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Creating Sales Without Selling

February 15, 2011 | Subscribe Free

The Race to Replace Lost Revenue

Slashed fee income and a dismal lending environment have left banks and credit unions scrambling to replace lost revenues. It’s all about the bottom line. The reflexive response is to hike fees and subject consumers to new account conditions. “What fees can we introduce?” “Which fees can we increase?” “What new requirements should be required?” “Should we kill free checking?”

Needless to say, consumers are not happy. “What else are they going to take away?”

Besides hitting folks with new fees and terms, isn’t there some other way to improve the bottom line? Oh yeah, it’s called…

Sales.

Financial institutions everywhere are gravitating towards “fees, fees, fees,” but too few are thinking about “sales.”

The Hurdles with Cross-Selling

Conventional marketing wisdom says it’s easier to generate additional business from existing relationships than it is to create new ones. If true, then why do banks and credit unions prioritize new acquisitions over building existing relationships?

Products-per-household at the average bank or credit union is low. Despite offering a wide range of services — everything from lending and savings products to insurance and investments — most financial institutions only meet a fraction of people’s needs, with a typical share-of-wallet hovering around 2 out of 10 products.

To remedy this, some financial institutions have deployed CRM systems, but CRM systems — while great at organizing data — don’t make sales happen. Ultimately, it boils down to the ability of the organization to generate sales appointments.

But that’s no easy task. Most frontline employees are “service representatives” and not “salespeople.” Helping others and reacting to their specific needs comes much more naturally to most people than does “selling.” Employees prefer “providing service” vs. “selling” because it’s emotionally more comfortable. Sales training yields mixed results because it fights against human nature.

Having spent the money to acquire existing relationships, it seems that the obvious solution is for banks and credit unions to build share-of-wallet, but what are financial institutions to do?

From Transactions to Interactions

Thousands of people hit your website and stop by your branches. It’s critical to maximize every one of these opportunities. Every touchpoint, every page view, every branch visit must be fully leveraged. But how do you pull it off when staff are uncomfortable selling? And how do you build sales without making people feel like they are being sold something?

The answer is dialogue.

People out there today are confused and looking for help. They come in wanting to discuss what’s on their mind, not just hear about the products you have to offer. Financial consumers aren’t necessarily looking for the cheapest provider either, e.g., the bank or credit union with the best rate. Give them straightforward advice, provide helpful information and make it easy to find answers, and they’ll trust you.

If you’re prepared, you can create conversations that give people the information they need to make better financial decisions, whatever those may be. Step up as an honest and informative knowledge advocate and people will consciously, deliberately choose to do business with you.

This is the magic of using an educational content strategy. With an end-to-end content marketing strategy, you can use financial education materials to organically trigger dialogue that create sales. Make it easy to spark natural conversations about financial services and sales appointments will schedule themselves. Best of all, building this level of trust will neutralize price as the primary factor in people’s decision-making process. All staff need to do is ask and answer people’s questions — a set of behaviors that fall well inside most employee’s comfort zone.

How It Works

Generating a steady flow of referrals and sales appointments takes two primary ingredients. First, you need the right content, strategically engineered to align with key products and/or core business lines. Second, you need an effective content delivery strategy. In order to be effective, it takes more than simply having educational content sitting idle on a website waiting for visitors. Delivery is the difference.

Step 1 – Become a resource for answers to people’s financial questions

Provide easy to understand educational content on a wide range of financial topics
Position it as a as a value added service under your brand
Package it in a way that makes it easy to find what you want
Present it online with “on demand” topic downloads that can be done from home and at the branch
Showcase the exact representatives that can help with the topic of interest

Step 2 – Deliver the service online and in branches

Integrate the content into your website in a way that engages the “transaction only” minded visitors
Teach frontline employees the easy process of introducing the service using marketing materials that stress benefits and encourage people to ask for the help they need based on their own circumstances
Provide the tools that make it easy for frontline employees to turn these dialogues into sales appointment using a “service” oriented approach

How It Pencils Out

Sales appointments lead to sales revenue. So, for example, let’s say each branch has four frontline employees that serve visitors every day. If each of them set one additional sales appointment per week, what would that be worth?

Of course not every appointment results in a sale. Assuming 80% qualify and 40% actually buy, each branch would be generating an additional $10,240 in revenue every month. That’s $122,880 per year. Over a 10-branch network, additional income would total $1,228,000 annually. With an associated cost of $100 or less per branch per month, that yields a gross margin of $1,213,600 — not too shabby.

You can see how much revenue you could be generating with more sales appointments with Truebridge’s Revenue Opportunity Calculator.

Experiment with different volumes of appointments and conversion ratios
using the Revenue Opportunity Calculator.

The Truebridge Educational Marketing Solution

Truebridge offers EducateFirst, a marketing solution developed especially for financial institutions. It combines educational content, just-in-time marketing materials, and tools and training into a single package. This affordable solution can be installed and easily integrated into your existing regular activity to generate results within weeks. The cost is based on the size of your financial institution, and can be paid as a monthly subscription.

For more information, please visit Truebridge.com. You can also send an email, or call Stewart Rose, CEO of Truebridge, or call him at (617) 956-5020.

Complimentary White Paper: Using Educational Content to Drive Sales

What this paper will do for you: Financial institutions increasingly recognize the importance of providing educational content, but struggle to properly leverage its potential. This paper explains how to drive sales by maximizing the effectiveness of educational content. Inside you will find guidelines on how to implement and use educational content to drive sales from both your branches and website. The paper includes two sets of guidelines, explaining:

6 steps to follow to present educational content as a value-added service
6 steps to follow to use educational content to drive sales

Send Me My Free White Paper!

Use the form below to request your white paper and learn how to turn educational content into sales referrals.

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Note: This paid advertorial was written by The Financial Brand on behalf of Truebridge Financial Marketing. If your company is interested in an advertorial, please contact The Financial Brand.