Welcome to Marks & Associates Consulting!

Marks & Associates offers marketing and management consulting to a broad range of companies. Focused on marketing and management issues our consultants key their work to your goals to get results that fit your firm within time, cost and other resource budgets.

Having worked with firms in various industries, much of our work has focused on financial services. While most industries understand that training salespeople to sell their products is only part of the total marketing package, many in financial services continue to struggle with the concept. Marks & Associates believes that it takes a well-developed, comprehensive marketing strategy, including product packaging, materials design, direct marketing, advertising, public relations, multimedia applications, trade show selling, sales management as well as sales training, to maximize a bank’s ability to attract and retain customers. We use our banking knowledge and marketing expertise to help your bank put that whole package together.

At the strategic level, Marks & Associates helps you assess your bank’s strengths and weaknesses, set marketing goals and objectives, and develop strategies and tactics that support those goals. Tactically, we work with you to design, conduct and analyze market research; collect and digest competitive information; develop and schedule marketing activities, such as direct mailings, newsletters, customer seminars and advertising; write and produce marketing materials, such as brochures, pamphlets, articles, and Internet sites; improve internal communications between product management, marketing support and relationship managers; as well as develop sales tracking and follow-up systems.

When combined with the unequaled effectiveness of our sales training, Marks & Associates’ marketing consulting provides the most effective way to jump start stalled corporate banking sales, more deeply penetrate existing customers and accelerate market expansion.

For several years now we have been hearing about the "sales culture" that banks have adopted. Is that all just talk?
For twenty years, banks have been turning to consumer products and technology companies for expertise in selling. They thought that if they bought a sales culture, they could just install it -- or institute it. Bring in one "salesy" senior manager from Xerox or IBM and the troops would fall in line, or so the philosophy went. But that didn't happen, because banks continued to hire economics and finance majors at entry level relationship manager positions. They joined all the other economics and finance majors already occupying middle and senior management positions. In the end, only the poor managers from Xerox or IBM had marketing degrees and they were so frustrated with the lack of sales training, sales management, general marketing and sales support that they quit.

Banks are still learning that you can't just buy a sales culture and install it. You have to hire the right kinds of people - not just managers but line salespeople, too. Then you have to train them not just to understand your products, but to understand physically and mentally how businesses work and how their treasury functions operate. When they understand this they will no longer fear going out and talking to companies -- existing customers or new prospects -- about their business, their business problems and how the bank can help them solve those problems.

What can banks do to reverse the slide?
First, they can begin to view businesses with the same marketing sense they use to view consumers. That means they must develop integrated marketing plans targeted toward attracting businesses to the bank. These plans must incorporate various communications elements, including advertising, public relations, trade relations, special events, seminars, direct mail and other marketing tools.

First, remember, everything written, verbal or electronic sends a message to your customers and prospects. Their willingness to listen to and absorb your message depends not just on their interest in what you say but on how well you say it. We are all bombarded with dozens of letters, brochures, and pleas for our money every day. Banks must focus on what they can do and say to make their pitch compelling.