Grab that steering wheel! Does your bank put marketing in the driver's seat? You can evaluate how well your institution is progressing by looking at the seven benchmarks of a marketing-driven bank. Use these 'roads signs' to confirm that you are headed in the right direction--toward the ideal of a unified marketing organization.

• Author: Clapp, Bruce A.
• Position: Feature

You call the bank with a question. The customer service rep knows about the loan promotion you read about in the paper and offers to answer your questions. You like what you hear. You walk into the local branch to apply; the branch officer knows about the promotion (and the details) and has an application package ready for you. As you walk through the lobby on the way out, you overhear a commercial loan officer detailing the promotion to one of his clients.

This is a marketing driven bank! Does your bank operate like this? If not, you need to get your organization more unified--and involved--in the process and delivery of marketing. To change your bank, all personnel need to learn how to automatically launch into "marketing mode" during every customer interaction--every time, every place and with every, product and service.

Step one in this process is to create a bank team--or TEAM, as in "Together Everyone Achieves More." We cannot isolate ourselves as just business bankers, retail bankers or marketers. Today's banking requires everyone to have a marketing mindset and, further, to be on the same marketing page. We need to act together to overcome the obstacles facing our organizations. Competition comes from all angles--some traditional, some nontraditional--and all these competitors are seeking to capture our best customers and prospects. Why fight against our own internal teams when the external competition is stiff enough?

You can remove the roadblocks to effectiveness by establishing as your goal the creation of a marketing-driven institution. Below is a discussion of the seven characteristics found in a unified marketing organization.

1. Senior Management Is Committed

   Marketing needs to be a bank driver-not an afterthought. The three ABC principles of senior management commitment to marketing:

   A: ALCO (Marketing should have a seat on the asset-liability committee).

   B: Become a part of the senior management committee.

   C: Communicate from the top that marketing is a key driver of the organization. Marketing leaders should be encouraged to volunteer for leadership committees and for leading new initiatives. Marketing should act as a critical link between senior management and the rest of the bank.

   [GO] ACTION TIP! (from David Kreiman of Glenview State Bank, Glenview, Ill.)

   "If you are not on your bank's strategic planning committee, use your marketing expertise to sell your way on that committee. Put together a proposal or plan of what you would present at strategic planning and present it to the powers that be as something you would like to pitch at the meeting. If it's impressive enough, and if you are able to successfully horn into strategic planning, then your success at that meeting should be all you need to always be included.

   "As for ALCO, I initially took the approach that I wanted to observe those meetings. Using that nonthreatening approach, I was allowed to attend ALCO meetings without any hesitation. After all, as marketers, we don't want to run the ALCO meetings. However, the need to be intimately involved in the decisions guiding the turns of the bank is important to the marketers. We need to know what to 'turn on,' when and to what degree to satisfy our balance sheet needs and then the ability to match that with our customers' needs is where marketers earn their keep!"

2. Marketing Is Viewed as an Investment

   In all discussions, presentations, and reports, promote marketing as an investment versus an expense. Change your report names, if necessary, to reflect the change. It is a subtle presentation change but a huge change of mindset. Talking "ROI," "net margins created," "reductions in turnover equating to dollars saved," "response rates to programs," all help with seeing marketing as an investment in the future. Create benchmarks for your marketing TEAM. Survey your internal customers...