The main reasons customers switch banks are for better rates and terms and because the bank does not have a solid enough understanding of their business and industry. As a lending professional, the rates and terms offered to clients are often out of your control. Still, with the help of IBISWorld's insights and analysis, you can increase customer acquisition and retention by deeply understanding your client's business and industry.

IBISWorld is especially beneficial for differentiating banks in times of high interest when the industry knowledge and insights that a lender brings become more of a deciding factor for prospects.

One of our most popular tools for prospecting new clients is our State Industry Reports. State Reports provide data and analysis on 31,751 industries across all 50 US states so you can better understand your prospect’s industry at a local level. Provincial Industry Reports are also available for Canadian clients.

Our State Economic Profiles, which all subscribers of our State Industry Reports have access to, are another popular tool for lending professionals. You can use our State Economic Profiles to find prospects based on growing areas of a state’s local economy.

For example, in the image below, the Sustainable Building Material Manufacturing industry in Illinois has 511 establishments and a relatively high establishment growth rate of 27.3%. You can use this data to target new entrants in growing markets.

The At a Glance chapter gives you a quick overview of key industry information found throughout the report.

You can click on any section heading containing an arrow to jump to the corresponding full section within the report.

For a brief overview of questions to ask prospects, you can reference the Call Prep Questions section in the Meeting Prep tab of the At a Glance chapter.

For more in-depth questions to build a relationship with a prospect, you can access our Call Preparation Questions page in the left-hand navigation menu below the Chapters.

The first section of the Call Preparation Questions page is Role-Specific Questions. Role-specific questions are useful for lending professionals because they allow you to ask questions specific to the role of your contact at a company. For example, if you're talking to someone in marketing or operations, you can ask them industry-specific questions about their role.

Using Role-Specific Questions in your client conversations also allows you to involve other stakeholders in the sales process by asking questions related to the roles of people you'd like to talk to. For example, if you're talking with a marketing contact, you can ask them finance-related questions if you want them to involve someone in finance in the conversation.

External Impacts Questions allow you to evaluate your client’s industry environment and work with the credit and underwriting teams to see what they’re looking at.

Use our Internal Issues Questions to understand your client's management, the inner workings of the organization and how effectively they differentiate themselves in the market.

In the Meeting Prep tab of the At a Glance chapter, you’ll see the Financial Ratios section. This preview allows you to ask your client questions they’ll understand about their company’s performance to see how it compares to the industry.

Jump to the full section in the Financial Benchmarks chapter by clicking the section heading.

In the Financial Ratios section of the Financial Benchmarks chapter, you can filter the ratios by asset size to ask more in-depth questions and start more targeted conversations about a client's cash flow or liquidity.

Another useful resource for lending professionals is Segment Benchmarking. This product, which subscribers can access in the Related Industry Products section of the left-hand navigation menu in Industry Reports, allows you to analyze industry data and insights by employee size segments.

For example, suppose your client is a long-distance freight trucking company with 100-499 employees. In that case, you can select that segment to see key statistics and insights, a SWOT analysis, performance benchmarking, related companies, productivity benchmarking, key statistics and key ratios relevant to operators of that size.

The SWOT analysis section of Segment Benchmarking is useful for lending professionals because it allows you to see internal and external impacts to your client’s industry that could affect their bottom line in the future. If you find a particular trend in this section that you think is relevant to your client, you can dive deeper into that trend in the industry report.

The Entry and Exit Rates tab in the Performance Benchmarking section of Segment Benchmarking allows you to see strong indicators of failure rates for companies of your client's size in their industry. This section allows you to shape internal conversations with the credit team by providing them with precise performance data specific to your client's company size.

For additional questions regarding IBISWorld for advanced lending applications, please contact your Client Relationship Manager. If you don’t have an IBISWorld account, please contact us to learn more about our membership options.