By John J. Coffey, C.P.A. and Gene Palm, www.profitres.com, originally published September 2003, ABA Bank Marketing

We are not huge fans of football and we don’t pay close attention to a lot of the details of this game.  However, we have noticed that professional football players seem to have a passion for the game – which, happens to involve tossing around an inflated pigskin with the desire to kill anyone possessing it, or, to run with this object to the other end of a 100-yard field to avoid being killed! 

Vince Lombardi (we’ve heard he was pretty fair coach) didn’t take anything for granted.  During one of this training sessions he went back to basics when he said, "Gentlemen, this is a football."

On the other hand, we are huge fans of database marketing and we do pay close attention to a lot of the details of this game.  However, we have noticed that not all bank marketers seem to have the same passion for database marketing – or even for selling – that football players have for their game!  So, in the tradition of Vince Lombardi, we don’t want to take anything for granted. 

Rules of the game

Rule 1 – Having a passion to sell

As a bank marketer, you need to have a passion to sell.  If you don’t have a passion to sell your products to other people, you’re not going to be a very good marketer.  If you don’t desire and experience the adrenalin rush of making a sale, you’re probably in the wrong profession! 

Yes, marketing still involves designing the product, pricing the product, promoting the product and placing the product in effective delivery channels.  But, marketing in the 21^st century also involves building queries in a marketing database, modeling your data and analyzing the results, and even knowing how to build advanced profitability analyses for your products.  But never forget, marketing is all about selling!  Pass or run, but don’t make your playbook so sophisticated that you forget the only way to score is to sell something to somebody.

Rule 2 – Knowing what to sell

But, you can’t simply sell just any product.  You need to know which products are the most profitable and then concentrate your efforts on selling them.  Otherwise, you’ll fall into the trap of evaluating your success on sales volume without regard to how profitable those sales are!

Having a marketing database is extremely valuable because it can help you determine which products are profitable – and most importantly why they are profitable.  After balancing your marketing database back to your financial statements, you can then examine the average balance, spread, fees, costs, provision and break-even balances of your products.  Tackling your least profitable products (understanding why they are unprofitable) can lead to a change in play – sometimes you have to punt!

Rule 3 – Selling to qualified leads

It does no good to have profitable products if you don’t have any qualified leads for your sales efforts!  In particular, you need to sell to people who have the potential to become profitable customers.

A marketing database can help you determine who those potentially profitable customers would be.  Most likely, they are already your customers (probably with a single service or low aggregate balances).  And, they are already another financial institution’s best customers! 

By segmenting your most profitable customers using appropriate data elements, like product use and demographics, you can understand which products your most profitable customers use and how they use them.  Then, you can find out which other customers look like them but have not evidenced the desired buying behaviors.  Handing off a qualified lead report to the right player at your bank could gain you some yardage!

Rule 4 – Following up the initial offer

Now that you know which products to sell and to which customers you want to sell, you need to let them know what the deal is and give them a chance to purchase your products.  However, introducing your customers to your products is only the first step in a series of follow-up steps before the sale is made.

Having a marketing database can really help you keep track of your follow-up efforts.  The database can be programmed to know when the customer has responded to a sales offer, and if not, what additional product offers could be given to the customer.  Also, when a marketing database is integrated into a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, you can track the progress of the sale by having the bank’s sales force log notes for each contact they make with the customer.  Knowing how the other guy responds to different tactics is key to changing your game strategy, when needed.

Rule 5 – Closing the deal

Following up the customer will end with one of four decisions.

1.       The customer may not want to make a purchase decision at all.

2.       They might want to postpone the decision.

3.       They might buy something completely different than the initial offer.

4.       They might purchase what you offering them.

By using marketing campaign tracking files, a marketing database can help you see which decision your customer has made.  Hopefully they actually purchased what you were actually trying to sell, and then you will have scored a touchdown!

John J. Coffey, C.P.A. and Gene Palm are the principals of Profit Resources, a consulting company that specializes in MCIF technologies.  © Profit Resources, Inc. 2006