Banking's greatest opportunities are often overlooked and underdeveloped. In fact, a veritable gold mine is already in your bank - the customer! Have you made the most of your customers' potential? You have a full line of quality financial products and services to offer, but chances are even your best customers do business with the competition. This isn't necessarily because of pricing or product or trustworthiness. It's often due to a simple lack of effort. We all know that it is easier and more cost-effective to retain and cultivate an existing customer than it is to attract new ones. Yet, many customers are never exposed to the full range of products and services available to them. In most cases, all you have to do is ask! Relationship Banking is the key to realizing the potential of your bank's existing resources: your staff, your customers and your product line. By cross-selling products to your customers, you gain an advantage in market share, retention rates, fee income and, ultimately, profitability. Author Dwight Ritter offers workable solutions which can be put to immediate use. Inside Relationship Banking, you will find the components of a successful program, including: . Financial products and services: By identifying how your product line relates to customer needs, its appeal can skyrocket. This comprehensive analysis includes everything from savings accounts to mutual funds. Lead Product Selling: By identifying those products which customers automatically expect and linking them to related products, you create natural opportunities for effective and productive cross-selling. Lead Product Selling helps bankers meet the needs and raise the awareness of their customers.Improving communications: Good communications are essential to build, nurture and expand any customer relationship. By asking the right questions, opportunities quickly become apparent. By learning how to listen, needs can be fulfilled and relationships can be cemented. Measuring performance and productivity: Without proper tracking, no program can be at its most effective. Relationship Banking includes a tested plan for tracking the results of cross-selling efforts.

This book is about generating profitable revenue from existing clients, and converting part-time clients into 100 percent full-time clients. Professionals and firms that offer financial services want to enjoy continued organic growth, and maximize the value of their business. Retaining and developing existing clients is one of the challenges they encounter in the process. The financial services industry is currently facing several key challenges: increasing competition, industry consolidation, rapidly changing technology, a soft market (for rates, premiums, and fees), and an increasing number of regulatory requirements. All these factors make it difficult for firms to produce consistent, positive, organic growth. This book is a follow-up to the author’s previous book The Financial Sales Handbook: A Professionals Guide to Becoming a Top Producer. Although this book is an extension of the first, readers can be confident in approaching it as a stand-alone book. Cross-Selling Financial Services: A Professional’s Guide to Account Development is for experienced professionals and firms who want to protect their existing top clients and revenue, and maximize the long-term growth and profitability of their business. The book will also help professionals to sharpen their account development capabilities. It is designed to be the nucleus for corporate training programs, as well as a guide for self-employed professionals who must market and sell to stay in business.

A how-to guide--subtitled A Consultative Guide to Cross-Selling--designed to develop the essential selling skills needed to effectively market the broad range of credit and noncredit services banks now offer. Updated and revised, it offers bankers a framework they can use to assess their sales effectiveness, improve their post-sales-call evaluation, and recover during a call.

How to change a bank from a passive to an active selling organization, by cross-selling financial services. In the wake of bank deregulation, the financial services industry has become intensely competitive--banks now engage in research, advertising, and product development. This book shows how to redirect effort into selling, and how to increase the performance and sophistication of a bank's sales staff. There is practical discussion of the unique features of sales in banking today, and sales techniques, backed up by case studies.

Acquiring, retaining, and developing clients are the major steps for any successful business; failure to accomplish these steps is the major reason many professionals and firms fail to achieve their full potential.The financial services industry is currently facing its biggest challenge: increased competition; smarter buyers who want to deal with professionals instead of sales people; and the emergence of social media, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google. The Financial Sales Handbook: A Guide to Become a Top Producer is for experienced professionals as well as for those who want to make the transition from managing work to more effective selling. The book is also for professionals who want to sharpen their skills. It is intended as the nucleus for corporate training programs as well as for self-employed professionals who must market and sell to stay in business.

Creating Value in Financial Services is a compilation of state-of-the-art views of leading academics and practitioners on how financial service firms can succeed in today's competitive environment. The book is based on two conferences held at New York University: the first, `Creating Value in Financial Services', held in March 1997, and the second, `Operations and Productivity in Financial Services', in April 1998. The book is essentially designed to be a compendium of leading edge thinking and practice in the management of financial services firms. There is no book today that has this focus. It contains ideas that can apply to other service industries. Topics addressed are increasingly important worldwide as the financial services industries consolidate and search for innovative new directions and ways to create value in a fiercely competitive environment.