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The two top reasons customers switch banks are for better rates and terms, and because the bank did not have a solid enough understanding of their business and industry. As a lending professional, the rates and terms offered to a client are often out of your control, but with the help of IBISWorld’s insights and analysis, you can increase customer acquisition and retention by gaining a deep understanding of your client’s business and industry.

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

One of our most popular tools for prospecting new clients is our State Industry Reports. Our 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.

Our State Economic Profiles, which all subscribers of our State Reports have access to, are another popular tool for lending professionals. One way you can use our State Economic Profiles is 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 Key Trends section of the Industry at a Glance chapter gives you seven to eight important trends in the industry, allowing you to quickly gain an understanding of the market without having to read the entire forty pages of the report.

Our Call Preparation Questions are another area of our industry reports that are popular among lending professionals. For a brief overview of questions to ask prospects, you can reference the Call Prep Questions section of the Industry at a Glance chapter. For more in-depth questions to really build a relationship with a prospect, you can access our Call Preparation Questions chapter by clicking ‘Learn More’ at the bottom of the Call Prep Questions section or find the Call Preparation Questions chapter at the bottom of the left-hand navigation within an industry report.

The first section you’ll see in the Call Preparation Questions chapter 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, you may be talking to someone in marketing or operations, so you can ask them industry-specific questions related to their role.

This section also allows you to bring other stakeholders into 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 contact in marketing, you can ask them finance related questions if you want them to bring someone in finance into the conversation.

Our 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.

You can use our Internal Issues Questions to get an understanding of what your client’s management is, what the inner working are at the organization and how good they are at differentiating themselves in the market.

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

For more financial ratios, click ‘Learn More’ at the bottom of the Financial Ratios section to go to the Financial Ratios section of the Key Statistics chapter. Here you’re able to 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 tool for lending professionals is our Segment Benchmarking tool. This is an add-on tool for industry reports that allows you to select a segment based on company size for more granular and specific insights.

For example, if your client is a long-distance freight trucking company with 100-499 employees, 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 all for that segment.

The SWOT analysis section of the Segment Benchmarking chapter 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 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 that’s specific to the size of your client’s company.

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.