Pub. 4 2015 Issue 3

The CommunityBanker 10 O ver 400 years ago, Francis Bacon said “Knowledge is power. If knowledge is utilized properly it yields money which is power in today’s times.” The same is true today. Knowledge is more important than ever in the business world and has led to much more effec- tive sales and marketing through the use of customer, prospect, officer, branch and market information and analytics. Today, bankers can be equipped to answer questions like: “Who are my best customers?”, “Who is most likely to buy?”, “Which sales officers need coaching?”, “How many new customers did we get last week?”, “Which branches have the most un- tapped opportunities?” and many more. The raw material of knowledge is data. It becomes knowledge when placed into context and combined with the experience and creativity of people. Banks are awash with data, but data needs to be organized and accessible. The ac- cessibility is provided by business intelligence solutions like SNL Banker. This paper will discuss three key ways to orga- nize data for sales and marketing purposes: Householding, Product Grouping and Household Assignments. These form the foundation for understanding the customer relationship, assessing customer opportunities, establishing new goals and assigning responsibility for execution. HOUSEHOLDING Householding is the process whereby individuals or businesses are linked to all their customer accounts and are then brought together as joint decision-makers whenever it makes sense. For example, Jo Smith owns a savings account, Josephine Smith owns a mortgage and Jossie Smith owns a credit card. If there are common data attributes (e.g., email Organizing Sales & Marketing Data to Improve ROI By Guenther Hartfeil, Associate Director of Product Management address or tax ID), these three different names can all be brought together as one person with three accounts. If Jose- phine has a joint checking account with Alex Mays and shares an address and phone number, they can be brought together as a household. Similarly, if three businesses are owned by two people, those three businesses can be separately identified as customers but can also be brought together as a household if there is enough visible evidence to link them together. Householding software uses account information such as tax ID or name and combines it with special lookup tables (e.g., nicknames) to process business rules which define individu- als, households and addresses. Each of these outputs is given a special key or number that does not change over time. Plus, each of these keys is attached to every name and account on the system. A TYPICAL HOUSEHOLD WITH MULTIPLE CUSTOMERS AND ACCOUNTS For SNL Banker, a super household key is also pro- duced—more on that later. The table below ( fig. A ) is an example of a simple house- hold. The constant household key is shown but the address key and customer keys are not displayed. These two individu- als, who do not appear related based on their name, share an address and own a joint checking account together. Note that Desirae does not own a credit card with the bank even though Emerson has one. Since credit cards are sold and used individually, a great cross-sell opportunity is to identify all households with two or more adult customers but only one credit card. If the sales force has access to this view, their pre-call planning can be done in record time. The relationships and F ig. A—Household Key F E A T U R E