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.