Auditing Your Sales Process is a Good Start

CU360
March 23, 2009 | COMMENTS

Community-based financial institutions do many things right. Certainly credit unions know their members in ways big banks can only dream of. Credit unions genuinely serve local communities and they have historically provided stellar service.

But when it comes to building relationships methodically, cross-selling a broad range of products and services, and developing a true sales culture, the local institutions frequently fall behind the larger banks.

The process of developing a sales culture tailored to your organization should begin with an audit, reports Community Banker magazine, to assess where you already excel and where you might strive for improvement. The audit, conducted either by your management team or an expert adviser, should examine your ability to leverage five areas critical to the development of a sales culture:

• Executive leadership and vision.
• Frontline activities and processes.
• Human capital.
• Performance metrics.
• Top-notch service.

This process is a journey with no definitive end, but the journey can lead to increased sales, deposit growth, and a consumer base wedded to you across a broader product range. The Kane Bank Services consultancy makes these recommendations:

Executive Leadership and Vision

Does your organization have a mission statement, and how is it implemented? CEOs must articulate their vision of a customer-centric sales organization—and then walk the talk. CEOs should:

• Stay close to both members and frontline staff. CEOs at the best community-based financial institutions meet monthly with 10 to 12 diverse branch-level employees to develop a genuine dialogue.
• Visit branches regularly to show how important branch-based sales and service delivery is to success.
• Directly participate in a host of informal recognition processes, ranging from calling a commercial relationship manager to sending out personal notes to tellers who make the most referrals.
• Directly and personally recognize employees who reach sales and growth goals.

Frontline Activities and Processes

Building a sales culture requires your leadership team to work with employees to translate your institution's vision and strategy into frontline staff's daily behaviors.

• Outline daily, weekly, and monthly activities for every sales and service position. Employees need to know what to do--and when to do it. This is a critical aspect of getting the right people to do the right things at the right time.
• To grow deposits and to deepen customer relationships, articulate specific activities and behaviors for various employees. Tellers, for example, can make members aware of long-term savings options when processing large deposits.
• Develop rigorous cross-selling strategies. How many members do you have with only one product and without a checking account? You might be surprised by how high the number is, and these members are very good prospects for cross-selling.
• Identify strategies, articulate supporting activities, and then hold employees accountable for the quality and consistency of execution through effective HR practices.

Human Capital

Evaluate practices to ensure that HR is laying the right foundation to develop the sales culture. Too often, they fail to create the proper infrastructure for employees to excel. Several of these actions are the simplest to execute:

• Establish well-defined job descriptions, job evaluations based on specific performance criteria, and regular coaching and feedback processes. Too many job descriptions are vague and only broadly describe duties without translating those duties into performance expectations.
• Top performers need to know what success looks like. They want to understand what outputs they should attain so they can control their destinies.
• Train top employees so they can help other employees succeed.

Performance Metrics

Proper performance metrics must support efforts to promote a sales and service culture. Community-based institutions woefully lag their big bank counterparts in this regard. Management must:

• Translate the financial plan into a business-performance plan based on drivers such as revenue growth or profitability. Every branch and every small business loan officer should have specific goals for deposit growth, loan growth, and fee income.
• Don't overcomplicate tracking and reporting mechanisms. Too many metrics will lose their impact and employees will be overwhelmed.
• Create alignment between all components of sales-culture development: job descriptions, performance evaluations, coaching, behaviors and activities, and performance metrics. When each of these elements support one another completely, the impact of all is greater than the sum of their parts.

Top-Notch Service

Community-based institutions need to be rigorous in protecting their service advantage over larger competitors. In recent years, big banks have narrowed this gap with the consistent application of techniques to improve service.

The quality of interaction at the branch level is critical. Do employees (including tellers) always use the member's name? Research shows that the use of the member's name has a major impact on loyalty. With the help of technology, consistently applying this behavioral standard to every interaction should be relatively easy for credit unions.

As leaders, management must demonstrate that sales equates to good service, as long as the sale satisfies a need. Asking a member for a larger share of wallet or suggesting how a product could fulfill a financial dream are sales conversations that also equate to fantastic service.

Sales culture development is a process of ongoing improvement. Whether you're just starting now or trying to ratchet your performance to the next level, you can increase the rate of change by auditing your existing practices in these areas. The institutions that travel this path can outperform their counterparts who don't.