As Founder of CompleteBankData I talk to a lot of banks. A universal message I heard across banks is that they want to grow, but they aren't built with an outbound sales culture. Growing loans by outbound direct mail and cold calls is foreign and sometimes scary. To grow in a predictable outbound manner would require an entire cultural transformation. Let's break down why this is untenable and how we can solve it.
What we hear from executives is that it just isn't worth lender time to make cold calls, prepare mailing lists, and mail sales collateral to prospects. At best a lender might bat 1 for 100 from these efforts. Additionally at most banks the process of going from a mailing list to mailed outbound collateral can take weeks to months. In our experience it typically takes a bank one month to six months to execute on a direct mail marketing campaign. Ironically the larger the bank the slower to execute. When you look at it like this it makes sense why banks aren't investing in outbound outreach.
What makes sense is for lenders to focus on handing inbound requests and farming business from existing relationships. Banks know that this works, and why try to fix what isn't broken?
What is worth it is for us (CompleteBankData) to do this outreach for you. This is why we're in business in the first place: it's not worth your time to prospect, but it is worth our time to prospect for you.
Let me explain how it works.
We use our next generation market intelligence to assess where the market is going, not where the market has been (to paraphrase a Wayne Gretzky quote). From this we identify areas of opportunity and recommend prospects to you based on your lending preferences. We can be as broad as "everyone in county X with a loan maturing in the next six months above 3.75%." Or as specific as "small business owners who also own a personal airplane, have recently financed an auto and have a house worth $1m."
Once we have identified a set of prospects you decide if they are good to go or not. Typically banks like to browse this list and knock off people they have worked with in the past that they don't wish to interact with again.
Then we execute on the mailing and or telephone prospecting on your behalf. Since our tools can identify prospects who are in an ideal position to borrow, our conversion results are significantly higher than average.
Finally we make your phones ring with prospective borrowers at the other end.
To summarize:
- We recommend prospects based on your idea borrower profiles
- You decide if they're good to go
- We execute on mail and/or telephone prospecting
- Your phones ring with prospective borrowers on the other end
In many markets there are at least $500m-$1b in commercial loans that will be maturing in the next six months to a year. Sometimes substantially more!
The possibilities for prospect automation are almost endless. Want to target commercial borrowers at a bank that's closing branches? We can do that. How about targeting borrowers at a bank that's merging? We do that as well. High income borrowers? Yup, that too!
I want to share a slide on how impactful this is for our clients. When one client sent a single postcard to ideal prospects identified by us they....
Imagine if prospects received multiple mailings. We can, at another client using Make It Ring with multiple direct mail pieces their response rate was 5%. Five percent of prospects picked up the phone and called our client asking about financing. If you know anything about direct mail that number is off the charts.
If you are a banker and want to grow your loans without your headcount we can help you. Click through and setup a time to get a demonstration of our software. If you are a bank investor who owns shares in an underperforming bank, or a bank that wants to grow but might not know how we can help them as well.
