It’s never too early to start thinking about 2017.
When it comes to strategic planning, there are many vital and wonderful voices in the room:
Finance: It’s all about making more than you spend, right?- HR: The staff drive the success of any company.
- IT: Technology is the glue that holds our back office and customer delivery together.
- Legal: Ever-changing regulations make compliance a louder and louder voice.
- Operations: Day-to-day branch delivery accounts for an enormous amount of our management time and our bottom-line success.
Together these voices form an exquisite chorus, rising and falling in harmony.
But what voice should facilitate the planning?
What about the role that is responsible for:
- Competitive intelligence
- Customer data-mining
- Your brand image
- Market trends
These are also the folks that are inherently wired to:
- Focus on ROI (Finance)
- Improve internal communications (HR)
- Understand the data in the core, manage your website and gauge the experience of your online and mobile banking (IT)
- Keep up with regulatory changes and compliance (Legal)
- Work hand-in-hand, every day, with front line delivery (Operations)
Marketing professionals may cast the widest net in terms of overall knowledge of your bank or credit union. They are the voice of your customer and they should have more empirical data about your market than anyone in the room.
Without a strong reliance on your marketing team, you may end up making decisions based on the one-off experience of the handful of people in your room.
“I just saw the XYZ bank building. It’s so big that they must be taking all of our business.”
“Why target Millennials? I don’t think that they have good paying jobs.”
“As long as our staff use customer’s names, we don’t need to train them on the touchy-feely stuff.”
When you have marketing as the conductor of your choir, the harmony of managerial voices will work together to solve internal issues and plan for future success while the conductor keeps their eye on how each decision will impact the customer and leverage you against your competition.
Next week, we’ll focus on the type of data you’ll want to collect when preparing for your strategic planning.
In addition to being a bank and credit union strategic consultant (and strategic planning facilitator), MarketMatch also has nationally and internationally requested speakers. Contact us to bring our marketing ideas to your institution or next conference.
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