Independent Banker - June 2017 - 72

Nuts & Bolts
alignment with customer needs. "
As other marketing companies
explain, when a bank identifies segments
in which it is doing well, such
as empty nesters, millennials or agricultural
households, it can increase
its emphasis on those groups, look
for similar households that are not
already customers and perhaps
withdraw from markets where it isn't
performing as strongly.
" The idea is to get a clear handle on
who are the dominant segments the
bank is attracting now, and are those
the segments it wants to attract going
forward? " says Sullivan, who talks
in terms of categories like Younger
Upwardly Mobile, Upscale Empty Nest
and Retirement Blues.
Hidden surprises
Like other firms, Market Insights has
surprised banks with the information
it uncovers about their own customers.
The company recently worked with
a thrift that did not want to get away
from its aging customer base, but
rather, like most financial institutions,
wanted to attract and retain a younger
customer base, Sullivan says. Once
his company ran the customer file, it
turned out the thrift's largest customer
segment was Upwardly Mobile. The
bank discovered that the greatest
opportunity for attracting a younger
customer base was already within its
current customer base. Now they just
needed the technology and marketing
to keep them.
Virtual sales coach
Customer segmentation is only the first step. You have to make the sale,
too, but not every branch employee is a natural salesperson. Ignite Sales
in Dallas, Texas, offers a cloud-based service called Ignite Dialogue that
generates dialogue guides for staff to use in branches and online.
" Our intelligent digitized guides lead the customer to only the products that
are a match with their needs, " says Thom Suhy, Ignite Dialogue's program
manager. " We get customers into the right products or no products at all. "
George Noga, CEO of Ignite Sales, says, " Bankers that use our technology
become more engaged with the customer, because they are finding out
more about the customer's needs and circumstances than ever before. "
-Tom Groenfeldt
72 ICBA IndependentBanker June 2017
" They'd never looked at the data;
they were looking at who was walking
into the branch, which is less than a
third of their customers, " says Sullivan.
" They changed direction quickly and
hired a director of digital strategy.
" Segmentation is a cost-effective
tool. You can quickly pull a household
file from your core system, and it gives
you so much information to help you
spend your marketing dollars better. "
Another data analytics firm, Main
Street Inc., is expanding beyond its
" Segmentation is a costeffective
tool. You can
quickly pull a household
file from your core
system, and it gives you
so much information
to help you spend your
marketing dollars better. "
-JOE SULLIVAN,
MARKET INSIGHTS
legacy business providing check
programs to banks. President Ted
Walton says checking accounts
provide a good starting point for customer
analytics, because nearly every
bank customer has one. Main Street
takes existing customer names and
addresses and combines them with
publicly available data such as geographic,
demographic and behavioral
characteristics to show banks who
their customers are and how they
vary by branch. With that information,
banks can select appropriate
advertising and branch imagery and
pursue new customers in segments
where they have a record of success.
Main Street, which has bank clients
in every state except Alaska, has
found its clients often don't understand
who their own customers are.
" We haven't had one bank yet that
hasn't been surprised by [data from]
at least one branch, " says Walton.
He has seen banks put ads in nearby
towns where they have no customers.
Or they put all their marketing budget
into newspaper ads while neglecting
social media and direct mail.
Analytics like this can show a bank
if a customer segment makes up 30
percent of the local population, but
it has only 4 percent of that segment.
The next step-reaching the other 26
percent-can be trickier. Community
bankers are nice people; Walton says
he has never met a mean one. And
that may be a problem. Given the
general mood of mistrust around
Wall Street, and in the aftermath of
the Wells Fargo scandal, community
banks should be going after megabank
customers aggressively.
" They tend to not think aggressively
about building their business, " says
Walton. " You have to acquire customers
when the time is ripe, and customers
have been abused [at other banks]. "
Tailor made
Aware of new technologies in the
marketplace, community bank customers
are demanding a better, more
customized banking experience, says
David Acevedo, senior vice president
and national sales director at 360
View. His company offers the growth
platform, which consists of a customer
relationship management system that
works with a bank's existing customer
information and demographic data.
Many banks rely on traditional core
processing systems, but according
to Acevedo, these are designed for
transactions, not for understanding
Independent Banker - June 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Independent Banker - June 2017
