During the last great recession, nobody trusted banks. Financial experts extolled the virtues of credit unions on national television. Credit unions gained 1% market share.
Recently, several high-profile banks failed and sent shockwaves through the financial world. The biggest beneficiaries of scared consumers were the largest banks. Credit unions were barely affected.
Clearly, credit unions shouldn’t rely on new members for growth. Rather, they must turn to their existing members to fuel that growth. This brings up the old “hunter vs farmer” sales question.
Read on to learn more—and to see how Vertice AI is providing a new answer.
Hunting vs Farming in Sales
For credit unions, “sales” isn’t exactly the point. There aren’t really sales executives in the industry. And when it comes to members and products, there’s a focus on need, financial health, member experience, and any number of other critical factors.
But there is an eye for growth. And any sales executive can talk your ear off about hunting vs farming in driving revenue. Here’s the Cliff’s notes:
“Hunting” is the strategy of going out and “hunting” for new accounts to bring in revenue.
“Farming” is the strategy of growing the value of existing accounts with new products, upsells, and cross-sells.
So, although credit unions should always look for routes of memberization (hunting), the most reliable growth will come from nurturing the members they already have (farming). In our research, the cost to acquire a new member today can range from $350-$1000 per member, while the cost to cross-sell a new product to an existing member is typically 20-25% of that investment.
Introducing Vertice AI
Vertice AI falls into several of the categories of fintechs that we keep an eye on: cloud-based, AI-powered, and credit union-focused.
The goal of Vertice AI is to help credit unions know which products and services each member needs and when. In other words, they help credit unions tend to each member and help them grow based on the life stage of each member. Right product at the right time.
In short, Vertice AI helps credit unions become farmers.
The strategy is simple, but it’s in 3 parts:
- Know. Vertice AI uses the data credit unions already have to understand where each member is today and quantify their member potential.
- Grow. Then, they use AI to predict the ideal member product journey and recommend the best-fit products, channel of engagement and tactic for product adoption along the way. (Because AI is helping to steer this ship, the “ideal journey” will be updated constantly with new data.)
- Measure. You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Vertice AI ensures that every action of product, channel and tactic engagement is evaluated for effectiveness—and that future efforts achieve similar or better results.
Half of the CU 2.0 team is made up of long-tenured sales executives and mid-career marketers. We’re very familiar with the “hunting vs farming” sales issue. And all of us are eager to see credit unions grow and succeed.
That’s why companies like Vertice AI pique our interest. Here’s a company that uses modern, flexible architecture and cutting-edge technology to accomplish a simple, necessary, and old-school need:
Farming.
Vertice AI helps credit unions grow their member relationships—and relationship value—reliably.
Link to article: https://cu-2.com/vertice-ai-hunter-vs-farmer/
