Cross-selling in banking

Customer value and cross-selling: potential-based sales management for banks

The buzzword of many banks these days is: More cross-selling – but preferably with a reduced promotion budget. However, the banking world has changed dramatically. With only a few exceptions, bank advisers no longer know their customers personally. CRM and SFA systems give little insight into customer potential. So how can the required objective be achieved in this environment?

The Customer Value Factory, developed by Dastani Consulting, strongly supports the interlinking of products through efficient cross-selling. The tried and tested concept is made up of three interconnected components.

The centrepiece is the customer value prediction, which determines the sales potential of each individual product group. The Customer Value Predictor shows, for example, the expected credit requirement or the assumed investment in funds and interest bonds within the following 12 months – for each individual customer. In this way, valid predictions can be made on the basis of historic transactions.

The result is a dream for marketers: cross-selling tips can now be lodged at every point of contact – at the self-service printer, cash machine or in the call centre or bank branch. Customers are addressed on the topics that interest them most. The messages are perceived as being relevant and therefore interesting.

The Factory also generates important strategic impulses: turnover projections and earnings indicators based on individual customer potentials are designated for each branch, each region and for the individual business areas. The customer value gives indications as to which parts of the organisation are in a position to exploit the potentials – and which are not.

The Factory also generates important strategic impulses: turnover projections and earnings indicators based on individual customer potentials are designated for each branch, each region and for the individual business areas. The customer value gives indications as to which parts of the organisation are in a position to exploit the potentials – and which are not.

But how to convert the projections to genuine leads? To solve this, we have developed Customer Value-Based Lead Generation. This tool optimises the centralised generation of leads in terms of permanently improving the cost per lead and its inherent quality. Scoring systems automatically select the best addresses – they learn in real time how to interpret the influence of customer value indicators and historic transactions on the contact performance. At the same time, they identify particularly effective call agents and dialogue strategies. This results in the best salespeople being connected to the best customers.

High lead quality and sales commitment must be assured in order to finalise a transaction from these expensively generated leads. This is taken care of by our Sales Controlling, which accompanies each lead through its "lifecycle". The controlling determines the lead quality, breaking this down for example into individual telemarketing agents and campaigns. At the same time, it is able to measure the level of commitment of individual salespeople and/or branches.

The Customer Value Factory enables successful banks to realise the potentials of their customers systematically and efficiently. It forms the centrepiece of an intelligent cross-selling strategy, delivering key tools from the allocation of requirements via the generation of leads to the final sale.