2017 Conference

Jack Hubbard:  There was this banker and he had a horse, and he, for three hours, was walking this horse around town. Stupid horse, and went to the lake and the river, and the stream and the trough, and dumb horse. The banker was very upset. He came across his manager, Janice. Janice said, “You look upset, Mark.” Mark said, “Janice, this is the dumbest horse I’ve ever seen. I’ve been taking this horse around town for three hours, went to the lake, went to the river, went to the trough, stupidest horse I’ve ever seen. Horse won’t drink.” Janice is a really smart sales manager. Janice says, “Mark, it’s really interesting. Your job is not to make the horse drink. Your job is to make the horse thirsty.” Welcome.

You know, I do this a lot. I was in Atlanta on Tuesday and Indianapolis yesterday, and this is a real historic day for me because it’s the year the 69,000th bankers that I’ve had the pleasure of teaching and coaching, and it’s just great to be here at PrecisionLender. I was talking to a couple of the Precision Lender clients and how happy they are, and how they use this amazing tool, and it’s a real privilege to have the opportunity to be here. You know, Brandi and Katie and Dallas and Maria, and the people at PrecisionLender, if they treat their clients like they’ve treated me, gee, I can’t imagine why they don’t have more. Congratulations to them and putting on this great conference, a real privilege to be here today.

Ever since I was six, I wanted to be the play-by-play voice of the 2016 World Champion Chicago Cubs, so I went into banking, and it was a real logical thing. I went to St. Edward Central Catholic High School, Elgin, Illinois, went to Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois. You know, two things were made in DeKalb, Illinois. They’re really important to banking. One is if you make loans to farmers and ranchers, DeKalb is very important because barbed wire was invented in DeKalb, Illinois. The second thing, of course, that was made in DeKalb, Illinois, the most important thing, is Cindy Crawford was made in DeKalb, Illinois. I got a 4.0 on my education. I’m really excited about telling you that. I had a 2.0 in high school and a 2.0 in college, and so I guess my point is that you don’t have to be really smart to be a resource manager. You just have to be dedicated and you have to do the right things over and over again.

A lot of people … I was in Indy yesterday and I got a standing ovation, six standing ovations in my life, and I called my wife, Mrs. Hubbard. We call her Mrs. Hubbard because we’re all afraid of her, and so I said, “Well, Mrs. Hubbard, I got a standing ovation yesterday.” She said, “Well, were you finished with your speech?” I said, “Well, yeah, I was finished.” She said, “Was there another presentation after yours in a different room?” I said, “Well, yeah.” She said, “Well, they probably were just getting up to go.” Love the support. I said to the folks in Indianapolis and Atlanta, I was in Atlanta on Tuesday, and I say to you, you don’t have to be really smart to do this. You just have to do a lot of practical things.

A lot of people say, “Well, are you a motivational speaker?” Oh, for the love of God, look at me. I’m not a motivational speaker. I’m a practicavation speaker, so today what I want to do is I want to talk to you practically about what it means to be a resource manager and what it means in your culture to create a culture of resource managers. I want you to walk away with a number of things here, but there’s two phrases that are made up of four words that I want to talk to you a little bit about, and those two words are flexible consistency … That’s the first phrase, flexible consistency. You know, the Chicago Cubs hired this guy from Boston in October 5th of 2011, and he dedicated his life to this team that was just … Had the height of futility. One of the things he said was, “I’m going to create a different culture here. I’m going to create a Cubs way.”

If you want to get resource managers to be occupying your bank chairs, you need to have a culture of consistency, but you also have to understand that everybody has their own sales style, and so within your culture you have to let them do what they do best. That’s flexible consistency. The other thing is urgent patience. If you want to have a resource management culture, you have to have the patience to make this work. You can’t look quarter over quarter, month over month, week over week, about how many of these things are we doing. You have to have the patience to make it work, but you have to instill within the culture a sense of urgency so when your people leave their homes in the morning and you begin to rent their time, they understand exactly what they need to do and who they’re going to talk with today. I have good news.

For those of you that are football fans, in the National Football League, we have a team in Chicago, the Chicago Bears, we’re very, very proud of them. This year will be our 30th anniversary of winning our last Super Bowl, so there’ll be a parade, and so I want to really tell you how excited I am to let all of you know that if you are in a National Football League city or if you are a fan of the National Football League, something very positive happened to us all today. Jay Cutler became a commentator for Fox Sports Network. I want to talk a little bit about what it means to be a resource manager and I always like to focus in on the client. This is a study that was done recently by Salesforce.com, and it basically talks about … You’re all adults. You can read it. I don’t need to read the words, of what it means to be a resource manager, what your clients want.

You see, the environment is changing pretty rapidly and pretty consistently over time, and the customer is driving this. I’m going to give you some books in a couple of seconds to kind of talk about that. I get the chance to fly on an airline once a week. Last year I flew on 122 airplanes, and I always sit next to somebody and I always say, “Hey, how’s your business doing?” They say, “Oh, our business is great. Business is fantastic. It’s fabulous. Things are going really well.” Then I say, “Well, tell me a little bit about what it’s like to work with your bank.” I get a lot of really different answers, but there was this one guy I was sitting next to. I was flying to Dallas, and I said, “Tell me about your relationship with your bank.” He said, “You won’t believe this. This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. I love to talk about my banker.”

He says, “Every Monday, I get an article from my banker. There’s an article or a white paper or a best practice. She even sends me leads from time to time. She knows exactly what kind of prospects I want. She sends me leads from time to time. I don’t know where she gets them, and I don’t really care. She’s absolutely amazing. The process started when she started to prospect to me. She sent me this amazing and very unique letter. She sent me this really unique voicemail message, and I let it play out, and I listened to it, and I had to call her back, and when she came in and talked to me, I said the same thing I always say to all the bankers. What’s this going to cost me? She said without skipping a beat, ‘We will be the most expensive bank you’ve ever worked with, and we are absolutely worth it.'” He said, “I was so intrigued by that I had to start a relationship with them.”

He said, “I give her referrals all the time. She’s a resource to me. She’s a value to me. I don’t make a move without at least talking with her.” I said, “Well, this is fantastic. I got to get to know this banker a little bit.” I said, “Where’s your business?” He told me, and I said, “Well, do you mind telling me where you bank?” He told me and I said, “Well, your business is here and you bank there,” I said, “I know who your banker is.” He said, “That’s not possible.” We’re flying to Dallas, Texas, two guys that have never met each other. He said, “I bet you can’t do that.” I said, “Oh, you’re a betting man.” He said, “No, yes.” I said, “Well, okay, tell you what. My favorite charity is Animal House Rescue in Huntley, Illinois.” I said, “What’s yours?” He told me and I said, “I’ll tell you what. For $100 I’ll bet I can tell you your banker’s name.” He said, “That’s not possible.”

I said, “Her name is Lisa.” He said, “How did you know that?” I said, “Because I taught her all these things to do. She’s amazing, isn’t she?” He said, “Yeah, she is.” He said, “So, you taught her all these things?” I said, “Well, yeah. I taught her, but what’s really important is the culture supports her.” The sales manager, every Monday, for their meeting, doesn’t go over numbers and how many calls you make and how many cold calls … It’s all crap. It’s all ridiculous. He asks about what kind of value you send, where’d you find the articles, how did the customer react to that? Those are the kind of things that support resource managers. It’s not about the banker. It’s about the culture. There are five things that make a resource manager … Actually, there’s 5.5. There are five Cs of credit. I’m on the board of directors of a community bank. I’m very proud of that.

We make loans from time to time, and I know there’s five Cs of credit. I’m learning them. I don’t know all five, but I’m getting pretty good at it, but I also believe there’s five Cs of resource management. I want to talk to you a little bit about what those things are today. Oh, there’s 5.5. I’ll give you the last one in a second. The first one is conversations. It’s the most important thing you sell. Conversations happen all the time. They happen when you speak, when you write an email, when you’re advertising, when people call the bank. I teach at seven banking schools. I teach at a graduate school of banking, did an exercise last year with my students, and I sent out an email ahead of time with a value ad to all of the 200 students that were coming to class. 83% of those emails come back and it said they were out of office, unavailable, away. Then I asked the students when we got to class, I said, “How many of you got the email that I sent?” Almost everybody raised their hand.

I said, “Well, when did you pick it up?” “Well, at school here.” I said, “Then why did you put your out of office message on it. It makes no sense to me. If a prospect that you’ve been trying to work with for years and years and days and days finally says, “I’m going to respond to that email,” and you say you’re out of office, they might move on to another bank. See, if have your out of office message on today as part of your conversation process, it’s kind of interesting because yesterday likely, and today, you probably checked your voicemail on break, or at least you will, so why would you tell people you’re out or unavailable, et cetera. Conversation is the most important thing you have to sell. It’s your number one differentiator. The second thing is curiosity, okay? Why do they make movies on HBO and it’s the ending there, like Veep, or Girls, or whatever you watch on HBO, and you just can’t get up and get a drink or go to the bathroom right afterwards, because why?

There’s previews of coming attractions. Why do we go to the movies early? Because we want to see the previews. We’re curious. What else could we possibly see? We, as bankers, need to make our clients more curious. Do you know last year in banking, bankers got into call number two after call number one only 17% of the time. Why? Because we talked about our products. We brought brochures, we brought annual reports and pitch books. None of those matter right now, so we need to make our prospects and clients more curious if we’re going to be a resource to them. The third thing is collaboration. Working together works. Collaboration works, inside the bank and outside the organization. Consultative selling used to be really big, and consultative selling is me versus the customer. Trust based selling is where we’re at today, ladies and gentlemen. Trust based selling means it’s me and you, the customer and you, the banker, versus the problem. That’s the real key.

Next is customization. The whole idea of marketing one to one, why do we print thousands and thousands of business banking brochures when we can customize them when we’re making a presentation? Connectivity. Today I want to talk to you about an amazing tool that bankers spend 17 minutes a month on, and the average high performing salesperson spends two hours a day on, that’s LinkedIn. We need to connect. We need to connect in community and we need to connect socially, and the last thing, if you want to have a culture of resource management, the only thing that will make a difference is coaching. It’s one of the biggest problems in our industry today, and it’s not about deal coaching. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about sales behavioral coaching.

I’ve taught 69,000 bankers over the last 43 years, and one of the things that I’m very, very proud of is being able to be around the country and teaching in 49 different states, but I’ve never had the opportunity to sit in a classroom and do a sales training class, never been part of a sales training class, so the way I learn is through reading. I really believe … There’s a ton of sales books out there. I read a sales book a week. Here are five amazing sales books. We have a client that does this kind of interesting things. It’s called the X,Y,Z Bank Book Club. Every quarter, the bank management buys the RMs, the resource managers, they’ve changed their card to say resource manager, the resource managers a book. All during the quarter they’re having to read books, these chapters of this book, and oh, by the way, they call the author and they get 200 additional books, and that’s their leave behind on really good initial business development calls.

Here’s five books that they have read. They’re all phenomenally good. I can’t go into detail on any of them, but I would tell you that these five books are game changers. These are books that your bankers should be reading because the customer is different, the buying cycle is different, the number of people that they’re buying are different. For example, in the customer … The Challenge Your Customer, what it indicates is there is about 5.4 decision makers that make a decision around financial services and who buys what from who, and the average banker is only getting to about two. Why last year was our close rate in banking only 42%? We need to think more strategically and that’s the whole concept around resource management. You see, the whole concept of selling is changing. When I started in banking in 1973, it was a consultative model. Customers came to us.

We sat at our desk and waited for the customer to come in. We did cold calls and blitzing and all the ridiculous kinds of things that we do. We ask a few questions and we pitch a product. Today, trust is the center, engagement and education, all those things are really important if we want to create a culture around resource going forward. Here’s our problem. We don’t have a lot of time. In fact, a Salesforce study recently indicates that bankers only have about 36% of their time to sell. That’s not a lot. What we have to do is to make it 100% effective and today I’m going to talk to you a little bit about what some banks are doing in that particular regard. Now, I’m on the board of directors of about a billion dollar community bank, and one of the things I always talk to community bankers about is that we need to stop having pity parties for ourselves. There’s some community banks in here, there’s some large organizations in here. We can do this. We just need to take control of our calendar a little bit, and that’s what one bank did.

This is about a $2 billion organization. They came to us and said, “Look, what can we do? We have sales meetings all the time. They’re not very good. They’re all over the place,” and so we did some research and here’s what we found, that Wednesday is the best day to make business development calls and that bank was doing most of their meetings, sales meetings, on Wednesday at 11:00, so they were drawing their resource managers out of the field, into the back end of the office to do sales meetings. Well, that’s absolutely crazy, so Wednesday is the best day to make business development calls. Thursday is the second best day and Tuesday is the third best day. You know the worst day statistically to make business development calls? Monday, so what they did was they moved all their meetings to Monday. They do three pipeline meetings on a Monday. Their last Monday of the month they do a skill builder.

After that, what they do is they drag their bankers to their desk and they do what’s called the power hour, which is one hour of planning for business development calls with no paper. Your bankers don’t need forms. They need job aids. Then after that, one by one, the manager drags the bankers into his or her office and does what’s called a check-in. Do you know what that’s done? Oh, I know what you’re thinking. “This is micro-management. I can’t micro-manage my bankers.” You know what it’s done? The average number of calls it takes to sell a prospect is seven. Their call to close ratio has gone down to about 5 1/2, because the manager has got engaged strategically. The bankers have captured their calendar by actually making a call on the way to the office and on the way home from the office, and twice a week they eat with a center of influence, and they call it the Never Eat Alone Syndrome. Friday is when they make their telephone calls between 3:30 and 5:30 p.m. because that’s when the decision maker is most likely to say yes to an appointment.

What this bank has started to do is to think more strategically. They haven’t created any more hours on their calendar. What they’ve done is they have taken control of the calendar. Resource managers use their time in a lot of different ways. Here’s how they do it. I want to talk to you about what’s in red today. I want to talk to you about how they find opportunities, how people prospect, how you connect socially. I do not like the term social selling. I think it’s a horrible term. That’s not what you do on social media. You collaborate, so I like, and we’re going to talk today about social collaboration a little bit. There’s a lot of different ways you can prospect. You can go to trade shows, you can do cold calling. Well, that’s foolish, but you can if you like. You can do blitzes. Well, those are stupid too, but you can do that too. Obviously centers of influence and referrals and different things are important, but I want to talk to you about what a couple of banks have done creatively around finding opportunities in their marketplace.

The first one is called Logo Day. This is a community bank of about 700 million dollars, and here’s what they do. They have about 20 bankers. Here’s what they do. Every October 1st, they have their bankers go to their computers and they ask the bankers to find 15 businesses for next year that they would like to do business with by the end of the following year. See, I was recently at a bank and the bank president said, “Oh, I’m so excited to tell you that we’re just about to do our strategic planning program for 2017.” It was April 15th. I said, “You mean you’re going to do your strategic planning session for 2018?” He said, “Oh, no. We’re very excited. We got this plan done. We’re going to have a great 2017.” I said, “Sir, 2017 is over, so we need to get ahead of this,” so what they do in October is they find 15 businesses that they want to do business with.

They go to the website of the business, they capture the logo and put it on a piece of paper and print the piece of paper out. Then they have a trade show inside the bank, these 20 bankers, and they hang up the pieces of paper all along the wall, and the bankers go around and look. They’re looking for duplicates or somebody that I know differently or better than somebody else, and then after the trade show’s over, we sit down and we go around the room, and we go over each and every prospect. It’s a little bit tedious, but it really works. What happens if Brandi and I each have the same prospect? Well, then Solomon, the manager, has to be smart and strategic and say, “Well, Brandi, how do you know the person? Jack, how do you know the person?” He or she decides which one of us gets it. Here’s the goal. The bankers walk out with 12 new potential prospects that they would like to do business with the following year. Then the manager takes over.

There’s coaching involved and strategy, and you see where it says, “Meet with the coach” twice? That’s not a misprint. That’s not a duplicate. That goes on all the time. What happened last year? Their close rate’s about 40%, their average deal size a little over $900,000. Last year these 20 bankers, by targeting these opportunities, by focusing their time and energy, generated $45 million in new business with this particular situation. It’s practical, it’s easy to do, and it works. What about prospecting? The statistic that I have for cold calling right now is about 1.5% close rate for the things you do with cold calling. Why do we continue to do that? I have a bank in Chicago that I know that does something like this and they’ve given us permission to talk about this situation a little bit. They call it power prospecting your TAPS, the Trusted Advisor Prospecting System. Here’s how this works.

Every Monday, five letters go out to very targeted prospects. On Wednesday the banker makes a LinkedIn connection with the prospect, and on Thursday or Friday, some other kind of value add goes out. On Tuesday of the following week, this bank has taught their bankers how to talk to the decision maker, how to leave a voicemail, and how to collaborate with the gatekeeper, not get around the gatekeeper, how to collaborate with the gatekeeper. Here’s a statist that you should know, scary. In American business today, bank to business, voicemails are returned 4.8% of the time. Why? Because they’re no good. They’re no good. They’re too long, they say nothing, nothing of value, and they drone on. Statistically, if you call someone and you say your name and the name of the bank first, you only have seven seconds to grab and hold people’s attention. It takes four seconds to grab and hold someone’s attention. When you say the name of the bank, they’re going to delete the voicemail 30 seconds later.

This bank has changed the way they do voicemail a little bit. This is getting their bankers in the door somewhere between 60 to 80% of the time. Do the math. I’m not terribly good at math, but if they send out five letters and they get three appointments, that’s a 60% hit rate. Three appointments times 52, that’s more than 150, almost 160 new prospect opportunities that they’re putting in the top of the sales funnel. Do they stop doing prospecting other ways? Absolutely not, but they’ve moved forward with the process and they’re resource managers are making this really work. One of the things I hope I’m bringing across here to you today is there’s no theory in this. Resource managers just get at this, and they’re very practical, but the bank provides a lot of resources around this. We did a study with a bank and the bankers were very frustrated. They were getting a prospect appointment, but they would call 48 hours before the appointment with a prospect to say, “I’d like to confirm my appointment.”

Well, that sounds like a nice thing to do, but guess what? The prospect said, “Oh, I’m so glad you called. Something came up.” Something came up? What do you mean something came up? They said, “Well, something came up and I’m sorry, we have to reschedule the appointment,” and then they never got the appointment. We did a study and we did 100 appointments that the bankers had generated. 72 of the 100 when they called to confirm the appointment said, “I’m sorry. Something came up.” They weren’t committed to the process. The prospect was not committed. Now, if you had bacon and eggs for breakfast yesterday, you know the difference between involvement and commitment. The chicken was involved. The pig was committed. What the bank needed to have these bankers do is to get the prospects committed. The bank president calls and says, “Look, we’re getting rejected. What should we do?” I said, “Well, how about we do this? Stop making the phone calls.”

He said, “Well, Geez. We’re paying you a lot of money. What else should we do?” I said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we do another experiment? Why don’t we create a unique email so that when after the banker gets the appointment, they send out the email before the end of the day to create some level of curiosity.” The bank president goes, “Okay, well, what should the email say?” I said, “Well, there’s nobody better in the history of trust than Charles Green, my friend, who wrote The Trusted Advisor and Trust Based Selling. Why don’t we put that right up in bold so you’ll notice the graphic design and the quote from Charles Green. “It’s about trust, Bob,” says the email, “and thanks for your trust to committing 70 minutes for me next Tuesday,” or whenever the date might be. “I promise I’m going to bring that white paper along with me.” Now, 70 minutes, did that create any curiosity in your mind? It should have. Why did they do 70 minutes?

Because the prospect will block out 90 minutes on their Outlook calendar and the banker gets 20 more minutes if they’re doing a really good job, so what we’ve taught the bank to do is to take their watch off when they start the call. They say, “Mr. Johnson, you agreed to 70 minutes and I’m going to hold you to that because I know you have a lot to do and I will get out of your hair in 70 minutes, but just know that I have another 20 minutes if in fact you need it.” Then we try to get the bankers to ask better questions than any other bankers, and guess what? They get that other 20 minutes, and that other 20 minutes really bears a lot of fruit in terms of questions and understanding of the business, and plant tours, and things like that, so 70 minutes. Now, Mr. Johnson says in the email, “In order for us to get ready and make me strategic along with you to get our minds right, let me ask you a couple of questions.”

Here they are in the middle of the email, and they’re in bold. Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Where did you get those questions? They’re kind of interesting.” Have you ever heard of a little company called Vertical IQ? I have. I can’t imagine for the life of me that any bank in here would not subscribe to Vertical IQ. It is absolutely the greatest business intelligence tool in the history of humankind. Now, I’m not on the board of Kevin or Bobby’s or Susan Bell’s company, but I’ll tell you what. Wherever I go, and whenever I talk about anything around sales, Vertical IQ is always part of that process, and here’s the problem. A lot of times people look at Vertical IQ and they say, “Well, it’s an underwriting tool.” No, it’s a sales tool, and that’s how this banker is using it. You’ll notice at the end, “Here’s to trust in your continued great success,” so we did a study.

The banker sent out 100 emails like this, and didn’t follow up with a telephone call. 92 of the 100 prospects were there. Now remember the statistics. Banker calls, “Hi, I’d like to confirm my appointment.” 72 out of 100 said, “Oh, so glad you called. Something came up.” The next time we did 100 of these emails, and 92 of the prospects were there. If you want to start the process out by picking up the telephone and saying, “Hi, I’d like to come out and show you how I can save you some money on your banking,” you’re going to be cutting your price forever. Sales is not a one-time thing. It’s a process, and once your train leaves the station, you’d better be providing resources and value all the way along. This, in fact, does that. If your bank ever gets a chance to hear an amazing speaker, you should hire Tommy Spaulding. Tommy’s story is absolutely amazing. He’s written two amazing books, and he has taught me the concept of net sharing.

The book is It’s Not Just Who You Know, so I want to talk to you a little bit about what resource managers do when they net share, both in person and in social kinds of situations on the computer. Net sharing, you know, there are a number of things that we could talk about around net sharing, but here’s one thing that’s really fascinating to me. Bankers go out on these net sharing or these community events all the time, and do you know that about 90% of the time and maybe more, they have no idea who’s going to be there? Do you know I got the list from Brandi. So did all the other speakers. I want to see do I have any clients here? Are there bankers that I know that I’d want to talk to? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All you have to do is just pick up the phone and ask, and all Brandi could say is, “Well, Jack, I really can’t give you that,” and I understand, but I need to ask.

We have a bank, this is pretty cool, a bank in Indiana that does this, so branch manager goes to a Chamber of Commerce event. They do it all the time. That’s really great, and they call now the Chamber of Commerce and they say, “Can I have the list of people who have signed up?” “Oh, sure, no problem. Here’s the list.” Then they give it to a teller, and they say, “Here, Margaret. What I’d like you to do, I’m going to a Chamber of Commerce event next week. Could you just go through here and look and see if we have any customers that I’m going to be seeing or that are going to be at the event?” Now, what does the teller feel? She feels fabulous. She gets to do something that’s of real value to the bank. What’s it do for you? Who cares? What it’s done for your customer is really important because resource managers understand that it’s not just about my customer that’s important. It’s about the bank’s customer, and here’s what the other thing to think about.

When you go into a net sharing event, you likely have one of those name tags that you wear on your upper right hand shoulder. It says First National Bank. What happens if Dallas is my customer a the bank … Not my customer, but the bank customer, and I walk right by Dallas, don’t make any eye contact? He goes, “Well, there it is. This bank is getting a little bit too big for its britches. They have ignored me again. They’ve ignored me for the last time. I’m going over to a different bank.” But if the teller can go through the list and just highlight, “Oh, Dallas is a customer,” I can walk right up to Dallas and I can say, “Dallas, I’m not your banker, but I do know you bank with us. Thank you for the opportunity to be of service. By the way, we’re always interested in knowing how our customers are feeling about us. How are you feeling? How’s it working for you? What do you like about our service? Anything we could do to improve?” Now Dallas feels very differently and he becomes an advocate instead of an enemy. Getting the list really helps.

Do you have an ABC criteria when you go to a net sharing event or do you just go because it’s one of the two tick marks you have to make this month? What do you mean by an ABC criteria? Look, if I go to a net sharing event and I’m looking for dentists, that could be an A. If I’m looking for manufacturers that have $20 million in sales or more, that could be an A for me. Then when I get their business card, mine go in my left pocket, theirs go in my right pocket. When I get their business card before I put it in my right hand pocket, I write A, B, or C and then tonight, before my head hits the pillow, I’m going to send those As something of value because I want to get mind share with them. I want to get mind share, and we don’t do a good enough job of mind share, because the two most important things, when I teach bankers … I’m going to be in Boston, in Marlboro, Massachusetts on June 14th.

I’m going to do a one-day business development program for the Massachusetts bankers, and one of the things I’m going to talk to the bankers about is mind share. The other thing I’m going to talk to them about is PIM and MIM. That’s the two most important things in our lives, PIM and MIM, and we don’t think about it enough. PIM is people in motion, and MIM is money in motion. We can’t know when PIM and MIM are going on in everybody’s accounts, or everybody’s business, but what we can do is to create enough mind share so that when something happens, they think of us first. Net sharing is absolutely a critical part of the process and the last thing I would suggest to you, and you’re all adults, you can read all this stuff, is we need to practice. At our little bank, we do business after hours with our board of directors, and our board of directors people play the board of directors, and we ask our bankers to come in. I do a one-day class with them.

I teach them how to do net sharing and how to ask the right kinds of questions, the most important question of which is, “Where are you from?” It’s the best networking question to start out a networking conversation of all time. We teach the bankers how to do that and then we, the board, go through with the bankers to make sure that they know how to do this effectively. In banks what we do is we send our people out and say, “Go work the room.” “Well, what does that mean? How does that … What do I do? Do I do an elevator speech?” Oh, please, for the love of God, don’t do an elevator speech. We have a client that does what’s called a personal capability statement, so here’s how this works. She works in the auto business. I know a lot of bankers don’t do that anymore.

She works in the auto business, and so she’ll go to a car dealer event and they’ll say, “Well, what do you do at XYZ National Bank?” She says, “Well, that’s really interesting you bring that up. My job is to help car dealers determine whether it’s viable for them to put a quick lube operation in their store or not.” Versus, “Well, we are a relationship bank and let me sing a kindergarten song for you and spew some things out that I memorized.” This is customization at its best. Now, where does she get all this information? Well, before she goes to the event, she knows what industries are going to be present and she’s go to a little tool called Vertical IQ to see some of the things that are going on in those particular industries. Net sharing. Here’s another thing. It’s always better to be interested than interesting. It’s better to be interested than interesting.

If we would change the way we do this, we would get a lot more business opportunities. We’d help a lot more people. In 2003, a gentleman named Reid Hoffman and two of his buddies from PayPal, were in their Palo Alto home. They said, “We’ve got an idea. What we want to do is we want to create an opportunity for recruiters to find people to hire. Let’s do something. Let’s call it LinkedIn.” Last week, LinkedIn crossed the 500 million member mark. 25% of people are on LinkedIn every day, 25%. LinkedIn is probably one of the more amazing tools. I’m on two to three hours a day. The average banker on 17 minutes a month. It’s pretty sad. I won’t have the opportunity to go through every single thing here, but I would suggest to you that as good bankers, please understand that LinkedIn is no longer a recruiting tool. I have bank presidents call me all the time and say, “Jack, I don’t know if I want my bankers on LinkedIn, because if I put them on LinkedIn they’ll be looking for another job and somebody will find them.”

I said, “Mr. and Mrs. President, they’re already looking for a job if that’s your attitude.” We need to look at this very, very differently. LinkedIn is part of a social collaboration process. It’s part of the resource manager process, and the first thing to understand personally, as a banker, is why am I here? Why am I doing this? Is it because the bank told me to, I had to? I got peer pressure to do it? Oh, for God sake, I don’t want to do this, but I have to? Why are you here? Here’s another thing that’s really important to take home, and a of bankers don’t even think about this, but I get complaints all the time from bankers who say, “Geez, this banker, I looked at their LinkedIn profile and they haven’t been with us for a year but they still say that they work at First National.”

That’s a really bad thing, so one of the things I would suggest to you is when your banker leaves, and stuff happens, for whatever reason, and they go to Human Resources and they do the exit interview, make sure at that very moment, the banker takes off the fact that they work at your bank now, because the last thing you want is to have them out there working for a competitor saying they work at First National Bank for a couple of months, and have somebody call them or in-mail them or message them and say, “Hey, you work at First National. I’d like you to come out and talk to me.” It’s a really bad idea. The third thing to think about is your SSI score. A lot of bankers say, “Well, how do I know that LinkedIn is good, my bankers are doing well? Can we capture sales from LinkedIn?” Stop thinking that way. Stop thinking that way. LinkedIn is not about social selling.

You’re not going to pick up the … You’re not going to open your computer, connect with somebody today, and have Mark all of a sudden come back and say, “Oh, you connected with me. I need $2 million.” It’s just not going to happen, so we need to think about this a little differently in terms of keeping score. The way I like to keep score with LinkedIn is an over time process. How many connections do you have? If you don’t have at least 500 connections, you’re not LinkedIn-licious. I made up the term. You need to be LinkedIn-licious and 500 plus is the number. Now, my wife would tell you … I just crossed the 7,600 connection mark yesterday. My wife says, “Geez, I don’t want to know 7,600 people.” I do. I do. You know why? Because she keeps shopping at Nordstrom, and so I need to know 7,600 people or more. Number one, over a period of time, how are our bankers progressing in terms of the right number of connections they have?

Number two, how many groups are they in and what are they doing in those groups? You can be in up to 100 LinkedIn groups. I’m in 62 LinkedIn groups, and I’m always constantly looking for ways to add to the group, to comment on the group, to add an article to the group, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That’s another way to measure, but the best way to measure is free. It’s available to you every day. It changes every week. It’s called the SSI score, the Social Selling Index, and here you see, and it’s probably on your handout, you can see how to get to your Social Selling Index score. Just to give you a little average, and tell you how we’re doing as an industry, the average banker’s Social Selling Index score is 19. The top Social Selling Index score that you can get is 100. Okay? If you are at 70 or higher … I was at a bank marketing school this week, my 32nd year at bank marketing school in Atlanta, so we all went to our Social Selling Index score, and I had bankers just, “Yippee!”

Because if you’re at 70 or above in your Social Selling Index score, you are in the top 1% of LinkedIn. If you’re at 80 or above, you’re in the top 0.5% of anybody who’s on LinkedIn. If you get to 90, you’re in the 0.1%. That means that 99.9 people on LinkedIn are worse than you in terms of what you are doing on this amazing tool. I’ll tell you what. If I get below … My daughter-in-law works with me and my son, and they know that I’ve had a bad day if my Social Selling Index score goes below 90. Now, the neat thing about this is that when you go to your SSI score, it will tell you exactly how to improve, and one of the ways to improve is your profile. What is my headline? I’ll tell you a quick story. People remember about 5% of what they hear in statistics and 72% of what they do in a story. We have a bank out east, about a billion and a half dollars. We were doing our one-day LinkedIn class and a senior vice president of commercial banking came up to me and said, “You know, I have to be here.”

I said, “Well, that’s really great you’re so excited about it.” He said, “Yeah, yeah. Bank president forced me to be here.” He said, “I got to use this LinkedIn thing. I think it’s stupid, but okay.” He said, “Here’s my headline. What do you think?” It said, “Senior Vice President, Commercial Loans at …” the name of the bank. I said, “Well, that’s a stupid headline.” He said, “Why is it stupid?” I said, “Because there’s only about 200,000 commercial bankers. Good job for commoditizing yourself. Way to go.” I said, “By the way, the name of the bank is right below there as your employer. Why would you waste characters to tell people you work at that same bank twice?” He said, “Okay.” He said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Let’s you and I work together to create a title and if it’s not stupid or crazy, I’ll leave it on my LinkedIn for 30 days.” I said, “Okay.”

He said, “What should I put on there?” I said, “Simple. Banker in charge of getting things done in …” name of city. I said, “What do you think?” He said, “That’s stupid and crazy.” I said, “Is it stupid and crazy enough that you won’t do it?” He says, “No, no. I’ll try it. The bank president said I had to. Okay.” Next week he gets a phone call, and the person on the other end of the phone said, “Prove it.” The guy goes, “What?” “Prove it. Prove that you’re the banker in charge of getting things done.” He said, “Where’d you find that out?” He says, “On your LinkedIn profile. Don’t you ever read it?” Guy goes, “Well, I haven’t for awhile, but thanks very much. Let’s get together.” The following week, two people called. The following week, three people called. He is the banker in charge of getting things done in his city. The other thing that he’s done is he’s rewritten his summary.

Your summary is not a resume. Nobody cares if you’ve been on the President’s Club for three years in a row. Nobody cares if you have $100 million outstandings in commercial loans. In fact, all those things are bad. What you need to do is to tell your story. Tell your story. What is your story? I was in the Midwest at a bank that we work with and I said, “What’s your story?” This banker started to cry. I said, “Well, gee, sorry.” She said, “No, you brought exactly to the table what I needed.” She’s an African-American woman. She said, “Now I can tell the story of how I got into banking, and why I’m so passionate about this industry.” She said, “When I was a little girl, my mother would go to the bank and she was treated just horribly by the white tellers and the branch managers, et cetera, and I vowed to myself that I would never let that happen to another African-American again.” I said, “That is your story.” That’s what I’m talking about. You know, you can use up to 2,000 characters to tell your story, and bankers don’t do a terribly good job of that.

The last thing I want to mention on LinkedIn, and you can see all these things, and by the way, we’re family now, so you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, fine. That would be great. If you want to message me, in-mail me, say, “Hey, how do I do this? Could you help me with my summary? Could you look at my …?” Absolutely. Happy to … Very happy to do that. The last thing I want to talk to you a little bit about is posting and sharing and publishing. Every morning when I get up … This is seven days a week, by the way. Now, yeah, I’m a little over the top. Oh, I know what you’re thinking. “Geez, Jack. You need a little balance in your life.” Mrs. Hubbard loves balance. The balance in our checking account is really important to her, so I’m up seven days a week. By the way, Taylor the wonder Beagle, our director of marketing, she’s up at 5:17 in the morning and when I’m home it’s my job to get her out and get her fed and all that. She goes back to bed and I can’t.

Every morning when I get up I find three articles from people that I’m following on LinkedIn. It could be Tony Hughes or Jill Konrath or Don Pepper, or Mike Kunkle, or whoever it might be. I find one article on human resources and training, one article on marketing and sales, and one article on sales management or leadership, and I leave them up all day long. I’m posting them all during the day. Yesterday I posted an article that got over 500 views. Now, that’s a lot of views, and all I need is one banker who says, “You know what? I need some help. I need some training. I need to call that guy.” That’s all I need. We need to be out there. If you want to be a resource to your community, first of all post articles that are valuable to the community, but if you want to be a really good representative of your bank, and get good mind share, and be a good resource manager for your bank, using LinkedIn is probably not an option.

The last thing is Sales Navigator. I am not paid by LinkedIn, I do not own stock in LinkedIn. Boy, that was stupid. But I’ll tell you what. The greatest tool in prospecting that I have ever seen in my life is Sales Navigator. At our little bank, I help my bankers and they came up with ideas around … They want to talk to CFOs. I said, “Okay, let’s look in Sales Navigator, CFOs in the Chicago area,” 33,000. 33,000 of them. I said, “Let’s limit that. That’s a little too many. Let’s put it in this particular city.” 174. Those are their targets. They created a list, and now every time a new CFO comes into that particular city, LinkedIn automatically drops it into the list and my bankers get an email. Why would you ever buy another list again? LinkedIn is active people. They’re not dead, they’re not retired. They haven’t sold their business, they haven’t moved. They are there, Sales Navigator is very, very powerful.

I know what you’re thinking. “Geez, Jack, how much does this cost? Sounds like it’s going to cost me a lot of money.” The price of ignorance is unbelievably high. It’s astronomical, but if you’re willing to pay $100 a month per banker for Sales Navigator and they use it effectively, it’s the greatest tool you could ever imagine around resource management. What happens when a client says, “You know what? I like this resource management concept. I’m yours. Let’s get married.” Too often what happens, the resource manager and the bank, they move on. They move on. They’ve got stuff to do. We got to get more business, and that’s all good, but what happens to that brand new client who says, “Now what do I do? Where are the bodies buried? What are the politics here? How do I use the bank? What’s going on? Who do I talk to?” We know of a couple of banks that are doing an onboarding process that basically says when I join the bank, for the first year there’s going to be touches.

Now, you’ll notice, and I’ll go through this very quickly with you, you notice it’s not an email. It’s not a product brochure. This is a phone call. Three days after the loan closes, the sales manager calls, “Hi, this is Tom. You closed a loan three days ago. My resource manager said that I would give you a call. You got a couple of minutes?” “Yeah, Tom. What do you want to know?” “Well, here’s the deal. I was not on any calls with my banker when he was working with you, or she was working with you, but you were on all the calls, so I’m curious. Coach my banker. If my banker could get better at something, what would you want my banker to do? What would you want my banker to continue to do?” The prospect is saying, the new client is saying, “You want me to actually coach your banker?” “Yeah. Tell me all about it.” They talk about that and the banker says, “Now, by the way, in one week, a member of our sales committee on our board of directors …”

We did a study with a company called Cadence, which is another unbelievable company, for advertising compliance software. We did a study with them and we found that only 4% of American banks have a sales committee or a customer experience committee. Now you think about that. We’re in a sales mode. What we do at our board of directors meeting, we’re reporting sales. Why don’t we have a board, a committee, that talks about sales? It makes no sense to me, but anyway, this particular bank says, “Well, our board member’s going to call you in a week.” “A board member’s going to call me?” “Yeah. He or she just wants to know that you’re doing okay and everything’s fine.” The bank has taught the board what to say and what not to say, questions to ask, et cetera. The board member does their talk. “Oh, by the way, about five weeks from now you’re going to get your first statement. A sales assistant will be calling you about making sure your statement’s okay, asking any questions you have, things like that.”

The sales assistant, a secretary, important person, calls and picks up the phone, and hears what the bank has asked the secretary to say after they make sure that everything is okay. “Mr. Johnson, what initiatives are on your plate over the next six to 12 months, and how can our bank be a partner in your success?” I’ll repeat the question. What initiatives are on your plate over the next six to 12 months, and how can our bank be a partner in your success? This is a sales assistant, sales assistant. Three months into the relationship, the resource manager and the sales manager make a joint call and one year into the relationship, the bank president signs a blind embossed anniversary card created by their partner in marketing to land on the desk of the new client the exact day they close the loan. 31631. The question I would ask you to walk away with here is what are we doing when a new client comes on? How do we welcome them? How do we mitigate buyer’s remorse because they have it? How do we move forward?

Here’s another thing that bankers are dealing with, and that’s team selling. This is a billion dollar bank and they call them CATs, Client Action Teams. Every two weeks, all these people meet together. Now, we’ve all done these programs. Here’s the problem with most of them. They fall under their own weight because we bring too many. Each one of these people are responsible to bring one. One. One client. They are not allowed to talk about product, and they must use the CRM system in order to present what’s going on with this client. The bank president has bought nine LCD projectors that are up in the roof of the conference room, ceiling of the conference room where they do these things, and they access their CRM system, so they can’t talk about product. These meetings last 45 minutes. The last 15 minutes the mortgage person gets together with the retail person who talked about a potential help with a new home or a second home, et cetera, et cetera. You get the drill.

These are done every two weeks. They last an hour. What really makes them effective is the alternate weeks the managers are doing check-ins with the bankers to make sure that they’re held accountable to do what they said they would do in the meetings. The last thing I wanted to talk to you a little bit about, and if we have time for questions that’s great. If not, I hope that we’ve added a little bit to your lives and as was mentioned, to be able to have you go out and use some of this stuff. I love Zig Ziglar. My goal is to train one more day than Zig did. Zig trained until he was about 80, and unfortunately got dementia and died. I think he was 84, but I love his comment about, “You can get anything you want in life, as long as you help other people get what they want,” and I really believe from a trust based selling perspective, that this is what we need to do. This is what resource managers need to do.

I want to give you a few ideas on what some banks are doing and what resources they’re using to affect this whole process. I hate follow-up letters. I think they’re about the … Other than cold calls, I think it’s about the stupidest thing that you could do. Now, you notice, I didn’t say I hate follow-up. I hate follow-up letters, and so do you, and so do your people. They don’t do them, or they’ll copy and paste paragraphs from other letters that they’ve sent, and they’ll put the wrong name of the company in and it’s just a complete nightmare. I do believe in follow-up, however. This is called a conversation recap. This is a bank we’ve worked with in Michigan for about 15 years. Here’s how this works. It’s really simple. Banker takes notes on a call … Yes, 100% of the time, I hope. Whose notes are those? They’re the prospect’s or the client’s. What happens to the notes? Well, they go in a file.

Why don’t we give them back to the client and make sure that they know that we heard what they said? We put this together and call it a conversation recap. You’ll see that it’s a Word document. It’s real easy. You want a copy of it? I’ll send it to you. It’s easy. It’s a template. Was it a discovery call? Who was on the call? What was the date of the call? Who was there for the prospect? Who gets copies of these? You’ll notice that in the middle is the vision or mission statement of the company, not the bank. Now what happens is four, five, six, 12 bullet points, but here’s one thing you will notice that’s not there, products, solutions, services. This is all about the company. This bank has reduced their calls to close by three over the last 15 years using that. They’re standing out in the community, they’re a billion-two bank. They’re a little community bank, but they stand up against the competitors, the bigger competitors because they do things a little bit differently.

Just a quick thing with this, one thing they do is they put their logo in the upper right hand corner, client/prospect logo in the upper left hand corner. As they make more calls, the logos get closer and closer together. When they’re presenting their solutions, they print out all of the conversation recaps and use that as kind of a beginning point for the solution, and the logos are right next to each other. What does that say? We were dating, we’re getting close, we met the parents, let’s get married. Easy, easy to do. By the way, how many … Don’t raise your hand. I don’t like when people do that. That’s crazy, but think how many sales people that you work with love your CRM system? They just … I mean, they can’t wait to get on the CRM system. How many of them love to do call reports? Okay? Here’s what this bank does. When the banker does their conversation recap, they highlight the recap, edit copy, edit paste into the CRM system. They’ve now done their call report. Real simple.

This is a bank that has 20 bankers. This is a very rigorous approach. This called Three Before Eight. It’s real simple. Every morning, the bankers send out three emails to someone of importance, client, prospect, center of influence, combination of the three, that land on their desk, the desk of the prospect, et cetera, before 8:00. They might send a lead, an article, a white paper, things like that. Last year, they worked 240 days, they sent 740 articles out, they had 20 bankers, 14,400 touches. Now the question is how do they know who to send stuff to? How do they know they’re not duplicating? They use Salesforce.com, and what Salesforce.com and most really good CRM systems, they blind copy Salesforce.com to the record of the prospect in their Salesforce.com system, so when they go out and they want to send an email out, they can go right back and say, “Did I send one of these to this person before? How long ago has it been? What did I send? Three Before Eight, very, very powerful.

Where do they find this stuff? Where do they find this stuff? I’ll give you a couple ideas. SmartBrief.com, SmartBrief.com. It is free. SmartBrief.com is a newsletter aggregator. There’s 150 different kinds of newsletters that are available to your people. You can get them in all kinds of different business and education, medical, things like that, and every morning you get an email from SmartBrief.com with four or five different little short articles that are hyperlinkable. You can tweet them, you can send them via electronics, you can print them out and send them, you can fax them. You can do whatever you want to do, and it’s all 100% free. SmartBrief.com. Another great tool is PRWeb, where you can go to the SMSA of any city in America and find out all the press releases from the previous day, or you can find out great best practices or different things like that.

Here’s a lead. Is this a lead for you? I’m going to be in Columbus, Ohio next week. Here’s a potential lead of a brand new attorney that I found in PRWeb.com. I get an email from them every single day. We need our resource managers to have resources to be able to use, and speaking of that, here’s one. Here’s one. We’ve talked about this a couple of times, and I just can’t tell you how proud I am that I know these people. The people at Vertical IQ have continued to enhance their profiles, the views and strategies of different kinds of industries. The thing I really like most, and what I like about Kevin and Bobby and Susan’s company is everything, but what I really like most is that every month there are brand new articles that resource managers can actually go to and say, “Here is what I can capture. Here’s what I can send out.” They do it all from their desk. They do it all from their desk. That’s the price of ignorance.

A lot of other resources available here to you and for you, and if you have any questions about any of these, about these websites, I’m really happy in any way to help. As we leave these resource managers today, here’s some questions you need to think about from a cultural perspective. How aligned is our conversations? Do our managers talk about conversations and then beat our people up for numbers? Because you’ll never have resource managers that way. What about my sales process and my sales management routines? How much am I interweaving this whole concept of resource management into my organization? I always ask, “Do you want a sales culture, or do you want a performance culture?” To me a performance culture is going to make the difference in a lot of money, a lot of sustained employment, and a lot of sustained clients. We’re done. I’m happy to take a few questions. I know you have to take a break, but folks, this is areal privilege and if you’re a client of this organization, of PrecisionLender, you are one fortunate bank. Thanks very much for letting me come, everybody. Bye-bye.