The retentive power of relationship selling.

• Author: Triplet, Ted
• Position: Customer Retention

With the perception of banks at an all-time low, a successful customer retention strategy requires frequent contact, a consistent message, education and trust--thus becoming not only a cross-selling strategy, but also a relationship-selling strategy.

"Relationship selling" is a fundamentally different way of thinking about your customers. It's based on a philosophy that business should be practiced as a trusted friendship, rather than a process of simply selling products and services.

Relationship selling focuses on identifying and meeting the individual needs of your customers. One of the major reasons for high attrition rates is that customers' needs change over time. And, unfortunately, banks fail to notice and don't do what they should: Preemptively offer appropriate products and services.

By integrating a relationship-selling strategy into your bank's current marketing strategy, you'll no longer have to rely solely on offers generated by your customer relationship management (CRM) system or directives from senior management on the products and services your bank needs to sell.

Often, marketing is told what product to offer then must try to identify what customer segment to send the offer. I'm sure you've all heard a statement like this: "We need to push home equity loans this quarter!"

But, instead of pushing products, your bank should be tailoring offers specifically for its customers. It's the strategy at the heart of relationship selling: Offer products that your customers need rather than what the bank wants to sell.

Research shows banks that implement a relationship-selling strategy are more effective in increasing cross-sell opportunities than banks that solely rely on their MCIF or CRM systems. Why? Cross-selling is far more than just slicing and dicing data to try to determine patterns of behavior that will reveal some hidden need for the bank's products and services.

Granted, CRM systems have the ability to...