S&P Global Inc. (SPGI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to today's webinar: Winning in Your Market: Asset Growth Strategies That Work. My name is Maureen McKenna, Senior Product Manager for Commercial Banks at S&P Global Market Intelligence. Before we get started, I wanted to cover just a few housekeeping items. [Operator Instructions] Just to make sure I'm advancing the slides. There we are. Secondly, you'll find a Related Content widget as well, which is filled with information regarding our commercial prospecting, Vertical IQ and money market directories products. So we encourage you to view that information provided in the Related Content widget. There's also a Survey widget. We kindly ask that you take just a few minutes to complete the short evaluation at the end. We value your feedback and take it very seriously. So thank you in advance for filling out the survey. Lastly, this webinar is being recorded, and so the recorded version will be available shortly after the webcast. So we encourage you to share it with your colleagues. I also wanted to remind you about a few upcoming events. First, our Community Bankers Conference is coming up in May. Our Community Bankers Conference is our flagship banking conference that we've been hosting for 10 years, and it is an event that -- where we discuss the most pressing issues facing community banks. So we're excited to host that event again this year in person in Dallas and hope to see some of you there. In addition, we have our bank -- top bank and credit unions rankings release coming up on March 22. Each year, S&P ranks top-performing banks and credit unions based on the following categories: top 100 community banks less than $3 billion in assets; top 50 community banks $3 billion to $10 billion in assets. The top 50 public banks greater than $10 billion in assets, trading on major exchanges; and the top 100 credit unions greater than $100 million in assets. So we will release those rankings live on the 22nd, so join us for that. Before we begin, please note that the activities of S&P Global Market Intelligence are independent and separate from S&P Global Ratings. S&P Global Ratings maintains a separation of analytical and commercial activities. During today's webinar, we'll start with a live demonstration of our commercial prospecting and Vertical IQ tools to help you screen for CRE, C&I and SBA loans in your markets and then prepare for sales calls with Vertical IQ's Industry Intelligence. Then we'll discuss how you can prospect for clients in your wealth management or trust business, including pension funds, family offices, defined contribution retirement plans, endowments and foundations. Finally, we're thrilled to have Jack Hubbard, Chairman and Chief Experience Officer at St. Meyer & Hubbard, join us to discuss how you can execute best-of-breed, trust-based conversations and maximize the customer experience from initial outreach to onboarding. First, before we dive in, I'm going to send out our first polling question. Let's go ahead and push that to the audience. What types of loans is your bank most focused on growing? CRE, C&I, SBA or all of the above? Give everyone a few minutes to answer that question. [Voting]

Okay. It looks like we have 37% interested in growing their CRE loans, another 37% growing their C&I, and 20% -- almost 26% say all of the above. So with that, I would like to introduce our first presenter, HD Jacobs, who's a Senior Commercial Banking and Lending Product Specialist with S&P Global Market Intelligence. HD is our S&P encyclopedia and knows just about everything there is to know about our product for commercial banks. So we're excited to have HD with us today. HD, I'll turn it over to you.

Awesome. Thanks, Maureen. Good morning and afternoon, everyone. I thank you all for joining the webinar today. As Maureen mentioned, we're going to be covering the commercial prospecting platform as well as our strategic alliance and partnership with Vertical IQ. When you think about ways that you can capitalize loan growth opportunities in the market using unique characteristics of commercial real estate mortgage deeds or C&I liens from UCC filings, this platform will be a catalyst to allow you to effectively and easily do so. We're also partnering with Vertical IQ's industry research to really also then help you address the what to say in your conversations. So when we think about how the 2 tie it together, think about commercial prospecting of helping you identify the who and then Vertical IQ providing the what to say, to bring credibility, to bring knowledge to your conversations that are going to distinguish and differentiate you as lenders in the market. When we think about commercial prospecting, it's really 3-pronged. Commercial prospecting is comprised of commercial real estate mortgage deeds, over 25 million commercial real estate mortgage deeds and parcels, a database of over 70 million C&I liens and UCC filings and a database of over 15 million business listings. The business listings component will provide greater transparency into the businesses as well that are tied to the mass DBA and LLC names on the mortgage deed or the actual names that are debtors on the UCC filing. But the first database we're going to dig into is going to be our commercial properties data set. Now there are a lot of unique ways that we could target commercial real estate opportunity in the market, and we're going to show you one specific and unique way to analyze prospects. Let's say that we wanted to hone in on a particular market area, let's say that we're looking at Harris County, Texas. We could further refine this down by land use classifications. We can differentiate owner from nonowner occupied. We could target a specific bank, credit union or nonbank lenders commercial real estate portfolio. But in this case, let's say that we want to identify those, the counties actually classified as an SBA. And furthermore, we want to identify those that could be coming up on a refinancing horizon, so we can remove a lot of the noise from the prospect list and the targeting efforts across your lenders and business bankers. We could come in and say, "I want to look at those that we know are coming up for maturity between June of this year to June of next year or those that were originated across the time span that could be coming up on a 5-year refinancing horizon." We save that criteria. You never have to recreate it. We then narrow this down to a list of opportunities in the market, where we can see the properties, when these were originated, to the size of that mortgage, the lender that has that relationship today, when this is coming up for maturity. Maturity dates only populate about 35% of the time when the term has actually been disclosed within the mortgage deed. So we can get in front of this when they're coming up on that horizon. You can really strike gold there using that maturity date query. You'll also notice we're mirroring in a business. So typically, you'll find that there's a mass DBA and CRLLC name on a mortgage deed. Who is that actually tied to? This is where we provide some of that transparency and understanding who may be the principal, the owner or the contact on that particular property. So if we were to dive into one of these here, let's say we're looking at the Northgate Country Club Management. We click that hyperlink, and that's going to take you into a property profile overview of everything you'd like to know about that. We can see the property street address, the owner mailing address. We can see the actual property to do a 360 around it, which is very important, especially when we think about gas prices right now. It saves you time. It saves you gas mileage there in visiting some of these properties in person. We can do a 360 around those. We could see the business that we've matched back to the mailing address on that deed. In this case, it's going to be the Northgate Country Club. We have contacts. We can see that Dan McIntyre is going to be our contact, and there's the phone number there to Northgate. From an underwriting comp standpoint, you'll have property value and recent sales data. We can see that this is a certified development corporation loan in SBA that was issued in 2017 that could potentially be coming up for maturity in June of this year. Interest rates will be disclosed about 10% of the time, and we can determine whether that's a true fixed adjustable or the average national rate. And the mortgage value is $1.7 million. We can then drill down deeper into owners and tenants, so we have greater transparency into who to call, who are the contacts, who should we be shaking hands with. Related properties will help you understand a full portfolio. Multiple approaches here to using this report and understanding across our current customer base. Do we have 100% of our membership or our customer relationships? Who's banking around "cheating on us or cheating on someone else with us." This gives us that transparency. We're relating all related properties back to an owner by looking at this that are tied to the same sale deed, mortgage transaction indoor owner mailing address. So we can see that there are multiple properties tied to Northgate here. In this case, those are multiple parcels that are tied to that same $1.7 million mortgage. But you have transparency into that full book, especially when you're looking at a master loan agreement. Now we can save these queries and export this data, but another unique way to analyze the market when we start to get creative and targeting opportunities in our backyard will be through our exportability options here, one of which is going to be the ability to export that criteria to a map. So we could come in and visualize here on a map. Where are those mortgage properties which are going to be the green dots that you see here that are coming up for refinancing. We gain greater transparency into who to contact, the context around that particular opportunity, and we can link into that property profile overview. The other piece here that my friend, Jack Hubbard, will discuss later is the importance of COIs in establishing those relationships. So one of the things we allow you to do here is take an upload file, which could be any of the data there, whether it's a group of your current customers, members, your COIs, your references, your points of contact today and upload this to the map. The yellow and gold triangles that you see here will represent, for example, a group of centers of influences, in this case, let's say, law firms that I work with and where they are in close proximity to these opportunities that can potentially help us make an introduction. We can also build out campaign and lead list directly from these maps. We can even use this to further layer in transparency into the market, such as CRA designations, which can be helpful as part of CRA compliance. So do these particular opportunities fall into low-, moderate-, middle- or upper-income segmentation? We give you the necessary fields and querying capabilities to really refine your search down to those market areas that satisfies the CRA component. We also provide you; transparency into opportunity zones. So part of working closely and building a relationship is also educating your customers and your members. What we do here is give you transparency into where you can shed light into where opportunities are based upon the Jobs Act. And there's areas where you can get tax credits for operating or investing in those areas. So multiple unique layers that you can use to help you gauge and provide unique pieces of knowledge in your conversations. Now the other component to our database here is going to be the C&I component. There are a couple of ways in which we can target C&I. That could be won through a reverse UCC search to quickly target a debtor or a creditor's portfolio, but we can also get creative in targeting characteristics of a business. As part of our business listings database, we can narrow down the list based upon characteristics, such as estimated sales revenues, employee size and industry classification code. So we can hone in on the market. Let's say that we're looking at Orange County, Florida. And let's say you wanted to look at all of these businesses that are tied to, let's say, manufacturing. We can refine our search accordingly and say, "Give me those that are tied to manufacturing that have an employee count that's less than, let's say, 500, estimated annual sales that are less than $5 million, and give me those where we know that there is an active UCC filing and C&I lien." You could also look at the reverse there of those businesses that we have not matched in active UCC filing or C&I lien, too. We can then run our search, narrow this down to a group of businesses that meet that criteria within that market. So if we were to scroll through here, maybe one that catches my attention is Evans Equipment Company. I can see they're on Satellite Boulevard there in Orlando, Florida. I can gather intel around that business, so the employee size, the industry description, the estimated annual sales, but I could also take a deep dive into Evans here by clicking that hyperlink to that particular business where I can quickly understand a summary of that particular entity. So I have all of that ammunition when going into my prospect conversation or call. I can see the company data. I can see the primary contacts. So vital here, who do we actually contact that's tied in that business. In this case, we can see it's Larry Chen, the President. If we want to understand the relationships that are already at play, we pull in together the active, the terminated and the inactive C&I liens, where we can quickly click this hyperlink to see who has the relationships. So we can see that there is an SBA that was filed in 2020. It was an original filing. We can drill then deeper into that particular lien. In a matter of seconds, we took you from an entire universe of businesses to those that are within a market area that meets certain characteristics of businesses that you all would like to target, whether that's a specialty or a niche or characteristics, such as employee size or revenue size, and we now give you all the transparency to arm you in that conversation, knowing who they have relationships with today and when those particular filings were filed. So we've addressed the who. The next component to this is understanding what to say in these conversations. Through embedded hyperlinks that take you directly to Vertical IQ's industry research on over 550 industries to allow you to be on the ready in these conversations. We provide these pivot points. So if you knew nothing about Evan's Equipment Company, one, the industry they're tied to, we're going to tie that together for you. We can then dive deeper into industrial machinery distributors through a hyperlink that's going to allow us to understand the industry structure, give us greater transparency into the what to say, understand, for example, how that industry has been impacted by COVID-19, so we can provide relevancy in that conversation. There's an industry risk component to this. So a proprietary industry risk rating comprised of 6 components also sourcing information around SBA default rate by number of loans and gross loan amount per industry to give you guidance as to where they fall on that risk scale; benchmarks that can be used as part of your underwriting process and your credit memos; sourcing data from the RMA around financial highlights, balance sheet and income statement information; product usage, so which product packaging should we be delivering to these particular industries; who do we loop in across the organization to create a compelling package that's going to be suitable for that business within that industry. This will provide you the percentage of firms within that industry that use a particular product or service, so you can position your packaging accordingly, so it's relevant and you're checking multiple boxes and what that particular business may need. Now how do we speak intelligently? Call prep questions will give you insight into the what to say. Not only is it questions, but it's also context as to why these questions are important, so we can ask the necessary drill-downs to make our conversations relevant, to continue to expand that conversation and say, "You know what? I know your industry just as well as you, and this is going to be the tool and the catalyst to provide you that transparency and insight." I'll now pass the controls back to my colleague, Maureen, so we can introduce my colleague, Jay Josey, as he covers our money market directories solution. Thank you.

Great. Thanks, HD. Before I introduce Jay, I'm going to send out our second polling question. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest in terms of priority, how much emphasis do you place on developing institutional relationships with asset owners, such as pension funds, defined contribution retirement plans, endowments, foundations and family offices? Give everyone a moment to answer that question. [Voting]

All right. It looks like half of the audience, it's a low priority. And half of the audience, it's a high priority. So interesting. Okay. Now I'd like to introduce Jay Josey. Jay is a product specialist for our money market directories product, as HD mentioned. Jay has been with our MMD business since 1990 and is well versed in the business development workflow of banks who are seeking to raise institutional capital from pension funds, endowments, foundations and family offices. Jay, I'll turn it over to you.

Thanks, Maureen. So for the half of the audience that is very interested in MMD's offerings, I will, at a high level, let you know that our global institutional asset owner coverage is profiling over 245,000 global plan sponsors, endowments and foundations; over 800 global industry consultants serving these allocators; over 26,000 global investment managers seeking relationships with a lot of these asset owners. And in 2011, we debuted a database of single and multifamily offices that has now grown to over 5,600 profiles. 100 outsourced chief investment officers were added to the platform in 2015. And in 2021, we debuted a new database of U.S.-based insurance firms with more visibility into their general insurance account assets and to what extent some of those assets are being managed by external investment management firms. The MMD database has been around for 50 years. We really put a premium on addressing the institutional business development workflow. The ways you can leverage the content or myriad, we can profile information on corporate, Taft-Hartley, plan sponsors, a vast database of endowments and foundations. I also wanted to highlight the U.S. institutional tax-exempt asset breakdown. And looking at the defined benefit pension industry, we are profiling over 14,700 traditional DB and frozen DB pension plans, representing over $9.3 trillion in assets; over 190,000 participant-directed defined contribution plans, encompassing profit sharing 401(k), 403(b), 457 401(a) plans, representing over $7.3 trillion in assets; and then lastly, over 52,000 investment pool funds, private foundation and endowment assets, representing over $4 trillion in assets. Our question would be for the half of the audience that is interested in this or perhaps for the half that isn't interested, can you really afford to ignore this market opportunity? MMD is really going to deliver insights on this universe of tax-exempt asset allocators, and one of the primary ways we can do that is in clearing the underlying data to help you do marketplace assessments, opportunity assessments for the regions your bank is active in, wherever your footprint is. One of the things that might be useful would be to do enhanced custody outputting reports, one that I was able to generate earlier today. I went in and simply asked for all the allocators in the U.S. with $5 million or more in total tax-exempt assets and wanted to see specifically by plan type, be it defined benefit, various defined contribution plan types, participant levels, what custodial relationships they currently have. When I search this, I get an output of over 1,700 specific results in a 3-state region: California, Colorado and Arizona. And these are all the entities in those 3 states the custodians they're using. If I want to bring this out and look at the entire U.S., I can go in, take out my state criteria. And then at a higher level here, the 16,364 plans attaching to over 13,000 allocators who their custodial relationships are with or their master custodial relationships. And if we want to look at a specific region, again, I'll go back to the 3-state region that I initially displayed. I can also change this output and specifically ask for the key contacts at these allocators based on their responsibility for defined benefit, defined contribution, endowment or foundation assets, along with any secondary finance executives. So changing the output now to the contact output report for that 3-state region, here are all the key executives at these allocators, e-mail addresses, phone numbers. And then to go into any of these profiles, you can see all the detail associated with them and back to the report output screen, all the results fully exportable to Excel. Hopefully, this will give you a good sense of the coverage on the MMD platform. We can go in, look at family offices. As I said at the outset, very important part of the database now that has been consistently growing over time. I believe in the U.S. when we initially launched over 10 years ago, we only had 50 single-family offices. That has since grown to a universe of over 700 U.S.-based single-family offices, 2,500-plus key decision-makers at these private asset owners, a very opaque segment of the industry to be sure, but I think we've really delivered on a number of years' worth of client requests to provide more rationality around coverage of this very opaque space, if you will, trying to go beyond what's typically been available here typically from conference planners, family office industry associations. We're really trying to denote more specificity around different single-family offices, what their specific roles are, key contacts, again with an emphasis on biographical information linked -- hyperlinks to their LinkedIn profiles, really helping you make more sense of a very opaque segment of the industry. We're engaging with a number of clients now. This drives a lot of our client conversations for MMD and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, I'm sure. That's going to do it for me. Appreciate your time today. I'm going to turn it back over to Maureen who will introduce our primary speaker today, Mr. Hubbard.

Thanks, Jay. Before I introduce Jack, we're going to send out our last polling question. The percentage of new loans in 2022 coming from prospects is likely to be: 0% to 10%, 11% to 25%, 26% to 50%, 51% to 75%, or 76% to 100%? Give everyone a minute to answer that question. [Voting]

All right. Sort of evenly spread across all of those different buckets with the majority, 41%, saying 11% to 25%. All right. We'll [ look to ] Jack Hubbard. Jack has shared his passion for what it takes to build trust-based sales initiatives since 1973. He's trained and coached more than 75,000 financial services professionals and is one of banking's most sought-after facilitators. His expertise and out-of-the-box thinking put him in great demand when the subject matter is bank-to-business sales and sales leadership. So we're very excited that he is joining us today. Don't miss Jack's weekly show, Jack Rants Live on LinkedIn Live, where he showcases best-selling authors and top minds in today's banking landscape. I think he has one coming up tomorrow with Chris Nichols, so don't miss it. And also, Jack serves on the Board of Directors of St. Charles Bank & Trust, a $1.8 billion affiliate of Wintrust Financial in Illinois. So with that, Jack, we're -- thanks for joining us. I'll turn it over to you.

Maureen, thank you very much. It's great to be with you all today, and thanks for that very, very kind and personally written introduction by me. I'm here at the -- in the headquarters -- in the basement of the world headquarters in beautiful downtown Elgin, Illinois. And it's a real privilege to have the opportunity to speak again on behalf of my good friend, HD and Jay; and the wonderful people at S&P; as well as Vertical IQ, Bobby Martin, and Susan Bell, 2 of my best industry friends. I want to talk to you today about tactical. HD and Jay talked about strategery. Where can you find all these names? And I use Market Intelligence myself. It's an absolutely amazing tool. And when you connect it to the power of Vertical IQ, you're in really, really good shape. As Maureen mentioned, I'm on the Board of Directors of a community bank, and one of the things we talk about a lot in our Board meetings are the 5 Cs of credit. Now I'm going to talk to you today about the 5 Cs of trust-based conversations, which is, number one, conversations. The second C is curiosity, followed by customization, collaboration and connectivity. When you were out doing prospecting in a tactical way, using the amazing tools that you have through S&P and through Vertical IQ, keep those 5 Cs in mind because this needs to be a trust-based opportunity to be able to touch that prospect. So I want to talk to you today a little bit about the -- what we call the pillars of prospecting. We're going to talk at a pretty high level about a couple of these, and we'll take a little deeper dive into some. I'm very, very big on net sharing. I don't like networking. I've never liked networking. If it's work, it isn't worth it to me, but I like when we go to networking events and we share ideas. It's not work the room. It's not an elevator speech. There's nothing to memorize, no scripts. It really focuses on the buyer. How can we be of help to you? Those of you that know me at all know my obsession with LinkedIn, and we could spend hours talking about that. As HD mentioned, COI development is so powerful. And if you really stop and think about it, if you want to get an appointment with someone in a prospecting venue, you're 82% likely to get that if you have a good COI network. And then the last thing I want to talk about is what one bank is doing to generate millions and millions of dollars of opportunities through a networking and a power prospecting situation. I want to talk to you a little bit [ about ] COIs that we really need to kind of focus on here. Clearly, what we want to do is we want to focus on our current clients, your Advisory Board. I think a Board member is such a vital part of the industry. I tend not to go to a Board meeting and take a fee without providing a qualified referral to one of my bankers. I think that's really important. And those of us that have Advisory Boards out there in the country, we need to do a better job of holding them accountable to do exactly what they're supposed to do, which is providing leads. Don't forget about those internal partners, your treasury management partners, your branch partners, your wealth partners. All of them can be a vital nature in a COI process. And then, of course, the last thing is the norm. On our Board of Directors, we have a CPA. We have a couple of attorneys. We have 2 realtors. The fact is they don't provide 100% of leads to St. Charles Bank & Trust, and they likely shouldn't. They spread their wealth around. So the norm is really important, but I'd like to think about this from a Monty Python perspective. Those of you that were born in the '70s, '80s and '90s probably have heard of Monty Python. If you haven't, you need to go watch him. Monty Python's team is known for something completely different. Think a little bit outside the box. I have a couple of banks whose #1 referral sources last year was a food store, a barber shop and a hotel. Those 3 things combined provided a lot of opportunities to get them over the top from a prospecting perspective. Every hotel has a director of sales. Every town has a number of barbers. There are awful lot of different kinds of industries where you can go out and provide opportunities to get referrals and certainly to give referrals. Now why don't people do that? Well, there's a lot of reasons. Too often what happens is we make COI situations into a campaign. This is an ongoing, never-ending kind of a process. So for example, your COIs may not know what you want. They might not know what industry you are looking for. They don't know the revenue size. They don't know the geographic location. By the way, you can find all of those on the S&P site that HD talked about a little bit. They might not know how to get you a referral. It could be as simple as send me an e-mail, give me a call, but they'd like to know what the process is. One of the key factors is I don't know you, and I don't trust you. I know a bank who pairs every quarter their Board members up with a banker. They're called a banker buddy. And the banker buddy and the Board member go out, and they make joint calls together. That has fostered significant trust with those Board members if the Board members know exactly what the qualified nature of the lender is, they know the kind of business they're looking for, and they know how to provide that. So trust is a real key opportunity. The other thing is, like any other prospect, it's mindshare. I don't have mindshare for you. I don't remember -- when there's an opportunity to refer you something, I don't remember, and we'll talk about how to make that a little bit different. And then there's no reciprocity. It's not always they want to leave, but they may want something else, something of value, maybe go to a ballgame, maybe play golf every once in a while. But there are some ways that you can avoid these kinds of issues: provide a lot of opportunities yourself to give referrals back to your COIs; collaborate with them; forward them testimonials so that you have mindshare and certainly make sure you're forwarding articles out to them so that if they have a vertical discipline, they know what their clients are facing. And I can't think of a better tool than that than Vertical IQ to do that particular situation with. What if I need some new referral sources? I love HD's approach to mapping, and I'm going to kind of piggyback on that and talk to you about what one bank is doing to generate new COIs. So let's say I'm a banker, and I'm going out and making a call on XYZ Manufacturing Company. Now I could go back to the bank after that call, but wait a second. What I'm going to is do use the mapping feature of S&P Global, and I'm going to find out within that territory, right where my client is, XYZ Manufacturing, 1-, 2- or maybe 3-mile ring around there, I'm going to look for CPAs, law firms and perhaps realtors that I don't get referrals from now, that I don't know me or don't know me from -- I don't know them or they don't know me from a bag of doughnut. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use that mapping feature. And 24 to 48 hours before I go out on my call with XYZ Manufacturing, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go find those CPAs, law firms and real estate companies, and I'm going to find out what their vertical disciplines might be. Then I'm going to go to Vertical IQ, and I'm going to find an article or a white paper or our best practice or something that I can print out in color, put my business card in the upper left-hand corner. And after my call with XYZ Manufacturing Company, I'm going to go to the CPA, the law firm and the real estate company and drop off that value add. We call that 3 by: 3 opportunities to get new COIs right by your own current clients. And oh, by the way, don't drop it off and say, "I happen to be in the area, and I thought I'd stop by." We need to stop doing that as bankers. What we need to start doing is to say something like, "I was thinking about your company the other day, and I know that you operate within the timber industry. I found this interesting article, and I'm wondering if you could pass this along to managing partner Smith." We need to get better at this, not memorize, but we need to get better at doing this. Now there's another organization that we know, about a $5 billion organization, that every week has put into play a systematic approach to prospecting. You see, you did a poll. And you said between 11% and 25% of your 2022 business will come from current prospects. A lot of you said that. The statistic is right there. Statistically, 78% of your new business will come from current clients, and about 22% will come from prospects. Well, how are you going to get those? Well, we just talked about COIs. That's one thing. We could do some net-sharing opportunities, et cetera. But what about that highest level, that additional 2% that might be -- put me over the top? This process, according to this bank, works really, really well. What is it? It's pretty simple. Every Monday, every Monday, somewhere between 3 and 5 letters go out to targeted prospects that they found on S&P and the Market Intelligence process. On Wednesday, those same prospects get a LinkedIn connection. It's customized. On Thursday or Friday, they get one more value touch from Vertical IQ. The following week, bankers start to make phone calls, and they're very, very different, and they leave a voice mail. And did you know that only 4% of bank-to-business voice mails with prospects are ever returned? It's because they're terrible. They're too long. They say nothing of value. This bank has returned 70% of the time. This -- they call it power prospecting, and it's generated millions and millions of dollars into their pipeline to put them over the top from a prospecting perspective. Now the question is, okay, that sounds really good, but how do we find these prospects? One of the nice things about S&P Global is that it allows you, the individual banker, to put together a list of prospects that you would like to make. I call it being a bankerpreneur. Well, I have another bank, pretty small community bank, under $1 billion. And I know they do this because I facilitate this program every single year. They call it Logo Day. Here's how this works -- and by the way, there's about 42 bankers involved in this from the branches to commercial bankers, to wealth managers and even mortgage professionals. Here's how they do it. First, between October 1 and November 1, the bankers go out, and they look for 15 prospects. Now they can use S&P Global. They can drive by an organization. It's just someone that they may know that they haven't prospected to. But before November 1, they have to get 15 prospects based on a particular criteria, theirs and the bank's. The second thing they do is on November 1, their logos are ready. What does logos ready mean? When they find the logos that they'd like to do business with, they right click and copy the logo of the business on a white piece of paper, and they -- copy and paste it on a white piece of paper. They print that out, and they bring that to Logo Day around November 1. We do a trade show. They put up all of their pages, and they all walk around and do a trade show. What are they looking for? They're looking for duplicates, "Oh, I forgot that one. That would be a good one for me," and they're writing them all down. We take the pages down. And for the rest of the day, our goal is to cut these down to 12, 1 a month, so they can prioritize them. And we do it in a very systematic and very logical way. Maureen, tell us your 15. Maureen says, "My first one is ABC Company. Say, "Well, anybody else in the room have ABC Company? No? Good. Maureen, you get ABC Company. Circle it. Maureen, give us a second one." "It's 123 Company." "Well, does anybody have 123? Oh, HD, you raised your hand. Well, Maureen, tell us how you found 123 Company?" And Maureen says, "Well, I'll tell you. I drive by there every day on the way to the office, and there's so many cars there. And when I go home, there's a lot of cars. They must have multiple shifts at that manufacturing company. It looks very busy. The products that I've seen on their website are outstanding. So I think I'd be proud to peg with that person." "Great. HD, what about you?" HD says, "Well, for 3 years in college, I went to Thanksgiving with the CFO of the company and his family." Who do you think is going to get that one? Well, it isn't Maureen, she can probably help out because she has enthusiasm for it, but HD is going to get that lead. By the end of the day, everybody has 12 leads, no more than 12, then we prioritize and plan. And the bankers think, "How am I going to generate business from these people? How am I going to get in the door with these folks? I prioritize and I think and I strategize." But before they leave, they interact with their manager because the manager wants to know, tell me how you're going to get at these things and how can I help you. And then one final thing. During the year, the manager keeps this alive. This bank is under $1 billion. Right now, they have $61 million in the pipeline. And last year, based on Logo Day, they closed 40%. Why? Because it's the law of small numbers. When you have too much, there's too much to do. Bankers only have about 37% of their time to sell. What you really need to do, you're going to prospect well using S&P, target and focus. Last year, only 17% of bankers got into call #2 after call #1. Prospecting is one thing. Getting in the door initially with an appointment is great. What about when I'm on that call? What can I do differently? In a recent study I did -- thanks, Maureen, for mentioning Jack Rants Live. I do it every Thursday at 11:00 Central Time. Last week, we had Andy Paul on. Andy Paul is the guru of all salespeople. He wrote a great new book called Sell Without Selling Out. And one of the statistics he points to is that Gartner and Forrester would tell you that 80% of business calls made by salespeople are horrible in the eyes of the buyer. Why? Because we need to remember this phrase that we too often forget: The buyer has the answers, and the seller has the questions. In any environment, whether we're doing a full face to face, a full virtual or a hybrid in what we call BEC-blended environment conversations, the buyer has the answers, and the seller has the questions. What kind of questions? I love a simple life. I'm a simple person. I got a 4.0 in my education. I got a 2.0 in high school and a 2.0 in college, and I'm very proud of my 4.0. So I know you don't have to be the smartest person to be a great salesperson. You just have to do the right things over and over again. What are the right things? Ask the right questions. Where have you been? Where are you now? Where are you going? What question can I ask of my buyer that no other banker will ask because I want to create a level of curiosity. That buyer might not even react to the question you asked. But in their mind, they're thinking, "I see myself banking with this banker across the way, across my desk because my current bank doesn't even ask me questions like that." Insights, very, very important. A good friend of mine, Mike Schultz, a number of years ago wrote a terrific book called Insight Selling, and it still holds up today. It's a great standard. Third thing is take good notes. What am I want to do here? I want to take snippets, not sentences. I want to focus on their priorities. I don't care to win a penmanship contest at this particular point. What I want to know is what can I capture that I can use to help this buyer move their company to the next level. And you notice I said it that way versus what can I do to obtain my goal. If you focus on the buyer, everything else will take care of itself. I believe in the year 2022 should be the year of selfless selling. We obviously want to summarize. And then we want to be a virtual turkey. So people ask, "Is this thing going away? Is this pandemic going to go?" Yes, sure. Are we back full face to face? No. Because people are spread out all over the place. I can tell you a quick story. I've got a client in New Jersey who just sold a big opportunity, millions of dollars to a medical practice who's head of the medical practice lives in Texas. His practice is in New Jersey. But because of being able to ask great questions on a virtual call, they were able to earn the business. They were a turkey. What's a turkey? If you want to really do a great job in doing virtual selling, this is the way to do it. We call it turkey feather. Questions on the left, up on the top, over on the top right and down below. Make sure you don't cover over the green dot that you need to be looking in 82% of the time. So you can be very successful at building relationships virtually as well as on scene. Last thing is, did a recent study, and we found that only 8% of bank-to-business banks actually welcomed in a formal way in that first year, that critical year of the relationship, a brand-new relationship. We have a great opportunity to do that virtually. In the last 2 minutes that I have, I'm going to talk about that. We call it team boarding a 1, 6, 3, 1 welcome. Why do we do this? Well, when someone buys something -- when you signed up for this webinar, you said, "Is this going to be a good? I could have done other things with my time." There's always buyer's remorse. So our goal with team boarding is to mitigate buyer's remorse, to maximize the experience, to foster referral opportunities, as we talked about, and certainly to do cross-solving. I don't believe in cross-selling. Cross-selling makes the customer a victim. How does this work? How does this work? One week after the loan closes, the relationship manager, or as I like to call them a resource manager, brings his or her team together on a video a branch manager, a sales assistant, a treasury management partner and a sales leader. And for 15 minutes, we're going to introduce ourselves, talk about our role at the bank and certainly see how we can have 15 minutes. At the end of that call, the sales assistant is going to schedule a 6-week call with a new buyer. And they're going to say, "You're going to get your new statement. And 6 weeks from now, I'd like to call you and make sure or have a virtual call with you and make sure that you don't have any questions." Speaking of a question, they asked the question. Now this is a sales assistant that doesn't need to be a salesperson. The question is really simple: What initiatives might be on your plate over the next 3 to 6 months? And how can our bank be a partner in your success? What initiatives might be on your plate over the next 3 to 6 months? And how can our bank be a partner in your relationship? Banks that are doing this right now, I know 2 banks that are doing this really well are getting referrals hand over fist to the sales assistant who then refers it on to the resource manager. 90 days into the relationship, the cross-solving call is done with the banker and the sales manager, and then there's a 1-year blind embossed personally written CEO anniversary card to arrive on the desk of the buyer 1 year into the relationship. This is not that difficult to do, but it's also not a sales campaign. This is part of a great process. So thanks, HD and Maureen and Jay for letting me join you today. I hope we were able to give you a few practical ideas. Maureen, I'll throw it back to you.

Thanks, Jack. That was great. Before we dive, just a reminder that we're going to do -- have the Q&A portion of our presentation now. [Operator Instructions] While you're doing that, I'm going to send out just one more polling question. Would you like to be contacted to learn more about our commercial prospecting, Vertical IQ or money market directory's products? And you can answer that at your leisure. And we'll begin the Q&A.

Let's see here. Okay. A question for you, HD. If a bank would like to run a campaign to bring in government contractors, is there a way to pull those out specifically in the commercial prospecting?

Yes. There would be. There are a couple of ways we can approach that. We could look at it based upon an industry description of the business that's tied to the C&I lien or the UCC filing or looking at the business that's tied to the more [Audio Gap] and that will allow us to take a very refined approach to looking at a 6-digit industry classification and all of the businesses that are associated with that.

Great. Thank you, HD. Question for you, Jack. Now that the pandemic is waning, what purpose will Zoom meetings have in bank-to-business sales?

Well, that's a great question. One of the things that I find disconcerting is that when the pandemic hit, we all kind of went home to be safe. And we did a study about 6 months in because bankers are starting to say, "Well, I need to prospect again. I need to be talking to my clients again." We found that about 70% of bank CEOs had still not provided the resources necessary for bankers to be able to do effective work in a virtual kind of a setting. So as I mentioned in my story, people are all over the place now. In the summer, your clients are going to have -- go to their summer homes. But if they're a CEO or a CFO of a company, it's pretty likely they're just not going to lay on the beach. They're going to be doing work. So being able to have a conversation with them in a very flexible way is really going to be important. The last thing that I would suggest is, and I've seen McKinsey studies on this, that 82% of buyers would like to have at least one sales call between the buyer and the seller to be virtual, and we need to do a better job of that. So that means training, that means resources, better lighting, better communication from an audio perspective, better sales leadership, better tools in general. So it's a great question. It's not going to go away, Maureen. I think this is a forever issue, and I think we're always going to be hybrid from now on.

Awesome. Thanks, Jack. We have one more question, I think, for HD. This particular person says that they use our tool to identify a maturing CRE, much like the example you gave in the beginning. How often is the database refreshed?

Yes. No, great question. So the commercial real estate mortgage deed data is going to be updated monthly. It's typically on a 2- to 3-month lag. We will not remove any mortgages that are associated with parcels until we receive a release notification from the county. Obviously, some of the counties are still catching up from the pandemic, so there is a slight lag in some of that being processed. But if there are certain examples that you identified that you want to validate, certainly run those across our support team or your relationship manager, and we can certainly evaluate those. When you're thinking about C&I, C&I data is going to be updated monthly, and it's received on the fourth Monday of each month. So there's constantly new data that's flowing into the platform. Our business listings database is going to be updated quarterly.

Awesome. Thanks, HD. Actually, a few more questions came in. Is there a way to save your UCC filings as a shortcut on the main page? Can you save your preferred searches on your main page as a shortcut?

So you can actually save those. If you go into the Screener of the platform, there will be a Manage My Screens component to that, where you can see all the screens that you've saved in the past to quickly access those. All screens can be saved, so they're unique to your user profile. You can also access this within the Screener under the Screening & Analytics tab, where you can see under Manage My Screens all of your favorites and all of the recent screens that you saved. So that's a quick way to access those that you may have developed or built out in the past to then further refine.

Perfect. One more for you, Jack. How would you adapt your sales prospecting to middle-market companies versus smaller business banking opportunities?

It's a great question. The bank that I referred to, especially doing what they call power prospecting, is a middle-market bank. And I think the -- think of it as baseball. Even though we don't have any right now, we probably will. My grandson, Gavin, is 12. He plays Little League. My son when he played, he played teener league. Then there's minor leagues and major leagues. The fact is they all have 3 outs. They all have 4 balls, equal to walk, et cetera. The difference is how do you ratchet this up. So if you're doing a small business initiative or a business banking initiative, you would very likely use the same process or the same backbeat. The guts of it would be a little different for middle market. For a middle-market CFO, you might sending something a value-add, like something on robotics. In the small business, you might do something a little bit of a less situation. But it's all in the execution of who your buyer is and what's going to float their boat, not what's going to float yours. So it does work in all instances.

Perfect. And I think our final question is a follow-up question to the question earlier about how often the database is refreshed. Are the other data points updated, contacts, et cetera? HD?

Yes. No, great question. So I think they're referring to there the business listings database and the information that's associated with that. In which case, that's all going to be updated quarterly. They're a partnership with DatabaseUSA. Currently, that's our business listings provider. But if there's unique situations that you do find, please let us know. We back all of our data with a guarantee around the accuracy. So -- but all of the names, phone numbers, et cetera, that are associated with the business are going to be updated quarterly.

Great. Okay. I think those are all the questions that we received. Thank you all for submitting those. So just a few closing comments. Again, the session has been recorded, and you will receive a replay link, either later today or first thing tomorrow, and we encourage you to share it with your colleagues. When we close out the webinar, you'll be routed to our evaluation form. We'd love to hear your feedback, so please take a few minutes to complete that. And thank you again to HD, Jay and Jack for presenting, and we really appreciate you taking the time to do that. And thank you all for taking the time to attend. If you have any questions about today's presentation, if you're a client and want to schedule training or if you're not a client and you're interested in hearing more about our products, please don't hesitate to reach out to myself or -- I'm happy to connect you with the right person. And I think that is about it. Thank you for joining us again today, and this concludes today's webinar. Have a great day.