News

Keeping Customers From Flying the Coop, the latest article written by Clarity Advantage President Nick Miller, has been published in the July/August 2010 issue of Bank Marketing Magazine.

In the article, Miller contends that customer retention tactics in bad times are the same as the ones in good times—only the basics need to be applied more intensively. He offers a refresher on the seven approaches that bring the best results.

Access the article on the Bank Marketing Magazine website at:

http://www.aba.com/NR/rdonlyres/60A41B2A-5F35-11D5-AB86-00508B95258D/67783/Cover_Story_Jul_Aug_101.pdf

You won’t be when they are free small business sales webinars!

Clarity Advantage proves that some shows are just as good (and in some cases, even better) the second time around! Join us this summer for our Talking to Small Biz Webinar Program. We’re kicking off the series with a new session followed by encore presentations of three of our most popular webinars. We’ll be sharing tips, techniques, and strategies you and your team members can use for selling to small business.

Click on the webinar titles to learn more and register.

July 8

Capturing Mixed Small Business Households

July 22

Talking Cash Management with Small Businesses

August 10

First Calls on Prospects

Available on Demand (held live on June 24)

Retaining Small Business Customers

Leading Workplace Innovation and Change: Brave New Role – an article appearing in the June 2010 issue of T+D, the monthly publication of the American Society for Training & Development, is available for download at Clarity Advantage’s website.

Download Now (free, one-time registration required).

In the article, Clarity Advantage President Nick Miller details 5 key elements training professionals must focus on when a request for training comes down the pike to help their organizations clarify, plan, and implement change.

Street-level Strategies for Commercial and Small Business Bankers, Branch Managers, and FSRs

Date: Thursday, June 24, 2010

Time: 12:00 – 1:00 PM EDT

Fee: Complimentary

Host: Nick Miller, Clarity Advantage President

Register Now

High levels of small business dissatisfaction with banks – particularly larger banks – hint at an oncoming train of significant customer attrition and churn when the economy improves and business owners feel confident they can get credit or better service at other banks.

How can individual business bankers and branch managers raise the odds of retaining small businesses and their owners as customers?

In this webinar, Clarity will share a suite of “street level” customer retention strategies drawn from recent customer research and long experience – strategies that individual business banking or branch team members can execute regardless of or in spite of what “marketing” or “product management” are doing, with an eye cast toward how their incentive plans work.

In this webinar we’ll focus on:

• Three tips for attracting new customers who are more likely to stay.
• Five keys to beginning and expanding relationships so they are more likely to stick.
• Three important principles of handling service breakdowns and dissatisfaction.
• Communicating and contributing value.
• Concentrating retention efforts on the customers that make the most difference to the bank.
• Six tip-offs that important customers may be thinking about leaving your bank.

Register Now

The bad news… there is no magic prospecting pill, potion, mailing campaign, or phone script. The good news… there is this LinkedIn Group created by Clarity Advantage, a firm that helps banks accelerate sales to small and medium-sized companies.

Winning at Prospecting is a forum for sales professionals who want to learn and share ideas about turning cold prospects into warm new customers. Visit www.winningatprospecting.com for the book that inspired this online group. It’s written by Nick Miller, President of Clarity Advantage.

Nick and the Clarity Advantage team have helped dozens of sales organizations from America’s leading companies generate more profitable sales by attracting new clients and expanding existing relationships, faster.

Join our Group and network with us about all things prospecting: http://www.linkedin.com/e/vgh/2918638/.

TNS and Clarity Advantage to share results and insights from their March 2010 survey of business owners and senior managers around trusted advisor banking relationships during a live webinar on April 22.  Results and insights gleaned from the survey will enable business bankers to more deeply understand what their clients expect and how to deliver it to them in a cost-effective, profitable way.

New research conducted by TNS and Clarity Advantage reveals what business owners and senior managers expect from their banking relationships.  The findings are based on a survey of 10,000 small and medium-sized business owners conducted through the TNS Commercial Banking Momentum Monitor.  An additional 250 in-depth interviews were conducted in March 2010 to focus in on a deeper understanding of client expectations around trusted advisor relationships.  The results and insights into how they can benefit business and middle market bankers will be shared during a live webinar on April 22, 2010.

Glenn Staada, Vice President of TNS and Nick Miller, President of Clarity Advantage will co-host The Banker as a Trusted Advisor—Myths and Realities in the Small and Medium Enterprise Segments.  During the one-hour, complimentary webinar beginning at 12:00 PM EDT, Staada and Miller will answer three key questions:

1. If you or your bankers seek to earn trusted advisor relationships, what do your clients expect of you and your bank?
2. How do perceptions of such relationships differ by business size?
3. How important are such relationships to the profitability and quality of bank relationships?

“Now more than ever, small business and middle market executives are seeking sound advice and guidance to help them navigate their firms through these difficult financial times,” says Staada.  “Bankers that can serve as trusted advisors to their clients now will benefit from long-term, more loyal, and more profitable relationships in the future.”

Miller adds: “The most successful business bankers we work with know that the deepest, most loyal, most profitable banking relationships are built on trust, service, and advice and in the best case, their clients perceive them as trusted advisors.  What we find, however, is that these same bankers don’t know what the term, ‘trusted advisor,’ means to their clients.  Without that knowledge, delivering the right services, at the right time, at a profit becomes difficult.”

To learn more and register for the webinar, The Banker as a Trusted Advisor—Myths and Realities in the Small and Medium Enterprise Segments, go to http://bit.ly/cR9LSg.

About TNS: TNS, which recently merged with Research International, is the world’s largest custom research agency delivering actionable insights and research-based business advice to its clients, so they can make more effective business decisions. TNS offers comprehensive industry knowledge within the Consumer, Technology, Finance, Automotive and Political & Social sectors, supported by a unique product offering that stretches across the entire range of marketing and business issues, specializing in product development & innovation, brand & communications, stakeholder management, retail & shopper, and qualitative research. Delivering best-in-class service across more than 75 countries, TNS is part of Kantar, the world’s largest research, insight and consultancy network. Please visit www.tns-us.com for more information.

About Clarity Advantage: Clarity Advantage helps banks generate more profitable relationships faster with small and medium-sized companies, their owners, and employees.  Clarity consulting, communications, sales tools and training help banks recruit and deploy sales team members, choose their best business and consumer prospects and clients, then approach, engage, sell, expand, and retain relationships.  Clarity also assists banks with consumer sales and cash management sales.  Clarity clients have posted increases in household penetration, cross-sells, deposit volume, and loan volume.   Visitors to Clarity’s website, www.clarityadvantage.com, can subscribe to “The Weekly Sales Thought,” a free eNewsletter and podcast focused on business-to-business selling and sales management.

Contacts:

Stephen Shively

TNS

585-545-4047

stephen.shively@tns-global.com

Karen Tunks

Clarity Advantage

980-939-2112

karen.tunks@clarityadvantage.com

Learn What Business Owners Expect and How to Deliver it Profitably

Date: April 22, 2010

Time: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT

REGISTER NOW

You already know that the deepest, most loyal, most profitable banking relationships are built on trust, service, and advice.  In the best case, clients perceive their bank relationship managers as trusted advisors.

What you may not know is what the term, “trusted advisor,” means to your business banking or middle market clients.

• If you or your bankers seek to earn trusted advisor relationships, what do your clients expect of you and your bank?
• How do perceptions of such relationships differ by business size?
• How important are such relationships to the profitability and quality of bank relationships?

Answers to these questions and more will be revealed in The Banker as a Trusted Advisor—Myths and Realities in the Small and Medium Enterprise Segments, a live webinar hosted by Glenn Staada, Vice President of TNS and Nick Miller, President of Clarity Advantage.

Glenn and Nick will share insights from their March 2010 groundbreaking survey of business owners and senior managers.  The survey results and insights will enable you to more deeply understand what your clients expect and how to deliver it to them in a cost-effective, profitable way.

Who Should Attend

• Business banking and middle market line-of-business leaders, sales managers, team leaders, and relationship managers.
• Marketing managers and product managers focused on business banking and middle market business lines.
• Credit officers responsible for business banking and middle market business lines.

What You Will Learn

• For what reasons business owners and leaders see their current relationship managers as trusted advisors.
• How those trusted advisors earn and maintain that level of intimacy and trust with their clients.
• On what specific business management, financial, credit, and operational issues business owners expect bank relationship managers to advise them.
• How frequently business owners expect to hear from their trusted advisor bankers.
• Business owner perceptions of the quality of counsel they receive from their trusted advisor bankers.
• Business owner willingness to pay additional fees for counsel they receive from trusted advisor bankers.

REGISTER NOW

Strategies for winning small business households and hearts will be offered by Nick Miller, President of Clarity Advantage, and Rick Otero, Executive Vice President, Services & Customer Experience for Capital One Bank during the session, “Small Business Transformers – Reinventing Business Models for the New Order”, on March 22, 2010 at the Best Practices in Retail Financial Services Symposium.

Small business owners and households banking with mid-sized and large banks frequently feel lost or forgotten between consumer retail banking programs and bigger-but-not-necessarily-better commercial banking, and the gap between their expectations of banks and banks’ offers continues to grow.  Bankers attending the Best Practices in Retail Financial Services Symposium in Orlando, Fla., March 21-23, 2010 have a unique opportunity to gain strategies to close this gap and position their institutions for revenue growth.

On March 22, 2010 from 2:30 PM – 3:15 PM, Nick Miller, bank small business sales specialist and President of Clarity Advantage, and Rick Otero, Executive Vice President, Services & Customer Experience for Capital One Bank, will co-host the session entitled, “Small Business Transformers – Reinventing Business Models for the New Order.”  During the session, Miller and Otero will focus on:

• Implications of the shift from a service economy to an experience economy.
• Client expectations about attention from the bank and their client experience.
• Integrating client experience management with other bank disciplines to close the gap between what small business owners want and expect from companies with which they do business.

Miller and Otero will share best practices for winning and retaining small business customers from inside and outside the banking industry.  They will suggest strategies for mid-sized and larger banks that want to transform the lost small business reality into a new experience to win small business households and hearts.

To learn more about the session and register for the conference, visit Best Practices in Retail Financial Services Symposium.

About Clarity Advantage: Small business bank training specialist Clarity Advantage helps banks generate more profitable relationships faster with small and medium-sized companies, their owners, and employees.  Clarity consulting, communications, sales tools and training help banks recruit and deploy sales team members, choose their best business and consumer prospects and clients, then approach, engage, sell, expand, and retain relationships.  Clarity also assists banks with consumer sales and cash management sales.  Clarity clients have posted increases in household penetration, cross-sells, deposit volume, and loan volume.   Visitors to Clarity’s website, www.clarityadvantage.com, can subscribe to “The Weekly Sales Thought,” a free eNewsletter and podcast focused on business-to-business selling and sales management.

Small Business Trends Radio, an hour-long radio program featuring small business experts on a variety of topics, today named Clarity Advantage’s Sales Thoughts podcast to its list of 100 Best Small Business Podcasts in 2010 (Marketing and Sales):

http://www.smbtrendwire.com/2010/03/01/100-best-small-business-podcasts-2010/

To listen and subscribe to the Sales Thoughts podcast, click here.

To access the podcast via iTunes, click here.

Introducing Econiq—Helping Banks Increase Branch Profitability

March 17, 2010 at 12:00 PM ET (One Hour)

REGISTER NOW

For decades, banks have been grappling with the challenge of finding effective ways to marshal the forces of their frontline staff to help sell more to customers.  It is simple, smart business sense and as relevant today as it was 20 years ago.  Who understands your customers better than the folks in the branches who talk to them?  What more cost-effective way is there to sell to existing customers than to use the resources already in place?

Effective selling at the frontline simply makes sense.  And now, there’s a new way for you to realize just how easily you can accelerate frontline sales effectiveness and improve key metrics like cross sell rate, investment and savings referrals, referrals to other specialists, staff satisfaction, reporting cost, and process efficiency.

Join Nick Miller, President of Clarity Advantage, and Colin Piper, President of Econiq, for a live, one-hour web demonstration of the Econiq frontline sales effectiveness solution, proven to deliver an increase in frontline sales by 20% or more within three months of deployment.  The solution is easily customized, requires no integration with your existing technology infrastructure, and can be implemented and delivering results within four weeks.

Date: March 17, 2010

Time: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM ET

REGISTER NOW

Intended Audience

EVP/SVP Retail Banking, SVP/VP Branch Sales, SVP/VP Human Resources

Attend the webinar and see how Econiq can help you to:

• Increase sales and cross sales of financial products and services
• Generate higher quality and more qualified sales referrals
• Automate the sales referral process
• Increase efficiency and turnaround time by providing the right information, checklists, and tools to staff exactly when they need them
• Reduce error rates and levels of re-work through process automation
• Reduce cost of report generation through automation
• Eliminate paper-based processes used in customer profiling, customer on-boarding, quality management, customer surveys, and employee performance management
• Improve employee and customer satisfaction rates
• Achieve a better return on investment in training by targeting resources and directly linking training to individual performance

Econiq was cited in Forrester Research’s December 2009 report, “Hot Banking Tech Companies to Watch in 2010.”  Don’t miss your opportunity to see this hot banking technology in action — REGISTER NOW

Video: Nick Miller on Econiq – Improving Sales Conversion Rate