Marketing System to Boost New Business

Amboy national bank is wedding high-tech marketing with its "high- touch" customer acquisition strategy by implementing a marketing customer information file (MCIF) system from Atlanta-based Harland, called Max$ell. The bank is using the system to find new business customers in the central New Jersey area it serves. The system gives the bank's marketing people detailed business profiles that they can use before making sales calls. "The system allows us to see a business's entire relationship with us, as well as the size of its sales and the number of employees," says Amboy marketing associate Carolyn Baum. "We can give our 13 branch managers a list of top customers which they in turn can use to sell additional services. We can determine what services our customers might need. We can target, for example, businesses with less than $1 million in sales that have a commercial loan with us but lack a business line of credit."

MAX$ELL creates a picture of each client's behavior, says Scott Hansen, a vp in Harland's financial markets division. "Harland collects publicly available data from across the United States and MAX$ELL is built to download it to a bank's database to provide an extensive profile of each customer," he explains. The profiles show how much a business is worth, how much equity it has and how it uses credit.

Baum says in one year the system has given Amboy an advantage over competing banks that don't research sales calls as extensively, dramatically increasing the bank's number of accounts and balances. The bank is now considering implementing MAX$ELL's telemarketing enhancer and a system feature that prompts sales people to make return visits to their clients.

-peterson tfn.com