In the hyper-competitive world of banking, clients are always demanding greater levels of personalized service. In fact, it’s practically a prerequisite for entrusting institutions to manage their financial affairs and elevate the customer experience. This reality puts intense pressure on your relationship managers, who are not only responsible for helping to deliver that personalization, but also deepening existing client relationships and establishing meaningful new ones.
The truth is that relationship managers can make the difference between whether a customer remains loyal to a bank or chooses to begin a relationship with them at all. That’s why it’s so important to empower them to succeed by removing the barriers that make their jobs harder than they need to be.
One of those barriers is preparing the variety of sales and marketing collateral such as the presentations, pitchbooks, and proposals they need to personalize interactions and maximize the outcome of their meetings. While these and other materials are essential, creating them manually is a timely and inefficient process. More importantly, it’s one that can easily divert relationship managers’ time—time that could be spent on more valuable work, such as engaging prospects and customers face to face and growing existing relationships.
The benefits and challenges of content
Make no mistake. Highly personalized content—whether that’s reports, proposals, presentations or product offers—is an extremely important part of creating great customer experience. The customer feels more understood when they see individualized solutions presented to them, rather than generic offers.
Putting in the effort to prepare a tailor-made consultation shows that the relationship manager understands customers and their unique needs individually, making it significantly easier to build trust and sell more. Plus, it leads to greater customer satisfaction and retention—the ultimate goal for every relationship manager.
The problem is that when relationship managers create content ahead of client or prospect meetings, it’s never a copy-and-paste situation. They need to create and present personalized, valuable information that lets the customer know they’ve done their homework and truly understand the client’s individual financial circumstances, needs, and aspirations.
While personalized content is a crucial weapon in relationship managers’ arsenals, producing it can take days. That’s not surprising, considering it includes gathering data, sourcing the right marketing materials, ensuring everything is up to date and compliant, and packaging all of that into a professional presentation that’s in line with company message and brand guidelines.
Further complicating matters is the fact that at many banks, this information and collateral is stored in disparate systems, making it even more time-consuming to retrieve. This causes version control and compliance headaches, and costs the relationship manager time as they inspect each document to ensure accuracy.
Luckily technology provides a solution.
Empowering relationship managers with technology
So what’s the answer? Leveraging sales and marketing enablement technology can pay huge dividends. By automating many of the manual tasks needed to create valuable personalized content, for example, relationship managers can prepare for their all-important in-person meetings in a fraction of the time.
Sales and marketing enablement technology means that relationship managers can access the information they need in minutes. Plus, leveraging new technologies can help deepen client relationships thanks to improved data management, better analytical capabilities, and easy data extraction for reporting. Having this information available at the touch of a button saves enormous amounts of time and effort.
When you digitally manage all of your bank’s collateral through one system, it also helps you standardize your documents, eliminating tiresome formatting tasks and improving the effectiveness of individual materials that can be tracked and evaluated. And with access to deep content analytics, it’s easy for relationship managers to see what content is and isn’t working—giving them the ability to change up their approach.
While the time and resource savings might seem obvious, they are worth spelling out. Organizations using sales and marketing enablement technology have been able to reduce the time to produce content by as much as 83 percent.
The way forward
The less time your relationship managers spend project managing content updates, the more time they’ll have for true relationship management. Automating time-consuming manual processes like creating proposals, reports, and sales and marketing materials means your relationship managers can direct their time to activities that are of most value to the business.
