Bulking up with profitable loans: to increase the amount of high-quality loans, your bank needs to renew focus on the fundamentals of selling. That's the lesson from the most successful lenders in the current economic environment.

• Author: Schneider, Jim

IT'S NOT EASY TO MEET YOUR LOAN GOALS when fewer customers are spending money to create loan demand and even fewer customers can meet the industry's tougher underwriting standards. Yet not meeting your goals for consumer, mortgage and business lending can place a false ceiling on revenue and earnings and lead to pressure to accept marginally profitable loans or unnecessary risks in credit quality.

Every marketer wants to attract the highest quality borrowers, but only the best sales organizations get them, making sales a key driver of credit quality as well as of revenue.

For many organizations, their lending teams have been flailing about with higher levels of unfocused sales activity or price-driven promotions with little payoff. Others have simply given up, withdrawing into their shells to wait for the good times of easy lending to reappear, despite the fact that the number of borrowers willing to switch lenders may never have been larger.

The best lending-sales organizations have simply narrowed their focus and invested a full-court press sales effort in identifying and pursuing those customers who can meet their underwriting standards. They are doing this using seven proven sales strategies that have worked historically for lenders across the board in consumer, mortgage and business lending.

Here are these seven proven strategies:

1 Target qualified borrowers.

Rather than market loans to everyone, top producing lenders narrow their focus to those potential borrowers who meet their specific sales qualifying criteria. This means they often work from prequalified lead lists and distribute target prospect profiles to all sales and referral staff.

The qualified borrower target profile might typically include customers such as: frequent borrowers and current mortgage customers; businesses that typically need cash and thrive during a downturn (such as the health professions); the A-list borrowers of competitors who are having financial problems; small-business owners with sales under $10 million; and mass affluent customers with investable assets between $100,000 and $1 million.

This laser-like prospecting focus contrasts sharply with the popular cross-sell strategy of trying to sell loans to customers who do not currently have loans with you and with the mass marketing strategy of promoting to simply interested borrowers who are willing to see you.

2 Prospect proactively among existing and past customers.

Through good times or bad times, the best lending-sales organizations profile their current retail and business customers for their emerging needs that...