Customer expectations in retail banking are evolving and getting more sophisticated. Yet, many banks haven’t been able to translate this into sales. And a strong reason is the limitations of banks’ digital capabilities, as McKinsey notes in its studies covering the US, China, and major European countries.
Without a sales acceleration platform, your retail bank will continue losing business to competitors that use such a solution. A sales acceleration platform for retail banking provides your sales teams valuable insights with which to tailor their pitches for each prospect and convert more leads than ever.
The Need of a Sales Acceleration Platform in Retail Banking
There are many ways such a platform can improve sales for retail banks. Here are the 4 top ways:
1. Increases sales by learning more about prospects:
Businesses today typically generate more data than they can leverage. You might be swamped with unconsolidated data, but without a smart platform that organizes all this data into meaningful, actionable insights, your sales teams may not benefit at all.
A sales acceleration platform makes selling a great deal more efficient for you. It organizes all the data and helps you understand your prospects up close. Are they looking for a new credit card? Is it time for them to begin investing for their child’s college tuition fees? How are they responding to your recent marketing campaign? What products are they currently using?
By building actionable insights from granular data, your sales acceleration platform for retail banking will finetune your understanding about the financial goals of your prospects. It removes all repetitive, admin tasks from your sales teams’ to-do lists and instead enables them to focus on customer-centric sales efforts and translate these leads into revenue.
2. Uncovers more cross-selling opportunities
Selling to an existing customer is easier, faster and upto 7X cheaper (Source). The question is: how can retail banks actually get better at cross-selling?
The answer is a smart sales acceleration platform. Such a platform lets each of your departments access neatly organized customer information. Using the information it has collected and processed, the platform will provide clear pointers on what product should you cross-sell next.
Because the platform organizes all the data in one place, it guides your teams on what products they should pitch at what stage of the customer’s relationship with your bank. That ensures optimising cross-selling opportunities and keeping your customers profitably happy.
Last but not the least, the centralized data lets you serve your customers much better. With access to all the relevant data, your teams can swiftly resolve customer queries without having to push the customer from extension phone number to the next.
3. Gives contextualized nudges for better conversion
A prospect that’s just entering your sales funnel needs a very different kind of information from what a prospect at the bottom of the funnel needs. Simple sales tools are not even close to helping you distinguish this.
One of the important reasons a sales acceleration platform for retail banks helps sell more is its ability to build context at scale. That means your sales teams can be a way more agile while responding to prospects. This speed can be critical, because, as this study suggests, sales reps that respond faster are much more likely to win more customers.
Such a platform can be considered ‘intelligent’ because it can put two and two together and provide contextual nudges. For instance, it will do tons of number-crunching to figure out whether this is the right time to follow-up, whether the prospect will appreciate a PDF more than a video and so on.
4. Makes selling efficient by minimizing resource wastage
Traditional sales tools stop at merely collecting some data. They won’t, for instance, carry out cohort analysis or provide you a strong understanding of why some leads convert and others don’t.
A study suggests that about 50% of your prospects actually don’t match your ICP (Ideal Customer Persona) and hence may not be a fit for what you sell. Yes, this number could be smaller (or bigger) for retail banks in particular. However, if your analytics can’t help with lead qualification, a huge proportion of your sales-directed efforts are actually wasted chasing leads that have no chances of conversion.
By uncovering hidden trends and preferences, a sales acceleration platform will help you channel your resources in the right direction. What’s more, it will minimize the time and resources you spend on prospects that will churn out without converting. By hugely improving your efficiency in selling, such a platform becomes an invaluable asset.
Making it happen
If your bank isn’t using a sales acceleration platform, or is mistaking an outdated sales tool for one, it’s time to begin a conversation. A smart platform can directly and substantially increase your sales by leveraging data and freeing your sales teams from unprofitable admin tasks.
As they say, there’s no better time than today to take action for positive transformation. The right sales acceleration platform can help retail banks drive sales, bring revenue, and build a sustained growth narrative. We encourage you to check the collection of these case studies to see how various banks and financial institutions have benefitted from such a platform.