VACAVILLE, Calif.-Service was always the name of the game at Travis CU here, but it has been an intense effort to create a sales culture that is really paying off, with loans funded per branch doubling over the course of the last year.
That new sales culture-both its internal components and the results-were enough to earn Travis CU a Best Practice Award from CUNA's Operations, Sales & Service (OpSS) Council.
The transformation to a sales and service culture was a long-term evolution, but Barry Nelson, SVP/COO at the $1.9-billion, 177,000-member credit union, explained that only during the last two years have all the pieces really come together.
"During the last 18-24 months, the technology has risen to a new level where the data is to the retail team the very next day, so they know where they stand," said Nelson.
The credit union relies heavily on what it calls Travis Intelligence, an Oracle data warehouse application that allows it to track sales and staff-member interactions.
"We struggled and floundered until we were able to get employees really timely data," said Steve Langley, VP of sales and training. "You can't coach an employee on what they did a month ago. You need to do it based on what they did yesterday. A lot of our scorecard is based on employees being able to see exactly what they've done, sometimes real-time, sometimes a day behind. There's nothing more powerful than 'How am I doing month/year/quarter to date?' They have a lot of those touchpoints at their fingertips, and it's very powerful."
Incentives For Employees
Employees receive incentive dollars for exceeding expectations, as well as additional coaching if they fall short on goals.
"Over the last year our branch loan fundings went from about $3 million per month to closer to $6.5 million per month" across all branches, said Nelson. As of its December 2011 Call Report, Travis CU had 75,168 loans and leases on its books totaling more than $957 million.
Along with setting the bar high for sales and service, employees are also expected to understand the inner workings of the institution. "We expect our employees to understand how strong we are, what our capital ratios are, what our membership base is, and who we serve in our membership base," said Langley. "It's more than products and services-it's to give a good understanding of our organization to all of our employees. ... It keeps us all on the same bus going in the same direction."
The shift to a sales culture also involved stressing to employees that sales and service are not mutually exclusive. "Service and sales go hand in and, and we were really only a service shop," said Nelson. "We migrated more toward financial advocacy and helping members by asking them what they need."
Travis CU built much of its training around the book "Good to Great" by Jim Collins as it worked to move from where it was to where it wanted to be. It also required a top-to-bottom rollout of the entire initiative. "We started with 'We need to migrate more towards an ask-and-financial-advocacy culture," said Nelson. "That started with the board of directors, with a business plan, with senior team buy-in. The next level was introducing that to the next layer of management and educating them on why," all the way down to the staff level.
'There's No Secret'
Nelson said that kind of across the board understanding is critical for any credit union looking to replicate Travis CU's success. "The way this happens is not through technology and marketing, but by everybody being aligned, being engaged and helping our members' financial lives. There's no secret."
