Category Archives: Retail Banking

Market Research Pitfalls, Part 1: The Art of Asking Questions

In working with clients, we often encounter marketing organizations that have been snakebitten by ineffectual research to the point that they no longer see the value in conducting it at all. Why is it so hard to produce valuable research?

One reason is that many don’t understand that the most natural and effective starting point for research is with a strategic problem. They think of research as a box to check rather than as a tool that can help them optimize their performance. Or, they think of research only as a tool for certain situations—focus groups for brand work, surveys for customer satisfaction measurement etc.

To be sure, there is an art to identifying and articulating strategic problems in a way that enable research support. It is the step that lies between identifying an issue—a product or sales region not making their numbers, a marketing program not generating the projected number of leads—and a proposed solution where this art can most effectively be practiced. In reality, however, most organizations simply want to make changes and move on. They don’t bother to ask the questions which are critical to producing effective, strategically vital research. The answers to questions like the following, delivered through well-designed research, play a central role in strategic and tactical decision-making:

  • Do customers in the underperforming sales region have different attitudes than those in other regions?
  • Did customers not know about the new product or were they simply not interested?
  • Are prospects responding more strongly to competitors’ lead generation efforts and if so, why?

Conducting research is not a panacea—it won’t give you all the answers and it’s not worth the investment in all situations—but it can and should help more than it does. Organizations just need to stop and ask the right questions.

Tablet Computers’ Killer App?

Anyone who works in sales enablement needs to take notice of how rapidly tablet computers are sweeping across the corporate landscape. According to recently published research from Model Metrics, 68% of companies plan to have tablets deployed in the field by 2012. Over 40% have deployed or plan on deploying them by the end of 2011. And almost 50% of those deployments, according to the study, involve sales force automation applications.

As we have blogged previously, the rapid and widespread adoption of tablets represents a huge opportunity for organizations that are willing to make an investment in sales enablement. Even further, deploying tablets to the field in the absence of high-quality sales tools designed for the tablet platform is a waste of the technology investment. In many ways, sales tools—such as automated proposal builders, presentation templates, and product comparisons—should be a “killer app” for the tablet in B2B selling because they represent a perfect alignment of technology benefits with user requirements. For sales tools to be effective, they must be easy to use, intuitively interactive, and fast: all of these characteristics are part of the raison d’etre of the tablet device. Moreover, though, tablets enable sales tools to go a step beyond the status quo because, if done well, they can facilitate customer participation. Compared to handing a prospect a feature-based product comparison sheet, how much more effective would it be to hand prospects a tablet loaded with a diagnostic app that walks them through a series of questions about features, benefits, and value that highlight key points of differentiation for your product versus the competitions’?

Perhaps the most important component of the tablet opportunity in the sales force is that tablets can provide significant support to the majority of sales people in the vast middle of the bell curve—not the stars but those who have some skills and the best of intentions. If the greater structure, consistency, and interactivity enabled by the tablets can raise the average performance of this group just a few percentage points, it can represent millions of dollars in revenue gains.

More banks launch initiatives for National Small Business Week

Earlier this month, we posted a blog on small business initiatives from Citi, TD Bank and Wells Fargo, which were introduced in advance of National Small Business Week. As National Small Business Week is taking place this week, other leading banks have also introduced new small business initiatives.

  • Chase introduced a number of initiatives, including incentives of up to $1,000 for new small business checking customers, as well as Instant Storefront from Chase, a solution that enables small businesses sell products online.
  • Bank of America launched a suite of small business charge cards (see our blog on this launch).  In addition, the bank has partnered with SCORE to develop a five-part series of three-hour workshops for small businesses, entitled “Simple Steps for Starting Your Business.”
  • Capital One partnered with Better Business Bureau to introduce Managing Credit – Made Simpler, a set of resources to help small businesses to manage credit.
  • American Express OPEN introduced AdManager, a tool to help small businesses manage online advertising campaigns

It is notable that the number of small business campaigns is much larger this year than it was for National Small Business Week in 2010, reflecting the improved economy over the past year, as well as banks’ renewed interest in the small business market.