Citizens National Bank

A Banker's $500,000 Lesson in CRM

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A Banker's $500,000 Lesson in CRM

February 26, 2007 By Doug Bartholomew

There's a saying that less is more, and if anyone can attest to its truth, it's Mark Singleton. Unfortunately, Singleton, president and CEO of Citizens National Bank, a 200-employee community bank in Waxahachie, Texas, outside Dallas, had to learn the full implications of that adage the hard way. It turned out to be a $500,000 lesson. When Citizens National first installed a customer relationship management (CRM) package from Siebel Systems (now part of Oracle) in 2001, Singleton had high hopes that it would help boost sales of his privately held community bank. The goal was to enable him and his managers to improve tracking of customer prospects and boost the number of contacts and sales made by the bank's team of 16 sales representatives, or so-called relationship bankers. "We needed the ability to store the interactions our relationship bankers were having with potential customers electronically," he says. An old-school, relationship-type banker, Singleton is the fourth generation of his family to run Citizens National since its founding in 1868. With 16 offices, the privately held community bank stays out of the big-bank competition in the metropolitan Dallas area, preferring instead to concentrate on midsize communities of 25,000 down to towns with 500 people. That strategy is working in spades: Citizens National ranks as the sixth fastest-growing bank in Texas, with total assets of about $400 million in 2006. Although Singleton believes in the power of automation to transform business, he endorses direct customer contacts a whole lot more. The last thing he wanted to do was let some fancy software gum up the connection between his bankers and their customers. That said, one of the goals he had for the CRM system was to arm his relationship bankers with every possible shred of...