Scary Good Offers

Interesting. IndyMac Bank was offering incredibly good deals on Certificates of Deposits. The next day they were taken over by the FDIC.

It made me wonder. We recently offered some of our best customers discounts on our open-enrollment training on Tax Return Analysis. We called it our first-ever Summer Sale. Our motivation was two-fold:

• Summer is slow anyway and with training and/or travel budgets getting cut we wanted to get more people in the workshops.
• We genuinely want to be of assistance to our long-time customers; the banks and credit unions who we've trained in-house or who have sent lenders over and over to our lender training workshops.

Then I was listening to NPR talk about how the incredibly good interest rates on CDs should be making people nervous. If the bank is that desperate for deposits, maybe the bank is in trouble.

So now we have a new problem. We need to communicate good deals to our customers in a way that it does not scare them off.

Think about it.

• What deals are you offering now?
  
• Are they scary?
  
• Are you accidentally reducing customer confidence as you are trying to help your business customers weather the economic storm?