Banks have a straightforward paradigm that impacts all sales processes: human-to-human interaction.

Customers want it. Banks know it’s important. Ideally these interactions turn into relationships that foster trust and customer loyalty – and lifetime value for the bank.

This desire for personal relationships is exactly what’s causing banks to miss out on a major revenue opportunity in their commercial and business banking segments. But removing these personal relationships? Absolutely not!

Many relationships in commercial and business banking are transactional and this is costing banks millions in revenue. Learn the root causes and a proven approach for enhancing relationships that provides more value to customers and unlocks massive revenue growth.

And because I’m our CEO, I have to mention we help banks with this exact problem today – you can learn about that on our banking page.

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• Challenges: Consulting at scale | Failure to provide value | Over-reliance on solution expertise
• Four steps for a solution

The Challenge: Transactional Relationships Create Missed Opportunities

We’ve all seen commercials of a banker shown walking through a business office or shop floor side by side with the owner. These images convey a strong personal relationship where the banker is in partnership with the business owner to meet their goals.

Banks desire every relationship to look like this picture, where bankers provide a personalized, white-glove experience to every customer. And as Deloitte discovered, customers still prefer face-to-face meetings and expressed higher satisfaction when doing so – almost at a 2-to-1 ratio.

However, in commercial and business banking many relationships are transactional.

Bankers are reactive to customer requests, don’t know the customer’s business, and aren’t on a first name basis with leadership. This lack of understanding means there are sales opportunities that remain uncovered, right under the banker’s nose! Not only is this missed revenue, it opens the door for a competing bank to take the relationship.

There’s three primary challenges leading to this all-too-typical scenario.

Customer-To-Banker Ratio Limits Understanding

As Bain & Company noted in research looking into banks and the SMB market, “Most banks still possess diamond-in-the-rough assets: their large customer base, robust balance sheet, and mature teams in sales, finance, and operations.”

Like every business, bank’s will do whatever is necessary to meet the needs of their biggest customers. This can include one or more full-time banker dedicated to serving the customer. However as customers get smaller, the resources that a bank can provide to each goes down. This is basic economics at play.

In commercial and business banking, each banker may have 50-100+ customers in their book of business. This limits the time the banker can spend with each customer and makes, it’s impossible to be truly consultative with each one.

Like any good sales exec, bankers will spend the most time with their best, highest paying customers which is ~20% of their customers. This leaves the other 80% very transactional in nature.

Why is this an issue?

In an industry built upon relationships, treating a customer more like a transaction prevents upsell opportunities from ever coming to fruition. Your customer won’t think of you when they have a pressing need or won’t give you the opportunity to inquire about their business needs because the trust isn’t there yet.

And the more customer needed to manage, the more customers that fall into the 80%. This leads to more transactional conversations – and it perpetuates a cycle of missed revenue growth.

Interactions That Provide Little Value

When bankers do meet with the other “80% accounts”, it is commonly in response to a customer request/need or it is a request initiated by the banker to “check-in” to see what’s new. In both interactions, customers aren’t getting much value from the banker.

Bankers will meet the requested need but generally won’t seek to go any deeper before moving on to the next customer. Or in a “check-in” meeting the discussion is only surface-level, not consultative. There is too little time to understand the business and uncover their needs across the solution portfolio (treasury management, merchant, corporate cards, etc.).

Therefore the “check-in” meeting fails to uncover other opportunities and the banker moves on to the next customer.

Related: Stop those sales fishing expeditions!

Over-Reliance on Solution Experts

Commercial and business bankers are generalists. They service customers across all industries, varying degrees of complexity, and each with a different technology and solution mix.

Add in complex banking solutions across treasury management, credit cards, merchant services, corporate cards, etc. and bankers have too much on their plate to be at their best. It’s impossible to be experts in every solution!

Yet, you still have to earn your customer’s trust.

Banks therefore team bankers with solution experts to bring solution-specific expertise to customers. This is a common model, sometimes referred to as a “two-in-the-box” model … but is very limiting and prolongs the sales cycle.

Here’s why:

A banker invites their treasury management consultant (TMC) into a customer conversation. Now the TMC does their own discovery to learn the business and uncover their needs in order to come back several weeks later to present solutions. This prolongs the sales cycle.

A hidden opportunity cost is that other solution consultants aren’t able to meet with the customer. Business executives don’t have the time to meet each solution expert to explore other solutions, thus limiting the number of opportunities that can be uncovered and solutioned.

This GTM team structure is why banks can’t go-to-market as “one bank” but rather a collection of experts selling their own products. This is a poor customer experience and limits the bank’s share of wallet.

And as Accenture research shows, friends and family are more likely to be asked for advice than a customer’s bank. Talk about a missed opportunity at establishing yourself as an expert!

So, how does a bank overcome these challenges?

Four Steps To (Actually) Realizing That Growth Potential

We work with large banks today, and their feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. They have been able to unlock growth in their commercial and business banking segments by overcoming the obstacles above.

How? Stop having conversations with customers. Have consultations instead.

Conversations are casual, informal, and lack buying intent.

Consultations are the opposite–they are formal, customers seeking solutions (or at least openness to change), have buying intent, are seeking your expertise and requesting your recommendations/solutions.

The best part? Consultations perfectly align with how banks operate today. It is a minor process change but a paradigm change in how value is delivered to customers.

Implementing the solution below provides the following benefits:

• Uncover more sales opportunities covering the entire solution portfolio
• Accelerate sales cycles by requiring fewer customer meetings
• Strengthen relationships by knowing each customer intimately
• Build trust by spending time advising clients
• Consistently give each customer value
• Standardize the process for uncovering cross-sell opportunities

Package Expertise Into Digital Advisory Tools

Digital advisory tools are designed to rapidly understand the customer’s goals, challenges, needs, etc. and instantly provide a personalized scorecard with recommendations and analysis– all in ~10 minutes.

Customers answer a series of questions about their business across topics like payables, receivables, credit cards, volumes, fraud, etc. and get instant advice from the bank.

These tools are used to enhance the relationship by educating the customer about their business holistically and equip bankers with the insights to advise customers in their biggest need areas—all in 1 consultation.

Bankers stop using all of their time with the customer talking at surface level or asking questions trying to find pain. Now bankers spend their time advising clients how to improve their business.

Add Proactive Value Before You Meet

This is how you take the initiative with a commercial banker’s “80%” accounts.

Request that customers take 10 minutes to complete the advisory tool so the meeting is spent discussing solutions to the customer’s identified goals & and top challenges. This shifts the purpose and expectation of the meeting from an informal, low-value conversation to a high-value consultation.

Why would a customer spend the 10 minutes? To get the best advice & recommendations from the banker. If your doctor asks you to get bloodwork before your appointment do you do it? Of course you do! Without this information your doctor can’t diagnose your problem or prescribe the right treatment.

This is the same reason why our banking clients are seeing their customers complete their advisory tools over 90% of the time.

Coming into the meeting the banker is positioned as the trusted advisor and the customer comes into the meeting feeling excited to discuss their business, not wondering what they are going to talk about.

What this requires:

1. Having assets and content in place to send – make sure these are simple enough that any prospect can understand them, too!
2. Training on how to communicate the value of what the prospect gains
3. Coaching on how to turn these assets into helpful conversations

Related: A discussion on scaling from your customer base

Huddle Internally On How To Consult

Advisory tools are designed to identify opportunities in treasury management, credit cards, merchant services, etc. so bankers know their customer’s challenges before the meeting.

Armed with this information, bankers are recommended to huddle with their solution consultants to review the customer’s scorecard and create a gameplan. Having a plan for which solutions to introduce and which consultants should attend maximizes the time and value for all parties involved, thus accelerating the sales cycle.

Exceed The Customer’s Expectations

This is where the magic happens. An educated customer meets with a banking team that is prepared to advise clients on their top challenges and opportunities.

THIS is what banking relationships is all about–understanding the customer’s business holistically, advising them, and partnering with them on the journey. Not only do customers love this consultative approach and insights about their business, banks love the loyalty and the increase in share of wallet. Banks, customers, and bankers equally win.

Your Outcomes: Stronger Customer Relationships = Growth

Enhancing your existing customer relationships is the way forward – because your customers don’t want to talk to AI chatbots or automated prompt systems

When the consultation process outlined above is standardized across your thousands of business and commercial banking clients, you will see an improvement across all metrics–number of opportunities, deal sizes, win rates, and sales cycles.

A top 10 bank in the US is succeeding at scale: having standardized this process and taken thousands of their customers through this consultation process, they are setting the bar for what customers should expect while unlocking growth levers.

A banking executive with this client recently told me “I was highly skeptical this approach would work. I couldn’t have been more wrong.”

If this sounds interesting for your bankers, I’d encourage you to reach out for a demo – I’ll be happy to show it!