Community Bankers Already Have What It Takes to Win the Battle for Business Customers

In an early scene from the 1993 classic Schindler’s List, businessman Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) is enlisting the aid of a local Jewish official Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) in a scheme to open a factory and get rich supplying hard goods to the Nazi war machine. Learning that the scope of Schindler’s idea would include Stern mustering the manufacturing know-how, equipment, labor, raw material supply chain, distribution and financing—in effect, doing all the actual work–Stern skeptically asks just what Schindler plans on bringing to the deal.   With arms raised and fingers splayed, the wide-eyed Schindler replies: “The presentation!”

Cinematic drama aside, in our bank marketing experience we have seen that many community-based institutions already possess the individual products new business banking customers are looking for, in some form or another. They simply need to be presented more effectively.

Chances are you now offer a suite of affordable business checking services, mobile banking, remote capture, maybe a preferred merchant card provider and other business-focused offerings. Yes, the whiz bang technology the national name institutions may appeal to five percent of the businesses in your market, but you probably stack up pretty well in a product-by-product comparison of the meat-and-potato products that the other 95% actually use in their daily operations. The ones that relationships are built upon.

As community bank marketing specialists, our passion is to keep hometown institutions from getting outpaced by the regionals and super-regionals. It takes some skill, but our job is not rocket science. With today’s technology and service bolt-ons, smart community banks have so many more ways to compete head-to-head with the big banks and win. For starters, their fee structures are more aggressive and personal service levels are consistently lower. But these and other liability points must be properly and consistently contrasted with the multiple advantages that community banks offer.

Suffice it to say, given the right guidance this playing field tilt between the Goliaths and the Davids of banking can be leveled through a two-part approach:

1. Assessment and Re-Tuning of All Current Business Services
2. Packaging Key Benefits into a Single, Streamlined Offering

Assessment and Adaptation

Assessing and re-tuning your current business banking offerings is a simple matter of “waddya got now?”, how does your suite of services/values stack up against your top three or four competitors and where can you tweak them to be more compelling without having your CFO scrawl “More Fee Income!” in blood on your office door.

A simple side-by-side comparison grid with a fill-in-the-blanks format will usually do. Your commercial lenders must be key contributors to this information-gathering process; they know (or certainly should know) what the comparative offerings are in your market. Involve them deeply in the assessing process.  Yes, they will always ask for a lower feature rate, it makes their job easier. But they should also be able to provide insights on the other hot button benefits that competitors are using to woo business owners and decision-makers, apart from rates.

Okay, I mentioned the R-word, so let’s discuss it a bit. It may sound heretical, but at least try to keep rates out of the equation at this point. Anybody can play the “rate and switch” game with an attractive introductory number to get calls, make new customers love you, and then fatten up the rates in six months or so. But that is generally not a long-term tactic that supports the development of relationships capable of spanning years or decades. Admittedly, rate-chasing is sometimes a necessary strategy and a pretty sure path to spike new customer inquiries. But it also opens the door to that cadre of “toaster customers”—those opportunistic souls willing to jump from one bank to another for a small handful of basis points (the metaphoric “toaster” giveaway). More fundamentally, it abets a culture that confuses cost with the real goal of community banking—bank/customer relationships built on mutual financial benefit and that most binding of values: trust.

Remember: you can always pull the introductory APR club out of the bag any time you wish.  Especially if you need it to neutralize a nettlesome competitor looking to buy their way into your market with loss-leader tactics. But for building long-term business banking relationships, it is infinitely better to have the fundamentals on your side: an affordable, sustainably-priced suite of checking services, the ability to flex annual loan fees or application fees, maybe a loan origination fee that is a fraction of the competition’s, prompt approval turnaround, etc. etc.  And chances are good that you already have these individual tools ready to deploy.

Once you and your team take the time to do the side-by-side composite comparison, you might be surprised how many advantages your bank currently offers your present and prospective business banking customers. And how well you compare with the competition, especially the bigger names in banking. You have all the tools…you just need to put them all in one sleek and sturdy toolbox.

Burnishing your own brand even brighter is the core benefit of any good hometown bank—your daily knowledge of, your abiding affection for, and your demonstrated dedication to the betterment of your own community. It’s in the community banking DNA and it is a critical distinction that the regional, super-regional and national institutions can never claim with the same level of credibility. Never forget that.

Packaging

All consumers love package deals, business owners included. Top providers in the travel industry, auto industry, now even the healthcare industry, are winning more market share through smart bundling of services. The reason it works is simple convenience. When a person is shopping for something they need or want, and they see all the benefits of a particular provider presented in an at-a-glance, visually attractive format, it makes it so much easier and faster to simply say “yes.”  Done well, the packaging or bundling of disparate features of a product or service offering gets you a giant leap closer to those “yes” decisions from your targeted audience.  It is also an opportunity to convey your bank’s healthy obsession with professionalism and community-facing ethic. But done poorly, it creates the kryptonite toxic enough to sour any consumer decision. The two worse fallouts of a half-baked presentation: Consumer confusion, or even worse, doubt about your bank’s ability to deliver the goods.

So here are two basic tips to package your community bank’s suite of business banking services for success.

1) Invest in a Professional Presentation:

Every marketing communication you attach your bank brand to bespeaks the quality of your product, your people, your performance and your institution. Don’t downplay the importance of a professional, consistent appearance to your sales literature and messaging. A class look conveys a class act. A crappy look conveys…well, you get the point.

If you need help to do it right, get a professional with a track record in community bank marketing to help with product branding, design, messaging, web content and other tools your business banking team will need to fully embed this new product package. The corner fast-print shop might be okay for printing, but they are not going to get you the visuals and messaging strong enough to compete with the big guys. Nor is your daughter-in-law’s ex-college roommate’s friend who is “really, awesomely creative.”

You may not have a vision in your head for this business banking product, but that’s not important. You will know the winning look when you see it. An experienced community bank marketing professional will take the funnel of facts and distill them into a convincing argument that looks, reads and sells properly.  You’ll get prototypes of all the individual tools in the marketing toolbox for this product line and a price range on getting it all done from concept to completion. You’ll have the opportunity for input and once you feel good about your new collection of consistent-looking collateral, print and digital ads, it’s your decision to pull the trigger. Then watch what happens. If you’d like to see some examples of approaches that are winning business banking customers for community banks, just visit www.keenannagle.com/communitybanking.

The marketing dollars you invest in professional marketing services will pay dividends for many years into the future. As a bonus, a fresh new packet of attractive-looking sales materials will also give your business lenders a stronger sense of home office support in their success, while energizing them to compound their outreach efforts throughout the business community.

2) Avoid the “Gotchas”:

Yes, every financial offering has to have performance parameters. Some legalese is expected. But today’s consumers are savvy, suspicious critters and a lot of asterisks, blocks of mini-type legal disclaimers or other codicils have them looking for the “what’s the catch?” hook hidden inside that juicy offer.  Strive for as much up-front transparency as possible. Transparency builds trust.

There are artful techniques to present the conditions intrinsic to financial offers without raising more red flags than necessary. Study what the competition is doing, particularly the larger institutions, and again, get some professional guidance on how to fashion the messaging and look that captures the unique character of your community bank.

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Michael C. Keenan is the president and CEO of Keenan-Nagle Advertising, Inc. Based in Allentown, PA with a full-service team of 12 professionals, the Keenan-Nagle firm has specialized in community bank marketing for more than three decades. For facts, visit www.keenannagle.com or call 610-797-7100.