Borrowing a page from the professional services industry, over the past 2 years U.S. Bank has tasked teams of consultants to work with an array of middle-market companies to deconstruct their cash management processes and identify areas for improvement.
Frequently kicked off with an hour-and-a-half client consultation or “discovery meeting,” U.S. Bank consulting engagements dubbed “Working Capital DNA Analysis” are now helping to trigger the sale of various banking solutions, the validation of a strategy that is a stark departure inside an industry infamous for its product selling.
“The goal of this group from the start was not about how many sales they made, but how many consulting engagements they were able to get — the sales will follow,” says Jeffrey Rankin, who oversees sales and client relationships for U.S. Bank’s corporate payments business.
To date, U.S. Bank consulting clients have grown to include a large retailer that the bank says saved more than $300,000 annually by executing its recommendations and a commercial real estate company that saved $100,000 after acting on the bank’s recommendation to institute changes to its intercompany payments.
“What we find is that when we come forward with a recommendation, they already know that we understand their business better than anyone else because we asked the questions and got to know how they function,” explains Rankin, who adds that the firm’s consultant ranks include career veterans from more traditional management consulting organizations such as Accenture and Ernst & Young.
Richard Erario, SVP in U.S. Bank’s global treasury management, says that the distinct differences among middle-market businesses demanded a more custom approach.
“The first thing that we do is try to understand the cultural attitude of the organization. What is their appetite for electronic processes? What is their appetite for adopting new types of technologies?” explains Erario, who quickly serves up yet another client example: an industrial firm that achieved a 70 percent savings in payment costs by adopting newer payables technologies.
At the start, not everyone was convinced that the approach would succeed. Says Erario: “There was some skepticism around whether a client would want to spend an hour with us, but with us doing most of the listening, what we found was that people love talking about their businesses and they really do want help.”
Apparently, listening to clients is what first led U.S. Bank to conceive of a consulting strategy. The origins of the bank’s “Working Capital DNA Analysis” were in part rooted in a number of client roundtables at which the feedback wasn’t always positive.
“One of the things that they told us was that they wanted someone who could talk about payments holistically,” reports Rankin, who notes that traditionally it would not have been uncommon to have multiple salespeople calling on a business to discuss different banking products.
He adds: “These engagements are now done on such a high level that they allow us to make an internal recommendation regarding who would be the right person to call on a client and when the appropriate time to have that person get in front of the client would be.”
Erario says that a more recent example of the bank being a responsive listener is the bank’s new supplier portal program.
“Our customers told us that they wanted us to build a portal where their suppliers could go ahead and enroll and we could inform the suppliers as to their payment options. Basically, they told us that they didn’t have the resources to build one, and we said, ‘No problem — we’ll build it,’” explains Erario, who proudly adds that the portal was launched earlier this fall.
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