Making the intelligent callCindy Heximerrelationships, relationship selling, intelligence treasures, comprehensive campaign management
"Know me. Hear me. Help me." These are the foundations of
successful relationship selling. This approach to sales is founded
on a dialogue with clients and prospects that allows you to use
their needs to set up a requirement for your products and
services.
How do you find out what your customers need? Chances are that
you already know. You'll find the foundation for those needs in
your own customer files. You just need to know where to look and
what to do with what you find. Think of the information you have
about your customers as "intelligence treasures." These treasures
help lenders increase their mortgage and home equity sales volume
faster and more cost effectively than traditional channels. This is
information that, when analyzed correctly, will help you strengthen
your customer relationships and minimize defections. The key to
achieving this level of performance is the skillful application of
analytics.
While the role of analytics as a back-end campaign-tracking tool
is well understood within sales and marketing disciplines, its role
and value as a strategic driver of comprehensive campaign
management is often misunderstood.
In the sales process, analytics can effectively serve as the
basis for strategy creation and campaign planning. You can use it
to drive contact strategy, identify target audiences and develop
and time offers by segment. In short, analytics helps lenders
deliver the right offers to the right audience at the right
time.
We've often heard the insider stories of misguided home equity
loan offers to student renters or mortgage pre-approvals to the
deceased. Using a spray-and-pray approach to campaign management is
inefficient at best and most often ineffective. Using analytics to
create strategy and plan a campaign greatly enhances your ability
make a campaign work. Campaigns based on analytics do more than
drive business through the door. They allow you to connect with
your customers and establish trusted advisor relationships. They
also help you establish a level of brand loyalty that endures in
todays unpredictable marketplace. Analytics helps lenders identify
lessons learned to improve campaigns today and tomorrow and build
relationships over time.
Lenders that excel at relationship selling profit because they
learn to consistently meet their customers' needs. They use their
data to understand what their customers want and anticipate their
needs. That's different than pushing product indiscriminately.
Relationship selling is a way of doing business through
conversations and relationship building. It's based upon
information, knowledge and trust. This translates into powerful
selling and long-term relationships with customers.
Remember, the greatest assets lenders possess are loyal client
relationships. They are the lifeblood of your organization. When
you make your data work for you, you build relationships,
credibility and value with your customers and the marketplace.
Cindy Heximer is vice president of business development and
marketing for the relationship selling and analytics business unit
of Fiserv Lending Solutions. She may be reached at (716) 564-4631
or e-mail
[email protected].
