Business Development and Relationship Managers at commercial banks are tasked with the almost impossible: keeping up with extensive lists of potential prospect companies and executives across a wide array of industries. Adding to the challenge of establishing and building relationships with small-to-medium-sized businesses is the fact that these companies are hard to find, the landscape is constantly changing (new companies are meeting the targeted revenue criteria all the time), and their executives can be even harder to find. Executive job moves are not as well publicized at SMBs as they are at larger companies, and people tend to move around more often.

RelPro’s commercial banking clients are looking for maximum business development impact with minimal wasted effort. They found that alternate sales intelligence tools, and other “do-it-yourself” options (reading newspapers and scouring websites), were returning outdated or inaccurate data that was actually leading to ineffective outreach and creating additional work. To make matters worse, clients were typically using multiple data sources (with multiple logins and multiple subscriptions) to piece together the relationship intelligence they needed, and this all wastes valuable time, and leads to unnecessary expense (one client said to us “it’s not a question of how many sources I am paying for, it’s how many I am actually having the time to use effectively”).

All in all, our customers expressed a need to make better use of their bankers and associates time through an integrated and efficient business development workflow, leading them to quality data and insights on their prospects and clients.

As commercial banks (national & regional leaders, and local community banks) initially adopted RelPro as a relationship intelligence platform, they began to understand that staying on top of prospect and client developments does not have to be a disorganized slog. The process begins with the discovery phase where a business development manager or researcher is able to quickly identify, research and qualify new companies to focus on, and the specific executives at those companies to target (including their contact details). Using up to 100 possible filters integrated into a RelPro search, users were able to organize, refine and focus their prospect lists.

For those relationship managers covering existing clients (in some cases, hundreds of companies), RelPro’s multi-sourced integrated data provides alternative employees to contact at companies, which is invaluable when relationships become single-threaded and “stuck” by an unhelpful individual, or where relationships are “at-risk” when a long-time contact departs and leaves the client uncovered. RelPro enables commercial bankers to identify new senior contacts to re-establish, “save” or upsell the relationship, and automated research to identify background on the executive and other common denominators or conversation starters to get the new relationship off to a fast and productive start.

The next step is to set up relevant RelPro alerts to notify users about important developments related to their targets. The time users save using these tools, in conjunction with additional useful data points, allows for more meaningful connections at appropriate times. RelPro’s multi-sourced research is key in providing the accuracy while also going beyond the superficial layer of information that is more easily accessible.

RelPro Alerts are invaluable for those accounts that seem to lie dormant for months, and then something happens at the company (or with an executive there) that creates an opportunity to engage and grow the relationship. RelPro alerts continue to track companies and executives for developments so relationship managers don’t have to. When something actually happens, RelPro lets the banker know about it, prompting them to take action with these companies without spending the time to manually research them all the time.

Our largest client in the commercial banking sector reports bankers saving about 15-20 minutes identifying and qualifying each prospect. With some of these account managers tracking as many as 500 targets, those efficiencies become game-changers, allowing bankers to execute their business development plans more efficiently, spend more time with prospects and clients and less time identifying and qualifying new leads. At this bank, what began as a pilot program with 30 users has expanded into a full-fledged national deployment of RelPro with more the 500 users across Business Development, Relationship Management and Research Associates.

A bonus to this productive workflow is that it’s also building the reputation of the bank with their clients. Their business development campaigns can focus on higher quality targeted marketing campaigns and no longer rely on flat-out cold calls. RelPro enables banks to target specific companies and executives with relevant content and interactions, when they need it, without annoying them with extraneous attempts to connect. Another well-known commercial bank using RelPro regained an important client by tracking her professional developments after she had initially ended the business relationship. After an extended period of time, a RelPro alert informed the user of a timely piece of new information. That knowledge restarted the conversation and rekindled the business partnership.

With results like these it’s easy to understand why the commercial banking industry is turning to RelPro’s relationship intelligence and time-saving workflow integrations to accelerate their business development and relationship growth initiatives.

To learn more, please visit RelPro's Commercial Banking Solutions page.

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