Change presents opportunities at BB&T

SAS® automates sales leads, identifies cross-sell opportunities

With a history of expansion that dates back to 1872, BB&T is one of the fastest-growing financial holding companies in the United States. Indeed, the profitable company has acquired 58 community banks, 70 insurance agencies and 23 non-bank financial services companies in the last 15 years alone.

As BB&T continues to aim for growth, however, it needs a more powerful way to generate sales leads and cross-sell opportunities for its growing list of customers. With SAS/IntrNet software, analysts in the company's marketing division are meeting that need with an online reporting solution that tailors customer intelligence for each of BB&T's 1,400 branch offices.

"We've been using the intranet for a long time," explains Ronnie Rowton, senior analyst at BB&T, "but not like this." Before Rowton spearheaded the SAS solution at BB&T, sales coordinators could download Excel spreadsheets containing regional customer data and also make ad hoc requests to Rowton and his colleagues for additional data. Now, everything – from customer lead lists and household win/loss reports to executive dashboards and administrative reports – is available from the same Web interface. The system receives more than 1,000 daily hits and produces an average of 600 unique reports every day.

"It's interactive and dynamic," says Rowton, "and the information that we've made available with SAS is vast." Indeed, just as BB&T's customers enjoy one-stop shopping for all of their financial needs, BB&T's sales force – nearly 14,000 strong – now receives its customer intelligence on demand from a single application.

Bill McCoy, Senior Analyst; Dwight Mouton, Manager of Client Analytics; Ronnie Rowton, Senior Analyst; Steve Hubbard, Manager of Reporting and Lead Management.

Quality, branch-level sales leads
Each month, SAS analyzes a combination of household data and product ownership variables, and then supplies every branch with a list of customers most likely to show an interest in BB&T's cross-sell opportunities. Customers who have a direct-deposit account and a credit card through BB&T might receive debit card promotions, for example, and loyal customers with both a BB&T checking account and mortgage are likely to be offered a home equity line of credit.

After consulting with the company's regional sales coordinators, BB&T's senior analysts developed dynamic, interactive lead lists for the 12 products most often sold at the branch level, including deposit-related products, business loans and equity loans. Designed to fulfill 80 percent of all information requests from the branch sales teams, these reports – which BB&T analysts call the Suite of 12 – replace thousands of monthly ad hoc requests.

"SAS provides us with a fast and efficient method of creating the Suite of 12 reports in real time," explains Bill McCoy, senior analyst and lead developer on the project. In the past, this useful information was available only at the regional level. Today, powerful analysis from SAS makes it easy to generate lead lists for each branch.

"We couldn't do this without SAS," says Dwight Mouton, manager of Client Analytics at BB&T. "We would have to manually create 12 unique lead reports for 1,400 individual branches. You just can't do that without the power and automation of SAS."

According to Rowton, the time savings that SAS provides on this project alone will total more than 140 days every year. "We were spending more than two weeks every month on these reports," he says, "and now we spend less than one day a month. That's a big time savings and true opportunity gained."

Automating household-level sales leads saves millions
Another valuable project that SAS has automated for BB&T is a series of household profile sheets, which inventory all sales leads for each of BB&T's existing customers at the household level.

"The profile sheets are a combination of leads that come from all the product areas, all put together into one report for each household," explains Steve Hubbard, BB&T's manager of reporting and lead management. "When we have three product areas that have offers for the same household, we put them all into one report and distribute them out to the branch sales network, so they can approach that household with one phone call instead of three."

Traditionally, these reports were delivered to each branch in paper format three times a year – a monumental effort that produced more than 15 boxes of reports. "Now we're using SAS to deliver these reports electronically," says Hubbard. "Employees at each branch can go to the intranet, enter their center number, and SAS brings up their leads electronically."

Automating this project with SAS offers huge savings for BB&T. "We simply did not have the resources to do this before," says Hubbard, "so we were using vendors to generate the profile sheets and mail them out. Now that we can automate that entire process, we'll be saving about $1 million a year."

Versatile, executive-level business intelligence
In addition to the many sales-related reports now available online, BB&T's analysts are providing high-level intelligence that executives can explore at many levels. Popular executive reports include sales penetration rates, detailed deposit reporting and response models that describe results for various sales and marketing campaigns. Regional bank officers can access this information from an executive dashboard that presents relevant and up-to-date information about their region in scorecard format.

According to Hubbard, SAS not only automates reporting, it also provides more versatility and accuracy than other analytic products. "With SAS, I can write a program that does anything I need it to do, and everything is automated, totaled and arranged the way I need it to be. Within minutes, the end user can pull out information in hundreds of different ways. We never would have been able to do any of this without SAS."

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