What to do when the World Wide Web is your competition

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]