Using your opponent’s momentum to your advantage is smart, but taking advantage of your own is even smarter.

In this revenue compressed environment, I hear a lot about initiatives to change bank culture from service to sales to drive badly needed cross-sell revenues.  Let’s ignore the many initiatives that are not being driven by the CEO -- they can’t work because culture comes from the top.  So, in the CEO-directed programs, one question remains: Does a strong sales culture lead to strong cross-sell results?  Perhaps, but, as I look at data Brad Strothkamp of Forrester reported in his report “2011: Solving The Cross-Sell Imperative,” it’s not clear. 

Several factors drive lead generation rates, illustrated below.  One factor we confronted this week was the percent of customers who qualified for an interview and the impact on lead generation rates. 

Cross-selling has to move online because that’s where customers are going.  So, what are the drivers of online cross-sell success, apart from getting business units to cooperate with one another in large financial institutions*?  Well, one of the great things about MIT is that you learn all these great analysis techniques – like system dynamics. The challenge is explaining them to the rest of the world.

-- Always up for a challenge, let’s see if I can explain the system diagram below.  The basic metric we’re driving is the number of leads we convert to sales each month which appears at the bottom of the diagram.

Bacon had it right in the early 16^th century.  Few bankers will dispute that face-to-face sales interviews with customers produce cross-sell results.  Financial products are relatively complex purchases when compared to most consumer products (e.g. it takes a little more work to select the right mortgage than it does to buy a pair of shoes – and the cost of getting it wrong is a lot higher too!  You can’t send your mortgage back if it’s the wrong size).  Most people would still like to talk with a competent human being before signing at the X. 

First Tech Federal Credit Union has a brilliant program called The Giant Ear, where customers can make suggestions and vote on the attractiveness of other members' suggestions.

Glen Urban, noted MIT marketing scholar and entrepreneur, in his book, Don’t Just Relate – Advocate!, talks about Financial Institutions using online advisors to increase loan volume, reduce cost, and improve customer trust with 95% of customers recommending the advisor to a friend.   

At the same time, Winbuyer.com, is building customer trust by offering to put competitors prices on their customers’ websites (Yes, you read it correctly) and quoting success stories like, “Leading home improvement retailer improves conversions by over 20% with Onsite Comparative Pricing Solution.”

Thanks to Jim Marous for his blog post entitled, “Bank Marketers Face Challenging Times With Great Opportunity.” It was thoughtful and pointed to IBM and Unica’s studies on CMO attitudes.   What jumped out at me were the multiple references around the inability to turn data into action – action leading to sales results, presumably.  Then I look in my wallet and think – maybe that’s why my primary direct deposit account holder doesn’t have my credit card, CD, or money management business; my own bank just can’t figure out how to get from the data they have on me to the cross-sell actions needed to sell me their other products. 

I've been trying to figure out why our KulaX cross-sell application has such high conversion to lead rates (48% compared to low single digit for most digital media).  When I say lead, here's what I mean:

These leads are the output of digital sales interviews conducted by KulaX™ - Micronotes’ cross-sell technology.

Here are a few hypotheses:

“Hate Banner Ads? A Credit Union Finds a Better Way” by Jeremy Quittner of American Banker

Mr. Quittner’s article highlights a couple of important points:

• Banner ads don’t drive leads very effectively
• Double-digit lead conversion rates are possible·
• Context matters
  

We recently completed a campaign with Fut Glove - a new company making five-toed shoes, based in Florida.

The first campaign ran 30 days and the table below shows performance compared to industry benchmarks.  Interestingly, 40% of the people who bought Fut Glove shoes had never heard of five-toed so, they would have been unreachable via paid search. 

I'd say the results speak for themselves. Congrats to Dan at Fut Glove!