If you work in a bank or a credit union you’ve almost certainly heard the concern, “If we commit to creating a stronger sales culture, we’ll lose the relationships and service mindset we’ve worked so hard to build.”
Everyone is familiar with the goal driven, product pushing sales climate that Wells Fargo built, and its disastrous impact on customer loyalty and shareholder value. This and other similar stories are almost always the result of unreasonable performance pressure and greed, not sales culture.
Most experts agree that culture is a key driver of performance. Companies like Chase, Nordstrom, IBM and Apple are high performing sales cultures, yet they’re also market leaders in customer satisfaction? How is that possible?
Most people wrongly associate sales culture with a numbers culture in which performance is defined by short term sales volume and sales activity levels with little regard for customer satisfaction. At the other extreme, sales culture is often compared unfavorably to service culture which is more of a quality assurance or problem avoidance approach to customer experience and customer satisfaction.
In reality, the sales culture modeled by high performing sales organizations is a system of values, beliefs and behaviors focused almost entirely on customer satisfaction and long term profitability. Sales at the expense of customer satisfaction are strongly discouraged simply because they are counterproductive to the mission.
Sales organizations with high employee engagement and high customer satisfaction tend to have higher market share and higher profitability than their competitors. Deloitte found that customer-centric organizations are actually 60 percent more profitable than other companies.
The Case for Sales Culture
I believe strongly that sales culture helps promote customer satisfaction.
In the past 45 plus years, we’ve conducted hundreds of in-depth sales practice assessments and sales climate surveys for some of the best sales organizations in banking like BBVA Compass, Marshall & Ilsley Banks and AmericaFirst Credit Union. I’ve repeatedly found that the better an organization’s sales performance, the more sales is viewed as a step UP from service.
In the numbers cultures I’ve studied, the emphasis on selling anything to meet goals always ends with customers being oversold with products that they don’t need or that aren’t profitable, and with employees product pushing to keep their jobs and experiencing dysfunctional sales discomfort as a result.
In service cultures like those often associated with credit unions, the all-out effort to please members with courtesy, making small talk and working fast to hit efficiency targets all too frequently falls short of actually helping members.
By not encouraging in-depth conversation about emerging needs, explaining the benefits of new products and new technology, or following up initial conversations with onboarding calls and other ways to help, members are ultimately underserved.
Measuring customer experience in terms of just speed, courtesy and absence of problems is misleading. Customer experience also has to be measured in terms of listening, probing, and advising customers on unmet or unaware needs.
According to the University of Michigan-run American Customer Satisfaction Index, banks actually surpassed credit unions in customer satisfaction ratings in 2019 despite the preponderance of service cultures among credit unions.
Are you Building a Sales Culture?
How do you know if you’re on your way to building a customer-focused sales culture or instead to a numbers culture or a service culture? Ask yourself these twelve culture-revealing questions.
1. Are your performance metrics balanced? In a numbers culture, the key metrics are always sales volume and sales activities. In a service culture the key metrics are usually net promoter score and service efficiency scores like wait times. In a true sales culture, the key metrics are a balanced combination of sales results, profitability, customer experience and use of preferred behavior.
2. Are your goals negotiated? In a numbers or service culture, goals are typically assigned. In a sales culture, goals are negotiated based on opportunity and aptitude, usually in combination with a tactical plan that forces a realistic approach to goal setting.
3. Are you hiring for EQ skills and fit with the job role? In a numbers culture, customer facing staff are often hired for their competitiveness and drive while the emphasis in service cultures is usually on sociability and operations experience. In a sales culture employees are hired based on their EQ skills and on their fit with the competencies required for each unique selling role for which commonly used pop personality tests like Predictive Index aren’t predictive of success.
4. Have you defined a Preferred Way of Selling®? In a numbers culture, there is very little concern for how sales are made in contrast to service cultures where there is a lot of emphasis on following a prescribed service routine that enhances speed of delivery and minimizes potential problems.
We’ve registered the phrase Preferred Way of Selling® for sales cultures because every great sales organization has studied and codified its own set of best practice behaviors that work for the company and for each selling role, including how to establish its offerings as clearly different.
5. Is your sales training focused on discovering and selling to the customer’s viewpoint? One of the most startling findings we’ve made in our four decades plus of sales training is that most sales advisors talk 70 percent of the time during a sales conversation compared to the ideal of 30 percent. In a numbers sales culture, this is typically the result of sales training that encourages product dumping. In the case of service cultures talking too much is symptomatic of excessive socializing and
reluctance to ask for next step advances.
In a true sales culture, sales training focuses on conversation skills with a lot of disciplined practice around seeking information that can be used to help the customer. Even the language used in sales training in sales cultures is different with the word helping frequently associated with both selling and coaching.
6. Is your coaching based on observation and on giving specific behavioral feedback? In our corporate assessments, we see a lot of evidence that coaching is occurring, but it seems to vary greatly by culture. In a numbers culture coaching amounts to “get your numbers up” with almost no “how to’s.” In a service culture coaching is frequently limited to transactional quick coaching around service standards with little strategic direction.
In sales cultures, managers are typically asked to give both behavioral feedback and broader direction on strategy.
7. Is your technology customer-centric? In a numbers culture, CRM and operating platforms typically provide structured sales pitches based on prompts generated by customer profiles often leading to sales by “immaculate conception” with little thinking
by the sales advisor. In a service culture technology is used primarily for improving
transaction efficiency.
In sales cultures technology is designed to assist sales advisors in conversational selling and in prioritizing sales and service contacts.
8. Are people recognized and compensated for doing the right things? In a numbers culture, recognition and compensation is driven entirely by achieving your individual numerical goals. In service cultures, individual accountability is often diluted by team based recognition and compensation formulas. The best sales cultures reward both behavior and goal achievement.
9. Do sales and marketing report to the same person? In both numbers cultures and service cultures, sales and marketing typically operate from separate silos with only minimal coordination between them. In sales cultures sales and marketing frequently report through a chief revenue officer who can maintain an integrated customer focus across both functions.
10. Are senior executives rewarded for developing their managers? In a numbers culture or a service culture, senior executives tend to be rewarded entirely for achieving their numerical goals whether those goals are for sales production or for customer satisfaction and efficiency.
In sales cultures, senior executives are often rewarded almost entirely for the percentage of their employees who meet goal and the percentage who meet personal development standards such as certifications of skill mastery. Since managers are the key leverage point for improvement, senior executives are given incentive to coach up every manager so they can’t rely on a few top producers to hit their goals.
11. Is the market feedback you rely on based on actual customer perception and is it specific with regard to employee behavior? In a numbers culture or a service culture, market feedback is typically limited to satisfaction surveys, net promoter scores and shopper surveys which are organized around preset perceptions of the factors customers think are important.
In sales cultures customer feedback processes like focus groups and our AdvisorScore survey are used to give unstructured customer feedback and specific behavioral feedback that can be used in providing specific coaching direction to employees.
12. Are job roles organized around customer relationship needs? In a numbers culture or service culture job roles tend to be structured for efficiencies such as maximizing the number of customers seen per banker per day. In sales cultures job roles tend to be organized to facilitate seamless one-stop interactions for customers.
Selling Your Employees on Sales Culture
Obviously, there are a lot of moving parts when it comes to executing well on sales culture. The strategic integration of these moving parts around the customer’s viewpoint is what makes sales culture so helpful to increasing customer satisfaction.
It seems paradoxical in light of the sales discomfort still prevalent in financial services, but customer satisfaction improves more with sales culture than with service culture. Helping people fully does seem to require a broad view of customer relationships that is heightened by sales priorities. Virtually every sales initiative we undertake for our clients increases customer satisfaction as well as sales and earnings.
Bottom line, to really help your customers, you first have to sell your organization on sales culture.
Jim Schneider is President & CEO of Schneider Sales Management, Inc. and author of The Sales Producers, How the World’s Top Salespeople Sell.
