Bayshore National Bank Implements Sales Force Automation Tool
Corporate Profile:
Thomas Houston is the Executive Vice President of Technology for Bayshore National Bank Located on the periphery of Houston, in La Porte, Texas, Bayshore is a middle-sized community bank competing with all of the major banks in the Houston, Texas area. Thomas Houston's background is both in banking and technology, having previously owned a technology consulting company and, prior to that, having been involved in the technology side of the banking industry. Throughout his career, Houston has used many of the Sales Force Automation products on the market and has extensive experience with SFA tools in the banking industry.
Business Need and GoldMine Solution:
Three years ago, Bayshore National Bank started to develop a "Sales Culture". All Bayshore Bank employees were required to be salespeople, from the courier to the CEO. The development of this "Sales Culture" drove Bayshore to make major changes, changes that Houston and GoldMine helped define.
As part of implementing this new "Sales Culture", Bayshore evaluated several Sales Force Automation tools, including Vantive, SaleMaker and GoldMine. During the evaluation process, Houston visited Bank One, one of the ten largest banks in the US. At Bank One's Cincinnati office he saw how they were using GoldMine to obtain credit information and streamline Home Equity loan processing. Any qualified loan officer in the company could easily have a loan reviewed or underwritten, because of the flexibility of GoldMine. GoldMine had all the necessary features available off the shelf, while Vantive, a GoldMine competitor, had offered them a skeletal structure requiring customization that would have boosted the price to more than $400,000. When he walked away, Houston was thoroughly convinced that GoldMine was the right product for Bayshore Bank. What sold Houston and the bank on GoldMine were the features and functions, the flexibility, interface capability and its ability to be molded around the company—as opposed to making the company change in order to fit the product.
Once selected, GoldMine Software Corporation provided Houston with the name of a GoldMine Solutions Partner, Inimage With the help of Inimage's Linda Hurwitz, Houston was able to customize GoldMine for Bayshore's use in a matter of days.
Today, Bayshore has 75 users on GoldMine 4.0 spread throughout their main office in La Porte and their nine banking offices. Of the bank's employees, everyone—except the tellers and facility maintenance staff—are on GoldMine. Each of the nine banking offices has GoldSync set up to transfer data back to the main office on an hourly basis. That data in turn gets redistributed to all of the other sites within the next hour. The synchronization process is set up to run every day except Sunday. Bayshore set up each of its offices with a Static IP address to use GoldMine's direct Internet connection method.
Bayshore National Bank has interfaced GoldMine with a specialized database called Marketing Customer Information File (MCIF). MCIF is designed to look at all of the banking products Bayshore offers, and determine the most profitable and unprofitable products and the most profitable and unprofitable customers. The MCIF program then extrapolates the data to determine where they should focus their marketing efforts. Once this is determined, the information is loaded into GoldMine and sales calls and appointments are scheduled.
When a customer applies for a loan, Bayshore evaluates their credit standing by pulling credit bureau reports from institutions like TRW. This data is then loaded into a program from Fair, Isaac and Company, Inc., the preeminent credit scoring system in the United States. The resulting credit score determines whether the bank will offer the customer a loan, debit card, or other credit product. Bayshore links these scores into GoldMine for later review. This allows agents to score a customer today for a new car loan and to re-use that credit score when the customer returns in the near future with a credit card application and eliminates the need for Bayshore to go back to the credit bureau and through the credit scoring process again.
Like many banks, Bayshore has always had the problem of not maintaining customer information that can be passed on whenever a branch manager left the company. "This has been an ongoing problem, which, prior to GoldMine, had no solution," Houston said. Today, all customer historical data is stored in GoldMine so that when a new office manager starts, they can easily take over.
Johneice Randolph, Bayshore's Project Manager for GoldMine, provides regular employee training sessions on basic, intermediate and advanced GoldMine usage. She has even created several workbooks, which outline the bank's GoldMine procedures. In addition, there are sales classes that are taught each quarter and a three-hour basic class for newcomers. "What we don't want to do is put someone in front of a GoldMine screen and say, ‘Figure it out," explains Houston, "GoldMine is loaded with features and options. We spend time on training and it pays off."
Houston also takes advantage of GoldMine's many features including Internet E-mail, merge forms (letter/memo templates) and reports. "GoldMine's Sales Forecasting ability is extremely important to Bayshore's Sales Culture and critical to the bank's CEO. With Sale Forecasting, we can see if people are selling, and GoldMine gives us the ability to measure this," explains Houston, "Prior to GoldMine, we were using a big tablet and a number two pencil. Now we can forecast sales and service activities anytime we want. I look at banking a little bit differently, and to me, this is a defining feature. One of the things that IBM taught us a long time ago is: ‘If you can't measure it, you can't manage it'. I learned that and I believed it. With GoldMine, we can find out which of our account officers are making calls and which of them are closing deals. That's the key."