One of the fastest ways to grow is to hire top sales and customer service people from your competitors. How do you find them and entice them? Here’s a great idea from Apple, which has been rapidly expanding their retail stores.
When Apple recruiters meet someone who gives them great service, they hand them this business card:
Front side: “You’re amazing. We should talk.”
Back side: “Your customer service just now was exceptional. I work for the Apple Store, and you’re exactly the kind of person we’d like to talk to. If you’re happy where you are, I’d never ask you to leave. But if you’re thinking about a change, give me a call. This could be the start of something great.”
Most banks do a poor job of creating a differentiated brand. They tend to think of the “brand” as the same as the logo. It’s not. Your brand is what you stand for, how you’re different than the competition. When we talk to bankers, and when we conduct competitive shops (more on this in a later post) we always ask “how are you different than your competitors”, and we rarely get anything more than platitudes (“we’re local” or “we’re friendly”). Continue reading
A common complaint: “Budgets are tight and we’re searching for every penny of cost savings. How do we grow without spending money on marketing and sales promotion?” A few weeks ago we published 5 Budget Friendly Marketing and Sales Ideas. Here are 5 more in the series some you know, some may be new, but all are worth your consideration: Continue reading
Bank of America’s announcement that it is considering closing up to 10% of its branch network is sure to revive the debate about whether US banks are over-branched. Our thoughts
- the issue has more to do with the type of branches we are building rather than the quantity.
On the face of it, the growth in the number of branches appears to be unsustainable. Banks have consistently expanded the number of bank branches more rapidly than either population or household growth. If we only take the period from the beginning of the decade (2000), bank branches grew at an annual rate of 2.56% while the population grew slightly less than 1% annually. Banks have been building branches at a more rapid rate than population or households growth for over 50 years. Is the BofA announcement a leading indicator that a retrenchment is on the horizon? Continue reading
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