Key Takeaways from Year 1 - School of Bank Marketing & Management

From my classmate, Amanda Rolfs, Marketing Assistant at Central National Bank:

Most valuable has to be most of the classes for me. I simply can't pick any one class. However, if you forced me to answer, I'd say I got the most out of the PR & Communication class or the Planning class. I'd have to agree with Phil, Compliance class was definitely the most interesting. It's too bad Chuck Lewis wasn't the headlining comedian at the comedy club. I think we'd have been rolling on the floor. Concept we're using already? I'm picking up bits and pieces from all of the courses; however, the stuff I came home and started right away has got to be some of the tips from the Digital Marketing class. We are doing social media already, but I picked up some great pointers from that and immediately incorporated them into my workday routine.

Note: The views presented here are the personal views of our ABA School of Bank Marketing & Management participants and do not reflect the views of their respective banks.

Key Takeaways from Year 1 - School of Bank Marketing & Management

More key takeaways from Year 1. Today's takeaway is from my classmate, Phil Lawrence, AVP/Marketing Specialist at OmniAmerican Bank.

I have found I use the greatest amount of information to be Web related, whether talking about the need to style our writing towards a more staccato style or taking into consideration search engine parameters.  The most useful information so far has been the ongoing discussions on maximizing our responses to direct mail.  The most interesting? I'd pay money to hear Chuck Lewis do "stand-up compliance" at a comedy club.  The man's a compliance artist.

To add an editorial comment, Chuck Lewis' compliance presentation was probably worth the price of the school itself. I don't think any of us knew that compliance could be so entertaining!

Note: The views presented here are the personal views of our ABA School of Bank Marketing & Management participants and do not reflect the views of their respective banks.

Key Takeaways from Year 1 - School of Bank Marketing & Management

One of the first things we discovered (during the reception dinner) as the Class of 2012 for the ABA School of Bank Marketing and Management was that each year, the curriculum is re-tooled based on feedback from the previous year.

From a marketing knowledge standpoint, that's awesome. The school is always evolving to meet the needs of the current marketing environment. But, there is still a solid focus on the fundamentals of marketing, management and sales.

Here is a key takeaway from one of my classmates, Angela Preston, AVP of Marketing at ABC Bank:

The takeaway that I wanted to start immediately (and actually did) was the Hot Seat training!  It was taught during the sales training class at the very end. The day after I came back to work, I used it in our monthly teller Education/Training class.  It worked so well!  We had a group of 6 people in the class, and I had each one of them sit in the hot seat and had the others ask questions about something they knew a lot about (icebreaker).  So they all got a chance to see how it feels to answer questions about something they already know a lot about.  It is interesting because not only was this a great tool once they got to the product/service part of the hot seat training...but when they were doing the icebreaker, they learned so much about their peers in the room.  So the takaway from this type of training is really two folds!!

Note: The views presented here are the personal views of our ABA School of Bank Marketing & Management participants and do not reflect the views of their respective banks.

First Thoughts from SBMM Class 2012

Perhaps the fact that my first blog post comes almost a month after school ended demonstrates that when you go to SBMM, you get a LOT of information and have a LOT to digest.

Or maybe it simply means that I mistakenly scheduled vacation almost immediately following SBMM.

As with most things, the truth lies somewhere in between. (Also, I would not recommend scheduling a vacation immediately after SBMM.)

Year 1 was an intensive week of marketing and sales fundamentals.

Perhaps like many financial institutions, mine requires a report following any school/conference of takeaway items that can be used by our bank. I stopped at 10 items, but I probably could have gone on for pages. Many of my Year 1 colleagues had the same reaction.

For me, an interesting concept that I brought back for my senior management team was an exercise that we did in our Marketing Planning course about who our target customers were.

Four questions. One answer: If you don't know who your target customers are, then you are trying to navigate without a map. And...most banks don't know who their target customers are.

As a community bank, I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that, historically, our focus hasn't been on a "target customer" because that implies that we have one set of customers who we treat differently (ie better) than our other customers. Moving from zero to "targeted customer list" is a HUGE leap for us.

A first step toward "target market," which was affirmed during one of our classes, is that different customers do want to be treated differently.

We don't need to treat any group of customers worse than others. We just need to treat customers the way they want to be treated. From a customer service standpoint, that is how you provide exemplary service.

Simple. Revolutionary. And that was just one of my takeaways from SBMM.

Note: The views presented here are the personal views of our ABA School of Bank Marketing & Management participants and do not reflect the views of their respective banks.