Why is it so important that banks and credit unions hire better salespeople, starting today? U.S. bank branches are closing down at record rates. The Wall Street Journal reported in February 2018, “The number of branches in the U.S. shrank by more than 1,700 in the 12 months ended in June 2017, the biggest decline on record, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of federal data.”
Why are so many banks closing?
One reason is that more people are using online banking apps and tools, which leads to fewer visits to local branches. This leads to fewer face-to-face opportunities to sell.
Fewer people are answering their phones or calling to talk with their bank or credit union representatives about their savings, checking, and investment accounts.
This means that banks need to create more sales, and more opportunities for interactions, with fewer points of contact.
With growth no longer a priority, many organizations eliminated the crucial sales development manager role and cut staffing and funding for sales support. More employees were forced into jobs requiring multiple selling, coaching and/or operations roles, many of which weren’t a good fit for their talents, and the time allotted for actual selling was reduced.
With fewer employees and fewer opportunities to sell, every employee, needs to be an excellent salesperson in addition to meeting the other requirements of their job. For Human Resources professionals, hiring customer-facing employees who are great sellers is an enormous challenge.
How can Human Resources professionals make sure that each new bank or credit union hire has the potential to bring in more revenue?
Schneider Sales Management has a forty-year track record of helping clients increase net income per employee at a rate three times faster than the industry norm. We’ve done extensive research into the best practices of top performing salespeople and have studied how banks and credit unions can make each customer or member interaction work to increase revenue and improve satisfaction and loyalty.
Based on our research, here are five ways you can hire better salespeople, starting TODAY.
- Create the Right Sales Goals. Challenging sales goals work as a motivational tool for the simple reason that salespeople work harder and longer to achieve them. At most banks and credit unions sales goals are set at the top and divided among business units and branches based on recent history and divided among individual salespeople equally by job role without negotiation. Typically, every salesperson in a job role like personal banker will have the same goals regardless of experience, competence or sales opportunity. For decades, we’ve recommended to our clients that they implement a simple goal setting process based on 90-day action plans negotiated between individual salespeople and their supervisor. Each plan includes 3-5 annual goals, 3-5 objectives for the quarter, activities and strategies to accomplish the short-term objectives, and the selling behavior the employee will work to improve.
- Conduct 90-Day Onboarding. When you hire salespeople you’re making an investment, and you need an immediate return on that investment given the industry’s high employee turnover rate. You never want an employee to leave because he or she didn’t feel prepared to meet your expectations for sales. The right way to do sales orientation is to state your expectations for the first 90 days in terms of learning, preferred behavior and sales production, to invest in product training and sales training immediately so employees know how to succeed, and to require new employees to test out on various aspects of product knowledge and preferred behavior throughout their orientation.
- Incentivize properly. Sales compensation is driven by employee scorecards and goals. If the scorecards are off, you pay for the wrong results. If the goals are off, you either overcompensate employees or demotivate them. Surprisingly, we find that most banks and credit unions overpay their employees with incentive dollars by trying to pay everyone something instead of paying their best contributors more for the results that matter most.To create maximum value for your incentive payouts for any job role pay only for sales above a goal level achievable by training and good supervision alone, pay for behavior and outcomes that are profitable, within the employee’s control and associated directly with discretionary effort, and pay compensation disproportionately to top producers and supervisors who drive most of your production.
- Hire for the right selling role. Simply put, different selling roles require different competencies. Our industry research identified five distinct selling roles in banks and credit unions, each requiring a different set of competencies that drive high performance. The five roles are SERVICE SELLING (think teller), CONSULTATIVE SELLING (think personal banker), COMPETITIVE SELLING (think commissioned mortgage originator or business development officer), COMPLEX SELLING (think commercial lender), and SALES SUPERVISION (think branch manager or sales manager). Two additional roles, FRONTLINE SUPERVISION (think teller supervisor) and ENGAGEMENT SELLING (think universal banker) are subsets of these primary roles.
- Assess bankers’ sales potential before you hire. The difference in sales production between top sales producers and average or low producing salespeople in banks and credit unions is staggering. Hiring employees who can sell is vital to increasing revenue. Our groundbreaking national research with the University of Colorado at Denver Business School concluded that top producers outsell average producers two-to-one and outsell low producers ten-to-one. This is true for every selling role from teller and personal banker to commercial lender and mortgage originator.
For HR Managers, the Optimum Performance Profile™ is a groundbreaking tool to assess and profile candidates for their sales aptitude. Learn more about the tool and shift your bank or credit union’s culture to one that transforms each contact, each lead, and each conversation revenue.
