Comment: Moving Step by Step to a Bankwide Sales Mentality

Despite the industry's success at converting administrative and reactive service-driven institutions into proactive sales and service cultures, fear of rejection and failure persist.

Many customer-service representatives still find selling less pleasant than taking orders-because people who sell hear "no" much more often than "yes."

The challenge today is to turn the work force into a well-oiled sales machine. Only through a highly disciplined, nonnegotiable, prescriptive process can such a massive transformation be achieved. Only by breaking through old patterns and creating new behaviors will true change occur.

Success can be achieved only through the identification of a set of activities that will lead to sales and become inherent in daily behavior. Loosely defined sales cultures that talk the talk but don't walk the walk won't do.

Strict adherence to prescribed activities is crucial. These behaviors need to be executed every hour of every day by every customer-contact person throughout the organization.

Because of the initial discomfort of sales behaviors, most training programs in sales and service fail. What works best is the introduction of a structured process, which should contain the following steps:

Adopt a sales management philosophy that mandates: "We're a retail operation, not just a bank." In a retail culture, time is managed in increments of a week at the longest. Branch personnel need to work as though they were born Monday, will die Friday or Saturday, and will be reborn the following Monday.

Share goals and revenue to reinforce cross-sales and referrals-despite pervasive "silo mentalities" reflecting worries about disintermediation. Collaboration is critical to building a bigger share of the customers' wallet by selling all bank products through each sales force.

Merge sales and service. A true sales culture supports the belief that the failure to profile the needs of high-value customers is the equivalent of malpractice. Sales equals service.

Make sure every teller tries to execute a pre-scripted referral "tag- on" to high-value customers-100% of the time. Tellers must capitalize on the customer-contact opportunity to identify cross-sell opportunities each and every time.

Turn every specialist into a generalist in financial-needs analysis, with a view toward cross-sales and referrals. This is needed to achieve a one-bank brand image for diversified financial services.

Make sure all line and support personnel are clear about objectives, capable of accomplishing them, and compensated for performance.

Provide user-friendly training facilitated by line management under the guidance of in-house professional trainers. Training sessions must be administered consistently, repeatedly, and efficiently.

Design incentive compensation and recognition programs to reflect the goal of these sales-culture behaviors.

Enhance high-value-customer segmentation using the principle: "We can be all things to some people and some things to all people."

Finally, the 10th and most important step: Senior management must buy in to the program. Without their commitment, the idea of having a successful sales and service culture is wishful thinking.

Banks that have properly implemented these steps have achieved truly remarkable results. For instance, some banks have been able to quadruple each banker's sales while retaining a greater number of high-value customers.

One example of a bank that has got it right is St. Louis-based Roosevelt. Utilizing these steps, Roosevelt improved its cross-sell ratio by more than 70%-and is aiming for a nearly 90% improvement by yearend. In fact, productivity has quadrupled, from fewer than three sales a day per full-time sales employee to more than 12.

At one user-group meeting after another, the world's largest and most successful banks share, compare, and cross-pollinate success stories and related best practices in sales and service.

In most instances, best-practice results like those at Roosevelt are reflected in cultures containing most if not all of the 10-step leadership model.

Though it is true that the implementation of these steps is a challenge for any bank, the results are well worth the effort.

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