Sales performance is as much a function of individual productivity as it is about managing an organizational ecosystem that helps sustain optimal performance.  This ecosystem includes factors such as manager coaching to help direct RMs, incentives to make sure everyone works toward common outcomes, and sales tools to make sure everyone has the resources to sell and serve customers.

But these factors alone will only get you so far.  True high performance requires that key components of your ecosystem are pointed toward a limited and specific set of activities.  For example, we’ve found that best-in class sales ecosystems include a manager coaching program that:

1. Tailors coaching conversations toward the key weaknesses in RM skill sets

2. Encourages a regular and face-to-face dialogue with clear next steps

3. Cleary distinguishes coaching from other management routines

To help you assess and measure the extent to which your sales organization is aligned with the right attributes across key areas, we’re pleased to announce the launch of the Anatomy of a World Class Relationship Manager Sales Force.

Understanding the drivers of RM performance as distilled from our benchmarking work across the previous two years, we’ve identified 22 critical areas which impact sales performance and further catalogued best practices within each to help you determine your gap-to-best practice levels.

Stay tuned across the coming weeks as we share some of the other 22 areas we’ve uncovered and key attributes within each of them to help differentiate standard from best practice.  In the meantime, if you are interested in learning more about all 22 sales capabilities and/or administering this assessment across your own organization please contact your Account Manager or me at merchana@executiveboard.com.

As you might recall from last week’s post, nearly 40% of today’s RMs operate as de facto specialists. They excel in selling either credit or deposit products, but not both.

40% is a large portion of your sales force and begs the questions:

A)    Should you enable and even encourage this de facto specialization? or

B)     Should you strive to make every RM a generalist who can sell both product suites equally well?

We believe the former.

Specialization suggests a trade-off. But we’ve found that small business RMs who specialize in one area don’t dramatically underperform in the other:

• Small Business Deposit Masters (our term for RMs who outperform in deposit sales) generate 75% more deposits than “average,” generalist performers but only 5% less credit.
• The same is true when we look at credit specialists. Small Business Credit Masters sell 60% more credit than average performers and only 5% fewer deposits.

Not a bad trade-off.   

Join our webinar next Tuesday (or Wednesday, if you are in the Asia Pacific region) to more about how to boost productivity by allowing small business RMs focus more heavily on one product area.

Instead of being the versatile salespeople that most banks want, many so-called “generalist” RMs operate as de facto product specialists. They excel in selling one type of product, but they are average (or even below-average) when selling another product suite.

It makes sense that RMs gravitate toward one product. Everyone has a “comfort zone.” But we were surprised to find that nearly 40% of RMs who we surveyed during our most recent productivity assessment excel in either deposit or credit sales. But not both.

That begged the question: What makes an RM a de facto credit or deposit specialist, and what can banks do broaden an RM’s area of expertise?

For deposits, the secret seems to be experience at the bank and the extent to which the RM leverages bank-provided resources.

Compared to RMs who excel in credit, RMs who excel in deposits (a group we call Deposit Masters) are more likely to have spent their entire careers at their current bank, in their current role. And as a result, they know how to navigate the bank and less likely to rely on practices or sales methods learned from a previous employer. Deposit Masters, for example, are more likely than Credit Masters to rely on tools, to bring product support colleagues to sales calls, and to adhere to the bank’s prescribed sales process.

What other factors might explain why an RM gravitates toward deposit versus credit sales? And should business banks encourage specialization or strive to have everyone act as generalists? 

Please join us for our upcoming webinar during which we will discuss these questions and more, and please share your thoughts about the drivers of this de facto specialization at your bank.

Source: CFC Branch Staff Productivity Accelerator, 2009

Utilizing the branch channel to serve and sell to business customers demands that business banking leaders confront what seems like branch staff’s unwillingness to sell business products.  A closer look into branch staff skills reveals a gap between the products that branch staff regularly use as consumers themselves (and hence can sell well) and the products they have never used before.  Clearly, small business products will suffer. 

In a recent conversation, a member shared,  “most of my retail branch staff have a checking account and online banking, but a vast majority have never used a treasury management product or business line of credit.” This is exactly what we discovered when we asked branch staff focused on serving business customers to rate the ease of selling a consumer versus a business product. Over 90% of these branch staff agreed that selling a consumer checking account was easy but only half agreed that selling a business loan was easy.

Getting right to heart of the challenge,  Sontag Credit Union (pseudonym) developed their  Experience-Driven Teaching program that helps employees learn about less-common banking products by using them directly. Sontag wanted their retail staff to experience the products as a customer would. Executives at Sontag knew that staff would eventually learn to communicate key products features to their customers based on their first-hand experience. The result of this teaching program was a significant increase in the sale of products that branch staff experienced directly, such as bill pay.

Board members learn more about Sontag’s Experience-Driven Teaching program here and share your thoughts on effectively utilizing the branch channel to sell and serve to small business customers.

With new regulations and decreased consumer demand cutting into branch profitability, banks are focusing on small business to recoup lost revenue and support branch expenses.

But  branch-based small business sales has been a perennial challenge that few banks have solved. Many business bank leaders are skeptical that even top branch managers – much less tellers – can become valuable small business sales people. 

Why?  Branch staff don’t know their banks’ small business products well enough.

A bank we’ve pseudonymed Abasto found a way to use tellers to boost small business sales.  After years of trying to get branch staff to sell the full suite of small business cash management products, Abasto realized that their extensive 40-product offer overwhelmed branch staff and hindered sales. Instead, Abasto narrowed the list of small business banking products offered through its branches, carefully pinpointing 14 products to sell through the branch.  This “less is more” approach increased the number of small business deposit product referrals originating from the branch by 30%.

Board members, get the details on how Abasto drove significant gains at the branch on our website, and share your thoughts about branch-based small business sales to help our guide our ongoing branch research.

Does your bank underestimate platform staff as a source of sales? What other solutions have you considered to boost small business sales through existing branch resources?

Frequent BBBEdge readers might recall a past post in which we outlined the best and worst behaviors for small business and middle market RMs . The key to RM performance, it turns out, is not whether RMs consistently perform an overarching role such as the Trusted Advisor but the extent to which they exhibit very specific (and sometimes surprisingly simple) behaviors during the most critical moments.

Since then, many members have embraced these findings as a great way to prioritize coaching efforts and help struggling RMs understand what they need to differently. But when thinking about embedding these findings in the broader sales process, many members say they face an up-hill battle to define and enforce the expected behaviors for all RMs. Read More »