Four Steps to Small Business Success, Part 2

Cheryl Brown

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Dave Brebner returns to The Purposeful Banker to continue discussing how financial institutions can boost their small business strategy—or any portfolio strategy—based on a proven success framework.

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Transcript

Cheryl Brown

Hello, and welcome to The Purposeful Banker, the leading commercial banking podcast brought to you by Q2, where we discuss the big topics on the minds of today's best bankers. I'm Cheryl Brown. Welcome to the show.

Today, Dave Brebner is back with us again to continue a conversation we started in March about how financial institutions can improve their small business approach using a framework that's outlined in Q2's Small Business Strategy Scorecard. So, welcome back, Dave.

Dave Brebner

All right, thank you for having me.

Cheryl Brown

So, to remind our listeners, you were on the podcast on March 18, and for those of you who missed it, we talked about this framework you use with clients to help them develop their strategy for small business, or really any part of their business. And together you and I wrote this Small Business Strategy Scorecard that goes through the phases of the framework and gives readers a way to gauge their completion, or their readiness for each step. So, as a recap, can you just give us a quick reminder of those first two phases, which are Strategic Analysis and Program Definition?

Dave Brebner

Yeah, sure. So, Strategic Analysis is based on the idea that you spend enough time looking outside the FI, you need to pay attention to the market, what customers are saying, what prospects are doing or wanting, what competitors are doing until you have a full analysis of what people want to have. So, we haven't executed anything, we haven't planned any roadmaps, we haven't built new software, or delivered anything. We're just 100% sure of what the world needs for the next period. Then you bring it inside, and you say, "Well, based on that information, now we need to go and put together the program for what we're going to deliver."

And we spend a lot of time with how much is that going to cost from a resource perspective, from a time perspective, and get together the entire program so that you know exactly what you're going to execute and when. But at that point, when you finish that, you haven't actually done any work necessarily yet you've just ... You're very confident that you know what the market wants, and you're very confident that you have your best approach to how you're going to resolve this, and what you're going to deliver to the market.

Cheryl Brown

And so, again, we dig way more deeply into those two phases in that previous podcast. But so now we're going to dig into the next two phases. The first of which is Org Readiness, and the name speaks for itself, but what's the overall goal for this phase, and what does it include?

Dave Brebner

Well, there is a hidden one in between which is implementation of the product, or the platform, or the tool set. So that is clearly important, as well, but we are just ignoring that for now because that would be going ahead with other teams. So, from that Program Definition, there will be target goals, and requirement documents, and various elements like that, and there'll be a whole team putting that together. So, that is happening at the same time as Org Readiness is going on, and Org Readiness is really your program is trying to meet a need in the market. We're not trying to build a particular set of functionality. The goal is to meet the need in the market. So, how are you going to make sure that when you have the product that you are looking for, everybody recognizes it for what it is, and can sell it, can position it, can understand what is being said to them if they're a customer, and make the best use of the program that you're putting together.

So, it really goes down to going back and understanding who the customer is and what they want, and how to position it for them, and also potentially how to position it not for them, as well. Everything isn't for every single person at the same time, every single type of customer. So, it's finding the right type of customers, and then having the right discussion with them about what this is going to be, or what this is when it arrives.

So, that's the key to it, because it's spending less time worrying about what it is you're going to deliver, and more time worrying about what it is that the customer wants to have, and how you can explain what it is that you are going to deliver in the context of the needs of the customer.

Cheryl Brown

Yeah, and some of the important aspects of the Org Readiness stage is communication, of course, as you mentioned, team prep, various teams across the organization, and then of course account holder prep, preparing your account holders for the program that you're going to roll out. What are some of the essential elements of a successful communication strategy?

Dave Brebner

Well, I think the most important one is the key messages. Because those have to be repeated by everybody in the types of language that they use with the conversations they're having, but consistently for the life of the program. So you don't need very many of them. If you have three, then people can remember that. If you have more than five, then people will not remember the first one you said in the list. So if you have seven or eight reasons why somebody should do something, and you list them out, they won't remember what the first one is by the time they go past five. So three to five is the right number of messages to have in there, and to begin with, you don't have to describe them in huge detail because you're going to be saying, “These are the things we want to talk about. This is what the market wants to hear.” And let the different departments and different teams explain those messages with their own specific language.

So, you might tell something to the sales team, and they will use very different words around that same key message than the contact center who is responding to a call from the customer, or the developers who are building something. So you don't have to go into enormous detail to explain it word for word and get the language polished because each of the teams will do that. You just need to make sure they understand that these messages—however many there are, we recommend three to five and no more—those are throughout the program. Everybody knows them. They're written on cards in front of people in the contact center or in the branch, they're in the coffee room, they're everywhere so that everybody understands this is the thing, or these are the things that I'm repeating, or I'm going to be describing to the customer.

And they can be really, really straightforward and simple like, “This will cost you less money,” or “This will help you achieve compliance faster,” or simple things like that, which obviously need explanation, but they get explained in the different context. So just having those three to five messages is the first thing to understand because that's how you get consistency on this communication.

Cheryl Brown

And talking about the various teams that are involved, whether that's the tech team, or the sales team as you mentioned. In your experience, which of these teams is typically the most challenging, or which one presents the biggest challenges in terms of readiness for a new small business offering, and what are some things that a financial institution could do to address those challenges?

Dave Brebner

From the internal teams? This is a tricky question. I mean the sales team, or the people who are out selling—however you describe that—and positioning it and offering products to customers are usually very, very receptive at picking up on those new messages because now they've got something to talk about. So they're not challenging. Typically, to explain the messages to the development people who are creating assets, whether it's software, or whether it could be communication documentation of some kind, those people are … they want those goals put in front of them. They want to know what it has to be that they're aiming at when they build the thing. So they're quite receptive as well, usually.

The ones that find it hard are the ones where we're actually making them change what they do, which is people at the contact center. So, the contact center wants consistency as much as it possibly can. It doesn't want change, it doesn't want new messages that people have to understand. It wants the same straightforward, simple type of ideas so that they can train the frontline with those simple ideas, and get the customers in and out as quickly as they can if the message or if the discussion really is something very simple and we don't have to hand off calls to other people to explain nuances. So it does tend to be places like the contact center where there are the biggest challenges, but it's not because they want to do that, it's the life they lead. So we can understand that that's one of the reasons why you give them the message in very simple language and let them come up with the way that they're going to say it to the customers and describe it to their frontline staff so that it can be passed on. Because if you make it too complex, then you just don't have time to do it.

The other group that's always seen as challenging but really isn't too much is risk, and compliance people. They're often seen as people who come to meetings just to say no. And that's not the case at all. It's risk and compliance. I think when you present these type of messages to people, I think the way I usually handle it is to say, "No one's allowed to say no. What you have to do is say, ‘If you want to do that, then you have to do this.’ " And that helps put compliance and regulation and things like that in context because it's not just somebody saying, "No, you can't do that." It's someone saying, "To do that, you would have to get around this barrier that is in the way because compliance and regulation says it is." And we can't ignore that, we have to deal with that.

So they do tend to be seen as being more obstinate, but it's not really the case. There are rules that have to be followed, and it's how do you describe a massive set of rules? And I think that idea of if you want to do this, then you have to do that is a good way of explaining it, and putting it in the minds of people in the product team.

Cheryl Brown

And I guess that's why it's so important during the Program Definition stage to have everyone's voice heard, and everyone have a seat at the table so that you can understand the perspectives that's each part of the financial institution, and make sure that you're addressing any obstacles from the get-go rather than waiting to the end and determining, "Oh, compliance won't let us do this. So, now we have to shift gears."

Dave Brebner

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Cheryl Brown

So another aspect many FIs may not think about when it comes to Org Readiness—they may think only internally—but this framework includes stakeholder readiness, or the account holders in this stage. And so what are some of the critical things that FIs need to do to prepare their customers or members?

Dave Brebner

Well, an FI is not going to change necessarily what a customer does, as in, “We've got this brand new thing, and you now need to change the way you work in whatever industry you are in.” So it's much more that the customer tells the FI, but these things get complicated when we're talking about commercial customers, and there has to be some middle ground. So when we're talking about integrating something very complicated, let's say, like an ERP system for a large multinational organization that is unchanging essentially in the way it works … We're not going to change SAP, we're not going to change Oracle Financials or Microsoft Dynamics or any of those platforms. They are the way they are. So how do we integrate that information in and out? And there has to be some give and take in there, in the way that the world and the product functions to get that to happen.

So, plenty of time ahead to say, "We want to integrate your platform with our platform, this is the way we're talking about it." Doing that months and months ahead stops any surprises, or any hurdles, or any tricks along the way that just cause problems when we get to them. Because, as I said, some of these large organizations just are unshiftable. The other way of thinking about it is when we look at smaller organizations, they may not understand the full nuance and detail of what it is they're sending. So if you went to a really small business and said, “Your NACHA files are missing some information,” I'm not sure that I believe that very many small business people would even know what you're talking about necessarily. They get a file from their accountant, they upload it, and what's the problem?

So, having some time to go back and say, “This is what you have to include to make this successful” so that when the platform is enabled and made available to them and they can take advantage of it, or this new set of features that have come along, however you want to look at it, they can take advantage of it straight away. So it's both because some obstacles are immovable like ERP systems, and it's because some knowledge needs to be gathered by the customer, like the small business, and everything in between is the reason why you need to start communicating with the account holders as early as you can.

Cheryl Brown

Yeah, I was on a phone call with Datos yesterday, and they were sharing some of their most recent small business research with us, and one thing that was abundantly clear is that the smaller small businesses are … they're hungry for tech, and they're quick to adopt tech that will make their business easier to run. To your point, they may not necessarily always understand the implications of that tech and how it affects other parts of their banking relationship or how they do their banking. So I guess it's not just communication, but it may also be this education aspect of preparing the account holders to be ready.

Dave Brebner

Well, yeah, I think if you go watch a program like “Shark Tank,” and you look at the successful entrepreneurs there, none of those people know anything about banking. What they know about is whatever their product is in the area they got into. So, clearly banking is the engine for business along the way. It's critical, but you're talking to people who have a passion for whatever the thing is that they're doing, and nobody wants to spend their life banking if they're an entrepreneur in a small business, and they're moving ahead from there. So we need to fit that understanding, as well as saying, “This is the way it's going to be.” So there are sometimes rules that have to be imposed, and payments methods work in a certain way. Bank regulation works in a certain way, and the small businesses need to understand that.

But on the other side of it, understand that they don't really care, really at the end of the day. What they care about is the widgets they're manufacturing and shipping—whatever they're doing—and we want to make banking fit as easily into that world as it possibly can and not make it something where somebody has to sit down and learn about this thing. It's how do we fit the two together rather than go and tell somebody, "You have to come and do a training course with us before you can use the product." So, I think there's an element of that which is just understanding, make it as easy to use as you can in the context of what that person does for a living. And that's where you can start to look at various industry verticals.

Now, there isn't a single doctor around at the moment who became a doctor because of the financial aspects of medical work. Doctors become doctors because they want to help people, and they form businesses around being doctors, and those businesses are very successful, but they didn't set out because they want to move money very quickly, and the best way to do that is to be a doctor. There are less messy ways to do that if that's what they wanted to do. And you can look into any industries, or some industries from there, you can say the same thing about dentist, or vets, or any of those people, none of them entered industries that are potentially lucrative because of that. They entered it to help people in the way they want to help people.

So, understand that, and then fit the product as best it can to their needs. So, think about what their day is going to be like. I mean, even write it down as a story, write it down as there's a short story for people so you can explain it. And once you've got that idea of what they do day-to-day, now you can say, "Well, how do I fit banking into that?" Because banking clearly matters, but if we're trying to change everything, then that's a much harder road to drive then just to say, "This is how it fits into your life."

Cheryl Brown

Right. So, we've worked through the first three phases. You've done your strategic analysis, you've done your research, you've put together your program, you've done your org readiness, and the next phase is Go to Market, and this is where the rubber meets the road so to speak. So what all does this phase entail? It's not just turn it on. There are many different pieces and parts of going to market. So what does this phase entail?

Dave Brebner

So this is when you really find out whether you understood it or not because, by the time you are going to market, you should have messages that resonate with the audience you're going to go in front of, whatever type of audience that might be. And if you get there and find that it's not resonating, then you made some error maybe back as far as Strategic Analysis, where you didn't look at what the market required. So this Go to Market is you should have all the material and all the scenarios and stories and whatever else you're going to need to put in front of someone to show them how useful this will be for them. And you have to adjust as you go along because the world doesn't stay completely still as you go, but by the time we hit that Go to Market phase, you have to be sure that you're ready to go.

So I think there's a lot of promise put into things like documentation and demonstrations and things like that about our product. We can say, "This is our product, isn't it great?" And I think it's simpler than that. I think you can just say this is what you need, and this delivers a solution to what you need. And if you can have a five-minute conversation with somebody who has a very specific need, and all the other things that you've built are great and they're useful and they'll be functional for everybody, but finding and knowing those one or two things that really matter to the particular individual that's in front of you, you can make a sale in a very short period of time if somebody can listen to you, and say, "That's exactly what I want."

The other thing about that, too, is if you can get into some form of niche—or segment perhaps is a better way of saying it—where it fits exactly what somebody wants. The one thing that's absolutely certain is that person is going to go and tell other like people that they got something that fit exactly what their needs are. So if you're a doctor, let's say, and you've provided some sort of program to do with updating medical equipment, so there's some lending cycle going on or some other scenario where they can keep their equipment up to date—because for a doctor or a doctor's office, keeping up to date with all the latest equipment is a big challenge for someone who really just wants to help somebody. So if you can provide that and make it so that it fits into their business and fits the way they work, you can guarantee that when they go to a barbecue at some other doctor's house, they're going to say, "You know what? That bank down across the street over there, they gave me exactly what I wanted."

And if you can get 10 people to tell 10 people that this is exactly what they want, and they're in that same segment, then you can own a segment very, very quickly. So it comes down to that question of the more you can fit who the person is and tell them a story that resonates with what they feel like, then you can make sales easily and quickly.

It does limit the number of industries you can be in. You can't be in 200 industries at the same time. And if you are going to try to do that, then you're going to have a horizontal message about simplicity and cost and things along those lines, but then you'll be up against Bank of America and Citibank and people like that. And those platforms are just bigger and more available, and they're hard to beat when you play the game of horizontal banking services. This is the interest rate and this is the deposit terms and whatever. It's hard to beat on those terms. So change the terms, then, and start to talk to people about what it's like to be in your region or in this town or in that industry. And now you have to make the big giants dance quickly, and they don't do that very well. So now you have your own competitive advantage there against them.

So I think working on who those verticals are for you—or even if they're not verticals, even if they're some blend of vertical industry and horizontal platform, so you might think about that like a region—then you can at least have a set of messages that anybody in the Pacific Northwest or wherever it might be, pick a region, what's bothering them, the issues of the day, how this helps solve them, solve those problems for them, and just come to the table with a story that they can understand because they're listening to what you're telling them. So all that goes together as well into this message.

Cheryl Brown

And I mean it even comes down to wording. I mean the scorecard, it gives the example of don't start your sentences with our product offers. Start your sentences with, “You will achieve,” or “You will be able to.”

Dave Brebner

Well, that's the key. If you have a rule that says every sentence begins with something about the customer, it's very hard to be overly proud about your product. If you have to word it in the language that the receiver of the product is going to listen to and understand, then you can't just dwell on your particular interest rates for too long. You have to start to think about it in the way that the customer's going to receive it, and use that language and talk in that way. So that's a good rule just to make sure that you are not overly proud of what you are doing, because at end of the day, banking is very important, but the bank across the street can easily match that.

If that's what it is, that horizontal model, and you're saying, “Here's my product, it has a certain interest rate, or has a certain set of terms, and conditions with it, and that's better than someone else,” then that's easily matched. When you've done the research and done the time and say, “This is the story I want to tell you,” that's much harder to compete against quickly. And the more you get into that and start to think of it in that way and act quickly in that way, you'll stay ahead of the competition.

Cheryl Brown

So the scorecard also stresses the importance of understanding where the target audience congregates, both physically and virtually. So beyond traditional advertising, what are some creative or underused channels that FIs could explore to reach their small business owners in their local communities?

Dave Brebner

Well, I mean there's all sorts of scenarios. Obviously social media plays a big part because social media is where you get the reach, but it's the message around it and understanding that people are people, and you don't attract people to a banking seminar. You attract people to some form of social engagement, and in that space you give them the chance to learn about the banking services in context.

So there's a really good example was where, this is a credit union in Minnesota who put out a communication to come and see the fireflies in the park on, it was an evening in June, and we'll be there, and we'll help you with various aspects of financial planning and things like that from there. And they had—and this is an unbelievable number, but it's true—10,000 people accept that invitation. So I don't know that there's ever been a bank who has had that many people say, "I'm going to sign up and come." 10,000 people was an astonishing number, but what it was, it's not really because of the banking, it's because who doesn't want to take their kids to the park at twilight and look at fireflies in the park?

So it's blending that together of what type of social engagement is there. The credit union in this case is putting together, he's organizing the event and is making sure that there's food and drink and whatever else around and available. They're also there with their various financial planning opportunities, and there's a tent and whatever else it might be to go and do that, and people do associate with that. But what they're really coming for was to go and see the fireflies and associating the credit union with that fun time and thanking them for helping arrange that.

And then the next time they're thinking about, "Well now I want to talk about my finances. Who do I go to?" That credit union is number one in your mind. So you don't have to make it specifically about banking. Remembering that we've kind of been alluding to along the way, most people don't care that much about banking. We are a part of someone's life and not the reason to exist for most people.

So that example there was very much one for the consumer end, go and see the fireflies in the park. The people who went there were retail banking focused. But if you go to the local medical convention and you say, “Well, here is my program for doctors,” and it has whatever else you might have in there about equipment financing or whatever we alluded to earlier, that's the same idea. It's just that the doctors are going to be collaborating and congregating around the particular event that's going on for the Northeast Medical Convention, whatever it might be. And when you turn up there, you can't turn up there with raw banking services. You turn up there with banking services tuned for the audience. In that case it might be medical, and you've got the same level of attention there as you would do for the fireflies in the park.

Cheryl Brown

And the spend was probably a drop in the bucket compared to an ad campaign. They probably barely spent anything on that.

Dave Brebner

Yeah, I mean …

Cheryl Brown

That's incredible.

Dave Brebner

Yeah, it really was.

Cheryl Brown

So the Go to Market phase doesn't just include putting things in place, but also it includes this idea of getting feedback so that you can inform the next cycle. So what specific types of feedback beyond just satisfaction scores should FIs actively seek from their small business customers or members? And are there processes they should have in place to effectively capture and use this feedback?

Dave Brebner

I think so, yes. I think it depends a little bit on how the account management is structured in that if all of the businesses are assigned an account manager, then the product team should be saying, “These are the answers to the questions I have. Please get the answers over time.” It doesn't have to be present a questionnaire to the customer and make them fill it out. It can be just bring it back to us over the next quarter or something so we can start the next cycle. And it's into that same model that you think, "Well, the customer is somebody who is using my product." So, if you think we're doing traditional commercial banking, and we've got some particular segment, then you'd have that relationship management model where somebody would contact the customer every so often and find out how things are getting on. And that kind of farming sales relationship is very common.

The other way of looking at it is how do you do it for things like the indirect market where you are selling, let's say, some form of loan. Just to keep it simple, let's say we're going to do auto loans to retail on the weekends in car yards. So we want to say when you want to get a loan to buy that car, just sign up. It's easy to sign up here. Those people are far more indirect, in that case then even though there is a person who opens the account, the customer is the car dealership, and that's the person to be having that conversation with. So when you sell through them, the feedback is going to be coming from somebody who isn't buying the product. So that type of idea, that indirect, that brokerage type of idea, but there's somebody in the middle they might be passing something on, but they see what it's like for the end user to use your product. And they can provide incredibly useful feedback, as if you make this easier, or if you reduce the fees, or something like that along the way just a little bit, then people will sign up with you.

So it's understanding the path to market, as well. And it's not just who's the customer, go and talk to them, it's how many steps along the way are there, and what does everybody along the way think and understand, and how do we do against the competition? Because some of those relationships between you and the end customer, they can be huge blockers as well as being huge enablers.

So definitely get the feedback from everywhere you possibly can. You can also get it from things like social media, which is less so in a commercial banking model, but certainly does come in. That's to be filtered clearly because very few people offer positive feedback. They'll say, "It was great," or they'll explain why it was terrible, but they won't provide much in between. So you have to filter that in a certain way.

The other one that we're doing a lot of work on in Advisory Services at the moment is sentiment analysis based on secure messages. So people will, when they write in secure messages, they will say what they think in the subject line to an extent, and definitely in the message body, and that type of feedback—not just about whether they're unhappy or happy, but also about what the problem is—pulling out simple things like pulling out all the nouns in all of the secure messages and they correspond to the products that you have. So if you say credit card is a single noun in this context, the more you see the word “credit card” in a secure message, it means the more questions and discussions people want to have around credit cards or business loan or whatever, however you want to put that together. So analyzing the language that people are saying when they don't really know that it's being analyzed.

And this isn't spooky. We're not trying to pick on individuals here. We're just trying to say what are the trends over time? That type of sentiment analysis, or language analysis, as we go along is critical to understanding how it's being perceived and picked up on. And that's usually six months long, and longer after the product's been launched. So you can get a lot at launch time, you can get a lot within those relationships, and you can get a lot with the feedback along that sales pipeline. But don't stop there. Because the feedback will keep coming in different channels that you may not be listening in today, and there's a lot of valuable information there, as well.

Cheryl Brown

Yeah, and I guess the point is no matter how you're collecting it, the point is that you have to take that feedback and do something with it. And so the framework does have two more phases that we're not going to dive deep into, but so Product Improvement, what do you do with that feedback to make your product better, and Solution Delivery, and all of these phases function in something of a continual circular pattern. This is not a one-and-done thing. So can you just quickly talk about those two phases and how they correspond to the rest of the framework?

Dave Brebner

The solution delivery is really what we just talked about in the detail we get to where, say, we know that there are valuable elements in the cycle and in the workflow, if you like, how do we form those relationships and how do we gather that information? So Solution Delivery is really formalizing the program around are we going to get this information, who do we ask for it, how do we hear what they're saying? Because, as I said, some of these ... Community information you get back may not be very positive at all because people are going to be telling you about all the things they don't like about it. So sometimes it's hard to read, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't use it to filter it down and say, "What does that really mean?" If somebody's yelling about a particular scenario, what they're telling you is, "In my life, this got in the way of what I actually wanted to do." So understand they're not yelling. The emotion they're supplying is not the point. The point is what did you not enable them to do that they wanted to do? And drilling in further from there.

So that really has to be understood. What is that model where you're going to go and gather that information, sift through it—sometimes with a tough edge because there's going to be a lot of discussion of all the problems that are there—but if you can solve them, you're going to get more of those happy ones. But a lot of happy ones with people saying, "Thank you, that's exactly what I want." And when you can see things like that, that's exactly what I need. Or messages which are, "You seem to know exactly what I want before I got there," or "That was very quick." Or messages like that. It's not a lot of words, but it tells you whatever it was you're doing is exactly what people have, and that's the key message in there.

So the Solution Delivery is really a formalizing of everything we've talked about the last 10 minutes or so, which is how do you get that feedback and make sure that it's utilized back in the next time you go through the Strategic Analysis phase.

Cheryl Brown

And then of course the Product Improvement is putting that feedback into action.

Dave Brebner

That's right. Yeah. So, at this point, I'm kind of leaving this out for now. Obviously, whatever the thing is that you are delivering—the product, however that would look, and feel—there's a huge amount of work to go into that. But that's something that everybody's quite good at, really, which is understanding software delivery and platform delivery and those things are things that we do every day. So, yes, you can't forget that. Not for a moment suggesting you forget that. But what people do is rely on that, and then say, “Look what I did. Look at what my product does.” And that message doesn't resonate as well as, “You can now do this because of what the product does.”

And it's the other cycles, the other elements of this plan that are more neglected than the platform delivery, platform improvement ideas from there. Those are things that banks and credit unions are usually pretty good at by now, and there's lots of partners to help with that type of stuff. So it's not saying it's not important, it clearly is, it's what about the neglected stuff. That's what this conversation's about, really, is all the things where the good things that come out of the platforms or the programs that you are putting together, how is that understood and communicated both internally and then externally? That's the area where there's sometimes less attention or less understanding.

Cheryl Brown

So, as we mentioned, the Small Business Strategy Scorecard, this is a tool that financial institutions, whether you're just starting with a new SMB offering or you're looking to strengthen your existing portfolio, that you can use to kind of go through those first four steps and gauge your readiness or where you are in the process. So what advice would you give to an FI that had an SMB program in place for several years, but they suspect it's underperforming? Based on the principles outlined of the scorecard, where would you suggest they start? At the beginning?

Dave Brebner

Yes, I would say so. I would say, "Who are you aiming at? What are you saying to them?" And if you can just ask those two questions right up front, and say, if you ask that, if you find that what you are saying is all about what you have, then you can tune that message for better effect. The thing about it is when we're talking about community banks and regional size banks, then everyone can do the same thing, typically. There are … the bank across the street from you probably has the same core, might have the same vendors in various areas. So everybody can do the same thing in terms of producing the product. That's not really the differentiator. The differentiator is how do you emotionally connect with somebody so they say, "Hey, that's exactly what I wanted," or "Wow, that was quick." Or terms like that, which are enough to say all the work you went into, into the product you're putting together, when somebody says that, they're saying they're validating everything you did.

So that feedback won't be huge and verbose, and they won't write hundreds of pages of why it's perfect. It's just as simple as that's exactly what I need, and that validates everything you've done. So if you have an open look at your program, and say, “Who am I messaging to? People like me? Or people like the customer?” Then that's where you start. If you find it's actually messaging to other bankers by talking about interest rates and things like that, or your product features, there's more that can be done, I think.

Cheryl Brown

Well, Dave, this has been a great tutorial in strategic planning, so thank you. And hopefully our listeners came away with some tangible things they can do to improve their FI's approach. Again, the link to the Small Business Strategy Scorecard, it's in the show notes, and that's free, download it for free, use it at your bank or credit union, or you can find it at hub.q2.com/whitepapers. Dave, thank you again for sharing your insights with us.

Dave Brebner

No worries, thank you.

Cheryl Brown

And that's it for another episode of The Purposeful Banker. A reminder to share your feedback on our podcast content at q2.com/podsurvey, and there's a link in the show notes. You can subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts, including YouTube, Apple, and Spotify, and you can see our archive of podcasts at hub.q2.com/podcasts. Until next time, this is Cheryl Brown, and you've been listening to The Purposeful Banker.