Andrew Vebber
Andrew Vebber
Title: Vice President, Area Manager, Blue Hills Bank
Age: 43
Experience: 17 years
Andrew Vebber got into banking on a break from college and picked up a job doing phone collections for a bank in Milwaukee. He did pretty well at that job, he says, “because I wasn’t mean on the phone.” After college, he took a job as a personal banker, thinking he would drop it once he picked up work in graphic design, only to ultimately find that he loved it. Recently, Blue Hills Bank recruited Vebber to head up its newest branch in Boston’s Seaport District.
Q: What are your thoughts about the way the branch is changing in response to shifting consumer preferences?
A: The thing that’s really cool about this is, I look at it as the economy is really changing and the way that Americans are viewing things is really changing. We were at one time an agrarian economy, then we went to an industrial economy. Now the U.S. is in a service economy, and we’re moving into what I think of it as the experience economy. Think of Disney World. You can go to a lot of places to ride rides, but you go to Disney World for the whole Disney experience – and I think banks are moving towards that. I think you can see that in our new branch, and the Seaport location is going to be really spectacular when it comes to this.
It’s tough because you have a bunch of sales people and you’re trying to teach them not to pitch checking accounts and not to pitch credit cards. It’s really getting to know that customer, building that relationship with them first, finding out about how they like to do their banking and then applying products and services to those needs that the customer’s expressed. So the skillset is changing for bankers quite a bit. We’re being asked to do a lot more in terms of the relationship.
Q: How do you manage people to be able to meet those expectations?
A: Well, that’s really exciting. That’s my job, is to help people learn how to do this, because it is a distinct skill. It’s not easy. You can do it for years and years and years and never perfect it. You have to take it piece by piece and break it down into very simple things – and things that people know how to do. Be nice to your customer. Have a smile on your face. Make them feel at ease. The thing that’s great about this type of selling is it’s really ethical. It’s really an ethical sales process, and people can go home at night and really feel great about themselves when they do this.
So my job is to teach them how to do this in a sales dynamic. You’re going to have great sales days, and you’re going to have terrible sales days, and if your only guideline is how much you’ve sold in that day, you’re not going to like your job very much.
I had a recent interaction with one of my colleagues here and I was talking to him about this sales process. I said, “Tell me about this customer you just spent all this time with on the phone,” and they unloaded all of this information on this person – what’s going on with their kids and their vacations – and they said they weren’t very successful. But that’s very successful! You’ve learned a lot about this customer and you should take this as a win.
Even if you didn’t open a checking account or you didn’t open a credit card, that’s still a win because the point here now is that we’re really trying to build this relationship. This is the new banking economy that we were talking about.
Q: Tell us about your new branch in the Seaport District.
A: I wasn’t involved with the planning in putting that branch down there, but it’s a great situation. I’ve worked in the downtown Boston area for about the past five years. I was more in the Financial District. The bank I was working for did have a location down in the Seaport. A little bit further down the road than I would have liked and I think they were kind of ahead of the game. They got in there so early that it was a little too early.
When I started working in downtown Boston, I went to a meeting down at State Street and we had an event at the Seaport Hotel. My boss and I walked and I think there was literally like one building between us and the Seaport Hotel once we crossed that bridge.
Now you go down there and it’s like an entire crazy city down there and everything is under construction. The market down there is going to be incredible. There are so many businesses going down there. It’s just really exciting and cool stuff. There’s the We Work building right around the corner that has all this innovation going on, you have Mass Challenge and all these startups, and there’s so much noise and excitement that to not be in that area would just be a big miss, I think, by any bank.
Vebber’s Top Five Sports Teams:
- The Green Bay Packers
- The Boston Bruins
- The Milwaukee Brewers
- The Wisconsin Badgers
- The Notre Dame Fighting Irish
