Maintaining a Realistic Balance Between Marketing and Sales

Creating a balance between marketing and sales is an important step in ensuring your credit union efforts are successful.

Throughout this article, I’m going to refer to your members as customers. I know full well they are members, but I believe by calling them customers when we talk about sales, we make a better connection with the sales activities. So, in advance, I apologize if I offend anyone.

I’m going to start with a little story about a previous client I had the privilege of helping when I owned a marketing company. At one time, we were running similar loan campaigns at similar credit unions in two states. One campaign was wildly successful and the other, not so much. To try to get to the root cause of the disastrous return at the one credit union, I asked if I could do an analysis of the organization.

Long story short, what I found was that our marketing efforts could have made the phone ring all day long, but unbeknownst to the CEO, the loan officers refused to take new loan applications or appointments after 4:30 p.m. at night because they wanted to leave at 5 p.m. with everyone else. Now, this was a postal credit union, so imagine the timing of all this. The postal service runs early morning to mid-afternoon. Mail carriers and those at the post office worked hard all day to get off shift at 3 p.m. So if we do the math, that leaves only 1.5 hours available to take new loan applications.

As you can see from this story, the marketing and sales balance was strikingly off at this credit union.

I liken this to arriving at a department store a half an hour before it is scheduled to close for the evening, finding the perfect dress at a great price, taking it to the register and lo’ and behold, the cashier standing right by the register says, “I’m sorry. I can’t ring that up for you this evening.” How would you feel if that happened to you? Would you go back another day or find the product somewhere else?

Marketing vs. Sales

There are some people who believe marketing and sales are one in the same. I firmly disagree. Marketing is the announcement that you have something you want to sell. It’s what you do before and after the sale. It is the culling of consumers and building awareness that you are the right choice when the need arises. It’s about painting a picture in the consumer’s mind of the need. It’s everything that makes ‘the phone ring’ the first time and convinces past customers to buy from you again. Marketing includes anything that comes into contact with your customer.

Sales and marketing will always be natural partners. Working together is important, but so is independence. Their job functions are markedly different.

Marketing is more than pretty pictures and fancy prose. It’s about business – the business of getting business. Marketing responsibilities include:

• Establish and justify the company’s best competitive product mix
• Create, sustain, and interpret customer relationships
• Locate and profile potential markets
• Generate quality sales leads
• Develop effective selling tools
• Analyze and track competitors and compare and contrast key products
• Develop, promote, train and police the company brand
• Simplifies the purchasing process

Right smack in the middle are items meant to support the sales process. Once again suggesting a balance of marketing and sales and both working closely together for success. Now, what does that mean for the credit union marketplace?

Marketing is the responsibility for your entire organization and should be viewed as an item in many more job descriptions than one.

It encompasses finance because it’s about knowing the components to pricing your product. It’s also about finance because your marketer will understand the competition and how their pricing compares. It’s a full understanding of the product features and benefits and how they play out against competition in the marketplace.

It’s working with the CEO to understand the roadmap to the company’s future. Without this knowledge, the marketer cannot successfully look far enough into the future to build the product/promotion plan and keep an eye on new developments.

Your IT person is also involved in marketing. Accurate marketing requires accurate data. Your marketer will need IT services to determine pockets of untapped sales, as well as demographics of those with a propensity to purchase. And, your operations team is heavily involved in marketing. These are the company’s eyes and ears to the customer. They should be reporting reasons for lost sales, closed accounts and customer comments.

Studies show it takes eight contacts before a potential customer makes the decision to become a customer. Those eight contacts come from the marketing side of the house. The time and expense these eight contacts take should not be taken lightly by leaving the sales conversation to chance.

Sales is the process by which someone closes the deal. It’s the “what do we do after the phone rings” event.

I’d like to be able to say sales involves every employee because they should be selling credit union products to their friends and relatives, but there’s no way to realistically manage a responsibility like that. It is safe to say that anyone who has contact with your customer should have sales responsibility and measurements written in their job description.

The key to a successful sales environment is having someone responsible for sales. Do you have someone like this who is responsible for growing your products per member ratio in your organization? I’m not talking about business development efforts to bring in new members. I’m talking about the day-to-day opportunities that present themselves to sell a product or service.

And, why do we call our member service teams member service? Doesn’t it sound like a phrase that is used to describe the process of taking care of our customers? What if we switch our paradigm to think about them as sales consultants? Simply by changing a title, you create perceptual shift and put employees on notice that they are required to do something more than wait to take an order.

Here’s the rub I hear all the time, “My tellers don’t like to sell. They’re not comfortable doing it.” I have to put this bluntly, as there’s simply no other way to answer. If you’re saying this, you’re hiring the wrong kind of talent. Effective sales skills come from a personality type – innate in whom the sales person is to their core. You can teach a sales person to be a teller much easier than you can impart in a teller the level of comfort needed to sell.

If you’re looking for ways to get the most out of your relationship with customers, I’ll challenge you to ask yourself – and honestly answer – these questions:

• Is my marketer and marketing function elevated to the right place within my organization?
• Does my marketer have access to assistance throughout the organization to accomplish all of the required responsibilities listed above?
• Have we created an environment in our organization that allows marketing and sales to unite as equals and work toward a common goal?
• Do job descriptions call out sales as a required responsibility?
• Have we given specific sales responsibility to someone in the organization or are we assuming everyone will do it simply because we ask?

Happy contemplating.

Amy Bucaida joined the Missouri Credit Union Association (MCUA) in February 2011 in her current role as the Vice President of Marketing and Communications. Immediately prior to coming to MCUA, Amy worked for three years with CUNA Mutual Group in sales and marketing. Previous to this experience, for six years she owned a marketing consulting company, dedicated to helping credit unions maximize their marketing budgets and get the biggest bang for the buck. During this time, she also helped credit union leaders analyze their operations to help them create greater efficiencies and prepare their organizations for the future.

Amy has worked in the credit union industry since 1981 in varying capacities, holding roles from teller to executive director of marketing and human resources. She worked with the National Credit Union Foundation as its director of grants and marketing, and the Iowa Credit Union League and The Members Group in a number of roles from director of research and compliance to director of marketing and communications. Her role as sales manager for the Outsource Marketing Division at Liberty Check Printers gave her great insight into what credit union leaders need and the challenges they experience.

Amy earned her Credit Union Development Education (CUDE) designation in 1990.