs, including:

• How sales managers can coach RMs to identify actions that help or hurt their performance.
• How banks can provide support, infrastructure, and processes that will enable RMs to perform the best behaviors.

A lot of our members have asked us recently how they can deploy an effective phone-based RM role. It’s a hot topic now for two reasons:

1. Costs pressures are on the rise and phone-based RMs offer a less expensive delivery channel and can manage larger customer portfolios.
2. Customers don’t always value or have time for a dedicated RM. Today’s business owners move at a fast pace and expect banks to keep up.

While most of our members agree they need to think about delivery channels beyond the standard RM, few have actually deployed virtual or phone-based account managers. They worry that remote RMs will struggle to drive sales and keep customers happy.

But Derby Bank, a bank we profiled a few years ago, debunks these fears. Derby has been able to grow revenue and keep even the largest business banking customers happy using a tele-RM channel.

The keys to Derby’s phone-based RM model include:

1. Recognizing a successful field RM doesn’t necessarily make a successful tele-RM. On the contrary. Some of the skills needed to excel as a field RM can hurt you as a tele-RM. So instead of simply migrating field RMs to a remote call center, Derby hires candidates who have excellent phone skills, can establish relationships remotely, and who can manage a large volume of different tasks. 
2. Carefully selecting customers best suited for a tele-RM. Not all customers will be happy with or well-served by a phone-based RM. Derby developed a six-step decision tree to determine whether a customer would be better served by a field or remote RM.
3. Maintaining high service expectations for tele-RMs. Derby executives didn’t want customers migrated to the remote RM model to feel like they were downgraded. Instead, tele-RMs receive intensive training and are supported to provide the same experiences that customers would expect from a field RM: ability to understand the business, bring together solutions, and resolve problems quickly and competently.

Board members, learn more about Derby’s work , and share your perspective about how banks can develop lower-cost alternatives to the conventional field relationship manager.