By Sean Brooks
As an executive, your time is a valuable asset, and your organization’s profitability depends on the efficient use of time. Managing time wisely requires, in part, that you do not pursue projects whose returns on investment, or value to the organization, do not justify the time or money required to complete them.
Projects with poor organizational alignment can sink companies and government agencies, or at least chart the wrong course. Implementing and executing on a systematic and consistent project selection approach can increase project value to your organization.
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By Sean Brooks
Have you ever wondered why your sales forecasts are off, you overshoot your budget estimates, or your projects miss critical deadlines? You believe that you’ve conducted thorough data analyses and yet the frustration of inaccurate estimates continues to haunt you. So what’s the problem? Where have you gone wrong?
You may be impairing your plans from the beginning by building them with numbers that represent “best guesses” in place of uncertain inputs. In other words, you’ve put one number into each spreadsheet cell that actually represents an uncertain, future quantity. Consider the following example:
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By Michael Deely
While attracting and retaining customers for your retail bank is certainly a difficult task, doing the same for B2B customers is an even more arduous challenge – especially when it comes to customer profitability.
In last week’s blog post, we covered the importance of a customer profitability analysis for retail banks, and next week, we’ll cover the calculation of customer lifetime value. Today, we’ll cover customer profitability analysis for business banking customers.
The Fickle SMB Market For Business Banking
Middle-market banks in search of growth consistently target small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Indeed, the SMB segment offers tremendous profit and growth potential since it’s perfectly aligned with the regional nature of middle-market and community banks.
SMBs account for more than 90 percent of companies across the country and, after some contraction during the latest recession, they are growing once again. In the United States alone, there are 8 million small businesses (those with sales between $100,000 and $10 million) and 160,000 medium-sized businesses (those with sales between $10 million and $500 million).
However, as many banks have discovered, SMB customers are more difficult to attract, retain and serve. One particular challenge for many banks is to match the needs of small business customers while still ensuring customer profitability. But by far the most difficult challenge is customer retention.
B2B banking customers are often more fickle than retail consumers because they’re motivated primarily by price. In fact, according to Barlow Research, almost 20% of small business customers are at risk of switching banks in the next year, and even more concerning: 48% of small businesses (and 42% of medium-sized businesses) report that they will use another bank for their next banking product purchase.
With so much business at stake for your bank, you need a thorough customer profitability analysis to ensure you’re maximizing your bottom-line growth.
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