Chief marketing officer
Forget rose-colored glasses. For Seacoast Bank, things are at their best when tinted in teal.
Besides being the bank’s corporate color, teal has turned into a defining element of a scorecard system that Jennifer Reissman spearheaded when she arrived at Seacoast in 2014.
“We use red, yellow, green, in terms of tracking our internal goals; and then if we’re 110% above, we use teal, because teal is our signature color,” she said. “So we make a big deal about if you’re in the teal, or this team just turned teal, in terms of performance.”
Though Reissman concedes that the color-coding might sound silly, the program itself is anything but.
It has been so successful in aligning employees with defined goals, that it remains a regular part of monthly strategy updates to this day. The updates consist of PowerPoint slides that illustrate how each of the bank’s divisions is performing — which the color-coding makes clear at a glance.
“The key was collaborating across the leadership team to align on the top 10 to 15 metrics across our key stakeholder groups — our shareholders, our associates and our customers — and then pick the most important things for our associates to know about for us to message consistently,” said Reissman, who started at the Stuart, Fla.-based bank as a vice president overseeing retail strategy. Two promotions later, she’s chief marketing officer.
She learned the balanced scorecard approach and the clarity and focus it brings while working at GE Capital, before joining Seacoast. “Banks have so many financial ratios and financial metrics that we hold ourselves accountable to,” Reissman said. “It was more like, ‘What are the most important ones?’ And then how do we make sure that we’re communicating those metrics in a way that every associate will understand.”
Reissman brought a similar level of focus to the bank’s call center. Within her first two years at Seacoast, she helped to transform it from a cost center into a revenue driver, propelling the culture change that was needed to shift away from a purely operational focus to incorporate a more proactive approach to sales. Marketing automation and lead generation now help employees tailor their conversations to a customer’s needs.
Reissman said she surprised even herself when volunteering to take on the work at the call center, which was outside the scope of her marketing experience. “It was the single most challenging year of my professional career, but it really got me connected to the intricacies of our business,” she said.
That earlier call center effort proved particularly helpful last year as Seacoast scrambled to ramp up communication around the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program. Anxious small-business owners flooded the phone lines with questions, and Reissman’s team was able to track those interactions and adjust messages across all marketing channels on the fly.
In her seven years at the $8.3 billion-asset bank, it has successfully completed 10 acquisitions, including two last year amid the pandemic. Reissman led the integration and rebranding efforts on those two acquisitions — First Bank of Palm Beaches and Freedom Bank — with the same speed as ever.
“We’ve always fully converted customers onto our systems and completed all rebranding on day one,” she said.
Nominating executive: Chuck Shaffer, CEO of Seacoast Bank and its parent company, Seacoast Banking Corp. of Florida
What he said: Reissman has displayed strong leadership qualities in both identifying issues and then volunteering to tackle them, even though they were outside her comfort zone. Shaffer said he knew when he hired her that she was a leader with a strategic mind. “What I was not expecting was her courage,” he said.
Shaffer also credited Reissman with helping Seacoast evolve, saying his confidence in her is reflected in her promotion to chief marketing officer last spring as the pandemic hit. “Jennifer has been a tremendous leader of change and strategic thought at Seacoast,” Shaffer said. “She has worked across multiple departments and roles to help further Seacoast’s innovation efforts, drive growth in value-creating relationships, all while delivering greater productivity across the franchise.”
