SMB Accounts Are the Bullseye for Growth
By Dave Crook
With growing competition from megabanks and big regionals, community FIs need to leverage their ability to attract new retail and commercial customers.
We hear this all the time and understand the challenges of going up against these Goliaths with just a sling and stone.
But as in the original story of David and Goliath, it’s also possible for community FIs to take advantage of their historic value drivers with a unique, focused strategy that expands SMB and retail business.
The Current Challenge of SMB Products
The first step is to agree that the David vs Goliath challenge has to be fixed on the day-to-day level.
Simply put, it’s about delivering a product that SMBs want to have and then providing the kind of sales support to tell SMBs.
In our two-plus decades of work with community FIs, the SMB sales difficulties we see most often are ground floor issues:
- Checking products that haven’t kept up with the times
- Uninspired sales teams that aren’t pounding the pavement for new clients
- Little to no real sales training
- No overall business development strategy
And now that rates aren’t as dynamic as they were a couple of years ago, it’s even harder for community FIs to compete on rates.
That’s why we surveyed more than 1,000 SMB leaders to find out what they were looking for in an SMB checking product and how satisfied they are with their current banking relationships.
The most unsurprising revelation – a majority of SMBs have primary relationships with the mega banks (usually because they have loans with those institutions).
The most surprising revelation – more than two-thirds of these SMB leaders said they were looking or planning to look for a new primary relationship in the next 12 months.
Once we sifted through this trove of information, we saw the opportunity to create a unique SMB strategy that offers much more value to SMBs and community FIs than a typical SMB product.
The concept is simple:
This approach delivers modern products and services in the checking product that SMBs want, need, and are ready to move to get.
It also offers a value-based approach that lends itself to attracting more than just the original SMB account.
The Virtuous Circle SMBs Provide
The Bullseye approach is simple, and its ripple effect radiates out to layers of opportunities to grow both high net worth and new retail accounts as well.
From this approach we built a unique SMB product, BaZingBiz.
Its focus is to not only build the kind of product that SMBs want but also gives community FIs deliverables like:
- A one-stop product for services SMBs want to run their businesses and help their employees, instead of shopping, vetting, and buy services from a variety of vendors
- Finding the sweet spot in for pricing optimization
- Business development strategy help
- Sales training for every aspect of the community FI
What’s more, BaZingBiz can be launched in as little as three months.
And that launch window includes significant work to develop each FIs analytics for optimum performance as well as continued support reevaluating those analytics.
BaZingBiz is also subscriber based, not fee based, which means each FI pays for success, rather than paying for a service.
Dave Crook is President and Chief Revenue Officer at StrategyCorps. You can connect with him at dave.crook@strategycorps.com.