EUGENE, Ore.-Lending is on the rise Oregon Community CU after it instituted a new sales culture as part of its 360 Training program for employees.
Those efforts (and their results) recently netted Oregon Community a Best Practice award from CUNA's Operations, Sales & Service (OpSS) Council. The CU saw its loans increase by more than 5% last year and saw similar numbers in 2010.
Rosie Pryor, chief marketing officer at the 103,000-member, $1-billion credit union, explained that OCCU's senior staff put together the 360 Training program by compiling lessons from "off the shelf" sales-training systems, as well as internal best practices, to craft a program for the entire credit union, including tellers, loan officers, frontline staff, new-account reps, support staff and more.
"In previous years we had invested in one sales-training model or another, but not really ever created a sales culture that sustained itself," explained Pryor. "If we were going to be one of the strong credit unions that emerged on the other side of really rocky times, we needed to find the keys or the formula that was going to help us create a sales culture at Oregon Community that we can truly sustain indefinitely."
As part of that, the CU purchased every employee a copy of the book "Go For No! Yes Is the Destination, No is How You Get There," and held competitions to see which employees could get the most "no's" before a "yes."
"'Go For No!' was huge," said Darrell Stark, OCCU's chief retail officer. "It got folks to understand that they have to ask for the business. All we have to do is ask for the business and then find out what's the best fit for the member."
Pryor concurred: "When we started shifting employee behavior-when they started asking questions instead of just performing transactions-our members responded in record numbers. Our loan growth in 2011 was 5.4%, up against an industry standard of negative 1.2%."
Living & Breathing
Equally important, if not more so, said Stark, was getting a top-to-bottom buy-in from the entire staff. That included executive staff interacting more with the rest of the employees "to encourage them to continue what we've started, and that's a big part of sustainability-to continue that kind of energy out there."
Pryor noted that for a sales culture to thrive and be sustainable, "it really has to live and breathe in the executive meeting room, as well as in the branch and on the frontline and in the call center on the phone. It can't just be something you tell somebody else to do."
Oregon Community also made sure to set goals for employees and put a tracking system in place on its intranet. Employees receive points for various behaviors the CU is trying to encourage-such as cross selling or pushing a particular product or service-and those points translate to additional compensation.
Transparency is another key, and the entire staff can see one another's progress toward goals. An internal tracking system also allows senior staff to communicate with employees and complement them on progress or help motivate them when they are struggling to meet goals.
"That was one of the main focal points in building this," said Stark. "We're going to make it very transparent, so people can see what we're all doing. It's not a secret out there what we're trying to accomplish."
So far it seems to be working. In addition to increased loan volumes in 2010 and 2011, OCCU met all of its lending goals for Q1 and is on track to meet its goals for 2012.
Pryor said that other CUs looking to make the shift to a sales culture need to remember that "it's not one and done. ... It has to be a full-on commitment from the top down. You have to be willing to put all the component pieces in place; you have to work at it every single day. We have to be committed to tracking it and to holding people accountable for it, including ourselves."
